SCOTT BRADFIELD

DAZZLE'S INFERNO

The animal fables of Aesop recently garnered some news when new translations revealed a somewhat less "wholesome" side to them. (In fact, the translators took flak for publishing a fable entitled "The Camel Who Shat in the River. ") In a similar way, Scott Bradfield's animal fantasies--including the stories of Dazzle--are earthy tales that seem like antidotes to the many twee animal fables on the market today. Dazzle the dog previously appeared in our Dec. 1999 issue; now the hard-bitten pooch takes us on a descent into some of the perils of modern times.

ON A BLEAK NOVEMBER afternoon, while searching Highway 1 for an errant grand-pup, Dazzle was snapped up by the SPCA and transported to the Animal Preservation Facility in Ventura, where he was printed, tagged, and impounded. "Preservation, hah, that's a laugh," Dazzle thought out loud as he was corralled into a mesh-wire compound. "Elimination of unreliable elements -- that's more like it." By the time the shock wore off, Dazzle found himself immured by hypersanitary living conditions, cold-eyed Animal Welfare Agents, and just about the sorriest collection of fellow mutts he had ever encountered.
"So I don't get it," Dazzle opined to anybody who would listen. "They de-worm and de-louse us, shoot us full of antibiotics, and when we're healthy enough, they throw us into this steel trap where we're expected to piss through the floors, and drink out of rusty bowls. But that's all part of the process of deindividuation, isn't it? Killing off the yeasty organic boil in our blood, while committing our bodies to this state of immaculate unliving called Animal Preservation. What they want to preserve, of course, is everything that isn't animal. Everything that isn't us. I mean, look at this bedding, for Christ's sake. Is that a vinyl beanbag chair or what? It's not comfort they're aiming at. It's something you can hose down, turn over, and re-use again. I mean, at the end of the day, life isn't about how many identical, machinery-manufactured days you endure, one after another. It's about the odd and insignificant moments. The ones you can't quantify. The ones that won't happen again, or exactly the same way."
While Dazzle was accustomed to being ignored, he found his fellow inmates especially irksome. For rather than acknowledging Dazzle's wrong-footed efforts at communication, they either growled him away from their Nibbles, or tried to mount him from behind and fuck him in the bottom.
"Hey, cool it!" Dazzle yelped, shaking free the latest serial-perv with a hippy little snap. "That's quite a grip you got there. I may be neutered, but that doesn't make me queer -- nothing personal, pal. It's just the way I am."
Everywhere Dazzle turned, his cell-mates were engaged in closet-busting activities, as if the very meaning of privacy had been turned inside-out. They freely licked themselves and one another in every conceivable orifice. They fucked each other in the bottom, and poohed in the water bowl, and dry-humped the bedding. They whined in self-doubt and yelped at bad dreams. And at the drop of a hat, they fought fiercely and endlessly over nothing, gouging and clawing and gnashing and shredding.
"If I told you once I told you a thousand times -- stay away from my Nibbles!"
"Don't look at me that way or even think what you're thinking!"
"What's oozing from that pustule? Do you mind? Mmm, thanks. I needed that."
"I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you."
"Hate me hate me hate me hate."
There were times when Dazzle felt like a bit of meat hurled into the gasketed vortices of some mighty machine--a process for producing pies, say, or a sharply pronged chicken defeatherer. Everything that was most mindless about dogs had been amplified until all you could hear was the raucous metal whine of denaturized stuff: bile, testosterone, greed, fear, denial and rage.
"You guys are the end of language," Dazzle told them, curled up with disbelief in a comer. "You guys are the end of rational thought. Isn't this the part where we're supposed to band together, organize, sing songs and rage against the darkness? It's not us against each other anymore. It's us against them, and I just don't get you guys, I really don't. You can either work together or die alone. The choice is yours."
"Where are the puppies, Daddy?"
"They're in the other pen, sweetheart. These are the grown-up doggies. The ones that got lost from their masters and nobody wants."
"Can we see the puppies now?"
"It never hurts to look, sweetheart. Like this doggy here? He's a big doggy, but he looks nice, doesn't he?"
Of all the indignities Dazzle had suffered in his life, visiting hours took the biscuit. Every weekday afternoon, human beings in search of pliable pets were hustled past on their way to the nursery, but they never stayed long. After all, nobody wants a self- formed dog with his own fully formed opinions about life. They want malleable, just-weaned babies they can mold into treat- mongers, circus chimps, and guard dogs. They want dogs who take what you give them and never complain.
"I don't know, Daddy," the little girl said. "Why's he looking at me so funny?"
"What do you mean, sweetheart? He's a pretty dog and well-mannered. He's just looking at you that way because oh, I see. That is a funny look, isn't it? It's almost as if, as if."
"It's like he doesn't like me, Daddy. But I'm not important enough to make him mad."
Bingo, Dazzle thought, gazing into the moppet's muddy brown eyes. Dazzle had never been terribly fond of human beings, but at least the adults remembered to feed, water and run you on occasion. Moppets, however, were always dressing you in doll clothes and trying to tempt you with their sugary sodas, fast-food sandwiches and candy bars, as if you were too stupid to know twenty- four-carat crap when you saw it.
"Yes, darling, well, at least we gave the older doggies a sporting chance. Now, let me at those puppies! I think we should get a cute one, and teach it all sorts of neat tricks. How about you?"
"And it'll love me, won't it, Daddy? It'll love me more than anything. Even more than its own mommy!"
As the human visitors were ushered happily toward the nursery, where the pulse-pleasing cacophony of puppies filled the air like jingly Muzak, Dazzle felt only relief.
"My mommy was a neurotic bitch who lived behind a dumpster in Van Nuys," Dazzle thought after them, with the sense of quiet grandeur that only comes to those without hope. "And for the record, chickie -- you'll never take the place of my mommy."
Dazzle knew that he and his fellow inmates were all traveling down the same short conveyor belt to nowhere.
"You're tagged with this number, right? Around your neck. There, right there," Dazzle explained to the only dog who paid attention, a mixed wire-hair spaniel with weird rubbery growths on his face named Grunt. "The number corresponds with the day of the month you were processed, see? Which means we've each got thirty days to find our way out of here, by hook or by crook. And when those days are up, so are you, pal. Pool. In South America, you've entered the ranks of los desaparecidos. And once that happens, it's like you've never been born."
Grunt was an unusually curious dog, part border collie on his father's side, who could sit for hours watching words issue from Dazzle's lips like glistening soap bubbles.
"You talk and I'll listen," Grunt assured Dazzle. "It's like I got this reverse attention-deficit thing going, comprende? I gotta keep staring at somebody, or I kinda go completely nuts."
In many ways, Grunt was the perfect friend for Dazzle, who liked to talk, but wasn't so wild about listening.
"Human civilization is like this big machine, right?" Dazzle would continue, inspired by Grunt's unwavering and dilated pupils. "Turning everything we are into everything we're not. Surplus value, commodities, spin, psycho-babble, culture, landfill, graphs. And when they're done, we won't be dogs anymore. We'll be a record of human efficiency. We'll be a pie chart displayed at the next managerial meeting that makes everybody look good. How quickly we were eliminated -- that'll matter. How cost-efficiently we were incinerated -- that'll matter too. But the moral and theological and philosophical reasoning behind why we were needled in the first place, well, nobody will waste much time on that. They aren't the sort of questions that can be submitted with your next budget proposal, hear what I'm saying? You want to build that golden parachute, you're better off leaving those questions alone."
"Absitively!" Grunt yipped. "Posolutely!" Grunt was so deeply affirmative that he seemed to glow. "Tell it like it is, Dazzle. I could sit here and listen to you all night."
In fact, Grunt was so exhaustingly attentive that sometimes, without expecting it, Dazzle actually ran out of things to say. He looked at Grunt looking at him. He pursed his lips, licked them. He lay down on the cold mesh floor, closed his eyes, and felt Grunt's intensity drilling through the back of his neck like an electronic probe.
"Are you going to sleep?" Grunt asked wonderingly. "I can't tell you how interesting you are. Look, you get all the rest you need, and I'll be here when you wake up. Sometimes I can take a little nap with my eyes open, I don't even know it's happening. So don't be startled, Dazzle. The moment you wake up, I'll already be here."

ON THE SAME rainy afternoon that the ward's biggest bullies, Spike and Fatso, were led to the Dispensary yipping about "Snacks! Bitches! Sunlight! Snacks!" an especially bland, perspicacious Visitor arrived at the Adult Male Holding Facility. Her name was Dr. Harriet Harmony and she wielded a clipboard, a severely bitten plastic ball-point, and a wallet-sized electronic calculator.
"Uh oh," Dazzle told Grunt, who was at that moment chewing his toes in a way that Dazzle found particularly revolting. "I don't like the look of this babe what, so, ever."
Dr. Harriet Harmony had received her B.A. in Animal Husbandry from Iowa State, and her doctorate from Princeton. She wore sensible shoes, wire-rim bifocals, and a crude, hasty bob which might well have been self-administered with a prison shaving mirror and a cereal bowl.
"Vivisection," Grunt growled darkly, and crawled under Dazzle's tail to hide. It was the longest word Dazzle had ever heard uttered by a dog to whom he wasn't genetically related.
"Which of you big boys would like to go with Dr. Harmony?" asked Maggie, the floor supervisor. To get their attention, she brushed her hand across the mesh with a thip thip thip, as if she were petting a huge scaly reptile. "Guess what Doctor Harmony has at her housy-wousy? A big bowl of meaty Alpo."
The very word struck a chill into Dazzle's heart. Whenever human beings were about to do something truly unconscionable to a dog, they always promised him Alpo.
Flipping through the forms on her clipboard, Dr. Harmony confirmed the identity of one random mutt after another with a brisk switch of her pen. Check. Check.
"Too big," she noted out loud. "Too furry. Too purebred. Too mean."
It's times like this you believe in precognition, Dazzle thought. For from the moment Dr. Harmony appeared, Dazzle knew they were meant for each other.
"What about this one?" Dr. Harmony asked.
She wasn't looking at Dazzle. She was looking at Adult Male No. 4243/8-30.
"Oh, isn't he a cutey," Maggie enthused. She already had Dazzle's attention, but she wanted more. "Do you want to go with Dr. Harmony, you big cutey? You big hairy cutey you!"
Dazzle was allowed no time at all to console poor Grunt, who leapt and spun about fiercely as if he were being teased by a bone on a bungee-cord.
"Don't worry, Grunt!" Dazzle shouted as he was pulled down the corridor on Maggie's leather leash. "If they torture me to death for the sake of improving human deodorants, at least I'll glimpse the blue sky again on my way out! And come to think of it, who wouldn't like to see some improvement in human deodorants, anyway? I'm all for it -- what about you?"
For once, Dazzle's words had a resounding effect on his fellow dogs.
"Human smells!" they barked. "How we hate those awful human smells!"
"Don't let them hook anything to your testicles!" Grunt shouted.
And Dazzle smiled, flattered by the concern.
"If they want to hook anything to my testicles, they'll have to call my old vet in Reseda Hills and find out where he buried 'em. Take care of yourself, pal. And keep a tight asshole, dig?"
It happened so fast that Dazzle never knew what hit him. He was retagged and re-registered, driven to West Los Angeles in a minivan, and reconfined in a smaller, tidier private accommodation in the Egyptian-style monolith of the Center for Applied Sciences at UCLA.
"Welcome to your new home," Dr. Harmony told him, and curtly disappeared with her clipboard.
The accommodation was equipped with a water dispenser, a yelp-activated shower, and, lo and behold, a fresh bowl of Alpo.
"You're not fooling me with that old trick," Dazzle grumbled, and curled up disdainfully on the floor beside the clean fragrant cotton futon, which was adorned with bright, squeaky rubber toys and rawhide bones like a canine odalisque. "You guys tell me what you want. And I'll decide if I'm giving it to you or not."
Within the hour, Dr. Harmony returned with her Senior Research Supervisor and a pretty young court reporter named Carol.
"Welcome to UCLA," Dr. Marvin said slowly, as if he were addressing a roomful of neatly attired, multinational students in a TEFL course.
The stenographer, cued by Dr. Marvin's non-aggressive smile, began to type.
Tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety
"We hope you have found everything satisfactory --"
Tip-tippety-tappety-tap-tappety-tap
"And that you will graciously accept this opportunity to meet with the recently endowed Department of Animal Linguistics on an equal footing --"
Tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety-tip
"Let's put the ugly days of blood-hurling demonstrators and bad publicity behind us. With the kind and generous support of Animals Alive!, itself the officially registered charity of sport-shoe entrepreneur and widely recognized animal-lover, R. Wallace McShane, we are about to forge a new era in human-animal relations."
-tappety-tip-tappety-tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap.
The moment Carol stopped typing, Dr. Marvin and Dr. Harmony exchanged curt, professional smiles. Then, in one smoothly synchronized motion, they entered Dazzle's cell, crouched, and offered their hands in a gesture of olfactory openness and good faith.
Dazzle couldn't work up enough enmity to growl. Had he his druthers, he would have liked to forge a new era of human-animal relations in Dr. Harmony's fat butt.
At which point Dr. Harmony slipped one hand into the vest pocket of her white lab coat, grabbed Dazzle by the haunch and injected him with the largest, nastiest hypodermic he had ever seen.
"Yowzah!" Dazzle expostulated, starting to his feet as the numbness spread to his haunches, his ribs, his face, his tongue.
"You goddamn, goddamn," Dazzle said.
And collapsed unconscious to the floor.
As Dazzle eventually learned, Dr. Harmony was inspired as a young girl by the best-selling fictional reflections of a sage, beneficent ape who had many wise things to say about the meaning of life, and the harmonic convergences of nature. This ape bore no grudge against the homo saps who had enslaved him in a zoo, since he pitied their collective inability to love, or be loved, with total sincerity.
"I guess that sensitive, beautiful creature taught me everything I know about Nature," Dr. Harmony confessed, drifting beside Dazzle in the dreamily burbling laboratory. "I learned to look beyond my petty, callous concerns, and to devote my career to exploring the spiritual oneness of Nature. I learned that this oneness invests every living creature on our planet, no matter how small, grubby or ignoble. It invests doggies, and kitties, and monkeys, and me. I want you to know that I consider you a lot more important than some silly, tenure-achieving article in Nature or Biology Today, and I hope we won't remain divided from one another by the false dichotomy of humans-slash-animals. What I hope is that we'll learn to respect one another as friends."
Dazzle was not sure how long he had been drifting in the closed current of Dr. Harmony's voice. He only knew that she was with him, then she wasn't, and then she was with him again.
"I guess what I'm trying to say is that we all make sacrifices every day for Nature. And in times like these, Nature can clearly use all the help she can get."

WHEN DAZZLE AWOKE he found himself drifting in a huge, gelatin-filled tank in a wide, omniscient laboratory buzzing with video cameras and metabolic gauges. His eyeballs were sewn open; his paws were bound in see-through plastic tape; and an array of multi-colored, follicular implants sprouted from his forehead like a cybernetic toupé.
"We call it a syntactical eductor," Dr. Marvin explained, standing before Dazzle's immersion tank with the rapt, wide-open stare of a child observing his first jellyfish at the aquarium. "As you will soon understand, it's not words that generate meaning, but the arrangements between words. Subject and object, subjunctive and possessive, predicate and noun. The invisible logic which our brains weave of things, thoughts, and sensations. Deprived of semantics, we drift through a universe of disparity and contradiction. We don't know which way is up, or how far, or how to get there from here. We can't distinguish us from them, or him from her, or being from what used to be. No wonder you poor animals have such a hard time, herded mindlessly from one form of oppression to another. You never learn right from wrong. You never learn volition from fate. And you can only comprehend one word at a time, like Sit, Shake, Dinnertime, and Kiss-kiss. But today, Mr. Adult Male No. 4243, is the first day of the rest of your life. And when you receive the Promethean gift of syntax, you will engage everything that comes with it. Synchronicity, intention, history, and causation. So now it's time, Mr. Adult Male No. 4243. It's time for you doggies to join us in the all- embracing community of Humankind."
At this point, Dr. Marvin performed a smooth physical elision, and Dr. Harmony stepped forward to take his place. She held a compact digital microphone, as if she were about to perform some high-tech version of karaoke.
"Me like doggy," Dr. Harmony enunciated, placing her flat, bitten fingernails against the glass of Dazzle's container. "Me protect doggy. Doggy help me. Me help doggy."
There was something so horrific about the concentrated sincerity of Dr. Harmony's face that Dazzle couldn't bear to watch. Meanwhile, the electronically translated words clanked hollowly among his wired-synapses, like chords plunked out on a child's xylophone.
Dazzle's brain, quite literally, rattled.
"Doggy eat Nibbles through tube," Dr. Harmony said, indicating the feeder inserted through Dazzle's belly. "Doggy go wee- wee and poo-poo without getting dirty," she said, indicating the yellow coil of Dazzle's catheter, and the brownish-green one of his colonic irrigator.
"Me talk nice to doggy," Dr. Harmony continued, miming the removal of fragrant words from her mouth, and presenting them to Dazzle like red rubber chew toys.
"Doggy speak nice to me? What do you say, doggy? Me want to heat your words very much."
The inflections pinged in Dazzle's brain like the chimes of a cash register. And for once, the space that emerged at the end of a human question mark was an invitation, not simply a playful taunt.
Dazzle wished he were the sort of dog who could resist that invitation. But of course he wasn't.
"Spuh," Dazzle said. His metal voice rasped on the overhead speakers like a dog-chain sliding across a stainless steel bowl. "Spuh, spuh."
Until a voice emerged that sounded just like James Earl Jones announcing the divine presence of CNN:
"Spuh-spuh-spare me the condescending horseshit, sister. And don't you dare talk to me like I'm stupid."
It was nothing like catharsis or expiation. It was more like reinventing the fractured remnant of himself with somebody else's words. For seven days and seven nights, Dazzle raged at the blunt world, hitting it with all the stuff he had in him: iron negativity and rage. It was a bizarrely liberating experience.
He raged at their illusions about Democracy: "Okay, so every country's divided up between these two cosmetically antithetical political parties, and they both represent People With Money. Isn't that what's called a tautology? Two absurdly redundant propositions. That's what your political process looks like to me, honey. A human fucking tautology."
He raged at their illusions about Dogs: "Of course we roll over and wag our stupid tails and follow you around the house, mewling and twitching at every scrap of affection. We're prisoners, for Christ's sake. If we live in the basement, who else will feed us? Certainly not that idiotic mailman, who does nothing useful but shove rolled-up newspapers through the door. And what do rolled- up newspapers represent? Mind-control, torture, irrational submission to authority. If you ask me (and I hate to remind you, but you did ask me, and now I'm telling you) that mailman deserves all the grief he can get."
And without mercy or remorse, he raged at their illusions about Nature: "So what do you tell yourself about this Grand Project, Dr. Harmony, alone in your bed at night? Personally, I've got you pegged as a Dances with Wolves girl -- wow, you should have seen yourself flinch. You've probably got the Director's Cut on DVD, right? And you light all your scented candles after a hot bath in some slinky robe, and stretch out on that crummy student couch you've still got with the itchy osier fabric, and you are Native Woman, aren't you, Dr. Harmony, and you will purify your Kevin baby in the musky sea of your loins, with that adorable moustache of his and that oh-so-striking uniform. And he will carry you into your teepee where you will teach him the magic ways of -- cool it, Dr. Harmony, okay, I'll stop. But before I do, let me tell you something about Mother Nature. She's got crabs, and lice, and about eight billion venereal infections, and every ingrown hair and toenail usually develops into this oozing, life-threatening abscess. I are nature, Dr. Harmony, and do I sound wise and benevolent to you.* You don't have to answer that, Dr. Harmony. What you think about me is written all over your face."
And ultimately, Dazzle raged even at the hard-bought illusions of Himself: "So I developed this extended family in the woods, right, with this practically autistic bitch who's always taking rips out of my ass, and about a thousand step-pups and step-grandpups running around, bickering and fighting all the time and copulating with anything that moves, and it feels, it feels all right. It feels like what you guys call really "grown up." And I drift off, Dr. Harmony, into my own irrational dreams for a while, sentimental dreams of wholeness and True Being, tinged with irony and all that, but in the world of bloody-minded civilization versus bloody-minded Nature, isn't everything tinged with irony, whether we like it or not? And here I am, this creature with a few brains still left in his head, trying to teach the pups about being true to themselves, and doing the best they can, and all that rubbish, and what's happening to the world while I'm away, Dr. Harmony? Are dogs receiving progressively better treatment at the hands of you and your fellow saps? Are social institutions growing more progressive and humane? Is even the notion of equality between species being knocked around by college eggheads like yourself, not because dogs and cats are that smart or anything, but look at the lie of the land, Dr. Harmony. We sure as hell aren't any stupider than you guys. And when I get my bottom tossed into that dandy little concentration camp called Animal Preservation, well, I can't help thinking I brought it on myself somehow, and watching my fellow dogs brutalize one another in every conceivable fashion, it starts to feel like dying, Dr. Harmony. I don't know how else to explain it. Like I'm saying good-bye to every illusion I ever had about myself or my fellow dogs. I never wanted to die, Dr. Harmony, but something happened to me the last few weeks, and these days, I don't much want to live, either. And now that I'm given the opportunity to say what's on my mind, it's like all I've got to say is, well, nothing. Nowhere. No how. And I'm left to wonder what you think about all this. Me, this chattering dog in this huge fishbowl, talking your head off for seven days and seven nights. What do you think about what I'm saying, Dr. Harmony? Answer that question, and it'd be like discourse, right. The first step toward something bigger than us both. So let me have it, Dr. Harmony. What do you have to tell me?"
Not-so-surprisingly, Dr. Harmony missed her cue. Flanked by Dr. Marvin (writing a grant proposal) and the court reporter (tappily transcribing the ineluctable data that was Dazzle), Dr. Harmony gazed into the translucent goo as if trying to remember where she left her car keys.
"What I think," Dr. Harmony said emptily. The pistons missed a beat, then another. "What I think. You want to know what I think."
Even Dr. Marvin put down his Bic. And the court reporter, sensing a rare opportunity, reached for her warm can of diet soda and took a long, habit-clenching swallow.
"What I think is, well. I guess it's this. I think it's time for you to shut the fuck up, you stupid annoying mutt."
They deactivated the recording machines, the lights and the overhead fans, and everybody -- with the obvious exception of Dazzle -- went home for a well-deserved rest. It was the first time in a week that Dazzle had the opportunity to hear himself think. "You can either talk or think," Dazzle often told his foster-pups and grand-pups. "But you can't do both at the same time."
When Dazzle was just a teething pup, he knew the meaning of words before he knew the words themselves. "Yip," he might tell Mom, shaking his nose at the blue sky. Yip: clouds. Yip: cars. Yip yip: Last night I saw a blazing meteor. Yip yip yip yip: I love catching buzzy flies in my mouth. In many ways, the words themselves hadn't mattered, for whatever Dazzle said, Mom smiled fondly and licked his face.
I was speaking my me, Dazzle thought. And that's all that mattered to Mom. The language we inhabited whenever we lay together.
Yip, Dazzle thought now, drifting in the slow tremble of gelatin like a chunk of pineapple in a blancmange. Yip.
Flickery, unbidden images appeared on the screen of his imagination: a ball, a stick, a bowl of Nibbles. Yip. A cardboard box. Yip. A meaty bone. Yip. A urine-scented tree. We speak our minds and other creatures don't quite understand, Dazzle thought. Which is, I'm afraid, what language is all about.
The following morning, Dazzle made his demands known to the first employee to reactivate the overhead lighting.
"Basically, tell Dr. Harmony I'll be issuing a list of demands at oh-nine-hundred hours, and I'd like our court reporter present. And Dr. Marvin, of course, is more than welcome -- though what constitutes his actual purpose around here, other than signing his name to the articles his grad students write, presently eludes me. Also, you might suggest it's time to fly R. Wallace MacShane down from Marin. He and I should share some major face time oh, and one more thing. I'd like you guys to stop calling me Mr. Adult Male No. 4243. My name, if you haven't noticed, is Dazzle."
R. Wallace MacShane was an all-right kind of guy. He flew an energy-efficient private jet. He wore nonblend earth tone slacks, shirts and shoes. He provided his nonunion domestic employees with a near-Union-scale wage, pension scheme and medical plan. And he always referred to his underpaid nondomestic employees as brave pioneers of the burgeoning Third World superstate.
"So here we are," Robbie said, clapping his warm, well-manicured hands together. Robbie liked to begin every tête-à-tête as if he were getting down to a happy weekend of Dad-and-son touch football. "Dr. Marvin. Dr. Harmony. Me and, well. You."
A blink was the closest Robbie ever came to a shrug.
"Our, uh, our esteemed canine colleague who, through the aid of modern technology, has crossed the great cultural divide to speak to us from the hallowed, er--"
Dazzle didn't have time for this.
"Yadda-da-yadda-da-yadda-da," Dazzle said, eliciting a long, confused squeal of feedback from the overhead speakers. "Are the tapes running? They are? Then, Carol, will you begin transcribing? We should begin."
As a pup, Dazzle had spent many lazy afternoons in front of the television watching black and white reruns of Thin Man movies on Dialing for Dollars. In these highly unrealistic Depression era mysteries, William Powell and Myrna Loy wandered from one drunken m[e]l[e]e to another, uncovering corpses, making friends with heartsick young people, and getting completely sozzled along the way. Then, during the closing minutes, they would solve the accumulated crimes at a recitation attended by their surviving friends, a few random gangsters, and the local Police Chief, who couldn't catch a cold without their help. Meanwhile, their useless pooch, Asta, chewed the carpets and performed back/lips like a trained bear at the circus.
This one's for you, Asta, Dazzle thought.
"So at first I figure it's just age-old self-congratulation,' Dazzle told them. "The Victor's history lesson and all that. Big time academics reaching down to shake the paw of lowly canines, air play on all the networks, drive-time talk and late-night panel. Hey, before you know it, you've got your well-verbalized pooch appearing regularly on 'Stupid Human Tricks,' or maybe he's one of the more lovable castaways on the next all-species edition of Survivor. They keep spelling your names right, and the name of this fine institution. This attracts more grants, and more notoriety, and pretty soon I'm like that sheep they cloned, that Daisy Whatever. It's not progress that matters -- just the same Public Relations machine grinding out copy copy copy. At least dogs piss where they think it might do some good, but you guys. You just love the smell of yourselves, don't you? You just love to spread it around."
R. Wallace MacShane firmly stood his ground, and smiled the smile he was known for. It was the sort of smile he smiled very well indeed.
"I'm still listening," R. Wallace MacShane said. And, for the first time that morning, he took a chair beside Dr. Harmony, who was slurping Red Zinger from a hefty-sized Doctor Dolittle II promotional mug. "My conference call isn't till ten-thirty."
If Dazzle could have smiled, he would have given R. Wallace MacShane a run for his money. Instead, Dazzle leaned back in his roomy mind and produced the only emphasis at his disposal.
He modulated.
"Ahh," Dazzle's smoother, warmer voice said out loud. "I think we're almost done."
At which point, Dazzle let them have it.
"But one way or another, things don't look good for yours truly. I'm not lovable or charming or telegenic. I don't do tricks on demand. And you've clearly dumped a good chunk of grant-manna on wiring me up to these dohickeys, and what's to show for it? An irascible, antisocial canine who won't exactly be barking your praises to Rosie. Which leaves you with two choices. You can perform an expensive surgical reversal, unhook and delinguify me, then suture up all these too-exposed nerves and whatnot. Or you can cut all the cables and toss me in the dumpster, right along with poor old Adult Males No. 1 through 4242. I'm guessing you've tagged me for the dumpster. What are the odds, guys? You gonna make me famous or make me dead?"
Dr. Marvin made a point of not looking at Dr. Harmony.
Dr. Harmony made a point of looking directly at Dr. Marvin.
Ha, Dazzle thought. I think we call that gin.
"Which leaves me swimming in this soup," Dazzle resumed smartly. "Wondering what I can offer you guys in exchange for my sorry bones back. And that's when I think the magic word. The only word that keeps pointing itself directly at me."
Dazzle paused for effect.
"Nibbles," he said finally.
R. Wallace MacShane's smile suffered a noticeable glitch, as if his software had gone slightly ditzy.
"Nibbles," Dazzle continued, "are like the only common denominator I can find, right? Nibbles at the Animal Preservation Center. Nibbles being pulverized by that whirring processor and pumping into my veins through these tubes. Nibbles Inc., which is a minor subsidiary of Worldco Foods, which is itself coproprietor of Kidco Shoes, which is controlled by a panel of stockholders appointed by the very same CEO who appoints them, and who just happens to be sitting in this room. Robbie, our golden boy. Robert Wallace MacShane."
Robbie performed a curt little bow.
"It's like some basic elemental matter, the building blocks of the universe. Not atoms or energy or karma, but Nibbles, and it comes in a variety of flavors. Barbecued ribs. Chicken Korma. Tuna Surprise. And for those diabetic dogs, there's sugar-free VeggieBurger Plus, with all the flavor and protein of real meat. To hear you guys talking about Nibbles, it's like you're discussing the Holy Grail or something, or the latest soufflé whizzed up by Wolfgang Puck. But the fact of the matter, as any dog can tell you, is that Nibbles taste like shit. I mean, imagine dirt clods sprinkled with pesticides and chemicals and you're in the same ballpark. You could soak this stuff in water for a thousand years and it would still taste like dirt clods. And what does it say on the outside of every Nibbles container ever produced in the history of this planet? It says: "Dogs love 'em!" Doesn't that make you wonder, Robbie? How you guys can produce Nibbles by the boatload and tell everybody dogs love 'em when nobody really knows what dogs love. Or, for that matter, even cares."
R. Wallace MacShane was getting his smile back. He was even drumming his neatly manicured fingers on his knee, as if to remind himself that time was moving again.
"My dog loves Nibbles," Robbie said smugly. "You should see Rex gobble them up."
It would make me sad, Dazzle thought. If it didn't make me so angry.
"What choice do you give Rex?" Dazzle asked. "I mean, does Rex love Nibbles more than, say, chicken-fried steak? Try putting a bowl of Salsa-flavored Nibbles next to a hunk of chicken-fried steak, Robbie, and tell me which one Rex really loves best."
It all makes sense, Dazzle thought, watching the various faces watch him. Dr. Marvin: thinking about the grant-appropriations committee that afternoon. Dr. Harmony: thinking about how much she loathes Dr. Marvin. And Carol, the stenographer, looking at her can of Diet Tab with a new and unformed expression. Could she be thinking about possible connections between Nibbles and Diet Tab?
You could never be sure who would be the first person in a room to figure out what was really going on.
Robbie stopped drumming his fingers. Like any good negotiator, he knew this was the part where the guy holding all the best cards offered you the only deal in town.
"Bring me the Yellow Pages," Dazzle instructed. "Turn them to Entertainment Lawyers, and hook me to the intercom. Meanwhile, Dr. Harmony should get her skates on and hustle over to Animal Preservation, where my pal Grunt will be staring into the eye of a pretty nasty hypodermic about now. Then, and only then, we'll talk contract."

AFTER A FEW WEEKS of physio, Dazzle regained most of his old poise and swagger; and once the sutures began to heal, he booked himself and Grunt into the Ventura Doggy Motel, where they were treated to a hot flea-shampoo, a chicken-fried steak, and a few sharp, well-received tonguefuls of strawberry schnapps. But even after Dazzle's hair grew back over the scar tissue, his expression retained a weird, jig-jawish incongruity, as if he were looking in both directions at once.
"Every so often, life takes us apart," Dazzle told Grunt on the day they were released back into the wide world. "And if we're lucky, we live long enough to put ourselves back together again. But along the way, we lose these little pieces of ourselves, and enduring these losses is what life is all about. Not paving ourselves over with cosmetic surgery, or spackle, or bad faith. But wearing our brokenness openly in our hearts, and in our faces."
As per Dazzle's instructions, the Oldsmobile Towncar dropped them off at the intersection of PCH and Spring Valley Road. Unsurprisingly (at least to Dazzle) this intersection was marked by a self-illuminating Nibbles billboard, as big as a barn.
"Maybe I sold out, Grunt. I don't know. I've always believed in speaking the truth as well as my crude tongue allows, but sometimes you just, well. You just want your life back. You just want to save your hairy butt and move on."
Dazzle and Grunt were standing on the freeway's soft shoulder, gazing up at a rumpus-room-sized bowl of multicolored Nibbles.
The billboard's caption read:

LATEST SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES CONFIRM DOGS LOOOOOOVE NEW,IMPROVED BOLOGNESE- FLAVORED NIBBLES MORE THAN FRESH MEAT!

Dazzle could abide the caption. What he couldn't abide was the tiny, asterisked confirmation which ran along the baseboard like the health warning on a cigarette pack:

(*) THESE STATEMENTS CONFIRMED BY EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED AT UCLA ANIMAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES; DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE ON REQUEST

Staring up at that monumental load of drivel, Dazzle couldn't help sighing at the enormity of language. It's us who should be speaking words, he thought. But more often than not, it's words that speak us.
Despite showing a brave face to Grunt, Dazzle did not feel victorious, or smug, or even clever. In fact, he didn't feel much of anything -- not pleasure, or joy, or love, or even rage. He felt only weakness in his heart, and the deep impress of too many years. Standing at the junction of four roads, he couldn't decide which way to turn, or why one road might be more useful than any other.
They might have sat there until nightfall had it not been for the unpredictable impatience of Grunt.
"Sometimes we have to fight like hell just to keep a little bit of what we've already got," Grunt said, with the sort of slow, surprising wisdom Dazzle forgot could exist in a fellow dog. "Wind, trees, rocks, sunlight, clouds and tears. Just the little things that keep us interested. The things that keep us looking for something outside ourselves."
It was the sort of self-evident wisdom Dazzle had always hoped to develop, perhaps when he was older and less prone to querying. But somehow, this wisdom had come to him through a completely unexpected source: the totally unremarkable voice of a fellow dog.
Who would've figured?
"Someday, Dazzle, you'll stop talking long enough to listen," Grunt said gently, as if he could read Dazzle's mind. "Hell, you might even learn a thing or two."
At which point, Grunt showed Dazzle the fastest route out of town.