NATHAN KNAPP / SCHOPENHAUER’S DOGS
Of all the things he’d learned, or so A. Schopenhauer later told me after the ordeal which had recently placed him first in jail and then in hospital, which I will not recount here as it belongs in another story, which fortunately has not been included in this text, the most important was this: all of our sufferings spring from having to do with other people. Remember that, he said. Remember that and it will be for you an eternal bastion of wisdom against the relentless battering onslaught of bullshit with which we must every day up put. Have nothing to do with other people, he said, and you will feel much the better for it. The trouble is, he said, however, that even if you do your best to have nothing to do with other people, even if you flat out refuse to have anything to do with them, other people will always find a way to insinuate themselves in your affairs, and there is really nothing to be done about this, aside from either removing oneself utterly from society, or by committing various acts mostly homicidal in nature. I meant to say hostile where I said homicidal, or so he later told me, but you get the point. And by that token, it’s a good idea to keep a claw hammer or at least rubber mallet under your sofa, he said, just in case, or if not a claw hammer then at least a ball peen hammer, but not—he here paused as if for emphasis—not, he said again, a wooden gavel such as judges use, because such gavel, being made of wood, as I have myself discovered, or so he then said, is apt when vigorously applied to the up-side of someone else’s head to crack, break, or otherwise come completely apart, leaving one hammerless. When it comes to warding off the suffering which springs from having to do with other people, he said, the implements of common household repair are best. Besides hammers: screwdrivers, hacksaws, drills, wrenches, calipers, large hardback books. The objects of childhood recreation also suffice, such as cricket paddles and baseball bats and pocket knives both large and small, as well as many of the numerous inanimate items commonly to be found in the home, such as brass book-ends, certain varieties of heavy glass ashtrays, cast-iron skillets, custom-made bowling balls, and, in a pinch, even human skulls kept in one’s study for the purposes of memento mori—provided this last was, or so he said, ready-to-hand. He elucidated all this near the end of our meal one Friday night on the patio of his apartment in Frankfurt. His cook had quit suddenly the day before without giving the traditional two weeks’ notice. You treat me worse than the poodle dogs, said the cook, or so A. Schopenhauer later told me, whereas he replied that the poodle dogs were more intelligent than the cook and as such more deserving of better treatment. And so, for supper the following day, because A. Schopenhauer either could not or would not cook, we ate microwaved frankfurters without buns and drank cheap canned beers and downed snoots of even cheaper schnapps, of which the latter substance A. Schopenhauer consumed a considerable amount (each snoot interspersed with the act of him sticking his index and middle fingers into the mustard jar and then into his mouth, which act was followed by a small peck or nibble of hot dog, followed by another snoot) over the course of the evening, so much so that when I stood to leave and he stood to see me off, he slipped and, improbably enough, struck the front of his head so forcibly against the wrought iron table at which we’d been sitting that he appeared to have broken his skull. He lay on his back. Small bits of brain extruded from the sucking wound. He was, however, still breathing. I think you’ve fractured your skull, I said. No shit, said A. Schopenhauer. He made a delicate little gurgling sound. It appears that your brains are leaking out, I said. He moaned. Because I was unsure if he fully grasped the situation, I repeated that his brains appeared to be leaking out, to which he responded, quite clearly: Put them back in. And I said: How? And he said: Put—them—back—in. And so I tried scooping up A. Schopenhauer’s brains with my fingers and stuffing them back inside his poor head. This went on for what seemed an interminable amount of time, him moaning and me scooping and stuffing and pressing, until I was out of breath, and he attempted to sit up, at which point a thin tissue—the blood filled with air bubbles—sloshed over his considerably bushy eyebrows, and he saw it, or seemed to see it, and he collapsed, and lay again on his back. Though his mouth was open, he made no more noise whatsoever. At this point, both of his poodles, which had been lounging in the grass at the edge of the patio in his garden, came running over, whining and wagging their tails. They lay down on either side of him and licked first at his presumably mustard-flavored fingers and then at his head. Whether they were trying to wake him or simply liked the taste I did not know. Just then a burst of wind—it seemed to me a guffaw—agitated the branches of the chestnut tree above us, or rather above yours truly and the body of A. Schopenhauer, the chestnut’s leaves making the sound, unmistakable at that moment, of outright arboreal satisfaction if not actual applause. I called the police and a policeman came. He asked me how A. Schopenhauer had managed to strike his head so hard against the table. I told him I wasn’t sure, as it didn’t seem possible for him to muster so much force on his own power, but that was what had really happened. Well, said the policeman, he had a very hard head. Not as hard as the table, I said. No, said the policeman, not as hard as the table. The policeman remarked that he had been summoned to this residence many times, usually by the neighbors on account, he said, of all the shouting. He would not have blamed me, he said, if I myself had struck the man’s head against the table. He himself had to confess, or so he said, that he’d wanted to do either that or something similar on more or less every occasion on which he’d been forced to speak with him. A more unpleasant man, said the policeman, he doubted if there was one in all of Germany; this was really saying something, in his estimation, since the competition was pretty fierce. There came a pause in our conversation. The policeman scribbled in his notebook. I managed to catch a glimpse of his scribbling: it was a rude picture—a doodle, to be precise, of a hairy dick and balls. He was not a nice man, said the policeman. I could not help admitting that I was inclined to agree. I lit a cigarette and asked if the policeman would like some schnapps—enough remained in the bottle for a couple of shots. The policeman replaced his notebook in his pocket. He said he would take one. I handed him the bottle and he took a slug and then handed it back to me and I dispatched the remainder. Next to the body of A. Schopenhauer, one of the poodles mounted the other and began to do the thing poodles do when one mounts the other. Inappropriate, said the policeman. I do not like poodle dogs. Without looking at me he nodded in the direction of A. Schopenhauer’s body and said: You are sure you did not do this. And I said yes, I was pretty sure that I had not done it. Good enough for me, said the policeman. After the poodle dogs were finished one of them tried to bite the policeman. The policeman kicked it and the poodle dog howled and the policeman declared the case closed. Just then the other dog came to the aid of its mate and managed to sink its teeth into his rump. Fuck you, poodle dogs, said the policeman. He kicked this poodle dog also and this poodle dog also let out a howl. He then made as if to contribute to the backside of each poodle dog another violent deposit via his boot but they both beat a hasty retreat to the edge of the patio, where they lay next to each other, glaring alternately at the policeman and then at me, as if to say that they would settle their accounts with us at some point more advantageous to themselves. At this point, as unbelievable as it might seem, there came the unmistakable sound of laughter choked with blood, and the body began to move, and the policeman drew his service revolver… but that, too, is for another time.
Nathan Knapp lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Daybook, his debut novel, is forthcoming from Splice in 2024.