How to become a dog impersonator slash ventriloquist (and not the other way around)
Karma caught up with me today. Yuanyuan and I were out for a walk around the horseshoe parking lot of our ungated apartment community. It was negative one degree out, a 10 degree drop from the day before, a completely unsustainable pattern on the weather’s behalf. The air didn’t yet smell like winter but the lids of the trash cans and the windshields of the cars were convincingly frosted over. In the moonlight they looked like oil slicks. We were sharing one of the pockets of my jacket, and it wasn’t for Yuanyuan’s benefit. Her hands warm up as soon as she starts moving, whereas mine are cold-blooded animals, cooling just slowly enough not to shatter.
We switched pockets every circle or two so the CIA spooks with their infrared goggles wouldn’t get curious about the one-armed man.
We used to walk right before sunset and admire the weird clouds that come to visit our neighborhood, but we haven’t reset our walking alarm in a month or so, and now by the time it rings it’s completely dark. This is fine, except that there’s no sidewalk on the narrow two way street where we cross from one prong of the horseshoe to the other. We’re in the northern hemisphere so legally we can only swirl around the lot counter-clockwise, but one way or another the gap must be crossed. The drivers can probably see us, but we usually step off the road just in case.
We were in the middle of the gap when the car came. We shuffled onto the grass and waited, pacing in place to stay warm. The frosted-over autumn leaves made satisfying crunching sounds underfoot. As the car was passing us, we started moving back towards the road. That was when it started barking, a hysterical throat-scraping self-indulgent bark.
You’re probably thinking: there must have been a dog in the back seat. Good guess, here’s why you’re wrong.
When I was a kid, still living with my parents, we had these bushes growing outside the living room windows. My parents weren’t big on landscaping, and the bushes had terrible manners, so eventually all you could see out of the window was bushes, with a few chinks of light here and there that opened up onto the street. From the outside, there was no way you could see anything inside. I wasn’t an exhibitionist yet, so it didn’t bother me.
One day, peering out through one of the cracks, I saw a little kid riding his bike up the hill. Our house was right near the top, and though the hill made for an easy walk, it slowed bikers to a crawl. The kid was younger than me, and he was huffing and puffing and struggling, and it looked like was going to make it.
I was seized by a sudden inspiration. The window was already open. If I were religious, I would have taken it as a sign, maybe even a blessing from Satan. I pressed my face up against the screen and barked as loudly as I could, which was pretty loud because this was the kind of thing I devoted hours of practice to in my childhood. If only I’d kept at it, with the compounding effect, I’d be the best dog impersonator slash ventriloquist in the world by now. But I quit for some reason and became a software engineer instead.
My bark arrested the kid’s momentum immediately, and he tumbled off the bike onto the grass. He whipped his head around frantically, and not seeing a dog, got back on his bike and made his escape as fast as he could, which was around the speed of a motivated senior citizen. I felt both guilty and flattered.
That’s how I knew it wasn’t a dog. Karma was giving me the chance to compliment another fellow dog impersonator slash ventriloquist (and not the other way around, to quote Fabio in Zoolander). The barking that spilled from the car was so unexpected and violent and convincing that Yuanyuan jumped and gave a little shriek, while my own body imploded. Like a turtle or a collapsing star, I withdrew my head and arms close to my body and almost twisted my own neck off in the process.
And then we passed each other, like ships in the night, the barking doing a nice Doppler effect as it vanished into the distance (not really, but it would have been cool). I slowly unclenched my tiny muscles and found that one in my back couldn’t quite unclench all the way. I rolled my neck around to try to loosen it, but it said only a good night’s sleep would do.
Properly motivated, we pooled our minds and figured out a way to avoid the inevitable gap. We just walk back and forth along the horseshoe. Our toilet has followed suit and now swishes its contents back and forth alarmingly before swallowing them.
Meanwhile, I hope the man or dog who’s responsible for me getting a neck massage as I write this feels a little guilty and a lot flattered. Cheers buddy!
