Timbuktu Read online

  “I’m afraid so,” Willy said. “I’m what you call a world-class fuckup, the king of the know-nothings.”

  “At least you knew enough to get in touch with me,” Mrs. Swanson said, sitting down in the chair that Sister Mary Theresa had provided for her and taking hold of Willy’s hand. “The timing might not be so hot, but better late than never, huh?”

  Tears started welling up in Willy’s eyes, and for once in his life he was unable to speak.

  “It was always touch and go with you, William,” Mrs. Swanson continued, “so I can’t really say I’m surprised. I’m sure you’ve done your best. But we’re talking about highly combustible materials here, aren’t we? You walk around with a load of nitroglycerin in your brain, and sooner or later you’re going to bump into something. When it comes right down to it, it’s a wonder you didn’t blow yourself up a long time ago.”

  “I walked all the way from New York,” Willy answered, apropos of nothing. “Too many miles with too little gas in the tank. It just about did me in. But now that I’m here, I’m glad I came.”

  “You must be tired.”

  “I feel like an old sock. But at least I can die happy now.”

  “Don’t talk like that. They’re going to fix you up and make you better. You’ll see, William. In a couple of weeks, you’ll be as good as new.”

  “Sure. And next year I’m going to run for president.”

  “You can’t do that. You already have a job.”

  “Not really. I’m sort of unemployed these days. Unemployable, really.”

  “And what about the Santa Claus business?”

  “Oh yeah. That.”

  “You haven’t quit, have you? When you wrote me that letter, it sounded like a lifelong commitment.”

  “I’m still on the payroll. Been on it for more than twenty years now.”

  “It must be hard work.”

  “Yeah, it is. But I’m not complaining. Nobody forced me to do it. I signed up of my own free will, and I’ve never had any second thoughts. Long hours, though, and not one day off in all that time, but what do you expect? It’s not easy doing good works. There’s no profit in it. And when there’s no money in a thing, people tend to get confused. They think you’re up to something, even when you’re not.”

  “Do you still have the tattoo? You mentioned it in a letter, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “Sure, it’s still there. Take a look if you want.”

  Mrs. Swanson leaned forward in her chair, lifted the right sleeve of Willy’s hospital gown, and there it was. “Very nice,” she said. “That’s what I’d call a proper Santa Claus.”

  “Fifty bucks,” Willy said. “And worth every penny.”

  That was how the conversation began. It continued for the whole night and into the next morning, interrupted by occasional visits from the nurses, who came by to replenish Willy’s IV, take his temperature, and empty the bedpan. Sometimes, Willy’s strength would flag, and he would suddenly doze off in midsentence, sleeping for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, but he would always come back, rising up from the depths of unconsciousness to join Mrs. Swanson again. If she hadn’t been there, the fly realized, it was doubtful that he would have held on as long as he did, but so great was his pleasure at being with her again that he continued to make the effort—for as long as effort was possible. Still, he did not struggle against what was coming, and even as he went through a list of things he had never done in life—never learned to drive a car, never flown in an airplane, never visited a foreign country, never learned to whistle—things he had never done and therefore would never do—it was not so much with regret as a kind of indifference, an attempt to prove to her that none of it mattered. “Dying’s no big deal,” he said, and by that he meant that he was ready to go, that he was grateful to her for seeing to it that his last hours had not been spent among strangers.

  As one might have expected, his last words were about Mr. Bones. Willy had returned to the subject of his dog’s future, which he had already mentioned several times before, and was emphasizing to Mrs. Swanson how important it was that she comb the city and find him, that she do everything she could to give him a new home. “I’ve botched it,” he said. “I’ve let my pooch down.” And Mrs. Swanson, who was alarmed to see how weak he had suddenly become, tried to soothe him with a few meaningless words, “Don’t worry, William, it’s all right, it’s not important,” and Willy, rousing himself for one last effort, managed to lift his head and say, “Yes it is. It’s very important—” and then, just like that, his life stopped.

  Sister Margaret, the nurse on duty at that hour, walked over to the bed and checked for a pulse. When none could be found, she took a small mirror out of her pocket and held it up to Willy’s mouth. A few moments later, she turned the mirror around and looked into it, but the only thing she saw there was herself. Then she put the mirror back in her pocket, reached out with her right hand, and closed Willy’s eyes. “It was a beautiful death,” she said.

  For all response, Mrs. Swanson covered her face with her hands and wept.

  Mr. Bones looked down at her through the eyes of the fly, listening to her grief-stricken sobs fill the ward, and wondered if there had ever been an odder, more perplexing dream than this one. Then he blinked, and he was no longer in the hospital, no longer the fly, but back on the corner of North Amity Street as his old dog self, watching the ambulance drive away into the distance. The dream was over, but he was still inside the dream, which meant that he had dreamed a dream within the dream, a parenthetical reverie of flies and hospitals and Mrs. Swansons, and now that his master was dead, he was back inside the first dream. That’s what he imagined, in any case, but no sooner did this thought occur to him than he blinked a second time and woke up, and there he was again, camped out in Poland with the recumbent Willy, who was just waking up himself, and so befuddled was Mr. Bones for the next little while that he wasn’t sure if he was really in the world again or had woken up in another dream.

  But that wasn’t all. Even after he had sniffed the air, rubbed his nose into Willy’s leg, and confirmed that this was his true and authentic life, there were more mysteries to contend with. Willy cleared his throat, and as Mr. Bones waited for the inevitable coughing fit, he remembered that Willy hadn’t coughed in the dream, that for once his friend had been spared that agony. Now, unexpectedly, it happened again. His master cleared his throat, and immediately after that he was talking again. At first, Mr. Bones dismissed it as a fortunate coincidence, but as Willy continued to talk, charging impetuously from one corner of his mind to another, the dog could not help but notice the resemblance between the words he was listening to and the words he had just heard in the dream. It wasn’t that they were exactly the same—at least he didn’t think they were—but they were close enough, close enough. One by one, Willy touched on each and every topic that had come up in the dream, and when Mr. Bones realized that it was happening in precisely the same order as before, he felt a chill go down his spine. First Mom-san and the bungled jokes. Then the catalogue of sexual adventures. Then the diatribes and the apologies, the poem, the literary battles, the whole bit. When he came to the roommate’s story about the dog who could type, Mr. Bones wondered if he was going mad. Had he slipped back into the dream, or was the dream just an earlier version of what was happening now? He blinked his eyes, hoping he would wake up. He blinked them again, and again nothing happened. He couldn’t wake up because he was already awake. This was his true and authentic life, and because you got to live that life only once, he knew that they had really come to the end this time. He knew that the words tumbling from his master’s mouth were the last words he would ever hear Willy speak.

  “I wasn’t there myself,” the bard was saying, “but I trust my witness. In all the years we were friends, I never knew him to make up stories. That’s one of his problems, maybe— as a writer, I mean—not enough imagination—but as a friend he always gave it to you straight from the horse’s mouth. A lov
ely phrase that, though I’ll be damned if I know what it means. The only talking horse I ever saw was the one in those movies. Donald O’Connor, the army, three or four asinine flicks I sat through as a kid. Now that I think about it, though, it might have been a mule. A mule in the movies, and a horse on TV. What was the name of that show? Mr. Ed. Jesus, there I go again. I can’t get rid of this garbage. Mr. Ed, Mr. Moto, Mr. Magoo, they’re in there still, every last one of them. Mr. Go-Fuck-Yourself. But I’m talking about dogs, aren’t I? Not horses, dogs. And not talking dogs either. Not those dogs in the stories about the guy who goes into the bar and bets his life savings because his dog can talk and nobody believes him, and then the dog never opens its mouth, and when the guy asks him about it afterward, the dog says he just couldn’t think of anything to say. No, not the talking dog in those dumb jokes, but the typing dog my friend saw in Italy when he was seventeen years old. That’s right, Italy. Nitty-gritty Italy, land of the witty ditty and the itty-bitty titty—yet one more place I’ve never been to.

  “His aunt had moved there some years earlier, reasons unknown, and one summer he went to visit her for a couple of weeks. That’s a fact, and what makes the dog business ring true is that the dog wasn’t even the point of the story. I was reading a book. The Magic Mountain it was, written by one Thomas Mann—not to be confused with Thom McAn, renowned cobbler to the masses. I never finished the damned thing, by the way, it was so boring, but said Herr Mann was a muckety-muck, a hotshot in the Writers Hall of Fame, and I figured I should take a look. So there I was reading this massive tome in the kitchen, hunched over a bowl of Cheerios, and my roommate Paul walks in, sees the title, and says, T never finished that one. Started it four times, and I never got past page two-seventy-four.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m on page two-seventy-one. I guess that means my time is almost up,’ and then he tells me, standing there in the doorway and blowing cigarette smoke out of his mouth, that he once met Thomas Mann’s widow. Not bragging about it, just stating a fact. That was how he got into the story about going to Italy to visit his aunt, who turned out to be a friend of one of Mann’s daughters. He had a lot of kids, old Tom did, and this girl had wound up marrying some well-heeled Italian chap and lived in a nice house up in the hills somewhere outside of God knows what little town. One day Paul and his aunt were invited to the house for lunch, and the hostess’s mother was there—Thomas Mann’s widow, an old woman with white hair sitting in a rocker and staring into space. Paul shook her hand, nothing of any importance was said, and then they all sat down to lunch. Blah, blah, blah, please pass the salt. Just when you think it’s going nowhere, that this is the end of a truly nothing story, Paul learns that Mann’s daughter is something called an animal psychologist. And what, you may ask, is an animal psychologist? Your guess is as good as mine, Mr. Bones. After lunch, she takes Paul upstairs and introduces him to an English setter named Ollie, a dog of no particular intelligence as far as he can see, and shows him a huge manual typewriter, which has to be the largest typewriter in the history of creation. It’s fitted out with a set of specially designed keys, big concave cups to accommodate the dog’s snout. Then she picks up a box of biscuits, calls Ollie over to the typewriter, and gives Paul a demonstration of what the hound can do.

  “It was a slow, arduous business, not at all what you would expect. The sentence he was supposed to type was ‘Ollie is a good dog.’ Instead of just saying the words to him—or instead of spelling out the words and waiting for him to hit the right letters—she went through each sound of each word, breaking the words down into their component phonemes, and pronouncing them so slowly, with such odd inflections and throaty timbres, that she sounded like a deaf person trying to speak. ‘Ohhhhh,’ she began, ‘Ohhhhh,’ and when the dog pushed his nose down on the letter O, she rewarded him with a biscuit, some lovey-dovey talk, and many pats on the head, and then she went on to the next sound, ‘l-l-l-l,’ ‘l-l-l-l,’ speaking as slowly and painstakingly as before, and when the dog got it right, she gave him another biscuit and more pats on the head, and so it went, letter by excruciating letter, until they came to the end of the sentence: ‘Ollie is a good dog.’

  “My friend told me that story twenty-five years ago, and I still don’t know if it proves anything. But I do know this: I’ve been a dunce. I’ve wasted too much of our time on idle pleasures and frolics, frittered away the years on japes and follies, dreamy bagatelles, unrelenting fracas. We should have borne down and studied, sir, mastered the ABCs, done something useful with the short time allotted us. My fault. All my fault. I don’t know about that Ollie character, but you would have achieved far greater things than that, Mr. Bones. You had the head for it, you had the will, you had the guts. But I didn’t think your eyes were up to the task, and so I didn’t bother. Laziness, that’s what it was. Mental sloth. I should have given it a try, refused to take no for an answer. Only out of stubbornness are great things born. Instead, what did I do? I dragged you out to Uncle All’s novelty shop in Coney Island, that’s what I did. Got you onto the F train by pretending to be a blind man, tapping my way down the stairs with that white stick, and there you were at my side, snug in your harness, as good a seeing-eye dog as there ever was, not one notch below those Labs and shepherds they send to school to learn the job. Thank you for that, amigo. Thank you for playing along so nobly, for indulging me in my whims and improvisations. But I should have done better by you. I should have given you a chance to reach the stars. It’s possible, believe me it is. I just didn’t have the courage of my convictions. But the truth is, friend, that dogs can read. Why else would they put those signs on the doors of post offices? NO DOGS ALLOWED EXCEPT FOR SEEING-EYE DOGS. Do you catch my meaning? The man with the dog can’t see, so how can he read the sign? And if he can’t read it, who else is left? That’s what they do in those Seeing-Eye schools. They just don’t tell us. They’ve kept it a secret, and by now it’s one of the three or four best-kept secrets in America. For good reason, too. If word got out, just think of what would happen. Dogs as smart as men? A blasphemous assertion. There’d be riots in the streets, they’d burn down the White House, mayhem would rule. In three months, dogs would be pressing for their independence. Delegations would convene, negotiations would begin, and in the end they’d settle the thing by giving up Nebraska, South Dakota, and half of Kansas. They’d kick out the human population and let the dogs move in, and from then on the country would be divided in two. The United States of People and the Independent Republic of Dogs. Good Christ, how I’d love to see that. I’d move there and work for you, Mr. Bones. I’d fetch your slippers and light your pipe. I’d get you elected prime minister. Anything you want, boss, and I’d be your man.”

  With that sentence, Willy’s rhapsody came to an abrupt halt. A noise had distracted him, and when he turned his head to see what the disturbance was, he let out a little groan. A police car was inching its way down the street, moving in the direction of the house. Mr. Bones didn’t have to look to know what it was, but he looked anyway. The car had pulled up alongside the curb, and the two cops were getting out, patting their holsters and adjusting their belts, the black one and the white one, the same two jokers as before. Mr. Bones turned to Willy then, just as Willy was turning to him, and with the cop’s words suddenly wafting in from the street (“Can’t stay there, pal. You going to move on or what?”), Willy looked him in the eyes and said, “Beat it, Bonesy. Don’t let them catch you.” So he licked his master’s face, stood stock-still for a moment as Willy patted his head, and then he sprinted off, flying down the street as if there were no tomorrow.

  3

  HE DIDN’T STOP AT THE CORNER THIS time, and he didn’t stand around and wait for the ambulance to show up. What would have been the point? He knew it was coming, and once it got there, he knew where his master was headed. The nuns and doctors would do what they could, Mrs. Swanson would hold his hand and make small talk into the night, and not long after dawn broke the next morning, Willy would be on his way to Timb
uktu.

  So Mr. Bones kept running, never questioning that the dream would make good on all its promises, and by the time he rounded the corner and started down the next block, it had already dawned on him that the world wasn’t going to end. He almost felt sorry about it now. He had left his master behind, and the ground had not caved in and swallowed him up. The city had not disappeared. The sky had not burst into flames. Everything was as it had been, as it would continue to be, and what was done was done. The houses were still standing, the wind was still blowing, and his master was going to die. The dream had told him that, and because the dream wasn’t a dream but a vision of things to come, there was no room for doubt. Willy’s fate was sealed. As Mr. Bones trotted along the sidewalk, listening to a siren approach the area he had just left, he understood that the last part of the story was about to begin. But it wasn’t his story anymore, and whatever happened to Willy from this point on would have nothing to do with him. He was on his own, and like it or not, he would have to keep on moving, even if he had nowhere to go.

  What a confusion those last hours had been, he said to himself, what a hodgepodge of memories and garbled thoughts—but Willy had hit the nail on the head about one thing, and even though he’d gotten a little carried away at the end, you couldn’t argue with the basic idea. If Mr. Bones had known how to read, he wouldn’t have been in the mess he was in now. Even with the skimpiest, most rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet, he would have been able to hunt down 316 Calvert Street, and once he got there, he would have waited by the door until Mrs. Swanson showed up. She was the only person he knew in Baltimore, but after spending all those hours with her in the dream, he was convinced that she would have been glad to let him in—and have done a cracker-jack job of taking care of him to boot. You could tell that just by looking at her, just by listening to her talk. But how to find an address if you couldn’t read the street signs? If Willy thought reading was so important, why hadn’t he done something about it? Instead of moaning and groaning about his failures and ineptitudes, he could have saved his tears and given him a few quick lessons. Mr. Bones would have been more than willing to have a go at it. That didn’t mean he would have succeeded, but how could you know unless you tried?