Doctor Rat Read Free Page A

looking the same, one mood upon us all. Where have I done this before? It seems so familiar—yet it’s unlike anything I can remember from puppyhood on. But somewhere, sometime—in dreams, perhaps—I’ve run like this with my brothers, in the twilight of the day.
    Feelings so pure and delicate assail my senses I can’t restrain my barking. I yap, I howl, call to them all, saying, “Do you remember, do you remember?”
    And “Yes!” they answer. “Yes, we remember!”
    “What do you remember?”
    “This, this!” they cry, as we run, down the wooded hillside, into the crimson valley, an open sky above our head.
    We decide upon the valley as our lodging for the night. It’s near water, and the sun is gone. We lie down and one by one the dogs at the rear of our run come into the valley and join us.
    Exhausted, we speak little, wanting just to lie quiet for a while, as the stars slowly appear. Some of us bathe in the water, and some are still chasing around the edge of the pack exuberantly, but most of us lie still, tongues hanging out. The leaders take the center and form a single powerful unit, which we know must represent our will. And at the outer edge, too, there are strong watchers, seated and alert.
    As I lie in the stillness, listening to the little brook beside me, the scent seems to be part of me. At the same time I know it’s scattered like mist all around us. But that my own body is part of its chemistry, I can’t deny.
    “Where are we bound for?” ask some of the dogs again.
    “Lie still, brothers,” say the dogs of the center.
    “What a smell, what a smell,” says one old dog, limping out of the shadows. His hair is long and filled with burrs, and his eyes are watery. But he seems not to notice the bad shape he’s in, so rapt is he in the wonder of the smell. “Always this smell,” he says, lying down with the wild dogs. We see that he’s forgotten his body, with all its old-dog woes. He’s the first one to sleep and we see him twitch and run in his dreams, as if he were young again. He whimpers in the night, and he roars and when we wake in the morning he’s dead and we eat him.
     
5
    “Doctor Rat, Doctor Rat…”
    A young female calling to me from her cage. She needs my special counseling, as she’s all in a tizzy about the bandages on her belly. “Yes, my dear, are your bandages too tight?”
    “They cut a hole in my stomach!”
    “Yes, of course. It’s so that they’ll be able to insert a plastic window there in order to watch your embryonic ratlings develop.”
    “I hate it! I’ll gnaw it off! I’ll bite through the bandages!”
    “Please, my dear, don’t be hysterical.” I must say she’s not showing the scientific attitude at all. We’ve got to have that window there, so that we can insert a thin hair through it and tickle the little ratlings as they grow inside her. It’s part of a new program, for which I’m preparing extensive notes. A great deal can be learned by tickling an embryo with a hair, but naturally only the most advanced graduate students are qualified for such tickling. How, then, can we expect this female rat to have any appreciation of the fine points of the Stomach-window Program? Nonetheless, it is my duty to make her more receptive to the learned hair.
    “Please don’t let them hurt me, please…”
    I think a little song might cheer her up:
    “Oh scaly skin and dandruff
    with hemorrhagic sores,
    come and look inside us,
    they’ve provided us with doors!”
    I must move along here to the next cage, where a special magnesium diet has caused fatal clonic convulsions:
    “Oh loss of hair and nervousness,
    diarrhea too,
    goiter and spasticity
    combined with Asian flu!”
    “Doctor Rat, I can no longer eat!”
    “Aren’t you the lad whose teeth have been trained to grow into a complete circle, piercing the roof of the mouth?”
    “A nightmare, Doctor Rat. My mouth’s a nightmare.”
    “We’re watching you with keen interest, my boy.