TO THE POINT

This is the first dog in this century, and only the second or third in recorded history, which has bitten someone in a pattern that can fairly be called a composition rather than simply an injury. This dog is a house dog that belonged originally to a family that petted it and played with it to the point where it looked as though it might smile evermore, spending much of that pet-and-play time listening to music to the point where the dog developed the ability to discern one melody from the next on the strength of just a note or two. Interactions between musical sounds became its specialty. After one year the dog learned to read sheet music though he told no one. How could a dog tell anyone anything close to that? It would not be believed in any form or fashion. But then after reaching a sort of plateau of satisfaction with music and its various iterations, the dog was rudely thrust out of that situation when the two parents developed cancer from chemicals leaked into the air by the company where they both worked, one developing a cancer in the throat, one in the stomach, and the pair of them became sicklier and sicklier over the course of a year and died within a week of one another, and the children were sent to live with relatives out of state, resulting in a situation where the dog was transported to a shelter where it put its paws over its eyes and ears, making a noise that the shelter staff called whining but was in fact a process of designing and assessing new melodies and various tempos at which those melodies might be deployed. Again, the dog told no one. There it languished, in that shelter, making melodies, until it was adopted by a very mean man, his very mean wife, and a very mean son. This new family hated music and hated dogs but hated strangers worse and planned to use the dog as a guard for their large and lavish mansion, which was putty-colored and located at the head of a large artificial lake. The dog looked mean but was nice. It was nice when it walked around the house. It was nice when it ran to and from the lake. The dog persisted in its fundamental kindness until it came to the point where it was not only not rewarded for that temperament but actively punished, and then overnight one night the dog had a nightmare, which dogs can have, and violent visions appeared to it, and the next day it was a perfect guard dog. When placed near the front gate it growled loudly and harshly, not musical any longer. It did not sleep. It  could not sleep. it walked around the house with only silence in its head and went stiffly to and from the lake, no longer interested in running, which connoted a joy no longer felt. Toward the end of its first week of cruelty the dog heard someone behind it and turned and lunged and bit. Its teeth went into a leg, came out, went in again. The victim was the mean son of the mean man and mean wife. He screamed and fell to the ground. His parents, mean but also immensely wealthy, called a private ambulance company which came and treated the boy. The ambulance driver and on-board medic both recommended that the dog be destroyed, but the mean rich people had only one trait that was more powerful than either their cruelty or their wealth, and that was their arrogance. As soon as the driver and medic offered their advice, the man put his hands on his hips and insisted that the dog would stay. The wife backed him up yelling a little. The boy, still crying, said nothing. The ambulance driver and medic went away. The mean man and his mean wife proceeded to station the dog by the gate, just as it had been before. The bite had alarmed them but had also reassured them. This was a dog capable of guarding. They looked at the dog from their window. They had not looked at the bite. Or rather, they had looked at it but had not truly seen it. Even if they had truly seen it, they would not have been capable of understanding it. Only a composer could have understood it. If a composer had looked at the bite, he or she would have gasped and dropped whatever he or she was holding—a coffee mug, a baton, a book about Scriabin, a bottle of pills—because the marks of the teeth were arranged exactly in what was almost certainly a nocturne. The year of 2019 coincides with the twentieth anniversary of this composition left on the leg of the mean boy by the talented, essentially kind dog, and the twenty-first anniversary of the death of the dog’s first and most beloved owners, the musicians who gave it love and affection and the gift of music. The nocturne, never performed, was composed in their memory. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas