Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online

sense of motion and real life around Layne-Dyer’s model, I felt no danger; didn’t feel frightened or threatened by it.
    “I’ll show you something.” Coming around me, he went to the section where the roof had been taken off and put his hand down into the exposed room. When it reappeared, it was holding a bed the size of a small loaf of bread.
    “Did you ever eat a bed?” He broke off a piece of it and put it in his mouth.
    “Cool! Can I have some?”
    “You can try, but I don’t think you’ll be able to eat it.”
    “Oh yeah? Give me some!” I took the piece he offered and put it in my mouth. It tasted like salty plaster. It tasted like a model.
    “Yecch!” I spit and spit to get it all out. Bob smiled and continued to chew and then swallow his piece.
    “Listen to me, Harry. You can’t eat it because it’s not your house. Sooner or later in everyone’s life a moment comes when their house appears like this. Sometimes it’s when you’re young, sometimes when you’re sick like me. But most peoples’ problem is they can’t see the house, so they die confused. They say they want to understand what it’s all about, but given the chance, given the house, they either look away or get scared and blind. Because when the house is there and you know it, you don’t have any more excuses, Boss.”
    Once again I was baffled by what he was saying, but the tone of
his voice was so intense that it seemed imperative I at least try to understand what he was so passionate about.
    “I’m scared at what you’re saying. I don’t get what you mean.”
    He nodded, stopped, nodded again. “I’m telling you this now, Harry, so maybe you’ll remember it later on. No one ever told me.
    “Everyone has a house inside them. It defines who they are. A specific style and form, a certain number of rooms. You think about it all your life—what does mine really look like? How many floors are there? What is the view from the different windows? … But only once do you get a chance to actually see it. If you miss that chance, or avoid it ’cause it scares you, then it goes away and you’ll never see it again.”
    “ Where is this house?”
    He pointed to his head and mine. “In here. If you recognize it when it comes, then it’ll stay. But accepting it and making it stay is only the first part. Then you’ve got to try understanding it. You’ve got to take it apart and understand every piece. Why it’s there, why it’s made like that … most of all, how each piece fits in the whole.”
    I sort of got it. I asked the right question. “What happens when you understand?”
    He held up a finger, as if I’d made a good point. “It lets you eat it.”
    “Like you just did?”
    “Exactly. It lets you take it back inside. Here, look where the roof is gone. It’s the only section of the house I’ve been able to understand so far. The only part I’ve been allowed to eat.” He broke off another piece and popped it into his mouth. “The fuck of the thing is, I don’t have enough time now to do it. You can’t imagine how long it takes. How many hours you sit there and look or try to work it out … but nothing happens. It’s so exciting and frustrating at the same time.”
    Whatever he’d said after “fuck” didn’t go anywhere in my head because he’d said that word! Even my father didn’t say it and he was a pretty big curser. I’d said it once and gotten the biggest smack of my
life. Whenever I’d heard it since, it was like someone flashing an illegal weapon at me or a pack of dirty playing cards. You were dying to look, but knew it’d get you in a hell of a lot of trouble if you did.
    “Fuck.” You don’t hear that much when you’re an eight-year-old. It’s an adult’s word, forbidden and dirty and owning a dangerous gleam of its own. You don’t really know what it means, but use it, and you sure get fast results.
    The whole wonder and awe of Layne-Dyer’s model house—what it was, what he said