Heart of a Dog

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This is my dream body,

the one I use to walk around in my dreams.

In this dream, I'm in a hospital bed.

It's like a scene from a movie

you've seen a million times.

The doctor is holding a small pink bundle.

And he leans over the bed,

and he hands me the bundle.

"It's a girl," he says.

"Isn't she beautiful? Look."

And wrapped in the bundle,

I see the little face of my dog,

a small rat terrier named Lolabelle.

And no one says anything like,

"You know, this is not a human baby.

You just gave birth to a dog."

But I'm so happy.

I put my head to her forehead

and look into her eyes.

And it's almost a perfect moment,

except that the joy is mixed

with quite a lot of guilt.

Because the truth was

I had engineered this whole thing.

I had arranged to have Lolabelle

sewn into my stomach

so that I could then "give birth" to her.

And this had been really hard to do.

Lolabelle wasn't a puppy.

She was a full-grown dog,

and she had really struggled.

And she kept barking

and trying to get out,

and the surgeons kept trying

to push her back in

and sew things up.

It was really a mess,

and I felt really bad about it,

but it was just the way,

you know, things had to be.

Anyway, I kissed her on the head,

and I said, "Hello, little bonehead.

I'll love you forever."

I'm standing in the room

where she was dying.

She's talking in a high new voice

I've never heard before.

'Why are there so many animals

on the ceiling now?" she says.

What are the very last things

you say in your life?

What are the last things you say

before you turn into dirt?

When my mother died,

she was talking to the animals

that had gathered on the ceiling.

She spoke to them tenderly.

"All you animals," she said.

Her last words, all scattered.

Different trains,

places she'd always meant to go.

"Don't forget you're in the hospital,"

we kept saying.

She holds up her hand. "Thanks so much.

No, the pleasure is all mine."

She tries again. "It's been my privilege

and my honor

to be part of this experiment,

this experience with you

and your... and your family.

And it's... it's been...

It's been...

Tell the animals," she said.

"Tell all the animals."

Is it a pilgrimage?

Towards what?

Which way do we face?

Thank you so much

for having me.

As a child, I was a kind

of a sky worshipper.

This was the Midwest,

and the sky was so vast,

it was most of the world.

I knew I had come from there

and that, someday, I would go back.

What are days for?

To wake us up,

to put between the endless nights.

What are nights for?

To fall through time

into another world.

I live in downtown Manhattan

next to the West Side Highway.

In September 2001,

after the Trade Center fell,

everything was covered with white ash.

For months, lines of trucks

moved up the highway,

carrying the twisted metal debris

from the towers.

Out at the end of the pier,

there's a strange,

Assyrian-looking building.

And during this time,

FBI speedboats began to dock out there.

It was the beginning of the time

when cameras began to appear everywhere.

And everything was so loud

and such a mess.

I tried to get out of town

as much as I could.

I decided to go to California,

up to the northern mountains...

with my dog, Lolabelle.

The idea was to take a trip

and spend some time with her

and do a kind of experiment

to see if I could learn to talk with her.

I'd heard that rat terriers

could understand about 500 words,

and I wanted to see which ones they were.

It was February,

and the mountains were covered

with tiny wildflowers.

And such a huge tall sky

and very thin, pale blue air

and hawks circling.

Every morning,

we walked down to the ocean,

which took most of the day.

And what happened was, more or less,

beauty got in the way of the experiment.

It was just so beautiful up there

that I forgot the whole project really.

It just slipped my mind.

Most days, the walk to the ocean

took several hours,

and we would just goof around and lie down

and have snacks of carrots.

Now, rat terriers are bred

to protect borders,

so Lolabelle was always on the job.

She would trot in front of me

on the trail,

doing a little advance work,

a little surveillance.

Now, occasionally,

out of the corner of my eye,

I'd see some hawks circling

in this very lazy way,

way up in the sky.

And then one morning,

suddenly... for no reason...

they came swooping down

right in front of me.

Dropping down through the air,

their claws wide open,

right on top of Lolabelle.

And then they swooped back up

and dropped back down.

I realized that they were in the middle

of changing their plan.

This little white thing

that had looked like

a tiny white bunny from 2,000 feet up

was turning out to be

just a little too big

to grab by the neck.

And they were making their calculations,

figuring it out.

And then I saw Lolabelle's face.

And she had this brand-new expression.

First was the realization

that she was prey

and that these birds had come to kill her.

And second was a whole new thought.

It was the realization

that they could come

from the air.

"I mean, I never thought of that.

A whole 180 more degrees

that I'm now responsible for.

It's not just the stuff down here...

the dirt, the paths,

the roots, the trees...

but all this too."

And the rest of the time

we were in the mountains,

she just kept looking over her shoulder

and trotting along

with her head in the air,

her eyes scanning the thin sky

like there's something wrong

with the air.

And I thought,

where have I seen this look before?

And then I realized it was the same look

on the faces of my neighbors in New York

in the days right after 9/11,

when they suddenly realized,

first, that they could come

from the air.

And, second, that it would

be that way from now on.

And we had passed through a door,

and we would never be going

back.

What is the name of those things you see

when you close your eyes?

I think it's "phosphenes"...

the reddish patterns,

the little stripes and dots

and blurry little lines

you see floating around

when you close your eyes.

And no one really knows

what they are or what they're for.

Sometimes they seem to be

brought on by sound

or random electrical magnetic firing.

Sometimes phosphenes are called

prisoner's cinema...

some kind of eternal, plotless

avant-garde animated movie.

Or maybe they're just screen savers...

holding patterns that just sit there

so your brain won't fall asleep.

When Lolabelle got old, she went blind.

She wouldn't move. She froze in place.

The only place she would run

was on the edge of the ocean

because she knew there would be

nothing to run into there.

And so she went running full speed

into total darkness.

Around this time, her trainer, Elisabeth,

decided to teach Lolabelle to paint.

And so Lolabelle began making

several paintings every day...

bright-red abstract works.

And she would scratch

on these plastic sheets

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