TYRANNY OF CUTENESS
By Jeff Carpenter
* * *
"I want a baby." She turned to him across the pillow. He opened his eyes. He looked back at the ceiling. "I want a baby, Tom."
"Now?" he said.
"Soon."
She put her hands on her stomach. "I want to feel it growing inside me. I want it to... change me. Change all of us."
"All of us?"
"Both of us."
He turned to the bedside alarm clock. 7:34.
His eyes felt heavy. Something prodded him in the back.
"Aren't you going to get up?"
He made a humming noise-- it didn't answer the question, but at least it was something.
"Remember your pills. You know what the doctor said."
He took the pill bottle from beside the clock. 7:35. He slipped a pill into his mouth, made sure she saw him do it. Then when she laid her head back on the pillow, he spit it into his hand and tossed it under the bed, with all the soiled kleenexes.
He looked at the ceiling again. He thought he could make out a pattern. A picture. A picture of something staring down at him.
It blinked. He blinked. Something blinked.
* * *
He went to the puppy with the biggest, widest eyes. The SPCA guy had just nodded in the direction down the corridor. He never even looked up from the book he was reading, "The Tyranny of Cuteness".
The puppy yelped when it saw him, like it was expecting this meeting.
He made the decision right on the spot: this was the one.
The puppy couldn't smile, but it did say, "Thanks, buddy."
Tom stood in stunned silence. A business card, pressed into his hand during the impromptu and unexpected shake-a-paw, introduced them: Chillius E. Dawg, Esq. -- Mongrel-at-Large.
Tom fumbled for the joint in his shirt pocket, dropping the business card in the process. He knew dogs didn't talk, but he also knew this was a town where prospective Dr. Dolittles got their own private rooms (even without a reservation), replete with cushiony surroundings and heady thorazine cocktails served up at regular intervals. A relaxing get-away could last up to several months if not longer. But he definitely hadn't thought to book in advance. He was pretty sure he wasn't ready for that kind of commitment quite yet.
So in the end he just took the dog and kept his mouth shut.
* * *
With the red bow and ribbon tied around its neck, the puppy looked exactly like what it was: a present, a gift, an offering, a sacrifice.
When she opened the apartment door, she let out a little yelp. Her eyes went wide.
"Oh, my god. Tom, he's adorable."
"He's a puppy."
"Our puppy?"
He put the dog down. With arms around each other, they watched as it ran into the corner, lifted a leg and peed. Ownership was declared.
"He's a boy." She gently hip-checked him in the groin. Still he could feel his testicles retract. "A boy," she said again.
The ribbon had come loose and the puppy was chewing on it.
She went to the kitchen for some paper towel to clean up the pee. He stood there, part of himself wanting to add his own to the puddle before she got back.
* * *
The puppy liked to hump stuffed animals. He attended to them like a conquering Attila to the rapine of his conquest. The bunny was his favorite.
"Do me, you sexy bitch." Tom peeked over the top of his newspaper to see the puppy advancing on the overturned bunny. "All right, I'll do you." The puppy leapt on his partner and writhed in ecstatic abandon.
A voice came from the kitchen. "We're going to have to do something about that puppy."
"Yes, honey." Tom looked back to his paper. There was an article on the newly opened Center for Genetic Research in town. Under it was an article about a book reading and signing at the local Barnes & Noble by the author of the "Tyranny of Cuteness".
"Fuck, you chicks are all the same." Tom looked up to see the bunny had rolled off to commingle with the other stuffed animals. She was sandwiched between a rhino and a hippopotamus.
* * *
Tom hated lying to the puppy. Lil' Chilly Dawg was under the impression that they were on the way to a tour of the factory that produced those cute little stuffed bunnies.
The puppy was almost frothing at the mouth describing his nefarious methods for enticing those wide-eyed recruits into his ‘stable of bitches'.
Tom turned on the radio to change the subject.
The radio sang a song about having sex without having children. Then there was a commercial for a family restaurant with adult drink specials on Tuesdays.
Through the windshield Tom could see the signs and billboards racing towards him. The twists and turns of the road obscured the vanishing point that he knew was ahead.
Tom checked his watch. The appointment was at three. He still had fifteen minutes. Time enough to zip into the industrial park and smoke a little weed before heading to the vet.
He forgot to signal his change into the right lane as he prepared to exit on the off-ramp.
A passing truck honked and Tom swerved narrowly missing him.
The puppy turned to him.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing? You're gonna get us all killed! Give me the fucking wheel!"
Tom let the puppy drive the rest of the way to the Industrial Park as he fumbled in the glove compartment for his bag of dope. His hands shook, his nerves were shot.
He gradually calmed down as he got into the rhythm of rolling the joints. He offered one to the puppy.
"Thanks, but no thanks, I never smoke up while I drive."
* * *
The Industrial Park was all but abandoned. The few buildings that were still occupied seemed to house leftover relics from a by-gone era. Yes, there was the warehouse of porno mags and videos that was still open and one of the guys kept peeking out from behind its sliding door to see if there was anyone left in the parking lot. Every so often he would go out and take something out of the dumpster. Some people still didn't have the Internet.
The rail line snaked by, empty except for the weeds, and the telephone lines overhead, which were silent except for the wind whistling through them.
Underground there was just dirt, no fibers carrying Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, Petabytes, Exabytes, Zettabytes, Yottabytes of information per second on beams of light.
The lighter flame winked out. Tom put the joint to his lips and took a long hoot. He sank back into his seat and saw the buildings at the edge of the parking lot rise up around him.
He felt himself shrinking and shrinking, zooming into a point.
"How small is small?"
The dog turned to him, more confused than irritated. "What?"
"How small can things get?"
"Pretty fucking small."
"They used to think an atom was the smallest thing. Not anymore."
"The approximate atomic radius of gold is 0.1441 nanometers, if you can wrap your mind around that, pothead. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. That's smaller than your dick, if you can believe that. That's small, but it's nothing compared to measurements scales of magnitude smaller: nanometers, picometers, femtometers, attometers, zeptometers, yoctometers. A yoctometer is 1 septillionth of a meter, or 10-24 of a meter. Are you still with me, rastafari? That's still gigantic compared to the Planck length."
"We're walking the plank," Tom giggled.
"That's Planck with a "ck". The Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meters long. It is the smallest measurement of length with any meaning. Beyond the Planck length our classic concepts of space and time break down. No smaller division of distance or space has any meaning. Do you know what I mean?"
"How the hell do you know so much?"
"I'm a good listener. Just like Nipper. You know, the logo for RCA Victor, the one with the mutt terrier listening to the phonograph. ‘His Master's Voice'? That's me. I sit with my big ear to the wall. Do you know our neighbor is a short-wave ham radio operator? He gets signals as far away as Japan. _Koinu kashikoi na!_"
Tom took a long toke. Smoke made swirling patterns in front of his eyes. The puppy was separated discretely in between ribbons of smoke.
_"Sono seito wa futatsu nu bunretsu suru? Koen o burabura shimasho. Kuni wa tennen shigen ni tonde imasu. Jikken wa tiken o tomominaimaide. Inu ga kashu no suchuwadesu o torikakomimashita. Yushoku o tabete kara shukudai ni torikakatta. Honto! Tamago ga zenbu tusubureta yo! Sonna koto wa totemo dekinai yo. Kesa kara zutto koko ni imasu. Atarashii hatsumei wa hitsuyo kara umaremasu. Inu wa ke ga usuku natte kimashita to ashi o kega shimashita. Kaze ga minami kara soyosoyo to fuite imasu. Seito no kazu wa gohyaku-nin desu.
Tokyo no michi ni yurushite shoben suru. Boku no machi desu..."_
The only word Tom recognized was the word "stewardess" and even then he wasn't sure. He shook his head and turned on the radio to drown out the puppy's babbling. Nothing but static. He went to adjust the knob, but the puppy stopped him.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Trying to get the station."
"You mean to tell me you can't hear it?"
"Hear what?"
"You got shit in your ears? The radio signal, asshole. It must suck to be such a deaf fucking species. I bet you can't hear frequencies higher than 23 kilohertz. I hear double that, easy."
"What do you hear?"
"The message, man. The message..." Tom thought he saw the puppy make the peace sign. He blinked twice, but couldn't catch it for sure.
"What message?"
"The message from the future."
Tom stared blankly out the windshield. For some reason he felt compelled to look in his rear view mirror. He was looking for someone, anyone. But no one was there.
The puppy jabbed a paw into Tom's ribs and laughed.
"I'm just fucking with ya, homie. Mind-fucking the stoner. You can't take anything I say seriously. In fact, everything I say is a lie. Figure that one out."
The puppy looked at him deadpan.
"Seriously."
He twisted the dial. An old Steve Miller song blasted through the ratty speakers.
"Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping..."
Tom jerked out his arm, and looked at his watch.
"Shit, we're gonna be late." He glanced over at the puppy. "I'm taking you to have your balls cut off."
* * *
He had another toke in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. He wanted to be responsive to the reading, but not overly suggestible. He had been known to cry in public. He tried not to think of the puppy. The surgery would be well underway by now. An orchectomy is what the vet called it.
A little girl looked over at him as she held her mother's hand. Tom took a long drag and searched the girl's eyes for signs of who knows what. It might have been forgiveness, if he could remember what for. The girl tugged on her mother's arm and pointed his way. Tom broke his stare and turned away, dropping the roach to the ground. When he turned back, the girl and her mother had gone, into the store, into the growing crowd. After a few deep breaths Tom followed them in. He hoped the herbaceous odor would not follow him. He thought he caught a glimpse of the little girl before she disappeared behind a bookshelf. Did she just finger him?
* * *
The woman was huge. She was a giant, a monster in a black leather skirt. She literally spilled over both sides of the chair. It was like watching a sherbet under the heat lamps of a buffet table melt in slow motion. By the end of the reading Tom was sure the janitor would have to mop her up. But there was something about her eyes, about her round cheeks that made Tom lean forward and listen to her more intently than he would have otherwise.
The woman introduced herself to the assembled audience. Her name was Auriga. She thanked the bookstore for hosting the reading. She thanked the publisher for arranging the book tour. She thanked each and every person for attending. She thanked them as a group, of course, not individually. Tom was not thanked by name, but he had been included in the group. He took some comfort in that. He smiled as he tilted the styrofoam cup to his lips and swallowed down a mouthful of coffee.
She wiped her forehead and cheeks with a handkerchief.
"Who among you were once children?" The crowd muttered to itself and eventually raised its collective hand. After a measured pause, she spoke again.
"Who among you are still children?" A scattering of tiny hands shot up.
"Take a good look at the owners of these hands. We'll come back to this later."
She opened her book and began reading.
_Karen Hime was a princess. She lived in a castle and everything. She was very young and very small. Why, standing on her tiptoes she could barely see out the window. She had a group of loyal retainers. These were her guards and escorts who followed her wherever she went. "I would like to go to the meadow," she would say, and they would reply," Yes, Princess Karen, let us all go there." She would say, "Lift me up so I can see what is over the hill." They would raise her high in the air, far above their heads, but still she could not see beyond. She had them affix a booster seat to the top of her palanquin which she called her "mobile throne". It had its own ring tones, a ribbon of golden bells which would chime with every jostle. She would perch up there, teetering and tottering like a blind fool on a tightrope unicycle. "Higher... higher!" she would cry. Then she would strain and strain her eyes, until the tears would fill them. She would bury them in her tiny clenched fists. "Take me home," she would sputter through trembling lips. "Yes, Princess Karen."
They called her Princess Karen to her face, but behind her back they called her Princess Cuteness. Awwwwww... poor little Princess Cuteness.
Princess Karen hated being called "Cuteness". When she was alone, back in her chamber, she asked her magic hand mirror why they called her this name.
The mirror answered with a question:
"What is cuteness? What things do we think are cute? A kitten purring in your lap is cute. A guppy in a fish bowl eating the food we sprinkle. That is also very cute. What then is not cute? A lion roaring over the carcass of a freshly killed gazelle. A shark circling our surfboard. These things are definitely in the non-cute category."
Tom glanced to his left and right. Around him some people were taking notes. Tom put his hands in his pockets. He had begun to fidget and feel naked without a pen and paper. He had the urge to do something, write something. Why was there never a pen around when you wanted one?
"What do the kitten and guppy have in common?"
She paused for dramatic effect. The people put their pens down.
"Both are small things we can control. We love cute things. Like babies. They have huge wide eyes and depend on us. They are helpless. They are ours. But nothing stays the same forever. They grow. Once we lose control of them, they cease to be cute, and look scary and unpredictable to us._ How many of you remember being teenagers?"
There was an uncomfortable pause. People weren't sure if it was the mirror talking or Auriga. The group seemed to make up its mind at once and an overwhelming number of hands went up. Tom would have put his hand up, but his hand was comfortably warm in a place it had grown accustomed to since his teenage years.
"Puberty is ugly. Cuteness ends at puberty. You don't think so? Hair sprouting everywhere, pimples, blackheads, oily skin. Our self-esteem goes in the toilet. At best we are gangly, awkward, ungainly. At worst we are prisoners in a body we can no longer trust. We are uncoordinated klutzes unable to bounce a basketball or score a basket. It's a frightening transformation. It turns us all into monsters. At least temporarily. Our bones feel wrong, like we're trapped in another person's body. We see the movie monsters on TV and see ourselves reflected there."
She put the book down. And looked at the floor.
"We become strangers to ourselves. Our voices crack and shift octaves. We can't even recognize ourselves any longer. We lose control of our selves and fear what the next day will bring."
The audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
Auriga went back to her book.
_"Things never remain cute forever, but there is hope that they can attain a lasting beauty"
The magic mirror showed Karen an image of a furry caterpillar crawling along its glass surface. In just blinks of an eye, it went through the stages of transformation. From pupae to chrysalis to cocoon and finally to a butterfly that flitted off the mirror and flew out the window, across the meadow and over the hill to places beyond and unseen._
Auriga closed her book. As one, the crowd erupted into applause.
* * *
Tom decided that he had to have the book. He saw a stack of them on a bookshelf. He peeked behind it first to make sure that little girl wasn't there. "Tyranny of Cuteness" felt heavy in his hand. It was as if the weight of the words was transferred intact from the heavy-set frame that produced them. A substantial tome is what his mother would have called it. He opened up the book to its title page. It was a first edition.
He looked over at the signing line that had formed in front of Auriga's table. It was already 30 people deep and growing. He'd better get there quick, before the woman exhausted herself.
As he moved up the line, person by person, he felt he was being drawn into a whirlpool or a blackhole. The inexorable pull of the woman's gravity was sucking him in. Nothing, not even light could escape.
And then he was there. She hadn't looked up once, busy signing copy after copy. All he could see was long flowing hair so black it was almost blue and there was a perfume rising off it. It was the scent of jasmine, he guessed though he wasn't sure.
"Did you find what I had to say... interesting?" She glanced upwards at him even though her head was down turned.
"I found it... I found myself listening very closely. Listening like I used to listen to the jazz trumpet on the radio. But I mean, you didn't sound like a jazz trumpet. What I mean, I heard something real, something true in what you were saying."
She returned his book, and her fingers brushed his. She raised her head and looked him straight in the eye.
"Truth is always beautiful, no matter how ugly it is."
* * *
He wasn't crying for the dog, or for himself. Or for Auriga for that matter. He was crying because it felt right. He wiped his eyes and turned off the ignition.
Doing it here saved him from the embarrassment of a public place. But doing it here also prevented someone from putting an arm around him and saying, "It's all right. You do what you have to do." If you couldn't cry in a vet's parking lot, where could you?
He blew his nose as he crossed the parking lot. He tossed it into the dumpster as he passed it. He heard something shift inside as he walked away. You don't suppose something alive could be trapped in there? He didn't go back to check.
The veterinary clinic was full of animals and humans. The humans were the ones having serious conversations. The animals were the ones licking themselves. Judging by the apparent levels of enthusiasm, it seemed obvious you could have a more intimate relationship with your crotch than with a cell phone. Waiting made him thirsty so Tom grabbed his third styrofoam cup of coffee from the percolating coffee maker. The drip, drip, drip was like a slow-ticking clock. He tapped his foot in time with the percolator.
They led Tom to a bare room. Chilly D was sitting on a table facing away from them, facing a wall. He was wearing a lampshade collar.
"To keep him from licking his stitches," the vet said.
"Hey, boy."
Chilly D. turned around slowly, but kept his head down. He never met Tom's eyes with his own.
Tom felt a sympathetic twinge maybe in his gut, maybe lower.
The vet lifted Lil' Chil roughly onto his haunches to show Tom the underside.
"As you can see, the sutures are clean. There really is no swelling to speak of."
You can say that again. There wouldn't be any swelling there for the foreseeable future.
The dog shifted uncomfortably and the vet put him down.
"All in all I can say it was an unremarkable surgery."
Unremarkable? Tom shook his head. You wanted to talk "unremarkable"? He thought the vet's haircut was unremarkable. But barbers usually didn't comment on their own work.
"There's just one thing. Do you have any idea what this is?"
In the vet's palm was a tiny metallic diode the size of a grain of rice.
"We found this embedded in the fatty tissue of your dog's groin and we removed it during surgery. I'm not sure what it is."
The vet dropped it into Tom's hand.
What the fuck was this?
Embedded? Could he have meant implanted? For what purpose? And by whom?
Was it just a useless hunk of junk, like the broken end of a syringe? Or maybe it was a fragment of a shank from when Mutt Gangsta D got shivved in the joint ? Maybe it was just a pellet shot from some kids BB gun. Yeah, just some inert slug of metal sloshing around in the puppy's insides.
Or was it a device? A listening device, tracking device, monitoring device? He remembered his boss had said he wanted to keep better tabs on his employees. He had told him in confidence, winked then offered him a cigar. He had felt paralyzed. What should he give his boss in return? All he had was a joint. Instead, Tom just stayed silent and smiled like an idiot.
"We charged you an extra twenty dollars for removing it. So I thought you might as well have it, seeing as you paid for it anyway."
Tom rolled the diode around in his hand. For that price he should put it on string and hang it around his neck.
"Do you have anything I can keep it in?"
The vet went to a cabinet and returned with an old empty pill bottle. The label said: "Warning: Overuse may cause teats to engorge and/or lactate and tear-ducts to dehydrate."
Tom didn't think that would be a problem.
* * *
Tom carried Sir Chilly D to the car. The dog probably could have walked by itself, if haltingly, but Tom didn't want to have to keep looking back into those reproachful eyes.
He moved "The Tyranny of Cuteness" from the passenger seat to the dashboard before putting the puppy in.
As he sat down in the driver's seat he felt something hard and sharp jab him none too gently in the groin. He straightened up and felt in his pocket. He pulled out a pen. Auriga's pen. He must have absent-mindedly pocketed it after she signed his book when they were talking together.
He turned to Chilly D in the passenger seat who was staring steadfastly out the window. The dog wasn't talking.
The lampshade collar reminded him of a megaphone-- no, a phonograph horn, like on the RCA Victor logo. But no sound was coming forth.
"I understand if you don't want to talk about it. I mean what happened was... well, that's in the past now."
Silence.
"If I can't talk to you, who can I talk to?"
Blink.
Tom thought he felt his eyes welling up again. To distract himself he took the book off the dash and busied himself with its pages. The dog looked over at him.
"Look, I bought a book today."
He opened the book to the first page. There was Auriga's signature in flowing flowery script. And under it, written in the same ink, was a phone number.
He blinked twice then swallowed. He clenched his fist, feeling the pill bottle tight in his grasp. He poured the diode into his palm then looked up at the rear-view mirror. Something lustrous and iridescent fluttered by. And at once he knew what he held. A silver cocoon. A pupae so full of potential that it was fairly vibrating in his hand. Something lay coiled inside, impatient to be released. Enclosed within a metal skin that could only be dissolved away by say-- hydrochloric acid.
Tom took out the diode and put it into his mouth. He swallowed again.
Blink.
* * *
END
© Jeff Carpenter