Outside the Dog Museum Read Online Free PDF

white hair, a large, always smoothly shaven face that looked its most comfortable listening or considering. He had green eyes but once told me the color had changed as he grew older. He wore overalls a lot because he didn’t like belts or suspenders. Overalls and running shoes. He loved running shoes and must have owned twenty pairs.
    When the Heavenly City was dismantled and put back in its rightful drawers (or garbage can), and the living room floor was visible again, the old man took me outside.
    We sat by the swimming pool and ate M&M’s chocolate candies, which were the animals’ favorite snack. Venasque said nothing; only spilled M&M’s into his hand from the jumbo-size bag and doled them out to the three of us. I was content to sit there, look at the still blue water and enjoy the sun on my legs. The only noise was the snuffling of the pig and dog as they ate their shares.
    The old man got up and walked two steps to the water. Once there, he turned the bag upside down and shook it over the pool. The candy flew out like buckshot across the surface, plink-plopping into the water like the beginning of a rain shower. Since I’d taken a Valium just before leaving the house, this strange act didn’t bother me a bit.
    “Come on, Harry, get up. We’re going for a swim.”
    We were already in our bathing suits, so Venasque took my arm and led me to the shallow end of the pool. The animals preceded us and, fearlessly walking down the steps into the water, floated out together. A white head, a hairy gray one.
    I felt the first cold stab of water on my left foot. The pig was in the middle of the pool, shoveling up M&M’s with an open mouth.
    “Connie, leave those candies alone!”
    He kept hold of my arm and moved us out. We kept bumping into candy buttons, which were already beginning to lose their color, in bright, unraveling swirls, to the pool’s chlorine.
    “Okay, here.” Venasque stopped us and put his hand over my face. Through the heavy velvet curtain of Valium and madness, I felt something extraordinarily vital and new open inside me.
    “We’re going down now, Harry, and we’ll stay down awhile. Don’t get scared, ’cause you’ll be able to breathe. Let’s go.”
    We settled like stones at the bottom of the pool. He pointed to the surface. Besides the wavering shimmer of the bright world on the other side of the water, I could see the many dark dots of M&M’s that had survived Connie’s mouth.
    “Look at those candies, Harry. Arrange them in your head. Look for a connection and tell me what you see.” His words were clear and distinct, as if we were sitting by the pool and not in it.
    What I saw was music. Music I could instantly read although I didn’t know how to read music then. The dark brown M&M’s were notes on the wavering “note paper” of the surface and it was all instantly, completely recognizable. Sublime music that made the greatest sense. Venasque later said it wasn’t music, it was me, “written properly.”
    “That really sounds 1960s! Who arranged it like that, while we were at the bottom of that pool?”
    “Don’t always be a wiseguy, Harry. It’s like a plaid jacket that goes
good with some outfits, but with others it looks like shit. You want to ask an important question, ask it. Don’t always hide behind a plaid jacket.”
    “Sorry. Who wrote the music on the water?”
    “God.”
    “I’m sorry, Venasque, but I don’t believe in God.”
    “Then who do you think spread them over the water like that, Mantovani?”
    “You, Venasque. You’re the closest to a God I’ve ever gotten, although I used to think a great building was God. You know, stand near the Treasury in Petra, or Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, and that’s as immortal or in touch with the Almighty as we will ever get.”
    He shook his head as if I was a slow fool. “Someone said, ‘It is easier for an imagination to conjure architecture than human beings.’ Know why that is, Harry? Because