Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

it was—fell from the horizon the moment this big orange “FUCK” roared up. The magic of death, the magic of great mysteries, lost to the magic of one dirty word.
    A short time later both Karla and my father began calling us from the other room. Bob put his arm around my shoulder and asked again if I understood everything he had said. Lying, I nodded in a way I thought was intelligent and mature, but my mind was on other things.
    The photo session ended soon after, which was just as well because I couldn’t wait to get home.
    When I was safely in my room and had locked the door, I ran for the bathroom. Locked in there too, I turned on the overhead light and said the word to myself over and over again. Loud, soft, as a plea, an order. I made faces around the word, gestures, I did everything. Hearing it from Layne-Dyer had set something loose in me and I couldn’t let that thing go until I had exhausted its every possibility. Fuck.
     
    WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, I saw Big Top lying on my foot. Venasque was looking at me and eating from a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.
    “That was a dream I had twenty years ago, Venasque. The only thing true about it was I went to Layne-Dyer as a kid to have my picture taken and he fell down once.”
    “How old were you when you had the dream?”
    “I don’t know, graduate school, as I remember.”
    “Why do you think you had it then?”
    “Cause I was thinking a lot about houses then. I was studying to be an architect!”
    “Harry, don’t be a dope. Before, you were saying things like Karate Kid are bad because they water down important issues. That’s true, but here you were having a …
    “Listen to me carefully. Sometimes dreams turn into soldiers. They’ll fight your battles and defend your land, but you’ve got to take good care of them. Feed and protect them, give them the attention they deserve. Forget or ignore a dream that size and the soldier dies. That one especially. You’ve got to write that thing down as much as you remember and study it till you realize how important it is. And for God’s sake, keep it protected. You’re going to need it again, believe me.
    “Karate Kid is nonsense, but you were given a gift of real enlightenment, Harry, and you forgot it, till now. Wrote it off like it happened because you were eating hot peppers before you went to bed.”
     
    BESIDES THE “TRAVELING” AND clarinet lessons, Venasque had me do autogenic training to drag my flapping kite of a heartbeat back to earth, as well as create a new quiet room in the house of my life. It would be both easy and false to lie and say our time together was full of miraculous events, profound aphorisms, and enlightenment every step of the way. But being healed and helped by Venasque didn’t work like that. There was magic, times when my jaw dropped open and troops of cold-footed lizards ran up my spine. But the norm was quiet talk and laughter, always. I am convinced the great teachers do two things that outweigh everything else—they explain clearly, and they exude an almost palpable feeling of benevolence.
    A shaman, teacher … must be fundamentally and at all times
benevolent. None of this half-devil, half-angel stuff, which is a very modern, convenient conceit that misses the point. The point is that while the teaching methods these men sometimes employ are odd and unorthodox and even horrifying, ultimately they know something about us that we ourselves don’t know—they have faculties functioning in their brains that don’t function in ours. And most important, behind all their strange behavior is the benevolent intent to bring us to our spiritual senses.
    Since my time with Venasque I have met or read books about other so-called shamans. But these characters aren’t the real thing. They are simply mischievous, intuitive, supersmart little opportunists who pass for spiritual teachers because they have psychic abilities. But psychic powers are a dime a dozen. Someone