Changing the Subject Read online

  CHANGING THE SUBJECT

  CHANGING the SUBJECT

  STORIES BY

  STEPHEN-PAUL MARTIN

  “Safety Somewhere Else” and “Cell” originally appeared, with different titles and in slightly different form, in Fiction International; “The Health of the Nation” and “Stopping” appeared in the Western Humanities Review; “Stopping” also appeared in Big Bridge and Rougarou; “Food” was originally published in Harp & Altar; “Food” has also appeared in the &NOW Anthology (best innovative writing 2004-2009, published by Lake Forest College Press, 2009) and in The Harp & Altar Anthology. “Safety Somewhere Else” (2008) and “The Health of the Nation” (2006) appeared in the Obscure Publications chapbook series.

  Thanks to Corey Frost and Eugene Lim for their careful and perceptive editing attention. Thanks to Mel Freilicher and Harold Jaffe for reading and responding to earlier versions of these stories.

  Copyright © 2010 Stephen-Paul Martin

  ISBN 978-1-940400-00-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927504

  ellipsis press

  www.ellipsispress.com

  Jackson Heights, New York

  Book design by Corey Frost.

  ALSO BY STEPHEN-PAUL MARTIN

  FICTION

  Safety Somewhere Else

  The Possibility of Music

  Apparently

  A New Kind of Happiness

  Instead of Confusion

  Collapsing into a Story

  Pictures of Nothing

  Gaps in the System

  Not Quite Fiction

  Undeserved Reputations

  Fear & Philosophy

  The Gothic Twilight

  The Flood

  Crisis of Representation

  Tales

  POETRY

  Invading Reagan

  ADVANCINGreceding

  Corona 2500

  Things

  Until It Changes

  Edges

  NON-FICTION

  Open Form and the Feminine Imagination

  CHANGING THE SUBJECT

  Safety Somewhere Else

  The Health of the Nation

  Cell

  Food

  Refusal as Radical Action

  Stopping

  SAFETY SOMEWHERE ELSE

  The greatest mistake of all time took place thousands of years ago, when God let Noah’s family survive the flood. God’s plan was to start a new human race with a man he thought he could trust, but the limits of Noah’s moral awareness were obvious right from the start. No sooner had God’s rainbow vanished into the clouds than Noah was getting drunk and cursing his grandson, declaring that Canaan’s descendants—one-third of the future human race—would be the lowest of slaves, a monstrous over-reaction that would have tragic consequences for countless generations of innocent people. Clearly, Noah wasn’t the man God thought he was.

  If God had been smart, only non-human animals would have been on the ark. The human race would not have survived and gone on to destroy and/or mistreat all other creatures. Instead, God made a point of encouraging human domination, assuring Noah that “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.” Why was someone as crazy as Noah given such ominous power? Why were all the animals put in such a compromised position? Had the “beasts of the earth” really done anything wrong?

  History has consistently shown how cruel our species can be to other animals, even those we’ve domesticated. We call dogs our best friends, but think of the horrible treatment they often receive. I’ve had dogs all my life, and I know they can be great companions. So when I think about the disgusting things that happen to them in research labs, I go out of my way to set things right, especially when the crime hits close to home. The most extreme example of this took place twenty-five years ago in New York, when my friend Karl was living with his dog, a beagle he called the Buddha, in a basement apartment a few blocks south of Canal Street.

  Karl woke one night at half past one with a ruptured appendix. He almost didn’t make it to the emergency room. Other complications developed after the surgery, and he had to stay in the hospital for a month. His next-door neighbor was willing to feed the Buddha, but Karl’s problems went beyond immediate care for his dog. He had no health insurance. Whatever he had in the bank was needed to pay his medical bills, leaving him with nothing to pay his rent. He was already three months behind, and the landlord lost his patience. He called the Salvation Army and had Karl’s furniture taken away. He put an ad in the paper and got a new tenant the following day. By the time Karl’s neighbor got home from work that night, there was no dog to feed. The landlord had taken the Buddha to the dog pound, which kept him forty-eight hours, then gave him to a medical research lab.

  If I’d been in New York at the time, I would have tried to help out. At the very least, I could have saved the Buddha from the lab. But I was on tour with Karl’s two other close friends, Charlie and Stu. Our band was in Japan, then Germany and Sweden, places where the cutting-edge music we’d learned to play had caught on quite nicely, though in the States people thought we sounded like stray dogs howling at the moon. The tour was fun, especially off stage, and we came home eager to tell Karl about all the wild things we’d done and seen, only to find him hospitalized and homeless.

  When Karl finally got out, each of us offered him a place to stay. But he wanted a place of his own, so we gave him money to rent a room at the YMCA. Then he went to the animal shelter to look for the Buddha. The receptionist was all smiles and friendly phrases. She searched her records and told him that the dog had never been there. But Karl had an ex-girlfriend who worked at the shelter, and though he didn’t really want to talk to her—she’d left him for another man six months before—he needed someone who knew how to get around the official cover-ups and denials. Two days later, she knew the truth. She tried to protect Karl’s feelings, making up a story about a freak accident at the lab, but he’d heard her lie before and he knew how to make her tell the truth. She finally admitted that the Buddha’s eyes had been surgically removed as part of an experiment. Then the doctor had put him to sleep.

  When Karl came over that night he was more upset than I’d ever seen him. He’d taken the Buddha off the street as a puppy five years before, claiming that the dog had approached him as a messenger from the universe. I didn’t believe in messages from the universe, but over time it was clear that the Buddha was making a positive difference. Karl was becoming a better person, more dependable and sensitive than he’d been before. The dog was the center of Karl’s life. Lovers and friends had come and gone, but the Buddha was always waiting for him to come home from work at night, greeting him at the door with eager eyes, wagging his tail. They’d played in Battery Park each morning before the sun came up. They’d taken trips all over the nation when Karl’s van was still running. The thought of someone cutting out the Buddha’s eyes filled Karl with hate. It filled me with hate. It filled Stu and Charlie with hate when we called and told them. We’d all known the Buddha for years. We’d cuddled and played with him many times. We agreed that we had to find the doctor from the lab and make him pay. And not just financially.

  Working through Karl’s ex-girlfriend the next day, we found out who the doctor was and where he lived in Forest Hills. We drove to his house at midnight in Stu’s old Chevy Impala. We picked the back-door lock, ripped the doctor out of bed, ignored the confused cries of his wife beside him, slammed him against the wall and knocked him unconscious, took his glasses from the dresser and squashed them into the floorboards, grabbed his wallet from the nightstand, dragged him into the kitchen, shoved him down an old wooden staircase into the basement, tied him tightly to a rotting s
upport beam, tied his wife and two young daughters to folding chairs we found beneath the staircase.

  The daughters were dazed and terrified. Their mother tried to make it seem that things weren’t as bad as they looked. She smiled at them and talked to us in a calm familiar voice. But Karl cut her off with what sounded like a prepared announcement: Please forgive us for waking you up. We’re not common criminals. Our visit here tonight is scientific in nature. My colleagues and I are concerned with the problem of blindness, not just in human beings, but throughout the animal kingdom. Our investigations have convinced us that blindness in animals can only be addressed by working with human subjects. We need to study human eyes, and what would be more appropriate than to study the trained eyes of a great scientist, the very same eyes that have studied the eyes of so many helpless animals. Through countless experiments, the doctor here has established the importance—indeed, the necessity—of surgically removing the eyes of his experimental subjects. Tonight this same necessity will be applied to the doctor himself!

  At first I laughed. I thought he was just pretending to be a mad doctor in a movie. But when he pulled a switchblade out of his pocket I started to panic. I thought what we’d already done was revenge enough, especially with the doctor looking so damaged and pathetic. But Karl looked vicious, out of control, and all my vindictive excitement was suddenly gone. I turned away from the doctor’s bleeding face in the dirty basement light. I knew that the law would define what we’d done as a crime. No one would even ask about the crime we’d been avenging.

  I told the wife and daughters what the doctor had done to the Buddha. The wife had no reaction at first, apparently familiar with her husband’s research methods. But then she gave me a sympathetic look, figuring she’d better seem concerned. The little girls looked horrified and the younger one started crying, as if she could see that her father had done something wrong and had to be punished.

  The wife took a deep breath and said: Look, he didn’t know it was your dog. He didn’t know it was anyone’s dog. The lab gets dogs from the shelter all the time.

  Karl said: It doesn’t matter whose dog it was. What he did was murder. Research is one thing; violence is another. And now it’s time to perform another experiment. Now it’s time—

  She said: It was just an animal. You can’t kill a man for killing a dog.

  Karl said: Why not? What makes people so special? That dog meant just as much to me as your husband does to you. And my dog didn’t deserve what happened to him. He didn’t hurt anyone. Your husband did.

  I followed his logic perfectly. But I knew I couldn’t let him take a knife to the doctor’s eyes. I grabbed his arm and led him upstairs to the kitchen, sitting him down at the table.

  I said: Listen man, we’ve got his wallet. Let’s rough him up a bit more, maybe knock his teeth out, or break his nose if we haven’t already, and—

  Karl nearly shouted: The man has to pay with his eyes!

  I said: But what if we end up killing him? If we get caught, we’ll be looking at murder charges. And I don’t think I can bring myself to cut the guy’s eyes out right in front of those two little girls. They’re innocent. His wife is innocent. Even if we take them upstairs and they don’t have to watch, their lives will be ruined. Or no—what am I saying? We’ll have to kill them too. They can identify us.

  Karl said: We’ve already gone too far. We might as well go all the way.

  We heard the doctor’s groggy voice downstairs, then Stu’s voice calling the doctor a killer, then the doctor sounding alarmed and angry, Charlie telling him to shut up, the doctor threatening Stu and Charlie with lawyers, Stu telling him to shut up, the sound of the doctor coughing and clearing his throat, the doctor threatening Stu and Charlie with lawyers again, a sound which must have been Stu or Charlie breaking the doctor’s nose or knocking his teeth out, the doctor’s wife and girls screaming and crying, the wife accusing my friends of being monsters, Charlie accusing her of being married to a monster.

  Karl stared at the wooden tabletop. He raised the knife above his head and slammed it down as hard as he could. It stuck up from the wood like a knife in a chunk of cheese. He started talking quietly, indistinctly, to himself. I asked him what he was saying. He stared at the knife and got louder, speeding up and slowing down, as if the pace of his words had replaced their meaning. When I stood and tried to make him stop he just got louder and louder, speeding up and slowing down, gripping the sides of the table. His words were like a slaughterhouse of syllables, like pit bulls tearing each other apart in a billionaire’s backyard, like wild applause in response to a bull collapsing with a sword in his back, or gunshots driving a herd of buffalo into a frenzy and over a cliff. He stopped, abruptly stood and looked through the window above the sink, as if his eyes were following the streetlights into the distance. I could tell that the crying of the girls downstairs was getting to him. After all, he had two baby sisters that he’d helped his aunt and uncle raise after his parents died. He shivered and yanked the knife out of the table, retracting the blade and putting it in his pocket. He looked outside again and the streetlights told him what to do next.

  He went downstairs and said: Ladies, prepare yourself to watch a great artist in action. Stu, you still have your tattoo kit in your trunk, don’t you? Go and get it.

  Stu looked confused but nodded and went outside to get his equipment. When he wasn’t making avantgarde music, Stu ran a mobile tattoo business out of his car, doing all his work in people’s homes.

  The wife took another deep breath and said: What are you doing?

  Karl said: I’m making the punishment fit the crime. Your husband cut my dog’s eyes out of his head. Now Stu is going to cut my dog’s eyes into your husband’s head.

  She looked puzzled. Karl told her to wait and see. She struggled in her chair, cried out her husband’s name. The doctor lifted his head, met her eyes briefly, passed out again. His face was a bloody mess.

  When Stu returned with his toolbox, Karl said: Get ready, man. This is going to be your crowning achievement. You’re going to give the doctor a new set of eyes. It’s clear that he can’t see things the way a dog sees them. So take your needle and cut the Buddha’s eyes into the doctor’s forehead, right above his eyebrows.

  Stu looked like he wanted to laugh, but he saw that Karl wasn’t joking.

  The wife said: A tattoo?

  Karl said: That’s right, a tattoo. From now on, wherever the doctor goes, he’ll see everything twice. Maybe then he’ll think twice before he decides to cut animals up.

  She said: That’s totally sick! You’re a fucking psycho!

  Karl said: Actually, I’m not a fucking psycho. My friends here can tell you that I’m one of the nicest people in the world. I’m a good listener, and when one of my friends is in trouble I’ll do anything to help him out. Sure, I lose my temper once in a while, but I’ve never hurt anyone before, at least not physically. But after what your husband did to my dog, he deserves—

  She said: He was doing research. Scientific research! Can’t you understand that? He was doing something for the good of the human race. He was trying to figure out how to make blind people see. He wasn’t being sadistic.

  Karl said: Normally you ask someone if it’s okay before you start cutting them up. And I seriously doubt that your husband asked the Buddha to sign a consent form.

  Red lights came flashing through the doorway at the top of the stairs. Apparently one of the neighbors, having heard all the screaming, had called the police. We made a quick exit, squeezing through a small basement window, got back to Stu’s car through an alley and drove away undetected.

  But we knew that we’d soon be in jail if we didn’t make ourselves hard to find. Charlie came up with a plan, a way to vanish into the sea. He knew someone who knew someone who called himself Captain Green, a man who’d been in the Coast Guard in his twenties and early thirties, then got involved with Greenpeace as an anti-whaling activist. He’d used his connections to buy
an old Coast Guard cutter for almost nothing, and now he spent most of his time hunting down whaling ships, ramming and sometimes sinking them or temporarily putting them out of commission. None of us had ever been at sea for more than a day. But Captain Green said he’d be glad to have us along, especially when we told him how much we respected the work he was doing.

  We left from New York Harbor two days later. The ocean looked beautiful. But soon I was sure that we would have been more comfortable in jail. For the first two weeks we were seasick and dehydrated. Our beds were wooden bunks in a cramped compartment beside the engine room. The noise was so bad that for the first three nights we got no sleep. The latrine was out of commission. We had to piss and shit off the back of the ship, a difficult balancing act even when the deck wasn’t pitching wildly. Often I found myself rehearsing a speech for Captain Green, begging him to take us home, though I figured he would just laugh and tell us to get tough and adjust. That’s what we finally did, though only Karl really took to the sea.

  At first I felt strange about ramming a ship. I knew that countless whales had been slaughtered over the years, and I thought that the captains of the whaling industry should be tried as mass murderers. But ramming and possibly sinking a ship seemed like a good way to get people killed. One of my crewmates told me that such things never happened. If a whaling ship was in danger of sinking, the captain sent out an SOS and help arrived in less than an hour, saving the crew, even if the ship itself went down. He also told me that whaling had been banned a few years before, that the ships we were hunting were in no position to take legal action against us. I nodded and smiled but still wasn’t sure what to think—until we encountered a whaling ship off the southern coast of Iceland.

  Karl and three of our crewmates had positioned themselves in rubber lifeboats between the whaling ship and a group of humpback whales. The harpoon gunners couldn’t fire while our boats were in the way. But suddenly Karl’s boat was lifted high in the air by a massive swell, and when the boat dipped into the trough, the gunners had a clear view and opened fire. Two harpoons hit a female whale. Her blood spurted out all over the waves. Her screams were shocking, unbearable. Until that point, I’d assumed that whales took harpoons in silence.