Ruffly Speaking

the source of Doug’s terrible sense of guilt, as if he’d staged Morris’s death. I’ve tried to help with that, but, unfortunately, it has some basis in reality. The garden is undoubtedly what gave Morris the idea. In effect, it is what killed him.”
     

28
     
     Imagine the cosmos as an Antarctica of infinite magnitude, cold, bleak, cheerless. The monotony is relieved once every three trillion --light years by some tedious astronomical event. A boring mess of gas explodes. A few celestial epochs later, a black hole looms. Pity the poor aliens. Among other things, their kids must drive them crazy. Consider the possibilities of intergalactic whining: When are we going to get there? and Ma, he hit me! and I have to go to the bathroom, and I have to go now! And then the father, Ralph, yells, Doris, can’t you get those brats to shut up! And Doris tries placating them: Now, darlings, only another thirty zillion millennia to the next clean rest room, and in the meantime, let’s see who can spot the first white asteroid. Aaron, you take the left, and Hazel, you take the right, and whoever finds it gets a lovely piece of green cheese. Won’t that be fun!
    Now ponder the typical abduction story, which goes something like this: At nine o’clock on the evening of September 3, 1993, a woman we shall call Violet J. is driving her two-year-old tan Ford Escort from Hoboken to Hackensack when she experiences the first interesting event of her thirty-six years, the previous ten of which she’s spent explaining the difference between universal and term insurance policies and selling both. After work, she watches television game shows while eating Rice-A-Roni. Her social life consists of occasional visits to discount shopping malls. Once in a while she treats herself to a wild fling by risking the price of a postage stamp to enter the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. She always promises herself that if she’s ever the lucky winner of the Grand Prize, she won’t change her life-style one iota.
    Ah, but something will. Enter Ralph, Doris, and the kids. In the driver’s seat of the Escort on the road to Hackensack, Violet has just reached forward and switched from a talk-radio discussion of household stain removal to a golden oldies station when a blinding burst of light appears, weird bells tinkle, and distant whistles sound. Some six hours later, a frightened and disoriented Violet finds herself in the passenger seat of the Ford Escort, which is inexplicably parked next to a foul-smelling Dumpster at the rear of the same pet shop where she once bought a gerbil that died three days later. At first Violet recalls nothing of the minutes immediately preceding those lost hours, but over the next few days, fragments return. She recalls that rubbing alcohol will remove ink from carpets and that Jerry Lee Lewis was singing “Great Balls of Fire.” After that? Floating through space. Paralysis. Looming gray figures.
    Hold it. Zillions of light years crammed in a flying saucer with whining kids for the sole purpose of spacenapping Violet? Come on! Sorry, Violet, but these beings don’t want insurance, Rice-A-Roni, game shows, Ford Escorts, or anything else you have to offer. What’s the one thing on earth worth that miserable trip through the great celestial three-dog everlasting night? Certainly not Violet. And not just any dog, either. After all, the cosmos is an infinite Antarctica. Of course. An Alaskan malamute.
    But they won’t get mine. Even co-ownership is out of the question. It’s nothing but trouble. The last person I co-owned a dog with was my own mother, and I’ll never do it again. My will weakens only when I watch Leah train Kimi. Leah is a great natural dog trainer, very charming, endlessly persistent, and so outrageously and implicitly bossy that she’d never undermine her authority by raising that sweet, rich, domineering voice.
    At four-thirty on the afternoon of July 4, about twenty minutes after I’d arrived home from Stephanie’s, I was sprawled on the landing of the steps that lead down to my fenced yard. I was practicing the popular obedience training technique that consists of drinking coffee while your dog sleeps. The temperature had reached the high eighties. Rowdy was indoors snoozing under his air conditioner in my bedroom. I was reviving myself with iced Bustelo and supervising the spiritual development of that rank-novice postulant, my cousin Leah, who had yet to attain the