(CW: Every aspect of dog-related trauma. Opiate abuse. Write anything you like in the comments: assume I would otherwise be posting this in some venue appropriate for its content.)
SOONDAE, the hero dog. Remember him? His face was on billboards.
He still kneels when the master approaches. He's strong. Watching him come to my heel again is like seeing a spring being wound up.
He's an old dog now. He only touches his chin to the ground for a moment. Then he shakes his head and pushes beside me, into the narrow space between my shin and the bathroom door.
He's been eating less, so he fits very well. Even if he had to push past me by force, I wouldn't have been able to hold him back. He does not choose to prove his strength in that way, though. I think he doesn't want me to prove the idea that I might try.
He remembers the scent and appearance of this two-room apartment even though it's been over a year since he lived here. The floors are so clean as to be sterile, but I'm still here. It probably smells like me.
After so much exertion he comes to rest on the marble tile. His paws slip -- they have no traction -- and he slips wide, in obvious pain as he slides. There's a swelling on his buttock that will eventually kill him. With a spring this old, it's difficult to know that it will spring back again.
He rolls onto his back and I see what he sees too -- the red rubbing alcohol on the counter. He raises his paws to his face to beg.
Dogs are able to be liked by humans, but that's their appearance, not their personality. Dogs don't know how to speak in a way that humans can understand. No dog in the wild begs like Soondae: to create a personality, I had to train it.
A dog that can't express itself is not, as you might think, a violent creature. Wolves are predators: dogs aren't, and only some contain violence. The tendency to fight without being provoked is also taught.
We don't know what dogs want. A dog has to be taught, in its natural nonverbal language, to express a desire for each little thing it wants. When a dog wants something without being told to, it's like a new color has come into being.
Now Soondae is begging -- for what? I know, and you don't know.
This is the bathroom where we gave Soondae his hero's welcome. You can see the evidence on the floor: marks in the tile made by the thick, astringent soap we used, long ago, to get the blood out of his fur and off his flesh.
As soon as the shower stopped dripping, a cameraman raced past me, thick braided rope of cables trailing behind him like a fox's long tail, and came to a deep squat in it. I brushed Soondae's haunch too quickly and caught a snag in the matted fur. The dog yelped once.
I only wanted to get him clean.
The photographer brought his camera lower, flash dead for now but near enough to go off bright enough to increase his pain. I thought of what I could do for a nice dog, a hero dog. The most expensive sirloin. I felt gratitude that he'd never had it. He'd never been taught to desire it.
You've got to understand that despite what you've seen on the billboards, Soondae never smiled. He wasn't a good boy and he wasn't a bad dog -- he was just a dog. There were dark circles around his eyes from the whole history of his life: reminders of a time, in his infancy, when I didn't know him and didn't control him.
We had always tried to show him love, but he didn't understand it. He couldn't show love back to us in a way that we understood -- only physical submission. Now his ability to show physical submission was strained by all the pain he was in, blood caked around his guard-hairs, even his muzzle.
He wouldn't stop making such painful noises and I looked at the photographer and saw that they were disturbed, effectively cornered on the low ground, hearing him bark. I didn't know Soondae as a killer. Blood around his lips, I didn't think of him that way. I sponged it away, the flecks of foam at the corner of his mouth. He made such awful noise.
In my cabinet I had a magic red bottle bought before the war, ornately labeled, an inheritance. Something very rare that they don't make anymore. It looked like milk. I took it, I opened it. I approached Soondae from behind and brought a needle from my pocket. I put it under his buttock where I knew the fat muscle was, like beef chuck.
He yelped again. I used a washcloth to get rid of the thin blood, his own blood, teeming through the opening. I watched the cameraman's soothed reaction as Soondae, the hero dog, became more quiet.
I had great fear of the hidden power of the droplets of morphine leftover on the surface of my skin. I washed my hands, and again.
The photo was taken. I turned back to look at him. I saw him grinning and drooling, not like a dog does. I knew that he had seen the magic red bottle.
We scrubbed him down so deep that his matted fur began to fall out. When that didn't work, we shaved him. The rare moment of pleasure in his otherwise cruel life.
Soondae, the hero dog. There are crimes a dog is expected to be able to understand -- theft, assault, murder. What a dog actually understands is the flow of aggression between its master and whoever its master is threatened by. A dog is known to charge into a fire or bite an electrical cable if its master is threatened by it.
I couldn't stand living with a dog who had killed someone, even when I found out that it hadn't been rabies. I had expected never to see him again.
Imagine what I saw. Do not imagine the object itself: imagine the looming presence of the object: centered in my window, not so close as to take the entire space but at a distance that made it convenient to view from any corner of my studio room: the room I slept in, cooked food in, watched television in. Imagine my experience -- not from your perspective, from my perspective -- and not on the senses, in my head. How it actually felt to be me and to be oppressed by it.
Now I'll fill in the object. The billboard I have already described to you -- Soondae, the hero dog. His grin, tongue at the corner of his mouth, unable to lift himself from the floor. Imagine it standing for many months.
In this imagined experience I've already sold the dog to his new owner. Now I have the feeling every morning of waking up to his elated face, and the knowledge of what caused that face. And every afternoon, its shadow streaming into my living room.
Then one day, it's not there. I'm not oppressed by it. Instead there's just the open sky behind it.
The appearance of the sky behind it has nothing to do with why I'm no longer oppressed. The goodness of being free is better than the goodness of the clean, open sky, but no attempt I make to explain the goodness of being free is clear. The only explanation that is clear to you my verbalized account of how the open sky makes me feel.
By staring and by feeling such horrible things, I demand a comprehensible account from Soondae of how much better it is to be free of pain. I am, at the time, acknowledging that the only part of Soondae's account that he can lucidly express to me is the part made visible in Soondae's expression: the feeling of his overpowering morphine high.
Now in my bathroom the signs that he sees the end are telling: he's thin, you can feel his ribs. There may be nothing that it's like to be out of pain, but there's something that it's like to be freed of it.
Soondae's mild aggression would lead one to believe he would prefer to have no master at all. His eyes go out of focus as he softens, now taking in breath, paw-fingers tight at the sides of his face, saliva dripping on his tongue.
He senses the idea of an enduring pleasure just beyond the sensory tableau that forcefully makes itself into objects in his view. He wishes for the shadow puppets to go back to being shadows, as they were in his infancy. He imagines the erasure of everything unpleasant to him -- of going back to a sea of pleasing red.
Now, I'm aware, morphine comes in many kinds, often in pills and much more rarely, today, in syrup. The magic red bottle isn't made and it's not sold to the public, but there are thousands of products in red bottles like it. Often candies, celebratory candles, certain soaps.
Seeing Soondae fall before my rubbing alcohol and beg tells me that he's seen thousands of red bottles in thousands of places, never for him. I see that he's formed a permanent sense-memory like the association of my smell with his former house. I say all this knowing that there's no plausible way he could have tried it a second time.
I have never tried an opiate; I don't intend to try an opiate. What I beileved months ago about morphine was that you had to try it twice to become addicted. I believed that well-adjusted people had no reason to try it twice.
Soondae had it once.
There is phenobarbital in my cabinet that can kill an aging dog. Paradoxically and irrationally, I fear the morphine more. I fear putting myself out or even killing myself. I ask myself if it would be so wrong to kill him pleasantly.
Freedom is not ordering what I want from a list of freedoms. I may live a life that others assess as meaningless. I may live a life that seems destructive.
There are freedoms I crave that I won't grant. I fear death so intensely that I'm frightened of pouring it into Soondae who yearns for it. My choice of poison will not matter in an hour.
Every day I do something subtractive. I spend time and the time is gone. I think every day of things I want to delete -- no police officers, no prisons, but also no crime.
To imagine this world, you have to imagine what it's like for me, not just what it would be like for you. You have to think of the erasure as killing pain -- not the goodness of there being nothing, you have to think of the goodness of going from something to nothing at all. The relief.
This imagined world is a happier place -- it's a simpler place -- the shapes that offend me sink into the tableau. Nothing is made for me here -- I imagine making a place for myself in the negative space. I imagine no borders, but what I'm really imagine is the boundary of my body dissolving into the boundary of my physical surroundings.
Every day I take some step towards attainment or away from it. See, I barely know where I'm going -- I know nothing's empty, I see shapes in it, I see thought rising in the medium like bubbles, and I see bubbles pooling at the surface. What do I want? I don't know. I know what I don't want. How happy does a life have to become for it to be meaningful?
Answer fast: you have 70 years.
I think of a thousand things in a list of things I want to delete. I think of everyone standing up and collectively walking out. No work, no scarcity. I imagine everyone marching out to a cliff and looking at the sea.
I look at my dog and watch him smiling and don't understand it, then see that I've stabbed my thumb by accident.