Hooey

“You know the way a dog will be so intent on sniffing a trail that he doesn’t see the rabbit right in front of him,” Walt said, “—and when the rabbit scurries away the dog does a delayed take? That’s the way Dopey was. We made him able to move one ear independently of the other, the way a dog can shake off a fly. And when Dopey had a dream, he pawed with his hand the way a dog does while sleeping.” With that decision, the dwarves were finally solved. —Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

My mother used to tell me bedtime stories of Hooey and Dopey, a rabbit and a hedgehog or a hedgehog and a rabbit. Each night, she would protest that she did not have a story to tell, but each night, she would find a new way to begin—“Hooey and Dopey went out for a walk …”—and step by step, she would find a new way to continue. The existence of a problem implies the existence of its solution, as a beginning implies an ending. Time and cause are the only fictions. It is written. Somewhere on their walk, I would be dreaming, sucking my fingers.

Back in March, on my walk with Ursa Minor up the mesa, I began to tell myself, or an unknown friend, a version of this story. I thought I had a problem, and I thought I had a solution. I told it to Nora and Jacob and Carter and Michael and Lexy. I was going to tell it to Kaitlin, but she asked me instead to record it for her Substack. It found its way to Chris and Gluey and Courtney and Joanna … The first time I told it, I felt high for hours. The first time I listened, I fell vibrating into dreams within dreams. Flying home from Lithuania via Helsinki to Dallas–Fort Worth and so forth in July, I watched Inception for the first time and became terrified I would wake with the ending. Turiya, said my Tantra teacher. In the Wonderful Dharma Lotus Sutra, the Buddha says to the Medicine King, “Should there be any who hear and have even one thought of rejoicing in but a single sentence of the Wonderful Dharma Lotus Sutra, I shall confer on them a prediction of unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.” Hear, rejoice, prediction conferred. This dream is mine, and it is yours.

It is August 16, 8/(8+8), whatever that means. A hummingbird hovers outside my window and stares in at me. It is 4:42 p.m., and my two feral kittens dream behind the dishwasher or the washing machine. It is 4:24 p.m., and my kittens tackle, wrestle, hide, seek. They were two orange brothers, born April 9—children of the zodiac—under a storage shack adjoining the local restaurant to a mother named Pearl. Lotuses and lilies are as pearls in the mud. (No grit, no dharmic pearl; no mud, no lotus or water lily.) I named Pierre for Melville’s and Sendak’s, Milo for Juster’s, but then Milo, hissing and purring at once, let me lift his tail when I cornered him in the bathroom window, and he was a she, Mila, for Jovovich at her orangest (Leeloo, alien for Lily or for my uncle Lee), for Milarepa, the murderous sorcerer who gained mastery over his extremely subtle wind and mind and became a singing tantric buddha. Sendak, ignorant of Leeloo, could not find a rhyme for Omoo, so he went with Pierre. His Pierre, of course, is eaten by a lion and does not care until he does; Melville’s Pierre, of course, becomes a miserable juvenile author of pages plagiarized from his own experiences, except in the Kraken Edition that Sendak illustrated, which omits the suffering in favor of intense exaltation, a choice I would choose to endorse. Milo, of course, didn’t know what to do with himself, until he found that there’s just so much to do right here.

My sister died just before Labor Day in 2017, early on August 28. It is August 17 at 2:44 a.m. Her first two names were Hannah Maitland, for our father’s cousin Hyman Moshe. Hannah Mait, she liked to notice, sounds like animate, which she was and did and studied. She squinted like Mr. Magoo when she was born, and the nickname Magoo, frame by frame, became Goose, as Frame by Frame became the name of her un/finished book. Sendak has a trilogy of childhood development starring Mickey, Max, and Ida. Ida vanquishes goblins who become babies—it was my sister’s name for her future daughter. “To name a child is to imagine what goes on her tombstone,” she wrote for the Believer in 2009, the year before our father died, our names tattooed on his shoulder blade, mine higher because I was older. “I don’t want to imagine who will die so that she might live and be immortalized.” Max was the name of our father’s father, and the pseudonym our dad gave me in one draft of his unfinished novel. My brother-in-law just sent me a photo of “Mickey mouse bush” in the Azores. Not the bush itself—its name.