I turn and gaze at him, suddenly feeling sorry, for him, for Dr. Zachary. “I know, Dr. Zachary. And I am your only friend.”
“You’re depressed, Mr. Lippmann. You have delusions of grandeur.”
“I am unhappy, Dr. Zachary. Wouldn’t you be?”
“You could have left a long time ago, at the first, when it all started.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps.” But he has already left. I can hear him walking down the corridor. To the elevator.
Which should have been … a Ferris wheel. A Ferris wheel. Not a merry-go-round. Is that why he has kept me here all these years? A glitch in my thoughts. A misfired neuron. A palsy that made me say “merry-go-round” when all the time I was envisioning a Ferris wheel. One foul piece demonstrating that the entire mind was souring. So here is Dr. Zachary’s secret evidence of my insanity.
When patient care conferences begin in the morning I will have the answers to all of Dr. Zachary’s elliptical questions. The other students will be quite impressed. At last we have concrete verification of Lippmann’s illness. Now a course of treatment can begin.
THE GREEN DOG
How strange it is to stare into the mirror and find that the one staring back at you is not at all whom you expected.
Sometimes I think that toward the end of my life I will become an old green dog.
Not that the dog would ever understand he was green. Like most dogs, he had a difficult time distinguishing among yellow and orange and green, or even red, not to mention the difficulty a dog has finding a reasonable mirror. A dog will find its mirror in his master’s eyes, we hear—but all too often what he finds there is small and miserable.
The dog didn’t remember that, as a boy in high school, it had known a girl whose peroxide-bleached hair had turned this same shade of green in the swimming pool. The girl’s hair had eventually gone back to auburn, but this was the dog’s natural color.
Canine greenness being a rarity, the dog was regarded with delight and distaste, wariness and incredulity. Other animals didn’t pay much attention to his color, for he smelled like a dog, made dog sounds, marked his territory like a dog, fought like a dog over scraps of food and places in the sun. But people noticed. A few took his pigmentation as an excuse to throw things at him, some of which hurt, some of which he caught in his mouth and determined to be edible. A few others tried to entice him closer, and once in a while the prospect of having his ears scratched outweighed both his street-wise caution and his dislike of being inspected. Most, though, kept their distance, thinking him an aberration of nature or their own minds, or his color a symptom of some dreaded and contagious disease.
This dog was lucky enough to have neither master nor mirror. If he’d had a mirror, and if mirrors made any sense to dogs, he’d have more or less expected to see an older man going to fat and gray, going to invisibility as his eyes faded and his voice grew weaker, and even though he had gained weight steadily through his middle years, he’d have seemed less substantial, as expansive as a cloud and no more significant in the great span of eternity. Then had come that too warm, too humid morning when he woke up as a dog.
The green dog howled then, in that mournful way of dogs and men. Some would say it was a sadness without much legitimacy, since no tragedy had occurred, no painful injury. It was the sadness of the human being living his human life. It was the sadness of the shape-changer.
The dog was lucky in another way: he wasn’t plagued by a man’s ambition. His flanks and belly were crusted with scars, including the vague crease from a human appendectomy. He’d sacrificed a testicle in a losing battle with a garbage truck. And now he was content to roll around on his back with his diminished genitals in the air, inordinately proud of what others considered a warped and sorry bit of punctuation. The man still in him identified it as a semi-colon. Used to join two main clauses, and between coordinate elements containing commas, to indicate a subtle variation of voice; the semi-colon was by far the man’s favorite punctuation mark. The fact that the man had a favorite punctuation mark spoke volumes about who he had become.
Sometimes the green dog saw the man it had been out in the street, or wading through the tall grass staring at his feet, as if having lost something very important, as if having lost his mind to the green dog. The man was lost, or puzzled, and these were things the green dog understood because it had often been lost or puzzled. How the green dog could still see the man it used to be did not puzzle it, because this was a man and the green dog was a dog who had left the concerns of a man behind.
The green dog sensed it should probably stay away from the man, but it could not. It was drawn to the man by forces as basic and compelling as its need to eat and get rid of what it had eaten, both as pleasurable as they were necessary. So one night it showed up at the man’s back door after the day went dark, and sang the universal sadness that even the man could understand. The man brought a bowl of something to the back door and laid it down for the green dog to eat, and the green dog ate what was in the bowl without bothering to smell it first, because it trusted the man it used to be.
And so the green dog came to feed each night at the house of the man it had been when it moved upright through the world. Although the food the man served was edible, something was not quite right about it. Sometimes the man cooked the food with the paper still wrapped around it; the dog ate the burned paper, too, which tasted quite good. Sometimes the man didn’t cook the food at all, which was fine with the green dog, even though it somehow knew this wasn’t so fine as far as the man was concerned.
Finally one night the dog came for supper and the man came to the back door without a bowl in his hand. The man opened the screen door and held it as the green dog readily trotted inside. “Here,” the man said, gesturing around the kitchen. For a moment the dog was confused, thinking it must be daylight again and this a garbage heap—it had that very smell, that very appearance. The dog looked up at the man. “Don’t look so stupid!” the man shouted. “Help yourself!” And after a brief, sad and nervous time, the dog did what the man said.
The man himself ate very little in the days that followed. Sometimes he would sit down on the floor with the dog and put a plate no cleaner than the dog’s bowl on the floor in front of him. Sometimes he would stick his fingers into the food, bring them into his mouth and suck on them loudly. The dog was hungry even though all it really wanted to do was watch the man.
But most of the time the man did not eat. Most of the time the man stared at the food, and spoke words at the food, but did not eat the food. Out of respect the dog held back from its own food as long as it could, but eventually of course it ate because it had the honesty of a dog, which compels it to eat when it is hungry, to rest when it is tired, to bark and to howl and to make any noise possible with its particular vocal chords when it feels whatever it is destined to feel. And to ignore what it sees in the mirror.
The man, on the other hand, had lied so long to himself and to others he could no longer tell if he was tired or hungry or in some sad and lonely state with the best part of him residing in this ugly green dog of the solitary testicle.
Eventually the man fell ill. The green dog had been expecting this, because even a dog understands that everything must eat in order to live, just as it must breathe and drink and move through the world with others of its kind. These are things that even a green dog knows.