Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

And who could forget the day when the Professor ran into the house red-faced and crying, “Wolf is ill, Wolf is finished!”? Felix ran to the kennel and was shown a stuprated blood-red stool, which turned out to be only a rotten plum. It was then he realized he was in the presence of a physician who had never witnessed a birth or a death.

Agreeing that the animal was being bombarded with suggestions from too many quarters, the Professor finally resorted to the French staring cure. Lying on his stomach and removing his spectacles, he looked deep into the animal’s yellowish eyes, deep into the history which baffles history, and with his pocket watch pendulating, applied such Odic force as he could muster. Wolf ’s nose followed the arc of the watch, but his eyes remained fixed without expression upon those of his interlocutor, sliding back and forth in their eyesockets like shot ball bearings. The tremors in his hindlegs gradually ceased. Father watched intently over his shoulder, resting upon one knee as a sergeant might observe a recruit on the firing range.

“Now we’re on to something,” he muttered.

“Yes, he seems to be responding,” the Professor wheezed.

“What I mean to say is, I never saw a dog you couldn’t stare down. Something is quite wrong with this one. It isn’t that he doesn’t know his place. It’s as if he has no place. . and is quite comfortable there.”

“Shhhhhh.”

Man and animal lay locked in each other’s soft glare for at least twenty minutes, both their bodies absolutely still. Then the Professor saw something which frightened him, for across the spheroid of the eyeball he could make out a shallow groove, a primitive streak, a milky band in which less than golden sunbursts spangled, and he realized he was looking into nothing like a soul or a mind but the inverted cosmos of hysteria. He was examining Absolute Time, which did not emit light and could not be mapped. An angina-like pain spread from his heart to the furthest extremities of his body.

The Professor looked up and removed the watch, which now lay on the gravel between himself and the dog. Wolf was calm, dispassionate, his brow uncharacteristically clear. Indeed, Felix thought he had never seen an expression so positively opaque in an animal, except perhaps a snake.

“Sleep,” the Professor muttered, “sleep now, good Wolf.” He was determined to awaken in the animal the deepest part of his heritage, that dangerous and paramount personality to whom only a passive attitude is possible. But Wolf did not sleep and did not rest. His eyelids had not dropped a single millimeter.

“This eyeball business,” Father whispered, “I know it’s in great vogue and threatens to take over everything, but it is quite short in its effect. Looking, after all, is our weakest sense. Please, Herr Doktor!”

But there was no response. Felix reached down to find his recumbent co-trustee asleep, while Wolf ’s bright and now perfectly unslanted eyes, corneas boiling like a drunk’s, beamed a ray upon his master’s closed lids. After dusting off his suit, Felix took the Professor’s arm and walked him briskly around the hydrangeas.

“I believe we should admit, my dear friend, that there is no authoritative command for such a state. We have reached the bottom of this turgid well. Wolf is complying in his way, don’t you see? But there is nothing for it. In this subject as in so many, depth is an illusion, just as much as surface. It is too much an offense to your medical dignity to enter his logic, and he knows it.”

“I will admit,” the Professor sighed, limping slightly, “that one’s pride is involved. But it’s more than pride of ownership, you must admit.”

“On the contrary, I revere your pride, as ever. Do you think I would waste my time with some ordinary physician? Believe me, people much less intelligent than yourself have survived this. Still, you cannot understand this animal if you insist on translating him into concepts. And the eyeball business — well, it has its entertaining side, no doubt, but what I suspect is this: what if the hypnotic state is the norm not only for Wolf but for all of us? The norm is infinite suggestibility, neither sleep nor rest but a kind of somnambulism with all the nerves firing without stimuli. Every animal will fight if you disturb his disturbed state, because it’s the only equilibrium he knows. No, we must somehow jerk him out of this idiot séance, not reinforce the trance!” And on saying this he took out the Dresden silver collar and pressed it into his comrade’s palm.

“Talk will not reverse these conditions. You have to tell this story with your hands. Take it. Close the loop, pull the chain, hear the click.”

The Professor obediently slipped the Dresden links into his fob pocket, next to his watch.

“His defenses are extraordinarily strong,” he whispered between gritted teeth, perspiration cascading in rivulets from his brow and dripping from his nose as if from a stalactite.

“Ah, yes. Defenselessness is the most powerful weapon. The old ‘I won’t live without your love’ defense.”

“There must be a way to reach him, to teach. .”

“Yes, indeed, but a good teacher teaches in a way you don’t call teaching. You must be on the alert to hear something you didn’t expect. If you’re only teaching, the orchestra sounds bad. If you tell them, ‘This is how it goes,’ you’re lost. Be honest, my good fellow. Have you ever learned anything from something which was told to you directly?”

While Felix now suspected that Wolf ’s static fits were of vascular origin, he suggested that the propensity for hauling was not really a way of taking advantage of his master, but instead was enforced by the Professor’s presuppositions, which were transmitted to the dog through the rope.

The Professor’s mouth dropped open. “You mean a kind of telepathy?”

“Telegraphy would be more like it,” Father said. “You needn’t mystify it. All we’re trying to do is to get Wolf to pick up the telephone. We don’t care yet about the response. It’s not that you are sending the wrong ideas. It’s that you are sending ideas at all. Do you bounce ideas off a child or a lover? Would you philosophize to your nude grandparent? No, it’s always something more or less than an idea one is sending out. You must learn to adopt a joyous, even childish tone, without the slightest hint of parody. This is a state which precludes — listen carefully, comrade— any ironic interpretation.”

The Professor nodded forlornly and returned with determination to the kennel. The staring cure in abeyance, he substituted long, animated conversations, conversing for both of them, as it were, with his full, round face pressed against the fence, speaking through the grill into Wolf ’s half-cocked ear, though the dog never seemed as interested as he had with the more musical Astingi nonsense. Indeed, Wolf listened piously but remained unapproachable. Occasionally he would lift his damaged paw and allow it to flutter across his chest. The Professor interpreted this gesture as a kind of lie. Things were reaching a head. He finally had to admit that he wanted to beat the animal.

“It’s quite understandable,” Felix said. “Remember, however, that the maimed tend to revenge themselves. It’s the police in him.”

“What is so frustrating,” the Professor said, “is that he is so accessible to observation, yet he only seems known to me through the stories you tell. It’s like some kind of strange picture book which looks natural but feels staged.”

“Oh, I should say that there is more affection operating here than one would think,” Felix said. “Behavior is created despite commands. It is external to them.”

“What does one do,” the Professor almost shouted, “when a patient is so, so. . schtupid !”