An abridged history of the dog Dingle is now buying, late afternoon, 9 June 1983:
      This dog, a three-year-old Setter/Retriever male currently in residence at Pets And More Pets, Northampton, is a fine-looking animal ...
      Fine-looking animal here or what? says the toupee'd Pets And More Pets salesman.
      Looks good from here, says a bespectacled Barry Dingle.
      ... and a potentially first-rate pet; with, though 2 (two) features that cry out for classification as Flaw. The first is an advanced case of ocular venerean substamus,^3 a progressive atrophy in the ocular cavity's web of muscle that causes one of the dog's eyeballs to roll chaotically in its socket, making the dog look, more often than not, cross-eyed.
See, for instance, photographs E. Dickinson, B. Streisand, J.C. Oates.

      I sense an affinity between you and this dog, sir, says the salesman, dapper in a checked sportcoat and white leather loafers. He fingers a flea collar speculatively. Am I off-base? You feel some sort of affinity here by any chance?
      Dingle considers the distant dog through his angled lenses. His homunculoid love lays low, chewing its own knuckle.
      Think maybe I do, Dingle is saying. The dog, a veteran of uncountable near-purchases, scratches endearingly with one tentative paw at the bars of its cramped cage.
      The second flaw represents the reason why the dog was originally let loose at rush hour along the Valley's busy Route 9 by his original owner, a scholar of Korean funeral pottery at nearby Amherst College. Information regarding this flaw is being withheld from Dingle at the professional discretion of the pet salesman, who is even now working at the lock of the dog's receptacle, flashing an uneasy smile at Dingle as the dog, freed, immediately lunges slavering at a Smith student who stands nearby, tapping on the glass tank of a comatose terrapin. The understandably withheld information: this three-year-old male Setter/Retriever suffers from a disastrous enthusiasm for the special scents unique to the privates of the human female; has proved untrainable, unbreakable in this regard; leaps without hesitation, snuffling wetly, up the skirt of any woman unfortunate enough to enter the unfortunate orientalist's home. (Imagine your own embarrassment as, say, cocktail host of a colleague and his wife, seated on divans, over gin, surrounded by somber dynastic thanography, trying to make polite conversation as the dog steadily disappears ever farther into the colleague's wife's nether regions, she and you and the colleague all too mortified to pull the dog away, since any such move would signify acknowledgment of what is going on, while what is going on signifies that the colleague's wife possesses genitals, with a scent, a reality the suppression of which is absolutely key to maintaining the thin veneer of civilization that separates the behavior of, say, you and the colleague from that of, say, the dog.) A more complete history would countenance the dog's repeated olfactory advances at the orientalist's feminist-ideogram-theorist fiancee, who eventually realizes, not without horror, that she is coming to prefer them to the pottery-scholar's own caresses, and today belongs to no fewer than three support groups. 1982: the dog is finally the object of abandonment, is found and saved, at rush hour by a cruising abandonee-scout for Pets And More Pets, rather a more high-pressure pet shop than Barry Dingle would have preferred, but the only present possessor of a male S/R in the whole Pioneer Valley phonebook.
      Also frisky, the salesman says, getting a headlock on the frantic animal, whose toenails scrabble on tile as the Smith student drifts off toward the venomous-reptile aisle. No shortage of joy de vivein this animal, the salesman says.
      Definite Setter/Retriever mix? asks Barry Dingle. He eyes the distant, dull-gold dog writhing under a tiny salesman.
      Word of honor.
      Sexually mature? intact? Inclined?
      As the day is long, sir.
      Name?
      No name. A nameless dog. Be creative.
      The dog barks.
      Price? Dingle asks.
      Highly negotiable. Plus necessary canine paraphernalia thrown in, as well.
      Done, then.
      Thank you, God.
      Excuse me?
      The salesman is making for a cage-lined back room, dragging the dog by the scruff. Right back, he promises. Vaccination-checks, paperwork. . . Price-negotiations moments away. He shuts a heavy door.
      Moments later Dingle departs Pets And More Pets with: one flea collar; one reinforced military leash; one bag food; one plastic crater of a dish; one set vaccination papers; one surprisingly cheap, covertly (in the back room) tranquilized dog, which trots grinning, stoned, next to Dingle, one eye on Great Awakening's sidewalk and one on his owner. Dingle heads for home, sandals and pants flapping.
      Good man, exhorts Dingles immoderate homunculoid love for Myrnaloy Trask.
      Thank God, the salesman repeats for the benefit of Pets And More Pets' cashier, who uses violet talons to remove a hair from his checked lapel.
      Fine-looking animal, the love says.
      The purchase by Dingle of a dog, 9 June, represents part of a whole broad homunculoid-inspired plan. The plan unfolds ideally thus: One day next week, Myrnaloy Trask, accompanied by Nixon, leaves Collective Copy at lunchtime, as is her wont. She heads south on Great Awakening, toward the town common, where her lunch is picked and eaten while Nixon is encouraged to make complete use of the limitless facilities. As M. heads south down the broad Northampton sidewalk, Barry Dingle, down the street, theoretically emerges from a convenient vantage point and moves north on same sidewalk, holding the leash of one well-rested, libidinous, pep-talked male Setter/Retriever. As he and Myrnaloy begin to converge, Dingle contrives something clever -- tripping, bumping into the odd passing spike-haired pedestrian -- to render his hand plausibly absent one leash-handle. Dingle's dog, driven to erotic frenzy by its time in confinement and the proximity of a premenses female S/R, is on Nixon like a shot. Etc., but ideally not too much etc., because Barry Dingle suddenly flops onto the scene and extracts upright dog from hunched bitch before any uninvited indiscretions are committed.
      The plan having the ideally three-fold result that: (a) Dingle is able to meet and reestablish social ties w/ Myrnaloy Trask w/o the oppressive fly-in-ointment atmosphere that attends the presence of Don Megala, who devotes his pre-prandial hours to his antique dulcimer craft; (b) Dingle appears sensitive, conscientious, possibly chivalric, in rescuing Mrynaloy's dog from drooling amorous assault right there on the main thoroughfare's sidewalk; (c) Myrnaloy sees that the sensitive, chivalric, etc., Dingle is in possession of 1 (one) male dog of just the right lineage and enthusiasm for the bulletin board's published assignment.
      The above results, then, according to the projections of Dingle's homunculoid love, lead with arithmetic inevitability to the mating of the two pets, the symbolism of which vis à vis Dingle and the increasingly Megala-dissatisfied Myrnaloy Trask escapes neither party; thus to a Megala-free connection between Dingle and Myrnaloy, one based on mutual anxieties, shared dietary concerns, and the common offspring of their lives' closest companions (Dingle figures he better come up with a name pretty quick: he's acquired a catalogue for parents-to-be, and pores nightly); thus to nature taking its natural, terrifying course. Yes Dingle appropriates the heart, soul, moderate love of Myrnaloy Trask of Collective Copy. Megala is kicked in the emotional ass. A new Barry Dingle emerges from the cracked chrysalis of chastity and clotted hankie -- complete, of the world, fulfilled, requited, ordered of heart and head, sound of mind and toe. A unified Mrynaloy/Dingle homunculus moves stately and plumply away, heading possibly north, disappearing into a cadet-blue horizon that darkens to a gloam of unity, eternity, immoderate love's good night.
      So, 9 June, Dingle maneuvers his dog, rattling with Dalmane, listing ever so slightly to port or starboard at female's passage, home without major incident. The dog eats three plastic bowls of Purina, sleeps for seventy-two hours, and establishes itself in front of the television. Dingle's love bides its time.


Nighttime, 14 June 1983, Troy, New York, Mrs. Dingle lies next to Mr. Dingle and dreams the following dream:
      Nighttime, 14 June 1983 B.C., Kingdom of Ithaca, the King of Ithaca, played in the dream by Nelson Eddy, has a dream. He dreams that a ship carrying a virulent plague from the Ionian Sea's south enters the port of Ithaca the following day. He dreams that, soon thereafter, plague erupts in the kingdom, and ravages it. He dreams that the plague eventually carries off his devoted Queen of a wife, played by Mrs. Dingle, and his handsome Prince of a son, played by the straight-eyed young Barry D. on whom Attic sandals had looked so darn dapper.
      The King of Ithaca awakens 15 June 1983 B.C. and is so distressed by his dream that he brushes aside his Queen's advice and neglects to eat a good Mediterranean breakfast. He summons his Royal Advisor, played here by Don Megala, which is passing strange, since Mrs. Dingle has never met Don Megala. The Advisor listens to the distressed King's dream. He strokes his well-groomed beard. Like the King, like all prehistoric pagan-types, the Advisor takes dreams very seriously He reflects. After substantial reflection, a flaming torch of inspiration appears over his head: he advises the King simply to stop, on this day, any ship approaching from the south before such ship can enter the port of Ithaca, to keep such ship far out to sea, south, downwind, and to quarantine it, in order to ensure that whatever is on this theoretical ship, plague-wise, stays out there, far far away.
      Sure enough. By lunchtime, a ship, tacking chaotically, sporting an ominous obsidian sail, manned by a moaning, bubo-studded crew, appears on the southern Ionian horizon. The King sends his most formidable Man O' War out to halt the ship, has the ship quarantined, and then just to be on the safe side has the formidable Man O' War itself quarantined, all far far out to sea, downwind.
      Sure enough. The black-sailed ship turns out to be a veritable petri dish of plague germs. The Advisor's advice to keep it out of the port looks to be sound. The King, the Queen, and the big and strong and emmetropic Prince all rejoice over a lavish supper rich in high-density lipids.
      Except a few days later (represented in Mrs. Dingle's dream by the fluttering palimpsests of a Hellenistic daily planner) yes a few days later, plague erupts in the kingdom of Ithaca. It ravages even the more respectable neighborhoods of the capital city. It eventually carries off the devoted Mrs. Dingle and the binocular, fine-sandaled Barry D.
      Nelson Eddy plunges into well-coiffed despair, not to mention rage. He summons Don Megala. The two men are to be seen facing each other, perfumed hankies fastened over their mouths and noses, in a linen-draped castle chamber festooned with garlands of olive leaves, roses, garlic, various herbal propitiations to big-biceped gods.
      The King sketches for his Advisor his despair, rage. Thanks to the Advisor's advice, he says, the dream-foretold plague-ship was stopped, isolated, kept at a big-time distance. And yet here, in Ithaca, as the dream foretold, is some pretty goddamn clear evidence of plague. The King demands an explanation, hinting that the continued connection between the Advisor's well-bearded head and toga'd body could well depend on the force of that explanation.
      There is a long silence while both Nelson Eddy and Don Megala utilize the filmy June sunlight through the windows' woven linen to present profiles, respectively agonized and pensive, to Mrs. Dingle's dreamvision. Really long silence. Then the Advisor changes expression below the tattered torch-flame of a tardy but near-epiphanic realization. He smiles a slow smile, one of sadness as at the inevitable, taking the King by the elbow and guiding him confidentially to the chamber's corner, even though no one else is around. The King, looking about, impatiently clears his throat while the Advisor feels delicately at his own.
      He advises the King: it was, unfortunately, nothing other than the King's dream itself that has brought plague to Ithaca, the kingdom.


The interval 11:50 to 11:57am EDT, 15 June 1983, finds a tiny percentage of the planet's persons involved in a tiny percentage of the planet's various and ineluctably modal situations.
      8:50am PDT, Dr. W.W. Skeat, Fullerton, California, driving north on the Brea Highway toward an Osco to obtain an esoteric brand of peroxide mouthwash, finds himself, in his car, afflicted with an enormous jumping muscle in his right buttock. The muscle jumps, bouncing him around in his seat. Skeat whimpers; his car begins to weave.
      11:50am EDT, Myrnaloy Trask, Collective Copy, concludes a pain-racked and I-should-have-known-flavored conversation with Don Megala, professional student, re the issue of her having entered his loft last night to find a nude Smith post-graduate (actually one Pamela Drax, 25, Ithaca, NY) astride Megala's doubly-bearded face. Megala, at his dulcimer work-table, perspiring over a little brown forest of blunt Bass bottles, claims that it had not been as it appeared. Mrynaloy responds with a shrill expanded variant of Oh sure. Megala, looking about him, launches into something about a contact lens lost under circumstances so bizarre he guesses he couldn't expect anyone to believe him about it outside an environment of very special sharing and trust. Mrynaloy laughs, cries, invects. Running his hand through the memory of his hair, Megala alludes with transparent patience to Myrnaloy's still-narratively-shadowy personal troubles regarding sexuality and men. From here things deteriorate faster than clinkers in fists. Myrnaloy hangs up and crumples onto the form-feeder of her Xerox. The form-feeder coldly continues to form-feed.
      6:51am MT, Patricia Dingle of Rock Springs, Wyoming, Hypo-Arctic Correspondent for Geo Magazine, wakes alone in a mummy-shaped bag by a dead fire on the northern shore of Coronation Gulf, North-Northwest Territories, Canada, to discover that the fingers of her right hand have escaped the bag's faulty zipper and are frostbitten solid. An odd windy June snow is falling, flakes skittering like mad insects over the solid crust of the shore. She looks at the dark remains of her campfire and the bright polkadots of frozen blood in her hand's cyan.
      11:5lam EDT, Mrs. Dingle, Troy, New York, sits over a corn toastie and peach tea and tries to articulate an unspeakable fear to Mr. Dingle, who is arranging leaders and flies on a tackle box's second tier.
      11:51am EDT, Barry Dingle, Northampton, Massachusetts, sans glasses, avec best poncho and conic cotton slacks, lurks in the recessed doorway of the Leftward Ho Cafe, just south on Great Awakening from The Whole Thing and Collective Copy. His ominously frisky dog held tight between his knees, Dingle is awaiting the public appearance of Nixon and Trask. Courage defined glows bright along his ribs, illuminating the glazed doll's-eyes of an im- moderate love, sitting lotus on Dingle's heart, staring straight ahead beneath the steady sixty-watt glow of a plan's fruition. The last of a shelf of spring rain-clouds is moving away east, carrying with it the drepanoid nub of a descending rainbow.
      11:53am EDT, K.K. McFadden, Stenographer to the Assistant Press Secretary to the President of the United States, Washington, D.C., makes a stenographic error, asserting, in a pre-summit statement to be read to the Cyrillic media by Press Secretary Speakes, that the President is, as he's iterated time and again, willing to go the extra diplomatic mile to ensure that the terrible possibility of unclear war never becomes a reality.
      11:54am EDT, Mrs. Dingle is at the telephone, dialing the Northampton number of The Whole Thing, her heart ridden with a nameless angst.
      11:54am EDT, Myrnaloy Trask, an automaton of distress, takes her zucchini bread and mineral water and dog and exits Collective Copy, moving south into the lunchtime sidewalk crowd's spectrum of hair and Kabuki paint. She feels humidity, sees a thoroughfare's rising steam, hears the brief rustle of her sheltered board, smells ozone and the sweet diesel of the idling public bus.
      6:54pm ADT, Aristotle Onassis, on his yacht, four degrees west and six north of Lord Howe Island in the Tasmanian Sea, ruminates over a celery juice at his yacht's wet bar. He sits on a teakwood barstool. The seat of the stool and the wet bar's top are covered in an exquisite cyan leather processed from the scrotums of sperm whales under Mrs. O's personal supervision. Onassis twirls his icecubes with a thick finger.
      8:54am PDT, W.W. Skeat narrowly avoids contact with a Trailways bus in the Highway's left lane. He shifts on his bottom, raising the offending ham off the driver's seat. The Trailways bus falls in behind him, the driver honking at Skeat's inclined-to-port image through two layers of thick glass.
      11:54am EDT, Don Megala redials Collective Copy, is informed that a very upset Ms. Trask has left for lunch. Megala peels at the triangular label of a moist bottle, staring at a half-strung instrument.
      6:55am MT, Patricia Dingle, eyes rimed with ice, palate hanging with the oystery starlight of extreme outdoor fear, makes a clumsy incision in the first finger of her frozen hand with a camp knife. The incision is a deep one just beneath the nail. She begins squeezing her finger with her left hand, moving the frozen blood up the finger and out the incision. The blood leaves the finger in a bright solid mass, protrudes in an arc into the snow-skittered and very cold air. Patricia Dingle remembers her covert passion for sweet cherry Freezer-Pops as a milk-drinking child and is suddenly unwell onto the royal gulf's sloped shore.
      11:55am EDT, Barry Dingle emerges from the doorway of the Leftward Ho and moves north on the broad sidewalk toward the tiny, divergent, dual images of Myrnaloy Trask and her life's companion. The sidewalk before him, aswarm with mohawked women, weak men in leather, children in dyed smocks, branches in his sight into two vivid columns. Dingle makes for the distant root where the columns converge, where two Myrnaloys and two incontinent dogs will come together. His sandals slap the wet pavement. Dingle tastes the material of his heart on his tongue. His white knuckles are redly dotted with clench on his dog's heavy leash; he's numb; he does not feel the dog's abortive lunges at the crewcut Sapphoids passing just outside Dingle's crossed-inward ken as they whirl on spurred boots, most of them, glaring at the male animal and either saluting as in Rome or assuming martial-arts postures. Dingle is blind to what passes; he stares straight ahead; his immoderate love's eyes roll over white beneath its lit bulb.
      11:55am EDT, Mrs. Dingle exchanges terse greetings with Nigel, temporary helmsman of The Whole Thing, lunchtime. She asks for Dingle.
      8:50-8:57am MT, the Eskew brothers, Ronnie and Boone, both remanded to the custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections for terms not to exceed twelve years, attach a centerfold to the back of new inmate Dean-Paul Doyle, age 18, and sodomize him repeatedly on the floor of a crowded dormitory in Cell Block D, Arizona State Correctional Facility, Florence, AZ.
      11:56am EDT, Myrnaloy Trask moves south on the sidewalk, seeing little past her curtain of hot tears but a miasma of colored hair, khaki pants, the twinkle of emergent sun on single earrings. Her past and present whirl together and yield a tornado of pain. Nixon trots cheerfully beside her.
      11:56am EDT, Mrs. Dingle, on the phone, finds herself weeping for no good reason. Nigel tries to soothe her with a recipe for gazpacho.
      6:56pm EDT, Aristotle Onassis, on his barstool, on his yacht, sees on the radar dish monitor behind him the videotaped face of Cliff Robertson, speaking on behalf of AT&T, which Aristotle owns. Robertson looks tan and fit. Onassis can see both their faces' reflections in his polished mirror over his wet bar, on his yacht.
      11:56am EDT, Don Megala, waiting for the special Weather-That-Wood brand shellac to dry on a soon-to-be-antique dulcimer, smokes a Dunhill, looking out his workshop window at the whitewashed New England brick wall the window faces.
      8:56am MT, ten-week-old Shauna Doyle, Olney, Arizona, lies on the carpet of her absent mother's trailer. She sees the sun shine faint pink through the upright ear of the white Husky puppy standing guard over her as Barry Dingle moves forward into convergence. His white-eyed love chants prayers for the living. The teams close. Nixon, in new heat, strains at the approach of Dingle's restrained male. The clouds, a dark eastern blight on an immoderate blue sky, rumble as their commalike nubbin of rainbow hangs there, indecisive. Myrnaloy is blind. Dingle smiles wildly as he reaches the columns' union, smiling, poorly feigning a shock of recognition. He goes into a rehearsed stumble of ideal surprise -- this time, though, unideally stubbing a swollen toe on the pole of the bus stop's tall sign -- loosening his grip on the length of chain. Dingle's dog is uninterested in Nixon: its rolling eyes lock on a point just below the denim waistline of Myrnaloy Trask, upwind. Dingle goes all too convincingly for his hurt toe, howling, his right foot brought up and held with both white hands; the Retriever is set free, its military chain a suitor's jewelry It clears a bright puddle in one horny bound. From below, the puddle reflects upward the not-pretty, bright-red arousal of one male dog. Myrnaloy stops. Dingle stops. Dingle's dog hangs in mid-air, entombed in color, fixed and fused in an unutterable focus.