Chapter Seven #2
Fourteen sad pairs of eyes followed Miles as he approached the desk.
They were pretty cute, to be honest, and they didn’t seem that distressed.
Maybe it was like facial acupuncture? A memory stirred: they reminded him of that guy in a movie he had never seen, but whose posters had haunted him through childhood.
Hellrider—that was the movie. No: Hellriser. Hellraiser.
He explained his situation. He thought the receptionist might be angry because he didn’t have an injured animal, but she clearly saw a big sale coming.
Absolutely, they had high-vis animal clothing; they just kept it in another room so it didn’t get chewed on.
Would he like a fitting? And before he knew it, he was dragging Giuseppe across the tile, the dog’s nostrils trembling as he took in all the scents of accumulated terror of the hundreds of animals that had been there before him, not to mention the sight of his colleagues covered in quills.
If Miles had to walk through the human equivalent—some kind of infernal hospital playing videos of maimed people, with loudspeakers blasting the recorded screams of their fear—the last thing he would be thinking of was a snack, but this was one of the many ways he and Giuseppe were different.
Once they made it past the porcupined, it took but a single biscuit, and Giuseppe seemed to have forgotten everything.
Then the receptionist strategically whipped out her phone to show Miles the photos of her patients who had been shot by hunters.
The beautiful Marmalade, the frisky Pablo, the soulful boxer, ironically named Blaze.
By the time they departed, Giuseppe was wearing so much reflective gear that he looked like a construction site.
In addition to his new orange collar, he had a pumpkin-orange harness, a neon-orange visibility coat, and reflective orange anti-road-salt booties.
The only thing the animal hospital didn’t have in stock were training collars, which the receptionist also highly recommended.
These were sold out. This he would have to get on .
Miles had never heard of training collars; back in California, Giuseppe’s vet had so terrified them with tales of canine culinary exploration that they rarely let their little gourmand off his leash.
But apparently, just about everyone else on earth had heard of them, because the collar, made by a company with an all-caps name consisting of letters that seemed randomly selected from the alphabet, had 39,435 five-star reviews, yielding an average of 4.
9; greater than Anna Karenina, greater than anything by Shakespeare, greater than Bach.
Still, it was a difficult choice. There were a few dozen other collars, each with similar spelling and similar rankings, and hundreds of websites that reviewed them, for bounty.
Best Collar for Moderate Leash Pullers. Best Collar for Obedience Training.
Best E-Collar with GPS. Best Hunting Collar.
Best Do-Everything Collar. How We Tested Our Collars.
Why You Can Trust Us. Pros and Cons. So it was that four hours of his precious, single life on earth was spent.
The collar he bought worked brilliantly, except that the buttons on the handset were so close together that when he wanted to beep a gentle reminder, he accidentally shocked Giuseppe so violently that he reversed, in an instant, all of his pandemic Zoom obedience training.
What nation of tiny-fingered human beings had made it?
Well, thank God for free returns, he thought, but by then it was too late: the collar was smeared with such a variegated mass of nature’s batter (dead frog, manure, half-digested caterpillar) that there was no way he could send it back.
So he had joined the 184 dissenters who registered the various horrors of the ZBIVWE with desperate one-star warnings.
Or, in the case of MichiganMom1 (“Terrified dog now hides under couch”), two stars, +1 for the color.
—
Clad in blaze orange, one November morning, the five of them set out.
For their destination, Miles had chosen a waterfall that the Greensbury Outdoor Club had called a hidden gem in 1993.
Now it was more hidden. There was a truck at the trailhead, which gave them confidence in their choice, but they were scarcely half a mile in before what seemed to be the trail, what made sense as a trail, was increasingly obstructed by fallen trunks.
Still, there were trail markers here and there, and the bareness of November lent a certain legibility to the land, and no one, not even Kate, worried they’d get lost. Reach the waterfall—now, that was still an open question.
But the trail led up, and it seemed but simple physics to follow it back.
Given the bareness of the forest, there were few new plants and mushrooms to slow them down, and after pausing at a pond to laugh at Giuseppe barking at his echo, the family settled into conversation, Miles and Wesley up front, and Kate and Olive following.
Miles saw this as an opportunity to spend some quality time with his son, who had adapted so easily to his new school, his new pastimes, his group of friends, that Miles almost missed King Damij, the sense that he was needed.
Was this a good time to bring up the birds and bees and see if Wesley had any questions?
Was the school teaching them not to send each other photos of their genitals?
How the curriculum must have changed since Miles was in junior high school, when sex ed consisted entirely of videos extolling abstinence!
Now even Olive came home asking what mansturpating was.
Did Wesley have a crush, a girl that he was interested in?
Miles and Kate assumed a girl, but if it was a boy, maybe this would be a chance to let his son know that he was also okay with that?
Miles’s own father hadn’t offered much advice; his own sexual awakening consisted of the “Reproduction” entry in the World Book Encyclopedia, a photo from Newsweek of a pop star in a sheer top, and eventually a friend’s father’s Penthouses, which had left him with the notion, for years, that sex meant dressing as a pirate.
Not that adulthood brought clarity. Indeed, he and Kate were often at a loss when some minor scandal transpired at their school in California and they received an email reminding them of the role that parents could play in bringing up a child with a healthy understanding of sex.
Use this opportunity to ask your child if they have any questions. Were they at the dance? Did they understand the lyrics? Explain to them that the activities described by the singer are for grown-ups, and as described, perhaps unrealistic, even for grown-ups.
If your child saw the drawing on the wall of the cafeteria, ask them if they had any questions. Use this opportunity to discuss anatomy, and normal proportions.
Explain to your child that some of the words heard during the incident with the loudspeaker have many meanings. This can be an excellent time to see what your child already knows, and the questions they might have. Use this opportunity to talk about the power of language.
When he and Kate dutifully followed the instructions, Wesley had rolled his eyes and quickly changed the subject.
Lately, however, Miles and Kate had begun to worry about a new avenue for miseducation, that being his daily games of Cosmos.
After all, if one creates a Universe and populates that Universe with beings, there will come a time when those beings need to reproduce themselves.
And Wesley, being the good student, would do research.
In the various and sundry gaming books Wesley brought home from school, Miles found no shortage of naiads in nothing but their tresses, elves with metal bras, and drunken snail-trolls in taverns being served by tarty snail-trollettes.
What kind of anatomy did trollettes have? Were the hydra-headed men treating the naiads with respect? What better time to ask such questions than a walk, man to man, with Mom and Olive lagging, safely, several minutes back?
For as long as Miles could remember, most of his conversations with Wesley consisted of Wesley sharing, with oblivious exactitude, some new object of his fascination, real or fanciful.
Miles often couldn’t follow, but this didn’t matter; he understood it was a dispatch from an enchanted age of learning, uncovering causes and connections.
Cosmos was no different, save that the younger Wesley would spontaneously lecture on his subject, whereas the current one seemed content to keep it to himself.
Still, he seemed genuinely happy that his dad was curious, and suspected no ulterior motive as Miles asked how Cosmos was going.
But it was also clear that the world Wesley was creating was still too abstract, too elemental for matters of the flesh.
And Miles had quickly found himself lost in a haze of chemical and structural details, interstellar wormholes and atomic strings, when Giuseppe, himself looking a little interstellar, a little bit like he was wearing the same orange flight suit as the rebel pilots in their assault on the Death Star, stopped on the trail ahead of them and began to bark.