Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

“But then keeping only what it chooses to use — ”

“And expelling the rest back out into the soup.”

“It blows itself up, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, in a hard-shelled clam-like way, it does.”

We were silent for a while, satisfied with ourselves, congratulating ourselves for being such clever kids.

“Of course, that’s just an analogy,” said Patti after a while. “But what about the human soul? What did you call it, the essence of the self? Where is it? Where does the soul reside?”

“I guess we will eventually discover that it resides in a set of minute chemical imbalances at the synaptic clefts in the brain,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she said, and I heard her pop her gum.

“But,” I said, and as I said it I could hear myself slipping into Dudley’s voice and manner, or perhaps I should say slipping even more deeply into Dudley’s voice and manner, “even thinking about the electrochemical states of all those neurological interstices is so difficult that we prefer to think of the soul as intangible, and even when we as a species someday succeed in mapping all of the brain’s neuronal highways, byways, switchbacks, crossroads, and dead ends and can at last see the so-called soul for exactly what it is, most of us will go on thinking of it as intangible, in a manner similar to the way in which we go on thinking that the sun rises and sets though we know that it isn’t so.”

“We are rational beings only when we remember to be.”

“Um, yeah,” I said, hearing from her what I had intended to say myself. “That’s right.”

“In other words, most of the time we don’t think: we feel, and our feelings guide us.”

“Right,” I said, a little annoyed that she should be making my points for me.

“We twitch and twist and lash out without reason, like dogs dreaming, always a comical sight, and we would be every bit as comical as dreaming dogs if we didn’t turn our nightmares into excuses for perpetrating horrors upon our world and upon our fellows.”

“I begin to suspect, my dear,” I said, as Dudley would have, “that you have been reading my notebooks, my diary, my private animadversions on what we laughably call human understanding.”

A giggle. “I have peeked at it,” she said, “when you’re not looking.”

I cleared my throat and said, “Well in that case I suppose that it will come as no surprise to you to hear that I think that the reason for mankind’s being so readily inclined to believe that there are forces at work in the world beyond all comprehension is the fact that there are some forces at work in the world that are beyond our comprehension, or because the effort to comprehend them is too much for us.”

“They give the entire species a headache.”

“Yes. I — ah — couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“It is easier, and in a way more exciting, to allow oneself to believe that the world is full of mysteries that we will never understand, that there is a spiritual side to life that is insubstantial but all-pervading, and forever unknowable.”

“Yeah,” I said, myself again, “like that gas bag we call the soul — and that brings me back to the subject of boats.”

“It does?” she asked, as herself.

“It does, because — I’ll tell you this, and you can think I’m crazy if you want — while I was working inside Arcinella, down in the hold, cleaning the engine, I felt that I was ministering to a being, that she was a soulful thing, a thing with a spirit, like something alive, and that she had a soul. We — we fixed her up. We cleaned her up, spiffed her up, put a good face on her, made her up so that she looks as if she’s ready to go out to a party, but the buoyancy’s escaping from her soul, and it’s being replaced by something denser and darker; she’s melancholy; she’s in the grip of a deep and abiding pessimism, and I get the feeling that she’s weary of this life.”

“What the heck are you getting at, Peter?”

“She’s sinking.”

“Oh,” she said. “That. Yeah. I know.”

Chapter 36

The Night Bailer Gets Some Help

PATTI WAS ALREADY ON BOARD Arcinella when I arrived, sitting on the deck forward of the hatch, crosslegged, with her shoes off. She waved silently when she saw me coming. With barely a word, we went below. Patti was fastidious about touching anything greasy, and seeing how careful she was not to touch anything, I realized how dirty everything still was down there. I’d fixed it up to my standards, but they weren’t Patti’s, or my mother’s.

Patti crouched alongside the engine and, almost immediately, pointed at a particular part and asked, “What’s that?”

“That?” I asked, stalling for time, since I didn’t know.

“Yeah, that.”

It was a protuberance with a handle on top of it. It looked like a valve of some kind, so I took a chance. “It’s a valve,” I said.

“A valve,” she said, with a teacher’s mirthless smile, “and what’s that valve for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. When she pouted at that, I added, “I mean, it’s probably — ”

“ — a way to pump the bilge dry when the engine’s running,” she added for me.

“What?” I said, amazed.

“Sure,” she said. She leaned closer to the valve and examined it, tilting her head from side to side. After a moment, she pointed to a short length of tubing that protruded from one port of the valve. “See this?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. The tube extended downward from the valve to a point about half an inch from the centerline of the hull, into the bilgewater at a low point near the heavy timber of the keel.

“And see this?” she asked, pointing to another tube that extended from the valve and ran to a fitting in the hull, from which it could draw water from the bay.

“Mm-hm.”

“And see this?” She rose and pointed to