Victor LaValle: Ecstatic

A heavy woman leaned against the ambulance and hadn’t yet bothered to move. The other cars on the street had been converted into benches. Three boys climbed up two trees. As the crowd got louder the youngest kids covered their ears.

Nabisase came to the doorway with Ledric. Her face was almost gone behind white tape and bandage. She looked like a poison warning before me.

I waved at them from the sidewalk. Relieved, even happy.

— Hello, Anthony, Mrs. Blankets said and smiled at me. Is that your book I’ve heard about? she asked.

I showed it to her and she clapped twice, enthusiastically. Genuinely. A festive mood filtered through the crowd.

My sister and her boyfriend went back inside. As I greeted other people, Grandma stood at the front door. She opened it and left a bag outside, at the top of the stairs.

I walked up to it. Some of my clothes were inside. I didn’t care about the jeans or T-shirts. Someone had packed my two other suits. I wore the purple one now. When I stood again, after touching through my belongings, Grandma locked the security door. She did that when I was watching.

— I could break this door open easily, I said.

She leaned against the handle. — Don’t.

— Where’s my money?

— It is with your clothes, she said. We apologize, Anthony, but there is no room for you.

— Who’s going to take care of you?

— Your sister will stay.

— I thought she said she was moving.

Grandma nodded. — Her or you.

— You could let me have the basement. I won’t come upstairs.

— I apologize, Anthony.

— You’re overreacting, I insisted.

— I do no such thing.

Grandma closed the door.

Let her try to live on an envelope-stuffer’s salary. He’d have to mail out 80,000 letters a month to cover the mortgage. I decided to be happy. A person can do that.

There really were worse situations than mine; like Viper had a hammer in its neck.

The crowd laughed, watched the paramedics wrestle the Doberman in and out of the ambulance. The woman screamed at Ricky as she pulled the gurney out and Ricky, refusing to lose, tugged the gurney back in. Even the President watched. I waved at him, but he didn’t notice.

Standing on my front stairs I could see past the crowd, over their heads, behind them.

To 145th Avenue.

Where the old German Shepherd, once owned by the Blankets family, jogged by without a leash. Without an owner. It went along.

After the German Shepherd two Pit Bulls ran behind the crowd.

A Jack Russell Terrier.

One limping Basset Hound.

A Rottweiler. A Rottweiler. A Rottweiler. A Pug.

More Pit Bulls.

Soon so many dogs were shooting down 145th Avenue that cars couldn’t pass. The dogs seemed to know what would happen. Traffic stopped.

A skittering, yippering Chihuahua went by. Eleven kinds of mutts.

The air took on that wet-sock smell of canine breath.

The EMTs stopped arguing. Both climbed on the ambulance’s rear bumper. Children were lifted onto their parents’ shoulders. Police put away their big, black notepads. Viper continued to breathe.

It was impossible to believe there were this many loose dogs in Rosedale. Even if they’d been imported from nearby Laurelton. It made no sense. Had to be two hundred now.

But I recognized the fat, haggard German Shepherd when it passed 229th Street a second time. Six minutes later it passed a third. Every one of them did. The Great Dane. The Mastiff. The Affenpinscher, too. They weren’t running away. They were running laps.

Now there really are only two ways to react to the extraordinary. The first is to ponder the grand purpose until all the fun is sucked away, the second is to enjoy it. The President’s Wife left his side and ran toward the breadbasket of the crowd. She screamed, — I got $80 on Mr. Frame’s boxer! Somebody better take my personal check!

Then everyone started making bets.

The dogs sprinted along 145th Avenue until they reached 225th Street. There they made a right for one block, right again on 144th Avenue, down to Brookville Park, right once more to the corner of 145th and started again. A good-sized circuit. I thought some driver, at least one, would beep at the dogs and scatter them, but not one did.

Beers were passed around soon. Given away by any men or women with a few in their fridge. All gamblers paid out when their dogs lost a lap and then picked a new breed each time. The police had to put the President in a squad car, but they left his windows down and told him how much his wife was losing.

November 26th, 1995, was the last time I lived with my family but I didn’t know it then. I’d thought our fight was just a mishap not a tragedy. Mom had put them through it one thousand times. Couldn’t they endure one more? It was such a surprise the first night I tried to get back in and my sister called the law.

That evening, the hounds formed a barrier. Their vigorous bodies blocked us in. We were free to mill around here, but not beyond. A person could run from one corner to the other but never, really, away. We were together. We were bound.

And I was a grown man in my fine purple suit. My black shoes fit me snugly. I held the front cover of my book to my chest. Anthony James. I felt the raised capital letters through my shirt; it was like I was screaming my name back at my own heart. That made me laugh. That made me wiggle. I felt so powerful I could have torn the moon in two.

Chris Jackson. Hard editing from a kind man is any writer’s dream. Literature needs fifty more of you. Friends.

Jenny Minton. Together from the start. Smart, exacting. You’re wonderful.

Dr. Raymond Smith supplied much needed information on botulism and its treatment. And attested to the snobbery of American physicians for their foreign trained peers.

John McCarthy’s The Official Splatter Movie Guide served as a model for Anthony’s own horror encyclopedia.

Last, I’d like to express my affection for fat people and crazy people everywhere.

An ecstatic is a term once used in places as diverse as seventeenth-century London and nineteenth-century Bengal to describe people whose actions were impossible to understand. The average person saw a man or woman who suddenly spoke gibberish or refused to bathe; a person they knew became a stranger. Seemingly overnight. Some saw these transformed people as possessed, or touched by God. Calling them ecstatics was a way to explain the unexplainable. Now, it seems likely that many of the ecstatics were mentally ill. I learned this curious history long before I finished my novel, but in the way it intertwined religious faith, the human need to know the unknowable, and mental illness, it fit. In a way each member of the family is, at one time, the Ecstatic. They are four people at the mercy of their minds.

— Victor LaValle

Victor La Valle

THE ECSTATIC

Victor LaValle is the author of the short-story collection Slapboxing with Jesus , winner of the PEN Open Book Award. He has also been awarded the key to Southeastern Queens. He lives in California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.