Einstein’s Monsters by Martin Amis

And so he sighed and gazed, and gazed and sighed. The flowers had all lost their swoon and now arched and strained to meet the young girl’s touch. Oh, how they longed to be picked. Light and naked she moved among them, leaning to free a stem from the earth, then straightening to fix the petals in her costly black hair. Loved by the little puppy (mutely, proudly—how many lifetimes would he not joyously spend, unrequited, unregarded, in this half-love, this half-life?), the young girl sang, the young girl swam, the young girl lay back on her dress, drying herself and dreaming of growth, of change, of mysterious metamorphoses. Humming, murmuring, she sought another sun-dazed shape in which to drowse, opened her eyes—and what should she see? Why, a little puppy, a very tentative little puppy, inching through the flowers, its tail anxiously shriveled, the hot nose brushing the grass. The puppy had had absolutely no intention of approaching the girl in this way. But then, the puppy just found that he’d gone ahead and done it—as little puppies will. The girl sat up and, with no waste of attention, stared at him strictly, a hand raised to her mouth. The little puppy, sensing the gravity of his error, was about to slink miserably away, to the ends of the earth, never to return—but then she laughed and said, “Hello. Who are you then? Come on. Come here. It’s all right. Ooh, what a funny little creature you are. . . . I’d take you home with me. But they won’t like you. Because of the dog. Keithette won’t like you. I don’t think Tom will either. My name is Andromeda. And I like you. Yes, I really do.”

All this of course was pure Greek to the little puppy— but who cared? Her voice, with its infant lilt and music, was just another vast extra in his ambient bower of bliss. Not in his dreams, in his wagging, whimpering dreams. . . . While it might be pushing it to say that little puppies have fantasies, it is certainly the case that they have sentiments, powerful ones too—down there, where everything rips and tears like hunger. Lying on his back among the envious flowers, her hand on his tummy (lightly steadied by a speculative paw), the tail in tune with the slow heartbeat, the little puppy fairly choked and drowned in his little sea of joy. Ah, the piercing peace. All covered in heaven— puppy heaven! For many hours they rolled and cuddled and snuggled and nuzzled, until the color of the day began to change.

“Oh no,” said the girl.

She ran away in vivid terror. Told to stay, the little puppy followed her, as unobtrusively as possible, averting his glance whenever she turned to shoo him back (as though he believed that if he couldn’t see her, then she couldn’t see him). But now Andromeda paused in her flight and stood her ground to warn him.

“Stay. Be careful of the dog. Come tomorrow. Promise. Stay, but please don’t go away. Stay! Oh stay.”

Deeply puzzled, his tail uncertainly working, the little puppy watched her run, down the valley toward the gaping crater, where the fires were already boiling, black-veined, as they started to consume the air of the dusk.

During the next wave or packet of time, the life of the little puppy that could resembled a gorgeous and dreadful dream, the two states—panic and rapture—welded as close as the two faces of a knife; sometimes he felt his heart might crack and ooze with the incredible uncertainty of it all. But, being a puppy, he spent much of his time in the unaltered conditions, the extremes. When Andromeda loomed above him, her sun-warmed hair patterned with magical flowers, when she tickled both sets of ribs and kissed his hot belly, do you think the little puppy was anything but definitively flattened with joy? Life was all foreplay, wonderful foreplay. The little puppy devised other games too: the game where he ran very fast toward her and then veered off at the last second; the game where he ran around her in concentric circles wherever she went; the game where he ran away quite languidly and then skipped out of reach when she approached; and so on. Andromeda seemed uncharacteristically slow to catch on to his games—perhaps because the little puppy was so weak and sickly now, and so easily tired. Yet he wouldn’t stop. There was an edge of delirium in his romps. Often, too, he came a cropper on some of his more ambitious maneuvers. One afternoon, after hours of prompting, she was persuaded to play the stick game, whereby she threw a stick and the little puppy ran after it —returning it to her, or not, depending on his puppyish whim. By accident she once threw the stick into the creek, and the little puppy hurled himself in there after it. He appeared to be in some difficulties for a while; certainly he had quite a coughing fit on the bank when Andromeda hauled him out. She noticed then, as he lay recovering by her side, that his tail and back paws were badly scalded and enflamed. She looked down at him with a worried frown. The little puppy blinked up at her gratefully. Through the spokes of his wet lashes, and what with all the photospheric brilliance above and behind her, well, she looked—she looked to him like a stern and formidable angel, divine essence, a Power, a Dominion, a Throne, covered in prismatic jewelry, sliding down the sun’s rays. Of course we must remember the little puppy’s poor eyesight . . .oh, that poor little puppy.

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