Perhaps in a way these neoclinical symptoms, tricks, alibis, and fantasies are the most important part of this narrative. The real fight was not, as might be imagined, with wild beast. Indeed, as must by now have become apparent, this war with the wild game was both my way of living and my pleasure. No, the real fight was with loneliness and boredom. Alcoholism was a way out, and for a while I tried it, reeling drunk and singing through the ruined, empty streets, through the reek of putrescence. I tried it till I fell and came to with a pack of starving mongrels sniffing and growling round me as I lay in the gutter. Another few minutes—if I had taken one more drink and had been just that much drunker—and the boldest of the dogs would have been at my throat.
At one time I contemplated suicide, and here, oddly enough, I discovered a great truth: a man alone, unless he is in great pain, does not commit suicide if he still has the means of living. Suicide is an act, when it is not done in a panic of fear which is a more or less unconscious running away, that is committed in order to impress, astonish, and dismay those who cause it. It is committed as a final act of annoyance, a kind of blackmail by which the dead hope to make the living pay. Either this, or it is a way for someone who has never been important in life to become important in death. Thus it was impossible for me, once I had made these discoveries, to kill myself.
It was about this time, and probably a part of the same mechanism—the opposite side of the same psychological penny—that I decided to collect and breed a pack of dogs as a distraction and as a means of hunting. There were a number of large dogs roaming about, some of which showed a tendency to follow me. I shot game for them, and even shot other dogs for them to eat. Some dogs had gone completely savage and, having lived on cadavers, were much more dangerous than any wild animal, for it is the half-wild animal which has lost its fear of man that is the most likely to attack him. There were some terrific fights between my dogs and these wild dogs, but by degrees the larger of the wild dogs died off and were replaced by the smaller coyotelike animal which skulks in the scrub and ruins today.
But I must go back to the disaster, and to the events, as far as I can remember them, that preceded it.
The funny thing to me, as I look back at it, is that the atom, the smallest thing in the world, should turn out to be the biggest thing in the world. In the summer of 1946 we thought we had control of the atom and we ran some bomb tests on Bikini, a coral atoll in the Pacific. Everything went wrong about that time. It was, if one had been cle.ver enough to see it, the beginning of the end. There was fear on every face—fear and anger. There was no kindness anywhere, because fear and kindness cannot live together. All over the world people were angry, and their anger, born of fear, became fury. I saw it only in New York, and there I withdrew myself, seeing fewer and fewer people and losing myself in the ivory tower of my storytelling, a trick that I had taught myself when I first found it necessary to escape from life—a trick at which, as life became progressively worse, I became progressively better, able to live more and more within my dreams, to love women I created in my mind, to ride horses that I bred in my brain. I needed a thousand subtleties as a defense against a future that came nearer every day, a giant who carried death in his hand.
But to get back to the experiment: There were stories about it, the best one being that some goats on the battleships had survived the blast. There are goats in New York City today. I can see goats any time I go out, and I hardly ever shoot one because their taste is too rank even for the dogs. But where are the people?
In those days, there was a world famine. Men had increased tremendously in numbers despite wars and disasters and the safety margin of nutrition was gone. This margin had never been very wide, and a world drought, combined with the effects of war, had closed the gap. And those who talked of a continually rising standard in American terms of eating were, whether they knew it or not, talking also in terms of reduced population, for the billions who were on earth then had to live on grain rather than meat except such meat as could be grass-fed. Here is another odd paradox, for now in this savage world of animals it is grain that is the luxury—grain and fat, because most animals do not carry fat, except a little around the kidneys, and I get most of mine from bears and porcupines. I melt it down and save it in airtight jars.
But I was trying to describe those times—the hate and fear and the little love. There was not even much love between men and women. There was marriage, of course, but only three marriages in five lasted.
It is easy now, so long after the event, to be wise and see that probably we should never have employed the bomb at all—not even on Japan. Instead, we should have brought Japanese observers under safe conduct from Ireland or other neutral countries to witness the first trials in the New Mexican desert and then said, “Give up or we will do this to you.”
Now I must tell something of my own personal life. This brings me to my home, and my wife, and the life we led together before it ended, and its end—a difficult and painful thing to do, but one which must be done as a duty, for this phase, too, is coming to an end. I feel it in my bones and heart. Even the dogs feel it: at this moment Bodo, who was sitting with his head on my knee, has gone toward the door and stands there growling, with his hackles erect and his tail stiff. Vixen, more dangerous but more restrained than he, is backing him silently; her eyes are on him and on the door. My hand is on the rifle at my side. I lay it across my knees and watch the dogs.
The dogs that have been growling by the door have quieted down and come back to me. Whatever had been outside has gone and I have relaxed. I can now go on with my narrative again, continuing where I had left off.
My wife, Mildred, was an American, a very small and beautiful woman who hailed from the swamps of New Jersey that are now inhabited by every kind of savage creature. She was an artist, and our small and unpretentious apartment in the Whitby Apartments was decorated with her work. She painted and I wrote, and we amused ourselves with our pets: a miniature pinscher called Annie; a kinkajou called Edward, which was a female but did not know it; a South American bugle bird or troupial called Sam; a golden hamster by the name of Stompie; and some sixty-odd tropical fish of various species whose names still come to me without difficulty: zebras, platties, angels, neons, moons, sword tails, clowns, guppies, gouramis, Siamese fighting fish, miniature catfish, and many others. The fish lived amid water plants in a large tank which, when lighted by a fluorescent light, looked like fairyland. My wife, who was filled with imaginations and fantasies, always said how wonderful it would be if we could only be very small (and able to breathe under water) and therefore able to walk about in so lovely a garden, sitting on the rocks and strolling over the silver sand.