Hounds of Hell

My Dearest Nephew,

A dog? You let your patient get a dog? A cat, maybe; a reptile, surely; but a dog?

The problem with dogs (unlike their noble forebears, the wolf) is that dogs like people and, worse, they need them.

After years of careful labor, I had coaxed a patient to the very edge of self-annihilation. (Even my detractors admit I am an artist with despair.)

By this time I had made him an unlovely specimen — angry, drunken, sullen, harsh — and every one of his friends and family had noted my hard work and quietly avoided him. He was on the edge of despair.

I could nearly taste the triumph.

So I stepped out for a short holiday, a few restful days at Auschwitz. I returned to find that his damn fool daughter had brought home a puppy. Not even a handsome animal. A filthy mutt, the kind of dog you could pick up on any street corner in Karachi.

The wretched animal was too stupid to see him for who he really was: a useless and loathsome creature, unworthy of love or even consideration. The dog simply saw the man underneath the crust of sin and judged him worthy of love.

The filthy, unthinking dogginess of dogs is a threat to hell itself. The devotion of an idiot animal to its undeserving master mimics, in miniature, the Enemy’s revolting affection for his human creatures.

Worse, it needed him. It needed to be let out, to be fed, to be scratched and walked and put to bed.

The physical needs of the dog, of the canine, pull a patient out of himself. Self-forgetfulness can ruin months of carefully constructed self-loathing. As long as a man stays curled inside his own misery, he is safely on his way to hell.

And so my patient, whom I had labored to make both unlovable and unloved, found himself both loved and needed.

But it sounds as though the damage is done. He has a dog. You will likely be punished for this foolishness. I would enjoy watching you get your just desserts, if it did not make me look like a damn fool, too.

But we can make the best of a bad situation.

I am relieved to hear that your patient purchased the dog from the pound. Make that his entire personality: a “paw-rent” with a “who rescued who?” bumper sticker.

Ensure the dog comes before humans. Ensure the patient always sides with the misbehaving dog over his offended friends, or make him skip a dinner party “because the dog has separation anxiety.” Dogs are bad, Bilchly, but relationships are worse.

Make the dog a barrier to people, and this won’t be as great a disaster as it should be.

If nothing else, give the dog fleas. Surely that is not beyond you.

Doggedly Yours,

Mulcifer