My Crazy Love Life

There are certain words which, once uttered, may never be un-said. Certain words which are irrevocable. Phrases like, “I want a divorce,” or, “It’s not you, it’s me,” and “Wow, that’s an ugly baby!” … I could go on.

On that particular morning, at the unholy hour of 3:00 A.M., the words that could not be un-said were, “Let’s go for a walk!”

Immediately,  those words were heard, processed, and acted upon. A clattering sound soon arose. A jingling noise ensued. An eager vocalization echoed around my tiny apartment, a cross between a bleat and a woof; what I had come to call a “Bahrk.” That was followed by an irate banging upon the wall; the guy down the hall, whose sleep had been disturbed. “Sorry, not sorry,” I muttered. Maybe I was a bit surly at the early hour.

My unkind mood melted, as Molly happily dropped her leash at my feet. In between my feet, actually. I tripped over it and tumbled clumsily to the floor. Molly licked my face with her oversized tongue, and bahrked again. Her hooves clattered on the floor as she eagerly danced from foot to foot. I untangled myself, clipped the leash to her Martingale collar, and off we went. At least the night was warm—too warm, too humid. It was like taking a walk in a clothes dryer. I tried vainly to get Molly to heel, and settled for keeping her from pulling my arm out of joint.

I loved Molly with all my heart. Still, as Molly bounded and clattered on our three A.M. walk, wagging her curled-up tail and rooting through the shrubbery with her tiny horns, I sank into a funk. I was still practicing radical acceptance…

How could I have been so blind! SO BLOODY STUPID!? What had I been thinking!?

The answer was that I wasn’t thinking. I was grieving. I was exhausted. I was feeling the huge, gaping hole left by Misty’s death. 

And, also, if I have to be honest, I was in the grip of a terrifying rage. This anger was a feeling wholly outide my usual emotional spectrum. Sure, I got annoyed at the undergrad students wallowing through the Genetics courses I was T.A.’ing for. I got sad when I ran out of bacon. I got crushes on women in my doctoral program who were way out of my league… But this towering, fiery rage was entirely different.

The blinding fury was aimed at the man who had killed my Misty. His feet kicked frantically just a few inches off the ground, as I pinned him against the hood of his cherry-red Mercedes SL. The sleek sports car was an all-electric model. Zero emissions, One dead dog.

Misty was dying in the grass by the side of the road. It was relatively quick, but no less gruesome. I will never, ever, forget the last soft whimper she exhaled from between crushed ribs; the last look in her soft brown eyes, now rimmed with blood and glazing over, as she gazed into my eyes for the last time. Those eyes seemed to be saying, “I’m sorry. I love you …”

But it wasn’t her fault! It was the fault of the stupid creep who had come tearing around the winding curve in the road in his bright red phallic symbol and run my Misty down. It was the fault of the alcohol I smelled on his breath, as soon as he staggered from his car. 

Which was how, and why, I found myself screaming into his face, holding him by the neck, pinned against the hood of his car, less than ten seconds later.

I am lucky if I get to the gym or do anything strenuous twice a week, other than taking Misty out for her daily walks. Sure, I’m a big guy, but not what you’d call “in shape,” by any stretch. Apparently, the desire to save a loved one’s life isn’t the only thing that gives one superhuman strength. Losing one does, too. I would be sore for days afterward, but just then, that fat creep in the Armani suit and polka-dotted tie was kicking and flailing, choking and gasping. When I paused in my roaring long enough, I could make out his strangled mantra: “Not my fault! Not my fault!”

Those were almost his last words; a fitting epitaph for his kind of yuppie scum. I dropped the bastard, only so that I could back off and get a good wind-up for the punch I aimed at his face. In typical fashion for his slimy ilk, he ducked and collapsed against his murder-mobile. He reached inside and scrabbled frantically on the seat. For a moment I thought he was going to come out with a gun or something. I almost hoped he would—it would be a relief to join Misty…

Instead, he came out with a scuffed, black briefcase—a freaking briefcase! I started my wind-up all over again. He started hauling out cash by the fistful. Despite myself, I glanced down, and did a double-take. They were hundred dollar bills, and they were falling to the ground between us like the winter’s first blizzard. “I’m … A U.S. Senator,” he quavered. “I’m sorry about your dog, but can we please just make this go away?” More hundreds cascaded to the dry grass. And more…

Misty lay, still and dead, a few feet away. She wasn’t coming back…

I don’t know what monstrous part of me bent and scooped up the cash. That same monstrous sub-personality also made me whip out my phone, under the cover of my crouching posture, and snap picture after picture of the car, the man, … of Misty. When I was done, I sprang up like a jack-in-the-box on meth, into the shaking scumbag’s face. “MORE!” I howled. He looked like he was about to wet himself. “MORE, YOU YUPPIE G-MAN! MORE!!!” And, he had more. When he threw up his hands and showed me the empty briefcase, I gathered up the cash. While I was doing that, he made a break for it, got back into his bright red sports car and peeled away from the scene of his crime.

My second feat of super-human strength that day was to carry Misty’s twisted, cooling, bloody body home, and bury her. I didn’t care how many ordinances against disposal of a body I broke. I just got it done, sobbing and cursing … It was all I could do for her, so I just got it done.

When I was done, the sun had gone down. The sultry evening air left me sticky, and I was grimy with caked dirt and blood—mine from the blisters left by the shovel, as well as Misty’s, made by a monster in a cherry-red electric sports car. I staggered back to my apartment, threw my ruined clothes into a trash bag and crawled into the shower. My keening was drowned by the torrent of scalding water.

There followed two days that I don’t clearly remember. Misty was everywhere in my flat. Pictures of her were on the walls—Misty, galloping after a frisbee, her golden coat dazzling in the sun; Misty, tugging frantically on a rope, me on the other end, giggling uncontrollably as I tried to keep my feet; Misty, buried in the neighbor’s flower garden, with a smug look on her broad, dirt-smudged face; Misty’s huge body taking up the whole sofa… And that’s not to mention her toys, her bones, her bags of treats, her food …

… And her food bowls.

It was in another cathartic spasm that I found myself gathering up pieces of Misty. The toys, the bones buried under cushions and piles of magazines; I couldn’t bring myself to take down the pictures. I was getting ready to wash her food and water bowls for the last time. That’s when I had the lightning-bolt moment.

I was staring at the coating of dried saliva and gunk that Misty had left on her bowl after her breakfast. There were golden hairs stuck in the gunk. The voice that began to chant inside my brain was like a hallucination. It repeated three letters, over and over. “DNA … DNA … DNA…”

I am not ashamed to admit it. I began to cackle like a mad scientist. “DNA!” I shrieked. “Deoxyribonucleic acid!” I gibbered. “The molecule of life!!!” I began to do the mad scientists’s dance of joy. If that isn’t a thing already, it is now. After I ran out of breath, I simply stood, clutching the gunky, hair-speckled food bowl and whispering, “Misty,” over and  over. I was going to get my mischievous, ungainly, fun-loving Yellow Labrador Retriever back!

In that instant, I had it all figured out … Well. Mostly. Well… I was going to do it! Shut up!

The next day, I did two things. First, I went through the pictures of that awful morning and culled the good ones—the damaging ones with plate numbers and facial features and … other … evidence …—and attached them to an E-mail, which I circulated as far and wide as I could think of. Police, DMV, the bastard’s wife and kids, social media, Animal Rescue League, PITA!

The next thing I did was count the insane amount of cash the senator had dropped, in his cowardly rush to flee the scene. I hadn’t even looked at it, after scooping it up and stuffing it in the pockets of my hoodie. And my sweatpants. And my belly bag … There was just SO MUCH! I had to count it five times. $23,400! What kind of a schmuck carries around that kind of cash? 

Three … I did three things that day. First, the public shaming. Next, the counting of the money. The third thing I did was load all that blood money onto ten pre-paid credit cards.

The fourth thing—Okay: public shaming, counting, pre-loading … Fourth, I got on-line, and started buying stuff. Amazon will ship just about anything.

We’ve come a long way since Dolly the sheep was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996. Ever since Watson and Crick figured out what DNA was in 1953, people have been cloning more and more complicated creatures. Starting with South African Clawed Frogs, scientists have been cloning anything and everything. Misty wouldn’t even be the first dog to be cloned, my frazzled mind reassured me, in the same voice that assures one who is about to bungee-jump off a bridge that they will be home in time for dinner. Clancy, an Australian Shepherd, had been cloned in 2027. Okay, he had only lived for two years, and the immune suppression drugs he had been forced to take made him an easy mark for every type of disease, but … But! … We’d come a long way with immunosuppressants, too! This was 2038, for God’s sake! I could do this! I WOULD do this! …

But, I needed stuff first. No way in hell was I going to let my pH.D. advisors know what I was doing! In theory, I had access to a whole laboratory full of equipment perfectly suited to my purposes. Even my grief-addled brain knew better than to mix my academic career with this … Let’s just call it a scheme, shall we? Scheme doesn’t sound nutty at all …

My shopping list went something like, “High-speed centrifuge, chromosome staining dye and applicator system, tiny clean-room, high-temperature autoclave, incubation chamber, about fifty boxes of Latex gloves, various glassware like slides and tubes and beakers… Waldos (Bluetooth, can you believe it!?), laser scalpel, ultraviolet lamps, …” and so on. I got amazingly lucky, and even found a scanning electron microscope on eBay! Okay, slightly used, needed some replacement parts … Hey! It’s eBay! And, the best part was, the dog-murdering yuppie creep paid for it all! I even had enough left over for Thai food! … Misty’s favorite …

Now, as Molly and I took our three A.M. walk, (Not on the winding road where Misty was run down. I can never go back there again), with me casting anxious glances back over my shoulder, I am once again flabbergasted at my stupidity. There was no excuse for my having been so careless. Not two days without sleep, not grief, not even the rage, or the intensity of my denial. I am the biggest fool walking the earth. My only hope now was to conceal the hideous, missborn chimera I have created … and come to love.

If I had been thinking rationally, I would have remembered that it wasn’t just Misty’s gunk on that food bowl. What I scraped off that stainless steel dish wasn’t just Misty’s DNA. Even the hairs, complete with follicles, were contaminated.

Misty, my poor pup, was plagued by food allergies. I had her on a special lamb and rice diet. Maybe Misty’s stem cells gave the clone viability, but not all the chromosome pairs were pure yellow Labrador. The creature I had carefully nurtured through quickening and brought to term was … well … not exactly a yellow lab. And not exactly a lamb. Bright side: No rice!

In fact, I wasn’t sure what it was. I think it may have had two hearts! Certainly its coat, predominantly yellow and curly, had fooled me during my admittedly hasty examinations. The sparse brown hairs, I figured, were just some sort of … artifact? Sure, the face looked a little different than a dog’s. My new puppy had a wider mouth and a strange shape to the teeth and jaw. But, I didn’t care if New Misty was homely; only that she came back to me.

It was only after birth that I began to realize the scope of my horrible miscalculation. What was my first clue, you ask? The hooves, I think. The curly tail wasn’t quite right, either. Still, any newborn pup is cute, right? When she licked my face with that enormous tongue, when she flopped around on her back on my living room floor … how could I not fall in love? After the first few pairs of masticated slippers, the first gentle games of tug of war … and how she went after that frisbee! By then, there was no turning back. 

I’ll admit, the weird, bleating barking noise she made gave me quite a nasty shock the first time I heard it. But, you’d be surprised how quickly that kind of thing grows on you, especially if you’re at the mercy of puppy love…

I got the first death threat about a week later. Had someone discovered the majorly illegal thing I had done, and wanted me dead? Only when I came to myself enough to get on-line did I realize what was actually going on. It seems my public shaming campaign had gotten just a wee bit out of hand. The senator had lost his job, his wife had divorced him, even his kids wouldn’t talk to him anymore! I couldn’t have been happier! Maybe it’s another reason Molly and I got so attached.

But, I knew I had to be careful. I also knew I had to potty-train Molly very quickly. Dog poop is chocolate candy compared to sheep poop. Even semi-sheep eating dog food. It just didn’t seem right to feed Molly lamb-based food… I may be a mad scientist, but I am NOT a cannibal!

So, now we took our walks in secret. “Let’s go for a walk,” is just as final and irrevocable. If you do not actually go for a walk after saying these words, you are instantaneously the biggest asshole on the planet.

Molly was unexpectedly strong, and I had to lean back against her leash to keep her from dragging me who knows where. Which is why I was terrified when she tried to bolt off the road and into the trees. I was even more scared when I heard a sound which somehow crossed a growl with a wail. It sounded like a banshee with laryngitis. And Molly was being pursued by it!

I wrestled Molly back to my side. She was being chased by something that wiggled, and then leapt. I saw the collar on the beast just in time to keep from bolting in panic. It had claws, and … fins? It continued to make that unearthly screeching growl… Molly bahrked right back at it, and bared her dull, flat, sheep’s teeth.

“Snyglet! You quit that!” It was a woman’s voice. A second later, she came out from deeper within the fringe of trees bordering the road. She held what looked like a leash, if leashes came on fishing reels. “I’m so sorry, sir,” she gushed. “My Snyglet didn’t mean any harm, really, he would never hurt your …”

“What the hell is that!?” We said in unison.

“Salmonese,” mumbled the woman, through pinched-in cheeks.

“Lambrador,”I mumbled, sheepishly.

It wasn’t a cherry red Mercedes or a U.S. Senator that had run down her Siamese cat, Snydely; it was a black BMW driven by a lawyer. Snydely had been fed a steady diet of salmon and soy. You can guess the rest.

It turned out that Snyglet’s … creator … Andrea, was in my undergrad genetics course. When I thought about it, I realized I’d seen her in class, but she hadn’t been too memorable.

We got to talking about our chimera pets. We both loved them so much! And then, we exchanged phone numbers!

I feel good about this. I feel hopeful. Even mad scientists can have a happy ending … Am I right?