CHAPTER 5

Oh, Nibble, you nimble soul, I grinned the next time that impudent duff darkened my door... audacious spludge you.... you cheeky, jingle brained barnaby... you said you wanted to tell me your life story but that scatterbrain of yours is leading you down all these blind alleys.... Irving Allen, Dexter Scoggins, Frederick B., Straker and Co... now this Miss Greenfield and her boyfriend Mike - what have they to do with you?

Julius D. rolled on his back in the hay, legs akimbo, and I scratched his belly. After a ritual groan or two, he flipped over and eyed me. "Patience," he intoned. "A little more patience, please. I'm about to tear away the veil of mystery surrounding the fate of Dr. Irving Allen and his girlfriend Crystal - lay bare the facts."

Allen and his girlfriend? But they're dead!

"That's what you think... that's what everyone assumed. Even that foxy fellow Straker who had just returned from Irving Allen's funeral... that's what he thought. But most things are seldom what they appear to be... agree?"

Please, go on, I said, mystified.

"Well, you see," said the cunning coon hound, "for a very long time after those two shots were fired there at the Yale Club, Irving Allen felt himself drifting out of control, propelled by some unknown force like a straw in the wind, a neutron riding on an atom, drifting, spinning helplessly toward something."

Then he wasn't dead, I observed.

"What can I say," Nibble blinked. "His first real sensation was that he seemed to be sucking on something warm and soft, a very comforting sensation. For a long time he just floated along like that wondering what it could be. Then, suddenly it occurred to him that what he was sucking on was one of Crystal's delectable breasts. 'Yes,of course, that was it,' he sighed."

"Having spent a long, wonderful afternoon together in the darkened bedroom of his U.N. Plaza penthouse, they had fallen asleep... a refreshing nap, yes that was it, from which they were just now waking and would have a warm shower together and afterwards go out to dinner and the theater. "Yum, yum," he purred softly, unable to tear himself away from those divine objects which to him had always been a source of wonder... in his long career of knocker snogging they were by far the most superlative examples he'd ever encountered. How he loved to play with them, jounce them around occasionally even bite them, and..."

"But as he lay there warm and secure, a most unpleasant thought intruded upon these bliss-filled musings. Not wanting to think about it he sighed and Crystal's nipple slid from his mouth. Still the unpleasant thought would not go away. What about that waiter, yikes, and that disgusting odor which he could still smell...and those gun shots.?"

"A shudder ran through his body commanding him to open his eyes but they were stuck shut, the muscles of his eyelids too weak to move. His heart thumped against his chest as, with sickening clarity, he began to remember how everything had seemed to slow down there in the Yale club, how no one else seemed to notice, how they had gone on chewing and talking and sipping their drinks as Crystal's face had caved in to a pool of blood and then? But how could that be? Here she was right beside him, her breasts right here against his cheeks."

" Wildly alert now, Irving struggled to get out of his dream and back into a better one. Those breasts, where were they? If he could just find them again he could start from there. Still, how could they be hers? Had he been blinded by the waiter's shot, taken to a hospital and attached to some life support system on which he was meant to be sucking? If so, where was it? If it had fallen out of his mouth he might die... Yikes! Calling for a nurse, he found he could not produce a sound, yet moments later what felt like soft wet kisses caressed his cheeks and ears and his paranoia vanished. 'Some hospital,' he clucked to himself... one didn't usually get tongued like that in any hospital he'd ever known.' Contemplating this thought, he lay still and limp for a long time, groaning now and then and waiting for what might happen next. And sure enough, again the lips were nibbling at his ears and down his chest towards his stomach and further down between his legs and as they reached his penis he peed involuntarily."

"How long he lay in this delirious and forgetful state, drifting in and out of consciousness, blindly sucking, submissively being licked all over, he couldn't tell. Suffice it to say that as time went on it became progressively more difficult to sort things out and gradually he became convinced that he had been drugged. 'Ah Ha !' That was it. He'd been shot with a drugged dart, captured by some gang and was lying somewhere waiting to be interrogated. Were they going to torture him into telling them all he knew? 'Yikes! All he knew about what? Yikes !' "

"Once more another millennium seemed to slip by before he was finally able to get the thing, what ever it was, back into his mouth and start sucking again - as long as he was sucking he was not afraid. Then presently he became aware of patches of dark and light filtering through his now half open eyes. 'Nurse,' he called, 'Nurse where are you?' But the words, originating in his brain, transmitted to his throat muscles became strangely stuck. 'Ah,' he thought, 'not blind, but deaf and dumb.' "

"Suddenly an enormous pink tongue, for that certainly was what it was; pink like the walls of Crystal's Gramercy Park bedroom and about the same size, swept into his vision and as it dawned upon him what this might be he became terribly embarrassed and began to whimper, ,' Mama, mama... Mom, where are you?' and the tongue licked away his tears."

"After all, he was a scientist for whom the world had always been an orderly arrangement of molecules, cells, genes and cyctoplasm - the twitching of muscles and nothing more! But his imagination, as expansive as it was, had not prepared him for what he now thought might have happened. Yet the possibility which loomed before him in the shape of that huge tongue could no longer be over looked."

"Filled with wonder, his mind, or what was left of it, raced on. And there was the tongue again; he could see it clearly now, and as his eyes began to focus he realized with alarm that a large hairy yes hairy hand, was picking him up, drawing him toward a pair of huge glinting blue eyes, the kind that could look right through you. 'Ah, the Lilliputian effect,' he yelled, and heard something like a small yelp echo back as if from a great distance."

"Just then his senses, sharpened by terror and assaulted from every direction by sights and sounds of gigantic proportion, picked up the distinct odor of frying pork chops. How ludicrous, Irving thought. Why pork chops of all things? The smell was nauseating. Hadn't he always hated pork? Why would pork chops be frying in an interrogation room?"

'Look at this one,' a voice boomed from behind the sky blue eyes, 'A real winner if I ever saw one. Just look at them ears. Hey Buymeah, look.'

Irving could now distinguish white teeth and and red lips moving in a forest of black hair. Then smaller hands groped him. 'He's so cute,' chirped a tiny voice, 'Just look at these cute big paws.'

'Paws!' Irving gasped and looked desperately for this hands. Couldn't he feel his hands somewhere. Yes. And they felt perfectly normal to him but where were they?... All he could locate were two patches of ocher colored fur. "Hoping against hope that from somewhere a hand would appear, Irving commanded himself to give the Boy's Scout Honor Sign."

' Look, it's tryin' to play with me, Pa, ' the small voice squealed gleefully.

'Yikes,' Irving whistled to himself. 'This is bigger than I thought!' "

I don't get it,Nibble, I said. Are you telling me Irving Allen suddenly grew paws? And this Buymeah, wasn't she Dexter Scoggins' daughter?

"His nose twitching, Julius D. Nibble groaned, a long deep groan and nodded his big head, "Thus my friend was I reborn... yes REBORN ! Me whom you know as Nibble, am the former Irving Allen and thus did my rebirth make itself known to me."

Just what evidence do you have for such a statement, I whispered, thunderstruck - what authority?

"Authority," Nibble looked disgusted and frowned... what more authority do you need than my presence here before you and that we can communicate? Believe me, it was just as hard for me to comprehend as it could possibly be for you. I felt myself disintegrating into a thousand pieces... or vanishing like water boiling in a pot. All hope of getting back into my former life slowly evaporated.... a very difficult transmigration and extremely hard to convey to you because of course the human language is not exactly structured to handle such concepts, is it?"

Please continue, I replied soberly, still sure that Nibble was putting me on, I'll reserve judgment until I've listened further.

"Well," sighed Nibble, " When I was convinced of what had happened, I was overcome by a fit of laughter which, to my astonishment, came out as a series of high pitched yipps. But inside I was laughing my brains out at all the fools I'd known, myself included, who were convinced life was such a neatly decipherable package."

So your first reaction was laughter, I observed

"Right," Nibble replied, 'Ruff Ruff Ruff,' I laughed excitedly at those big blue eyes and was chucked gently under the chin and dropped on to something soft. There, for the first time I could see the mysterious, delectable something on which I had been sucking. Yes, in fact, I could now make out ten of them lined up in two rows of five each - huge swollen slightly hairy nipples. 'Yikes,' I thought, it's my new mother, and soon discovered as I scrambled to get my share of the action that I was not alone and had to paw my way though other squirming balls of fur intent like me on the same thing. As I fastened my mouth around one of the available nipples. I became aware that though my memories and feelings were still human, a whole new set of instincts and desires were replacing them. The whole idea of drinking dog's milk, for example, would have been thoroughly nauseating to Irving Allen. Yet there I was, diving in to get it, gulping it down as fast as I could and finding it delicious. After drinking my fill, I would float away into a state of bliss more relaxed than I had ever known as a human... sucking and peeing and being licked all over by my mother's big pink tongue, I was soon very willingly transformed into a dog and when from time to time this prospect terrified me I lapsed into a profound sleep."

"Each time I awoke I found that I had grown bigger and so had my siblings who were now fighting tooth and nail. Obviously the rules of dogdom were not that much different from those of human society, - and perhaps there were no rules at all."

"As this uncomfortable conclusion edged its way into my mind, another pup who seemed determined to dislodge me from whichever nipple I was intent on sucking, challenged me and began picking fights. As Irving Allen I'd always been reserved and shy and now I began to lose weight.... I, who had been the strongest at birth was being reduced to third or fourth by a big bully who later became known to me as Wayne - but I'm getting ahead of myself. Actually it wasn't Wayne's fault. My runt status was not being brought about by Wayne's greedy disposition, but because I was so preoccupied by what was happening to me I simply forgot to suck. Working on the frontiers of human understanding I'd become adept at dealing with apparent nonsense, but this morphing into a dog was certainly the ultimate in that direction."

"I wept. I cried. It was all too dumb to believe - like an extra-terrestrial being emerging from a space ship and asking for a hamburger with onions and ketchup."

"As the days and weeks slipped by you can well imagine how crowded it got in that whelping box. But as I became resigned to my new situation, an inner joy began to creep into my consciousness... Yes, joy! So what if I found myself in a dog's body? Didn't this mean that individual consciousness went on, souls surviving in various bodies? Many intelligent people had arrived at the same conclusion and the most recent thinking was: as it cannot be established clearly that we are different from inorganic substances, logically we have to admit we might not be alive to begin with. Alive or dead, who could say which we were? Who could define the limits?... I was now on a fantastic adventure. Dogs' lives are relatively short. Perhaps some day I'd wake up in a totally different world, inhabiting a body of entirely new dimensions, a vegetable for example or even a crystal. A bone of unlimited possibilities opened for my speculative jaws to chew upon, and I grew weak from too much thinking."

"I know how ridiculous this must sound," continued Nibble, nipping at an imaginary flea, " like looking for one's cosmetic case as the ship is sinking or the house is on fire, but can you believe that throughout this period I was obsessed with my appearance? Yes, even though I was filled with wonder and terror as my new life unfolded, I became awfully concerned about what I looked like."

Only natural, I observed. Why should you be embarrassed about that?

"Well, it did embarrass me because I suddenly realized that, though I'd kept it well hidden, I'd been a very vain man. And now this absurd vanity had followed me to dogdom. I heard the Scoggins clan constantly referring to us as 'them hounds'. I'd never been a dog lover myself and wouldn't have known the difference between a Poodle and a Pekinese, but I certainly hoped I wasn't going to be an ugly mongrel."

"As my eyes slowly grew stronger, however, I managed to get broad glimpses of black and tan patches which were, of course, parts of Bluebell, my dog mother... and I supposed I would look like her but it was hard to piece together these fragmented impressions and in that hairy slippery world, there were no mirrors."

I can imagine.

"I doubt you really can imagine how frustrating the whole experience was?"

I suppose I really can't.

"And yet there were moments of elation... of incredible highs,"

Yes?

"Like, for example, when I realized that contrary to the notion that dogs see only black and white, I was seeing everything in vibrant color, a completely new range of florescence that seemed to represent my emotions. Objects both animate and inanimate were surrounded by wavy bands of light shot through with rays of brilliant color. "

Fascinating... do you still see this way?

"Definitely. Not only that but the colors tell me what's going to happen next.

"You're clairvoyant, then."

"Yes, it's automatic, even some stones talk to me and seem to be sending messages."

Extraordinary. I can see why you might have been too busy to eat.

"I was stunned," Nibble declared. "For a long time in my research I'd been wondering if instead of being the creative thing we think it is, the brain might not be more like a resistance transformer blocking the full range of what was coming from somewhere else or co-existed with us in another dimension.

From where?

"God only knows, but I'd come to the conclusion that it must be extended more or less infinitely in many directions and now, as a dog, fantastic as it seemed, my ideas were being confirmed."

Incredible.

"Yes it was, and is... and as for my sense of smell, what had happened to that was even more astonishing. I soon thought my mind might be going to be replaced by my nose and I became really scared. There I'd be, trying to stand up on my wobbly puppy paws and a scent would come along and knock me over. Just like that, kerplunk, I'd be down on my back, knocked over by an odor. I can tell you, at times I thought my environment was becoming pretty antagonistic. Against my will I'd find myself lifting my nose skyward trying to howl at what I smelled. It annoyed me greatly... seemed for awhile my new relationship with odors might even wipe out my memory of being human... tabula rasa... I certainly didn't want that."

So you hung on desperately to your human feelings?

"I'll say I did, and it took all the concentration I had... That's when I began to realize how important it is to do things that give you good memories. If my memories had all been unpleasant, I'd soon have forgotten everything. Another thing that changed was my hearing. Each day that passed the sounds around me became amplified - what a racket! By the time I was six months old I could hear Scoggins' truck fifteen miles away. At first it was hard to believe. I remembered reading somewhere that heightened hearing was a sign of insanity and began to imagine that I hadn't really been re-born, but had cracked up from stress, been institutionalized and was imagining all this"

And then?

"Then one day, dreaming of those last minutes in the Yale Club, the memory of that waiter's horrible smell so startled me that I managed a deep growl."

'Listen to that,' I heard an old man say. 'He's gonna be a real scrapper - let's call him Scrapper. He's Scrapper.'

"As I growled, a small voice next to me went Ruff Ruff Ruff and I turned to see this pair of beautiful dark eyes staring at me. They belonged to a pup who'd been following me around, nipping at my ankles, trying to touch noses with me. Scoggins called her Bella and I wondered idly if perhaps we could communicate... I mean since I'd been human, chances were she might have been human too."

And so you followed that up.

"It was a difficult time - we were being taken off our Mother's delicious milk and put on something repulsive called Puppy Chow. Since that first look Bella and I had been constant companions. We slept curled up against each other, apart from our brothers and sisters, and had developed a sort of message system of sniffs and yowls, whimpers, eye movements, head jerks and so on." "Then suddenly one morning I was awakened by a familiar voice grumbling about the food."

A familiar voice?

"Yes, very familiar, it was Crystal's."

Crystal's voice? You mean your girlfriend?

"Yes."

Now you've gone too far Nibble, I objected... I can't believe it."

"You're hearing me aren't you? You're hearing a talking dog..."

I had to admit that unless Nibble's voice was being projected into my consciousness by a force beyond reason, I was.

"Well then, believe me when I tell you I was awakened that morning by the voice of Crystal coming from the female pup with the pretty brown eyes ." Nibble's grin now broadening to reveal a full set of sparkling incisors. "She was grumbling to herself about food, wondering when she was going to get back to her Gramercy Park kitchen and when her awful dream was going to end."

What did you do?

"I stared into her eyes. I didn't yip or bark, I just sat there, staring into her eyes, trying to form words in my mind and send them to her - that's as close as I can get to it. I sent my thoughts towards her and she got them. You ever read a man called Heinlein?"

You mean Stranger in a Strange Land?

"That's the one. You remember how he talks about something he calls grokking, a kind of communication without talking?"

Are we grokking now? I asked, thinking perhaps Nibble's voice might really be happening inside my head. As you know, there've been many instances of dogs that really talked, but your vocabulary is so extraordinary...

"Perhaps it had something to do with some of the exotic substances I'd been ingesting in my quest for eternal youth, my life extension research," replied Nibble. "I'd been experimenting on myself. One of the hangups about longevity is the brain, brain cells don't age well. They have difficulty in energizing themselves. I was ingesting substances I hoped would correct this. Perhaps part of my brain just spilled out and floated away. The best thing I came up with is that Irving Allen was like a letter posted in an unmarked envelope and somehow he got delivered and opened at this new address... me, Nibble. At first I didn't feel like I was in a different body... it was like I'd moved to a new location - that's all."

You were talking about grokking, I reminded him, feeling I might be getting in over my head.

"Ah yes, what happened was I said 'it's me, Irving.' and we were both so surprised that for a long time we just stood there staring at each other. Then she whimpered, 'I'm so frightened, Irving, what's happening? You can't imagine what I've been going through.'

"We're in the same state," I grokked.

'You mean bad dream. oh, please tell me this is all a nightmare, that I'm going to wake up soon and... '

"I figure we've been reborn as dogs, imagine, out of all the rebirths we could have had, we managed to stay together. That's something to be thankful for anyway."

'You mean this isn't a dream?' she replied in a businesslike way. 'You mean we really are...' she could barely get the words out... 'in dogs' bodies.'

"I replied that I was pretty sure... that for a while I had thought I might have been drugged or hallucinating in a mental hospital but now that I'd communicated with her, and could see her, a young pup standing there in front of me, I was sure."

"She touched noses with me. 'Then we were definitely shot," she grokked feebly. 'I keep seeing your face caving in, blood all over.'

"I saw the same thing in slow motion."

'I saw the bullet go into your head and come out the other side, that's how slow it got for me.'

"Do you remember anything else?"

'Yes, a horrible odor. I think it came from whoever shot us - the waiter?'

"Precisely my impression."

'Tell me then," she yipped, "If we've really come back as dogs, do you think it's because as humans we were acting like dogs? I mean, it's a thought that's been bothering me off and on. When I haven't been able to rationalize things...'

"I've been trained that nothing is accidental," I replied, "but what did we mean, as humans, by 'accidental'...? Do you think we were acting like dogs... I mean before?"

"Crystal hesitated."

" Well, we mustn't bother our heads with too many questions like these... it's like trying to prove the existence of God... won't get us anywhere... we just have to accept that now we are dogs... and cope."

'Why do you keep wagging your tail?' Crystal whimpered.

"I'm smiling. Tail wagging is my smile. I'm really glad I've found you. Tell me what I look like."

At last now you had a mirror, I observed.

"She told me I looked very noble. A bit dumb looking but very aristocratic and asked me what she looked like. I told her she had the most beautiful brown eyes I'd ever seen... the same serious come-hither look behind those long eyelashes and found the whites of her eyes to be clearer than they were as a human... and I admired her gorgeous long silky ears. In many ways I found her more attractive as a dog than as a human."

You actually said that to her?"

"I did."

And what did she say?"

"She almost bit me. 'Thanks a lot,' she growled and started blaming me for everything that had happened which, of course, was true. 'Thanks a bunch,' she snarled, 'I hope you understand, it's all your fault.' "

"But doesn't it astound you?" I asked. "Aren't you really impressed by what's happened? I mean, metempsychosis is not just a religious theory, it's a fact."

'Metempsychosis?'

"Life after death - migration of souls, Pythagorean idea ...heretical"

'I'd rather be back in Gramercy Park with my well-stocked fridge, thank you very much.'

"Cuddling next to her, I lowered my grok so no one could overhear me. Have you met - that is to say, have you communicated with any of our... err.. brothers and sisters?"

'No, but I've overheard them.' She pointed her nose at a female pup whom I had noticed constantly attacking the male who'd been bullying me.

"Really?" I exclaimed. "How exciting!"

'She's not very exciting,' Crystal yawning, "her name is Debbie... I mean it used to be and the one who's always after you.... he was Wayne, her husband. He killed her for fooling around with a young hustler in California - that's where they're from, California. Shot her in bed while they were having sex, then blew his own brains out. She keeps trying to make friends with me but I find her a bit too much. Look at her licking her vagina."

"As you say, they're from California. But then you have to remember, we are all dogs now. Sooner or later our canine instincts will probably overcome our human scruples, don't you think? You've got to understand that as dogs we're going to be... uh... less inhibited. Crystal glared at me. I mean, compared to being human, things may get a little raw now and then. Anyhow, this Debbie has managed to locate her husband... looks like if you're together in one life you may be together in another."

'She's managed to get through to the one they call Bucko too. I overheard her telling Wayne that Bucko had been a very sinister character, a terrorist of some sort. She was trying to make Wayne jealous ... told him she found Bucko very sexy. This Bucko calls himself Danton, claims he was in the French Revolution.'

"Really - how remarkable."

'Yes, she says he told her he's been waiting all this time to find a body. Just think what that must have been like.'

"Guess we're lucky, I observed, gazing across at Debbie who had begun to whimper loudly."

Crystal sniffed. 'Wouldn't that Scoggins be surprised to know his pup is crying for the pink marble bathtub she left behind in Santa Barbara?'

"Is she really?"

'I'll say she is. She has this feeling she's dirty all over, moans constantly about this dirty pen. Keeps going on about bubble baths and clean towels and lovely hot water. I don't blame her but after awhile she's very boring.'

"And who are the other two females - curled up there between our mother's legs?"

Crystal snorted. 'Them? I heard Debbie saying they'd just come up from being bugs.'

"Insects?"

'Yes.'

"Yikes!"

'Yikes is right,' Crystal sighed. 'Debbie claims to have communicated with them. Says one was a famous film star before becoming an insect, the other one was murdered in some revolution. Having been bugs in between, however, they're naturally rather vague about things. They told Debbie we should be thankful we're dogs and said it's very crowded out there, waiting for bodies - especially bodies of American dogs.'

52

"Out where?"

'How should I know...? Somewhere... not here. For awhile I thought Debbie was part of this bad dream I was having... some awful version of Alice in Wonderland until we communicated."

"I shuddered, thinking of what might become of me after my relatively short life as an American hound dog. I certainly didn't want to be reborn as an insect... what a thought... or did I ? I pictured myself, inexorably, descending the evolutionary ladder, from dog to reptile, from that to the insect world and from there to God only knows where. Perhaps, I reasoned, if we became heroes in the dog world we'd be promoted back to humans again."

'Perhaps,' Crystal crossly, 'If we're just good dogs and behave ourselves we'll get out of here.'

"Well, there must be a key to it all... I mused aloud, my tail wagging uncontrollably.

'What are you wagging your tail at now? I don't see anything funny about our situation.'

"I can't help it. You always looked so cute when you got mad. You still do."

'Really, Irving, be serious.'

"As a dog I think I'm going to be less serious than I was as a human. At least I'm going to try."

© Elwyn Chamberlain 2009