Free Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll Page A

for life below. Time and again I’d hear a shout and, looking up, see only the bright pants of his ski suit leaping into a pile of smoking rock as if it were something soft.
    Hours later, when we had a chance to sit down and eat some Red Cross sandwiches, I noticed that his borrowed shoes—a pair of white canvas sneakers—were blood red almost to their tops. I nudged Fanny and pointed at them. She nodded and said in a quiet, loving murmur, “He’s been working the whole time with those cut-up feet. The man is my hero.” Which summed it up perfectly.
    He saw us looking at those poor feet and, grinning sheepishly, held one up for our inspection. “Next time I will wear some shoes to the earthquake, huh?”
    “We were just saying how impressed we are by what you did today.”
    He shrugged and slowly unwrapped a piece of chewing gum I offered him.
    “The only thing we can do is try to give life back some of the justice it loses sometimes. Is trying to save people’s lives right? I don’t know. All I can say is our intentions are good. I read about a man who said, ‘God’s memory is failing and that’s why there are so many tragedies and terrible things like this today happening in life: God doesn’t remember the justice or goodness He gave the world in the beginning. So it’s Man’s job to try and put it back.’” He put the gum in his mouth, but took it out again and pointed it at us. “I do not agree with this. It’s a fool’s line. But I liked the idea about putting justice back into life. It’s like our lives are dolls that have gotten rips in them and have lost some of their …” He snapped his fingers, looking for the right word. “ … their …”
    “Stuffing?”
    “Yes, ‘stuffing.’ God gave us these dolls in the beginning, but if they begin to lose their stuffing, we must find the right materials to
fill them again. Is this Juicy Fruit? Aah! I like Juicy Fruit gum—it’s so sweet.”
    “But we didn’t make earthquakes! Auschwitz, okay, but what did man have to do with what happened today?”
    “Now you’re talking with a monkey’s tongue, Fanny. Man is responsible for everything. Why do you think we control the planet? Why do all the other animals worship us? Everything in life is our work—Auschwitz, earthquakes. Good things too! We just do not want to recognize and accept the fact it is all our doing.
    “Listen, I will tell you a funny story. A woman I know went into a restaurant here where you get the food yourself. She got her meal and put it down on the table but forgot to buy a drink, so she took some coins and left her tray to get one. When she returned, a very fat black man was sitting at her table eating her meal! Sitting there with a smile on his face, eating her food!
    “Now she sits down very angry, pulls her tray back across the table and starts eating her food. But this crazy man will not stop. Still smiling, he reaches over and takes her soup. Then he takes the salad! She is driven so crazy by this, she must suddenly go to the bathroom badly.
    “When she comes back from the bathroom, thank God the man is gone, but so is her tray of food and handbag too! Now he’s stolen her money! She runs to the cashier and says, ‘Did you see the big black man go? He ate my lunch and stole my bag!’ The cashier says, ‘We’ll call the police. Where were you sitting?’ ‘Right over there!’ the woman responds. She turns around and points to her table. Only what she sees makes her scream: One table in front of where she was sitting with this bad black man is a tray full of food and her handbag on the seat.”
    “Huh?”
    Hooting with laughter, Fanny turned to me and said, “The
woman sat at the wrong table! She ate the black guy’s lunch, not vice versa.”
    “And he let her! He was very friendly and smiled the whole time she was stealing his food.
    “This woman acts like Mankind, Fanny: He always wants to blame himself on others. That’s why there is a devil. We