No Dogs in Philly (3 page)

He realized then, that there was no randomness
involved here. What he had taken for brutal motivation was a
ritual. Every twenty-four hours, on the exact second, a toe was
removed. Every twelve hours blood was injected. Every six hours a
new cocktail of drugs to keep him awake. He was being
transformed—like a club with a notch for every skull it had broken.
These were creatures of ritual, moved by ritual, obsessed with
ritual. They were clocks, machines, vampires, slaves to a higher
order. He felt a comfort—was it the blood?—in this ritual. He had
thought his search methods to be perfect and orderly, but now he
recognized how crazy, how random they were. He began again, from
the beginning, from birth records, genetics. He knew, somehow, that
the eyes were natural blue and not a bought alteration. He knew
much more now, the knowing a great staff he could lean upon. It was
wonderful to
know
.

There it was, all the girls in Philadelphia
born with blue eyes in the last forty years. Now their medical
records. It was a phenomenal amount of data, more than he could
ever know or process, but it seemed to glide by. He felt his
consciousness divide like a cell, and then again and again and
again until he was a thousand cells, a million, all working in
tandem to solve this problem. In the background, time was passing,
seconds, days? Millennia? He felt light and free, a mind without a
body, a creature of pure data. And girls, surrounded by girls, so
many in just one area, beautiful, ugly, horrid, filthy sacks of
copulation making more and more girls—did they never stop? Why was
he here? This girl, Charlene M. Farrow, grew up in Kensington,
black with blue eyes, was this the girl? No, she was dead, beaten
by her husband into a coma. And this girl, Ramona Ko, she was the
one! No, she was married, three kids, Glish teacher in the
suburbs.

And what was this? A cell-mind trembling in the
foreground, bursting with excitement, rushing, exploding,
destroying all the other tiny minds around him. It was the girl!
The one they wanted—they, who were they? It didn’t matter, they
knew, they knew already he had found her; he had done it. She had
made a call, called her mother and he had heard the voice, all the
bits of data going through the line, and he knew the voice belonged
to those eyes because all data was one, any form of information
expressed as any other; a stream is a star is a tree is a limb is
an arm or a drop of blood or a snowflake, a scrap of cloth, my God,
no, God, he understood, understood everything!

In the climax of knowing he died—or at least
his new self, his transformed self. He found himself, his old self,
alone in a chair in a cold basement. He looked down and saw stumps
where his legs should have been. He looked to his sides and saw
similar stumps where once had been arms. The pain was coming now,
the drugs, the blood, the bliss, all fading. He understood now. He
had glimpsed the UausuaU—there was no doubt. He had seen into the
dark and emerged sane, but he had paid the price in flesh—he knew
now, there was always a price to be paid. This task was his task;
it had always been his task, his gift from the Uau, his purpose to
serve. He spat out the feeding tube. There was a tremor in his
throat, a tickle, a vibration, traveling up to tremble on his lips.
He burped, then he groaned, and he coughed. And then he laughed, a
quick, harsh bark, and then another and another until he could no
longer stop and the laughter raced madly out to echo through his
tomb.

Chapter 3

It was a mistake, Ria thought, to go into the
subway. She had taken the normal route, sliding through the
oversized storm grate on Logan Boulevard, climbing down the iron
spikes that some nameless hip had hammered into the walls, dropping
carefully onto the cinder-block island—now practically submerged
from the pounding rain—and then feeling her way along the wall
until she came to the hatch that lead to the abandoned Logan
Station. She had stepped carefully over the mounds of dozing elzi,
careful not to even brush against the coat-hanger or chicken-wire
antennae poking from their eyes or ears or throats. The boojie were
afraid of the elzi, but to her they were a comfort. They were the
canaries of the underground, their snores and growls and whimpers a
sign that all was safe.

The dog had followed her, of course. She had
thought the trip underground might shake it, but of course the dog
wasn’t real and didn’t have to climb ladders or slide through
grates or tippy-toe hop from cinder block to cinder block to find
his way to Lo City. It was there, in the shadows, in the corner of
her eye, prowling, watching her. It grew and shrank with the light.
Black as a pit with golden eyes or suddenly gold with black eyes.
It wasn’t a breed she had ever seen on vision but it looked maybe
like the bastard freak of a wolf nailed down by a lion. Lately it
had been growing larger, huge sometimes, like a parade balloon
swelling to fill the streets and the terror would overtake her, a
suffocating sense of
impending
and she would run, tear down
the street, shoving the sneering boojie out of the way and
confirming to all the world that she was indeed a crazy woman unfit
to handle herself.

Fuck you, she thought at the dog. It stared at
her from the shadows. You ruined my life.

It had appeared five years ago—was it really so
long?—on her thirteenth birthday. Or was it fourteenth? Was it her
birthday? She couldn’t recall. A birthday was no different than any
other day back then unless it fell on a Friday and the free lunch
program had cheesecake. She loved cheesecake. It had come in the
same little plastic cups that all the other deserts had come in and
she had licked it clean every Friday. Mom had called her fat, but
that wasn’t true, she was skinny as a stick, which was what Derrick
used to say, laughing at her, but it didn’t stop him from kissing
her under the bleachers. Was that when the dog had first appeared?
Under the bleachers with Derrick Wilson, between his sloppy tongue
kisses and him grabbing her boob so hard it hurt? She had slapped
him for that and then she’d let him do it again.

She wasn’t crazy though; she knew that. The dog
was there, even if no one else could see it. Sometimes it left—but
never because of the pills they gave her or the words they said,
condescending—but it always came back. At first it was tiny, not a
puppy, not cute or juvenile, just smaller, a little wiener-dog
version of itself. At first she thought it was because of the acid
or the pink powder that Bobby had given her that she later
discovered was lolacaine, another sex drug, and he was just trying
to get her to put out. Why was it that all the “nice” guys were
just trying to wet their cocks? The only one she had even really
liked was Cale—he was an asshole but at least he never made his
plans a secret. He always brought over a bottle of sweet rum, and
not the dollar store kind, and she’d let him touch her a few times,
even use his tongue when she was feeling really foggy, but it felt
better to shoot him down each time he thought he was going to
score. Once he’d pinned her arms to the floor and told her he could
just take it if he wanted and she’d said nothing, almost hoping
that he would. But he pussied out and zipped up his shitty
thrift-store jeans and slunk away.

It wasn’t the drugs though because she didn’t
know a drug on the planet that made a tiny golden dog appear and
follow you around for half your fucking life. At times she thought
maybe she
was
mad, that maybe she had gone too far and
peaked into the Uau and this was all her personal nightmare and she
was actually rolling around in a pile of trash somewhere with a
computer stapled to her forehead. But that seemed too far-fetched,
too anti-climactic that the darkness driving all the poor sobs
insane was a virtual pet simulator.

It was warm underground, and dry, but she had
been soaked in the rain and she shivered. Up ahead was a flickering
and she followed it to a group of four other hips huddling around a
trash fire. She approached the group cautiously, holding up her
hands and walking slowly so they didn’t mistake her for a hungry
elzi. She saw them tense and then relax. Close to the fire she saw
their faces, two boys, a girl, and one that was a toss up. They
were older than her, except for the girl, who seemed very young to
be hip. She must’ve ditched foster or a bad sit at home. Ria felt a
surge of sympathy.

She took a seat on an old tire close to the
fire but slightly apart from the rest. The others said nothing.
They stared at the flames. Wordlessly, one of the older men
withdrew a flask, took a long swig, and then passed it to his left.
It went around and Ria drank gratefully; it was harsh in a good
way, and she felt herself warming. She took off her jacket and lay
it on a pile of bricks and subway tiles close to the
flames.

“
Bad nigh’,” the other man said.
He could’ve been thirty or sixty. His face was shriveled and most
of his teeth were gone. She guessed he’d been using a bit. His
words had a chewy, gummy-like feel as though he couldn’t quite
remember how to form them.

“
Lossa rain,” he continued. No one
could argue with this. Ria stared at the curving wall beyond the
fire, enjoying the dancing shadows. It was quiet here; she liked
it. She wondered how many other small groups like this were
scattered throughout the station. There was a slight tremor, a few
stones rolled; some dust fell from the ceiling. A train, probably,
from another line, or one of the big dumb waiters bringing food to
the distribution points. Could she get to there from here? There
must be a way. Her stomach growled. The thought of all that
food—still in its neat, pristine packaging—made her mouth
water.

The dog was back. He stepped out of the shadows
on the wall, stood in mid air and stared down the subway tunnel.
Ria thought this might mean something, but she had resolved to
ignore the dog. She could have lived with the dog, ignored it
completely, if it hadn’t started killing people. That had caused
her some problems, all her problems, really. The man at Lourdes,
what was his name? Dr. Stermdrick? Stern Dick? Why not? He had said
that she had started the fire, that she couldn’t remember it, that
she was blaming her imaginary dog, but that wasn’t true! Sure, she
had been drinking, but they seemed to think that meant she was
drunk. She could pound a liter of vodka and walk a line and thread
a needle and she remembered exactly what had happened.

The john had come at her, stiffed her, was
going to kill her, maybe. He had his meaty hands locked on her
throat, thrashing her, slamming her head into the car door, stars
exploding in her face. She’d struggled and flailed her legs but he
sat his fat hairy ass on her body and pinned her to the seat. She
was ninety pounds with a meal in her and he was a fat fucking
gorilla man that felt like a bus crushing her sternum. In the end
he had broken two of her ribs and torn something in her gut that
made blood show up every day of the month, and that was what forced
her into the hospital in the first place.

Then there was the dog, two eyes in the
shadows, growing, filling the van. The john letting go, the look of
terror in his mongoloid eyes, the gooey sweat on his fat neck and
the hole opening in his chest, like a fist-sized cigarette burn,
and his scream. He was too big, she couldn’t get him off, and the
hole widened and widened and burned away his mass, his chest, his
face, his arms dropping off like sausages, and then her squirming
out from under his melted belly and running into the night. It was
the dog, she knew it was the dog, not her—how was she going to
start a fire like that? How could she even get free? They didn’t
care; they didn’t listen.

It was impossible to feel grateful to the dog,
even though it had saved her life. It was too much, to burn a man
alive that way, even if he did deserve it. It couldn’t have scared
him away or pushed him off—if you can burn him, why can’t you do
that? She didn’t feel safer after, merely hunted. She had killed a
man, apparently; she was insane, dangerous. What would happen the
next time she felt threatened? Was the dog going to vaporize anyone
that came at her? Could it tell the difference between unease and
terror? A good pain and a bad pain? A real threat from some dumb
punk trying to snatch her purse? How much did the dog understand
her?—because she didn’t understand the dog at all.

There was another tremor, greater, and then
noises, hundreds of bodies scrambling to their feet, cans and
garbage kicked around, and then a mass of people. All around them
the elzi were rising from their stupor and shuffling or scrambling
or sprinting if they hadn’t decayed too far. A herd leapt into the
pit of the subway track and began racing south. Another group
scrabbled for the sewer entrance. The hips thrust themselves up to
their feet and looked wildly around for the danger. Ria stayed
seated and stared at the dog. The dog stared down the subway
tunnel.

“
What do we do?” the young girl
asked.

“
Run,” the man with the flask
said, but it was a question more than an answer.

“
No,” Ria said, “We can’t, not
yet.”

She felt that same cold sweat like when she
couldn’t find booze, and a queasiness in her stomach. All the hairs
across her back stood on end, but she knew they couldn’t run. There
were too many elzi, clogging the exits with their mass, dumb beasts
getting stuck and crammed in the narrow exits. If they tried to
follow, one of them would touch an implant and then the elzi would
rip them all apart.