Memory Dog
She is always busy and today the temperature is dropping. So she splits wood and I lie next to her, paws out?stretched, belly on cold ground, panting breath outflowing, white. Memory huge and bleeding, not keeping to one track, mammalian but skipping, skipping.
She is ferocious with energy. She is mad. The chips fly everywhere and so do the split logs. Splinter, splinter, splinter: kindling. The insides of trees smell sweet; sharp.
Arnold Wentworth watches from his wheelchair at the window. She is not angry at him. We brought him here. It was an arduous journey. But my kind likes journeys. Their imperativeness pulls us, gives us purpose. We know we will find you, eventually. Take us for a ride, throw us out of the car and drive off. We will think you made a big mistake and make it home again.
Split and long crunch of log-fiber. She does not know me, but I know her. She used to be different, and I was too. I am her memory-device, but she has lost the key. This happened before our memories were beamed down to us; among us.
Our thoughts, our feelings, re-edited and re-cut events -- some true, some false, but all completely manipulative -- emanate from the Allover Station in a constant flood. Some of us knew it was coming, or at least suspected, and took steps. The three of us in our strange symbiosis are immune, but we have to live out here, alone. People would notice.
And there are those who want to find us.
A pale flare curves against gathering storm clouds. It comes from Evan's Ridge, which used to be a tourist town but which is now a rebel stronghold. They have a missile launcher hidden in a bread delivery truck -- at least that's what Jake says. I even hear the small pop when the missile hits the floater, but she cannot; her senses are dimmer than mine.
I would not have guessed how many people just wanted, needed, an excuse to use weapons. Everything went to hell fast -- overnight, it seemed, and everywhere. Individuals joyously got out their guns, knives, bombs, and missiles. Nations happily suspended diplomatic relations and declared war. We are safe here, at least today. Elizabeth still believes she can change people, that Arthur's smacks can do that.
The worst memories, the deepest, most searing, and most universal, are inside a small, protective bubble. The bubble is inside of me.
She has no idea.
Perhaps I am loving this too much, watching her, being with her. Putting off what needs to be done. But I am in heaven.
I hear it before her, the low sound of the truck engine, the hiccup of the driver shifting gears, and jump up, stiff, growling. Alerted, she lowers her ax and stands waiting, wondering: is this the time? She picks up the pistol she left on the rock next to the chopping block. "Who is it, girl? Get him, Daisy!"
By now, I've recognized the sound of Jake's truck, relax, and run down the steep hidden road wagging my tail. Jake, a local farmer that Elizabeth has known since she was a teenager, brings us supplies. Food, gasoline for the generator so we can save the propane in the big buried tank, and local news. Not regularly. The dead-end tree-hidden dirt road below us also goes to property he owns, so it is far more likely that the smoke from our woodstove would give us away than Jake's visits. But this has been a vacation hideaway for years, so we could be anyone. Jake understands the need for not revealing who we are.
I was cast off, taken for a ride, thrown out of the car, but I came back. I will always come back. I am a dog.
Rain strikes the leaves, making them shiver. Fall is almost over and they are few. By tomorrow, according to the weathernews that is so submerged in my brain that I no longer have to access it deliberately, the trees will be cloaked in ice.
A rumble arose in my chest and I transmuted it into a sharp bark. Elizabeth reached down, ruffled my head-fur, and I happily danced, all dog, threw in a few leaps. Elizabeth said, "She stays."
Arnold's scent was slightly sour. He smiled. "Whatever you want, honey." His eyes, when he looked at me, were irritated. I didn't care. He was not the boss.
She was.
Memory is anatomical change. Period. Neuronal change. Synaptic change.
Aplysia, a giant marine snail, has few brain cells, compared to mammals, and they are comparatively large. It was a good subject for early memory studies. It is a beautiful marine animal, its head arching up and around, topped by what looks like fronds of a stubby palm. However, it is usually ensconced in its shell, so you can't see all of that. It is a hermaphrodite.
Training creates actual anatomical changes.
Memory is physical.
I wanted to remember love. I wanted to remember Elizabeth and Wendy. I wanted to remember the extraordinary web of being in which I had lived, and because I did not know whether or not the experiences that you or I might call "bad" -- the disappointments, the setbacks -- might have contributed to the overall flavor of that being, like a wash of one pigment over another gives a watercolor depth or a pinch of spice gives a dish an indefinable flavor and because, let's face it, I was a memory addict, I wanted it all. All of it in the skull of a dog.
The heads of true collies are not pinched, and they are herding dogs, so their memories have to do with the big picture, and being bossy, and with speed, direction, and following complex signals. Their long, lowing coats are beautiful.
I chose to be a female because I did not want to be reflexively aggressive.
Because I wanted to be like Jolly.
Lying at Elizabeth's feet, I knew I had made the right choice.
After they were in bed, that first night, I padded to the door of Wendy's room.
This was not the room of Wendy that is inside me, the room I made, the room I can't go into, the room full of pain.
This was her real, lovely, physical room, frilly purple and green like she wanted. Moonlight stretched across the bed, washed the pillows. Rumble, her beloved teddy bear, lay there, stub arms outstretched, his black bead eyes facing the window.
I whined. I stretched out on my belly, put my chin on the floor.
I howled, and was surprised. I did not know I could howl.
It was a truly mournful sound, a soul-releasing "Owooooo!"
"Goddammit!" Arnold's voice.
"Shhh. It's okay. Get back in bed."
I still had teeth; I could bite if I decided to do so. My growl was low, but sufficiently ferocious. When I heard Elizabeth's moans through the doorway (they did not bother to close the door) I could have shot through that doorway, leapt onto the bed, and torn out Arnold's throat. Rapid pictures filled my mind. Elizabeth's naked legs, parted for me.
I padded to the kitchen, tipped over the garbage can. "What's that?" I heard Elizabeth say, and then whatever Arnold did made her shriek with delight. I teased a trail of chicken bones and rotted vegetables across the kitchen floor and cracked the delicious bones between my teeth. Bacon grease drooled onto the rug beneath the dining room table.
Deeply satisfied, I trotted back to Wendy's room. Without pausing, I leapt onto her bed, curled up, took Rumble in my mouth, and fell asleep, my mind a train wreck, a bonfire, an amusement park, of memories. A slide show. I saw it all going one way, each snapshot: Elizabeth's slow joy at realizing our love, a lazy morning in a sunstruck St. Paul hotel room, her smile across the table at the diner the day she found out she was pregnant.
I can see her thinking then, thinking about all the things I'd done as a memory scientist.
I nudge her pocket. The smack.
She pulls out the bloody, protective bubble. Then she grabs a knife, sets the bubble on the table, and carefully slits it open.
Out it falls, the smack that I so carefully, lovingly made. I cringe back, whine.
"What is it?"
It is something I cannot do, because I am a dog.
But I must. Again, I pick up Rumble, and this time just hold him in my jaws. Then I put him down and lick his face.
"Okay," she says heavily. "Okay. Something to do with Wendy." Her shoulders sag. "I'll do it." Her smile is wan and she is crying. "First. Wendy goes first."
She puts the smack I made into the sequence that she has prepared. The sequence is prefaced by U's hack. After a minute, the smack is ready. All she has to do is press a key to send it.
On the Allover Station, firing seems to have gotten heavier this morning. I am not sure why the local soldiers haven't come back. Perhaps there is too much disarray. The television says so. The long, grinding, universal violence is creeping upward, always upward.
A deep, low growl shakes the ground. I hear loud cracking sounds. Out the window, I see the tips of trees topple.
"Must be a tank," says Elizabeth. "The bastards."
"Tuh," says Arnold. "Tuh. Gu. Nnnn." He gestures toward the rile. He is healing. The smack, I think, might hurry things along. I bark, loudly. Go! Go! Go!
She does it. She makes the smack, biological information now converted into electrical signals, rush down the wires at the speed of light and just as quickly is in the air, relaying, disseminating, smacking.
The tank slowly comes round the bend, ponderously slow, and stops fifty yards from the cabin. A gun on top rotates, adjusts straight at us.
"Fu!" yells Arnold.
And then --
The top opens and three men climb out. They hug each other, they are crying.
The same thing is happening on the Allover Station. A reporter is in some war-torn downtown where suddenly everyone looks around, bewildered. Two men ling down their riles. The same look, of awful grief, comes over their faces.
Tears low. They grab one another, reel around.
The television reporter is weeping too. "What is going on?" she cries out in a parody of the reporter's false concern.
"What is going on? Sir?" She shoves her microphone in someone's face. "Sir? How do you feel?"
"I," he gasps. "I -- oh, my god." He falls to his knees.
Elizabeth grabs me, hard. "Wendy," she whispers. "It's Wendy. Oh, God, I remember, oh, my sweet baby."
All that grief and longing. Now everyone feels it. Everyone feels the loss of just one child.
Just one precious person.
But there is no revenge. No anger. Because this is not just our grief, not just Elizabeth's and mine distilled and reined and full of blame. It is Jolly's: pure, whole love and longing.
That smack, and its heavy burden, and the chemicals it was secreting, are gone. Gone from my blood. Mike is leaving too, ebbing away. It is good. It is as I planned.
I did not plan the bullet. But it doesn't matter. I am, of course, happy.
"My god!" Elizabeth gasps. She just stares at me, then falls and hugs me, hugs me, hugs me. "You GENIUS!" I glimpse for a brief instant a look of horror on her face as she draws back her hand, sticky with blood, before I close my eyes, deeply satisfied.
This exquisite grief, this unwillingness to kill, this respect for all others, may last for years, universally, making loss impossible, removing the numbness that most people live with and leaving them raw and open and kind, unable to hurt another human. Or someone like The Wonderful Wizard of U might hack it quickly, just for fun, and make everything as it was.