INTERVIEW WITH THE LAST REMAINING MEMBER OF THE FERAL DOG PACK WHICH FED ON GOD’S CORPSE – JUNE 2006 by Ronald F. Currie, Jr.

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables. That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

Mark 4:11-12

This interview was conducted in the Sudanese desert, near the town of Nertiti, in early June, 2006. After five months of searching South Darfur for , who by then had already passed out of any verifiable contact with people, I’d set out for Nertiti from Nyala, but managed to travel only seventy kilometers before the Jeep I’d purchased for the trip bogged down in sand. I didn’t last much longer than the truck; one sunrise later, lost and disoriented, to escape the heat I crawled into an abandoned animal den. With no idea where I was in relation to Nertiti, and no strength to get there even if I’d known how, I assumed I would die. It was at dusk on the second day that entered the den, and the interview began.

– RFC

Q?
Locating you was fairly simple, really, and has less to do with whatever abilities I gained from eating the Creator than with the abilities I already possessed as a feral dog. Contrary to what people believe, I’m far from omniscient. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of things, as I presume was the case for our Creator. For example, I was aware that you sought me out, and I knew you were somewhere in Darfur, but beyond that I was more or less in the dark. Among dogs, though, those of us with the best noses can detect the smell of a dying animal at ridiculous distances. Despair, like its cousin fear, carries a bitter scent, and just a few molecules of it, driven across the plains on a gusty afternoon, are more than enough for me to trace its source. Finding you was not difficult at all.
Q?
No. I’d expend more calories in the effort of chewing you than I would gain. Too thickly muscled. The inevitable result of obsessive weight lifting. So please, don’t worry; though you’d make an easy meal, easy meals are plentiful for us during the hot season. I’m sated. But that’s not the only reason I won’t eat you.
Q?
Oh, this whole application-of-morality-to-animal-behavior problem I’ve been grappling with since eating the Creator. Compassion is a coat of fur I find particularly ill-fitting. Just doesn’t mesh well with the nature of a dog. To feel pity for the young, old, weak, injured, and infirm, and as a result to abstain from killing them – not only does this contradict directly that which is feral dog directive number one, but it’s also poor strategy from the standpoint of self-preservation. I’m still in the early stages of sorting it all out, and honestly it often makes me unhappy.
Then there’s a third reason I won’t eat you – much as I desire now to avoid your kind, I do sometimes miss intelligent company. This is why I’m here.
Q?
Don’t be silly – yes, even by my lofty standards you are intelligent. If I may be frank, this was one of the things that eventually repulsed me about people. The way they prostrated themselves before me, sometimes literally, with hands clasped and all manner of entreaty on their lips, but more often figuratively, as you do now – ‘My meager intellect can’t possibly compare with yours,’ et cetera, ad nauseam. One shouldn’t confuse knowledge with intelligence. Is an encyclopedia smarter than you? Or a computer?
Q?
Of course not. So what makes you so certain that I am? The fact that I know without having been there what India’s prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, ate for dinner last night? I do. He had a bit of a sour stomach, and so ate a bland mixture of lentils and rice, of which he finished only a meager portion. There. Can you accept this, and still be my friend? Not my supplicant, not my apostle, but my friend?
Q?
It does. It does upset me. You need to understand that from the perspective of one steeped in the social customs of dogs, the eagerness with which people bow down, with little prompting and no real evidence that such humility and reverence are justified, is beyond distasteful. Especially when, as I’m now aware, that humility obscures a greed and sense of entitlement which is nearly ubiquitous in your kind. Boundless duplicity. It’s small wonder great masses of you are so unhappy.
So, to sum up: you’re smarter than the average wildebeest. Which will suffice.
Q?
Yes, perhaps it would be better to change the subject.
Q?
Certainly I’m willing to talk about it. You’ve nearly killed yourself for the dubious privilege of hearing my story, after all. Where should I begin?
Q?
Well, I think I should start a bit before the beginning, because it seems worth mentioning that I and another dog had an encounter with the Creator a few days before the five of us actually ate him. An odd coincidence, in retrospect. I can’t offer much detail, because my recollection of life before my transformation is vague, and could probably be more accurately described as a general impression of experience, rather than memories in the sense that I’ve come to know them.
Anyway, it was around this time of year. I know this for certain, because the days were searing hot. Dogs are not terribly intelligent, but they are very good at finding food, and we’d learned from our mothers, who had learned from their mothers, and so on, to follow the roving bands of Janjaweed militia, because food was always plentiful in their wake. They killed everything in a village, and when they moved on to find more to kill, we came in and cleaned up after them. A tidy relationship, except for the rare occasion when one or two of us neglected to keep a safe distance from the Janjaweed and found ourselves in their path. The first time I encountered the Creator, this was what happened. My brother and I caught the scent of despair and, unwisely, we followed it, ranging ahead of the Janjaweed until we found a young woman lying half conscious and alone in the tall grass. I did not know at the time that this was the Creator, in the form of a Dinka woman. I had no capacity to understand the concept, of course. All I saw was an easy meal. We walked cautious circles around her, to test her awareness and ability to fight. She did not strike out, did not flail or cry or respond at all, and we were about to make the kill when we heard the Janjaweed drawing near. Without hesitation, we bolted. The strategy, again learned from our mothers, is to determine the direction of the Janjaweed’s approach, then run as fast as one can at a ninety-degree angle to that approach, and move out of their way. This is the only hope for survival. They can’t be outrun, and believe me when I say that whatever they come into contact with dies.
Q?
Well, after that my brother and I returned to the pack and resolved, insofar as dogs are capable of resolving, that it was better to be hungry and alive than full and dead. We knew that with the Janjaweed on the move, our patience would be rewarded. Two days later we followed the smell of scorched flesh to the ruins of the refugee camp. This was when the five of us, those famous five, partook of the Creator.
Q?
That strikes me as a tactless question, not to mention beside the point.
Q?
I suppose you’re right; it is rare information. I can see why you’d be curious, however morbid that curiosity may be.
Q?
Fine, I’ll indulge you. It was tough, sour, gritty, the vilest meat I’ve ever tasted. Which was why none of us ate more than a mouthful.
Q?
It is surprising, when one stops to think about it. The flavor was anything but divine.
Q?
No. I don’t recall my transformation. There is a gap in my memory between the last moments as the dog I’d always been – wild, cheerful, nothing more or less than the sum of my appetites – and this new, heightened sentience. But I can tell you it was not instantaneous. When we discussed the sequence of events later, the others confirmed that their experience of the change was identical. For several hours after eating the Creator, we continued to feed at the refugee camp with the rest of the pack. Other animals – jackals and vultures, even a few big cats – straggled in and took their fill. Due to the abundance of food, there was none of the shrill bickering that usually breaks out over fresh kills, only the quiet, leisurely rending of meat from bone, and the crackle of small fires burning themselves out as dusk drew down over the plains. Eventually the pack came together and moved west out of the camp to find a suitable place to spend the night. These, now, were the last moments of my old life. I tramped down a bed in the tall grass and set about grooming myself. I lapped at my paws until the bloody paste was gone from between my toes, then licked away the crust of blood on my snout. I was surrounded by the nighttime noises of my brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles, rolling languidly onto their backs, sighing and growling in pleasant fatigue from the long day of eating. Soon the satisfaction of a full stomach, combined with a cool north wind blowing steadily over my fur, lulled me to sleep.
I did not dream.
The next morning I woke to the sun glaring down from a throne of distant hills. Immediately I was aware of the change I’d undergone. Whereas before I’d known only impulse, instinct, and habit, now suddenly my mind was full of thoughts; whereas before nothing existed for me outside of what I could detect with my senses, now I could apprehend the whole earth as a single entity, the minute and varied ways in which the parts of this whole interacted, passed into and out of being. All this became clear and accessible in a flash of consciousness, and with the same clarity I realized that my time as a member of the pack had come to an end.
The other four had reached this same conclusion. Our departure was as natural and inevitable as the next day’s sunrise. We rose together and prepared slowly to leave, hobbled by the unfamiliar complexity of sorrow. Hearing us, my brother stirred. He shook briskly to wake himself and trotted over, wanting to come along, thinking perhaps we meant to do some early scavenging before the day grew too hot. I tried to tell him that he couldn’t accompany us, but already the old way of communicating seemed lost to me. I flattened my ears when I should have brushed shoulders with him; I raised my tail when I should have lowered my snout. Frustrated, I showed him my teeth, and he moved away one small backward step at a time, tail drooping, eyes meek and downcast.
I haven’t seen him since that day, and of all the sorrows that I’ve learned, this last image of him is among those that pain me the most.
Q?
No. I’m aware, in my way, that he’s doing well – happy, healthy, a father now. Loss, among our kind, is a daily fact of life, and he forgot about me almost as soon as I disappeared from sight. My sadness is for myself.
Q?
Much as I would like to, I can’t seek him out, for the same reason I had to leave the pack that day – I don’t belong anymore. I never will again. I don’t expect you to understand this. You’re not equipped to understand it, emotionally.
Q?
We had no specific destination in mind when we left. We did know that people, in addition to being both our most plentiful food and our most dangerous enemy, possessed great intelligence. We hoped we might find a new home among them. So we headed toward the large cities of the north, but the going was hard. With the knowledge of time, our legs were heavy with regret and dread. None of us could muster the spirit to hunt. We passed hungry through great plains and dry riverbeds, up and over hills, across dark stretches of desert. At night we tried to comfort ourselves in the old ways, by grooming one another and curling together while we slept, but these things were empty now, useless as wings on a toad.
Finally we came to an oasis farming village. With new hope we approached the first person we saw, a thin old man with a long, gently seamed face. I asked him, in the same way you and I are communicating now, if he could take us to the person in charge of the village.
Only four of us left that place alive, running as fast as our weakened legs would carry us. The one who did not survive lay in the dust of the village’s single road, a rifle bullet in his head. The farmers, as Christians, believed we were evil spirits rather than dogs, and they pursued us into the desert with their guns. We escaped into a system of underground caves and spent three days and nights inside, mourning our friend and our fate. Snouts on paws, we whimpered in the gloom and dust; we still knew how to do this, at least, and it was the same waste of time it had always been.
Q?
It’s a good question. I’ve tried many times to explain this to people, without much success. The analogy I use, when comparing a normal dog’s emotional range to that of a person, is the difference between primary colors and the wide gamut of secondary colors. Normal dogs, for example, will experience a primal anger – let’s call it basic red. People, on the other hand, have an entire spectrum of red shades – the bright scarlet of irritation, the vermillion of resentment, the deep crimson of fury, and so on. The four of us now possessed this emotional kaleidoscope – or it possessed us – and early on the strain of enduring it nearly drove us insane.
Q?
We may have died there if it hadn’t occurred to us, for the first time, to talk to one another. To use our new knowledge, share our thoughts and figure out a potential solution. This was our third night in the caves. With an enthusiasm that in our former lives had been reserved only for stalking prey or mating, we cast our minds further north, searching for the right person to reveal ourselves to, a person with intelligence, learning, and an intellectual curiosity that would allow him to get past the initial shock of being spoken to by a dog. After several hours we decided on Khalid Hassan Mubarak, a professor of theology at the University of Khartoum. Mubarak kept up appearances as a pious Muslim for professional reasons, but had years before jettisoned all religious conviction to make way for an innate and blossoming egomania. In our zeal and naiveté we neglected to consider Mubarak’s character as well as his intellect, a mistake we would all come to regret.
Q?
We were anxious to get underway, so we returned to the oasis while the village still slept and drank from the spring pool until our guts bloated like water skins. We headed northeast, trotting a straight line to Khartoum, again over hills and across great stretches of sand, pausing only for an hour or two each day when the sun rose to its apex and beat every living thing into hiding. We hunted without much success; though all of us had been accomplished predators before, now we stalked like pups, clumsily and with little teamwork, managing only to kill an old plated lizard none of us had much interest in eating. But not even hunger could dampen our optimism or slow our pace, and soon Khartoum’s slender minarets rose before us out of the desert like a miracle.
Q?
No, I don’t believe in miracles, not in the way I think you mean it. Sorry to disappoint. I never had an opportunity to believe. One moment I was ignorant of the very concept of miracles, and the next I knew far too much to believe them possible. I use the word as a figure of speech, to describe the shock of seeing this huge city materialize out of nothing but wind and sand.
Q?
What can I say, really, about my first impressions of Khartoum? It goes without saying that none of us had seen anything like it before. The noise and bustle. The people packed together, shouting and grabbing at sleeves, demanding the attention of others but never offering their own. The broken, bullet-marked cars jockeying endlessly for position. The riot of the bazaars, the stink of rotting fish and apple shisha, the vacant stares of loitering war wounded. We became lost as if in a sandstorm, unnoticed except when a soldier or shopkeeper moved to kick at us. We scurried through the streets for most of the afternoon until we arrived, more or less by accident, at the campus of the university.
Q?
We waited outside the building where we knew Mubarak lectured. After an hour he emerged, tall and pale in a plain white dishdasha and embroidered skullcap. I approached him and, for lack of any suitable entrée, said simply ‘Hello.’
Q?
It was somewhat absurd, but there seemed no reasonable way for us to introduce ourselves.
Q?
Well, as you can imagine, Mubarak was taken aback. At first he didn’t notice me at all, and looked around to see who had spoken. The only other person on the common, a man in a crimson tunic, had his back to Mubarak and was well out of earshot besides, receding around the corner of the Agriculture Building.
‘Down here,’ I said. ‘At your feet.’
Mubarak looked down and, seeing me, muttered a reflexive curse to a God he no longer believed in.
‘Professor Mubarak,’ I said, flanked now by the others, ‘we’ve come to ask for your help.’
‘Have I gone mad?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so. I’m speaking, in a manner of speaking, and you’re hearing me. This is real.’
Mubarak was silent for a few moments, staring down at us. Absently he put a hand to his skullcap and adjusted it. ‘What . . . ?’ he said, his voice trailing off, but already we could sense his disbelief waning a bit, giving way to the intellectual vitality with which he’d mastered seven languages and established himself as one of the leading translators of the Qur’an. I saw this opportunity and seized it, rushing headlong into an explanation: the Janjaweed, the refugee camp –
But Mubarak interrupted me. ‘Not here,’ he said, still seemingly dazed. ‘Whether this is real or not, I can’t be talking to dogs in public for everyone to see. I’m walking home. Follow me – at a distance.’
So we did. Mubarak left the campus and headed east, and we trailed him, thrilled at the possibility, so close now, that we’d found our ambassador, the one who would introduce us to the world of people and help us belong somewhere again. In our excitement we failed to notice Mubarak duck into a grocery stall to buy a pack of Dunhills. Without realizing it we passed him and reached his home before he did; we were waiting outside the gate when he arrived.
‘How did you know where I live?’ he asked.
‘We’ll explain everything,’ I told him. ‘As well as we understand it.’
Q?
We went inside and told him our story. Mubarak listened and chain-smoked. An amused little smile played beneath his mustache, as if he had accepted that none of this was real and decided to have fun with it, to hear us out and discover the fine points of his madness. Even the air he breathed, heavy with tobacco smoke and spices from the shwarma stand beneath his window, was suspect.
‘Right now, I could smoke a thousand of these without consequence,’ he said, holding up a freshly lit cigarette. ‘Because none of this is actually happening.’
‘Professor,’ I said, ‘we understand that you want to believe that’s the case. That you need to believe it, because in your mind there are only two logical explanations for what is happening – either you’re dreaming, or you’re insane. But we assure you that this is very real.’
Mubarak absorbed this in silence, then suddenly rose and stalked out, leaving us alone in the apartment. He returned several minutes later with a sodden package of chicken livers wrapped in newsprint. The mischievous smile was gone from his face.
‘You must be starved,’ he said, gazing down on us warmly.
Q?
For three days we fattened up on raw liver and goat’s milk, and slept on woven rugs. Mubarak bathed and brushed us, switched on ceiling fans and drew the curtains to shut out the afternoon sun. In the perpetual twilight of the living room, we dozed and were thankful. For the first time, I licked a man’s hand in affection.
Still, despite the luxury we were restless, and when we asked when he would introduce us to the larger world, Mubarak told us soon, soon, but first we would have to return to the refugee camp. He said that for practical reasons, only I could accompany him; the others would have to stay behind at his apartment. He took leave from the university and quickly made plans for an expedition south. This was also when he introduced the cages, stainless-steel crates padlocked from the outside, which he said were for our protection and comfort. When not in the crates we would need to be leashed, again for our own protection.
Mubarak purchased a used Land Rover, loaded it with gas canisters, food, water, and several body bags purchased from a man he knew who trafficked in illicit arms, and off we went. He worried aloud that the rains would arrive early and turn the roads to impassable mud holes; as a consequence we traveled faster than was safe and arrived at the camp in just three days, having used both the spare tires. Small groups of aid workers had returned and were busy cleaning up the dismembered, putrefying corpses. Mubarak cursed when he saw them.
‘They haven’t retrieved the Creator’s remains yet,’ I assured him.
‘Where?’ he said. ‘Show me. Quickly.’
We rolled through the collection of makeshift shelters, most of them knocked flat or burned to cinders, past the communal well, and out to the edge of the camp, where we found the Creator’s body exactly as we had left it three weeks earlier.
‘There,’ I said.
Mubarak put the truck in neutral and engaged the parking brake. ‘It hasn’t decayed at all,’ he said, and he was right. The Creator was dead, certainly, and picked over, but while the other corpses were so badly decomposed they’d begun to liquefy in places, His flesh was still fresh and supple, as if He’d died only a few hours before.
Without another word Mubarak leapt from the truck and began stuffing the body in one of the black vinyl bags. He moved hurriedly, continuing without pause even as he gagged on the almost visible stench that hung in the air. An aid worker, standing amidst a group of corpses perhaps fifty feet away, called out in muffled English through his respirator: ‘You! What are you doing?’ The bag protruded here and there with hastily packed knees and elbows, and Mubarak gave up trying to zip it as the worker and two others approached. Instead he dragged the body to the back of the truck and heaved it inside, then climbed into the driver’s seat and jammed the accelerator even before he’d closed his door.
The aid workers ran to stop us, but a cloud of yellow dust kicked up by the wheels enveloped them, and they disappeared from sight as we sped away. Mubarak kept the accelerator to the floor until the camp had melted into the horizon behind us. Then, suddenly, he stopped the truck, got out, and went around to the back again.
I knew what he meant to do.
‘This may not be a good idea,’ I told him, but already he had the tailgate down and was pulling a jackknife from the breast pocket of his khaki vest.
‘Shut up,’ he said. He raised his eyes to mine; gone, suddenly, was the benevolence he had shown us, replaced by something base and sinister, something frightening even to my predator’s heart. ‘If you lied to me . . . ’
The Creator’s hand, pale palm up, hung from the opening of the bag, and Mubarak seized it by the thumb and cut a bloodless chunk of flesh away with the knife. He hesitated, pausing just before the meat touched his lips. I saw that his fingers were trembling. Then he bit down hard, as if eating something that might bite back. Eyes closed, he chewed quickly and had to throw his head back to swallow.
When he opened his eyes again he gazed about like someone emerging into light, expectant and wondering, but he soon realized that nothing had changed in either him or the way he perceived his surroundings. Disappointment crossed his face, then anger. He slammed the tailgate shut and climbed back into the driver’s seat.
‘You made a cannibal of me, for nothing,’ he said.
‘Professor,’ I said, ‘we told you that the change took time.’ I considered pointing out that I had advised against his eating the Creator, but thought better of it.
In any event, he had stopped listening. He turned the truck around and headed north again, making an off-road detour around the refugee camp. We drove in silence until night fell, when Mubarak pulled off, reclined the seat, and fell asleep with his arms folded across his chest.
Q?
Quite simply, in the morning he was changed, just as we had been. Mubarak didn’t speak of it – not one word – but it was obvious. Whatever he gained (and this I never determined, as our time together was drawing to a close and I would not see him alive again), he seemed mostly to be hobbled by the transformation in strange and inexplicable ways. For one thing, he had difficulty driving: grinding gears, pressing the gas when brakes were indicated and vice versa, and failing to notice turns in the road. More than once he got stuck on the soft shoulder and had to use a hand winch to free the truck. When he spoke, which was not often, he peppered his sentences with words that did not belong and which he did not seem to notice coming out of his mouth. For example, at one point he said, ‘I must call Ibrahim and make plans pedagogical to move the body to London.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Professor, are you alright?’
‘Shut up. I wasn’t talking to you. I’m just thinking thimbleful out loud.’
And so on. Needless to say, it was an odd and somewhat frightening ride back to Khartoum, because not only was Mubarak acting strangely, but it was becoming clear that though we’d trusted him, allowed ourselves to be locked up in steel cages, he had no intention of helping us join human society.
Q?
He did nothing to us, strictly speaking. When we arrived in Khartoum he simply put me in the spare room with the others. The next day he left for London, taking the Creator’s body with him and leaving us behind, still in the cages. The others had had no food or water for six days. Their ribs showed through their fur and the skin of their noses was dried and cracked. They pressed into the corners of the cages, trying vainly to distance themselves from their own feces.
Q?
I can only assume he meant for us to die there in his apartment. At the time it saddened me to reach this conclusion. This is, again, one of the great moral chasms between your kind and mine. Among dogs, one does not use affection to deceive, as Mubarak did. It simply doesn’t happen. So when I realized he’d departed without giving a thought to us, I was confused. I wondered what we had done wrong; surely the blame rested with us, somehow. Even now, though I’m much wiser, it still hurts to think that he left us there to starve.
Q?
We grieved, for everything we’d lost and were about to lose. For dogs, to grieve means to howl, and so we did, through that first night and into the next day. The others’ voices weakened, then dropped out of the chorus altogether, and soon I was alone, crying out against the walls of that room, throwing myself headlong into the bars of the cage until my snout was bloodied, feeling my insides shrivel and fail.
Q?
What happened to Mubarak is well documented; you probably know as much as I do. In London he met with Ibrahim Hussein Al-Jamil, a friend and colleague who lectured at King’s College. Together they oversaw the autopsy and study of the Creator’s corpse, which revealed, among other things, a massless composition that defied long-held principles of physics. A select group of scientists descended on London, all of whom agreed, on reaching the inevitable conclusion, that it must be kept from the public. Mubarak, being more interested in recognition and personal gain than in the preservation of human society, did not honor this agreement.
Q?
By all accounts, his bizarre behavior resembled the symptoms of certain neurological disorders – tics and spasms, bouts of catatonia, babbling – except that the progression of these symptoms was far too dramatic. He danced spasmodic jigs in lunch-hour traffic and once spent an entire day on the Piccadilly Line of the London underground, ropes of drool hanging from his lips, traveling the loop around Heathrow over and over until early in the morning, when the operator had him removed by police. Shortly after urinating on Ed Bradley during an interview for 60 Minutes, Mubarak went missing, and a few days later his body was fished from a gate on the Thames Barrier, east of the city.
Q?
It’s true that accident or suicide is the widely held view.
Q?
I am aware of the actual circumstances of his death, but I’ll decline to divulge them, except to say that Ed Bradley had nothing to do with it.
Q?
By now I was near death myself. The others had been gone for a week when Mubarak’s housekeeper, a girl named Lily Gabriel Holland, eased open the door to the spare room and peered in, her eyes wide and white against the ashy black of her face. Seeing us, she pushed the door open wide and entered the room, tall and bold, a Christian girl cursing her Muslim employer in his own home.
Q?
Initially she thought we were all dead. Tears spilled onto her cheeks, but her voice was strong and steady. ‘What has that bastard done?’ she said, moving slowly from cage to cage.
I was too weak to rise. ‘Help me,’ I said.
Lily grasped the bars of my cage and shook them in her sturdy hands. ‘You’re alive,’ she said.
‘I’m alive,’ I said. ‘Barely.’
‘How are you speaking to me?’
‘Your God is dead,’ I told her.
‘Yes,’ she said. She gave the cage another shake, and examined the padlock on the door. ‘There are rumors circulating in Mandela, though the government has tried to keep it quiet. People are more frightened of no-God than of the soldiers. So they are talking. They say Mubarak has something to do with this.’
‘I can explain,’ I said. ‘But for now . . . ’
‘Yes, no, of course!’ she said, rising quickly to her feet. ‘I’ll find something to open this cage.’ She left the room, returning a moment later with a glass of water, which she spilled carefully on the floor of the cage, near enough to my head that I could lap at it without having to move. She left again and returned after some time with a hammer and pry-bar. She wedged the sharp end of the bar against the latch, raised the hammer high above her head, and snapped the lock with one powerful stroke.
Q?
Lily was thin but very strong, and she gathered me in her arms and carried my wasted body through the streets, several miles to the slum of Mandela, where she shared a room with her father in a long, dormitory-type building made of donkey manure, coconut timber, and sand.
Q?
Like Lily, her father was kind, helping to care for me, fetching water from the neighborhood well and grinding pigeon hearts into a paste I could digest. But unlike her, he was feeble, with spindly shriveled arms and a weakness for homemade liquor distilled from dates. Where his left eye should have been was a narrow, puckered hole, bisected by a scar that ran from the middle of his forehead down to the jaw.
Q?
When I’d recovered my strength, I confirmed for them the reports they’d been hearing: the Creator was dead, and the first tremors of this revelation were being felt around the world. I told them, too, how I’d unwittingly eaten part of the Creator and been transformed.
‘Then you are Him,’ Lily’s father said.
‘What?’ Lily said. ‘No, Papa.’
‘Isn’t it clear?’ her father said. ‘He ate God’s body. Here he sits, a dog who talks like a person. He tells us things of a world we’ve never heard of. America! What does anyone here know of America, except its name? Yet he knows. He knows everything.’
‘I’m not your God,’ I said.
‘He’s not God, Papa,’ Lily told him.
‘I know what I know,’ her father said, drinking from a jar of date liquor.
Q?
Lily guarded me closely, even from her father. Tension was gathering in the slum. People disappeared almost daily, taken by soldiers to Omdurman prison for blasphemy and incitement. Army trucks ground slowly over dirt streets, broadcasting orders for residents to attend churches and mosques on the appointed days of worship. Lily found this bitterly humorous.
‘They must be desperate,’ she said. ‘Before, they bulldozed our churches and built apartment complexes on the rubble. Now they want us to show up every Sunday, without fail.’
One night I pretended to sleep while Lily and her father argued about me.
‘He could help people,’ her father said.
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Lily said. ‘If the government found out about him. And they would.’
‘He could give people hope. My friends, they want to know the future will be better.’
‘And what if it won’t be, Papa?’ Lily asked pointedly.
‘Other things,’ he said, sidestepping her question. ‘What has happened to their families, for instance. Years of wondering, of suffering, could come to an end.’
‘Ah,’ Lily said, ‘now the truth comes out. We’re not talking about your friends, are we Papa? We’re talking about you. What you want to know.’
‘Yes! Of course! And I hope you would be interested to know what became of your mother and sisters, too.’
‘I already do, Papa. They’re dead.’
After a few seconds of silence, he responded. ‘You think you know so much,’ he said, but his voice was quiet now, almost a whisper.
Q?
Lily was right; her mother and two older sisters were dead, killed by the goat farmer they’d been sold to after being kidnapped by the Janjaweed fifteen years earlier. But when her father came to me one afternoon while Lily was out bartering for wheat flour and lentils, I didn’t have the heart to tell him their fate. He’d been kind to me, and I wanted to return that kindness.
Q?
I said they’d escaped the farmer and were living together in Darfur, near Nyala. I told him they were hoping still, after all the years, that he and Lily would return to them.
Now, in retrospect, I think of this as the moment when I truly joined the human pack.
Q?
Lily was angry, with her father for asking, and with me for giving an answer. She asked if it was true, if her mother and sisters were still alive. Not knowing what else to do, I told her that it was.
She cried all that night, while her father swore off date liquor and went about Mandela relating my story and making plans to bring in people from the neighborhood to commune with me.
Q?
The next morning people began to arrive, bearing clothing, jewelry, sandalwood, crumpled wads of dinars, baskets of food. Lily’s father collected the offerings and led people in one by one. Most, especially the women, immediately fell to their knees before me; others were more skeptical, and did not genuflect until they heard my voice in their heads. Some were Christian, some were Muslim. They wanted to learn about the future, and the past. They asked after fathers who had disappeared, grandmothers long since dead, sons who had turned to thievery. When the honest answer was bad, which was most of the time, I lied to them. I told them that their dead fathers would return, that their grandmothers were happy in an afterlife I knew did not exist, that their psychotic sons would someday repay their love tenfold. I pretended to heal children who had only weeks to live, and called down great fortunes on the poorest of the poor. Every person I saw departed happy, their faces streaked with tears of shock and gratitude. Some even searched their pockets for anything else they could offer me, scattering coins and bits of lint on the dirt floor. By the time night fell, a growing crowd had clogged the street outside the room, and Lily’s father told them to go home and return in the morning.
Q?
That night he cooked a feast of sorghum, corn, and lamb chops. Lily refused to eat; she sat silently on her cot, staring through the room’s one window at the people still waiting in the street, their hopeful faces lit by flickering kerosene flames. After dinner her father counted up the offerings, and though his hands trembled for want of a drink, he smiled and waved the money in the air.
‘Soon we’ll have enough to travel to Nyala,’ he said to Lily. But she gave no sign that she heard him.
Q?
She watched in silence as word spread and people came to Mandela from as far away as Uganda and the Congo. They brought fear, despair, and money, and left that room relieved of all three. Many of these pilgrims brought their families and erected makeshift shelters. In two weeks the population of Mandela swelled by thirty thousand. At night they lit fires and sang songs of praise, united in their new devotion.
Q?
It did bother me, taking their meager belongings in exchange for lies, however well-intentioned those lies were. What bothered me more was Lily’s disapproving stare. But I craved inclusion so desperately, and now I had it, or at least I thought I did. It didn’t occur to me then that being an object of worship is possibly the greatest exclusion of all.
Q?
It ended as Lily had predicted – the government learned that people were making pilgrimages to Mandela, worshipping a dog as if he were God, and they sent troops in. Rain fell hard the night they stormed the slum, beating a violent rhythm on tin roofs, and while the people around me assumed the distant rumblings were thunder, I knew better.
‘They’re coming, Lily,’ I said. ‘Men in half-tracks, with rifles. They’re coming for me.’
‘The people will fight them,’ she said. ‘They’ll fight and die for you.’ It sounded like an accusation.
‘I don’t understand this,’ I said.
‘You need to go,’ she said. ‘But before you do, I want to ask. Why did you lie to me about my mother and sisters?’
I didn’t respond.
‘Why?’ she said again.
And for the first time in weeks, I spoke the truth. ‘I don’t know,’ I told her.
Q?
Lily lifted me through the window, and I fled. I ran south through endless crowds of worshippers surging in the other direction, toward the fighting. In the darkness not one person noticed me, and I ran until the desert swallowed me again. I didn’t stop until the sand became dry beneath my paws, until I had outrun the rains.
Q?
Hundreds of people died that night, Lily among them. She was the only one among that crowd who fought for the right reasons. She stood tall in the rain and threw rocks and used her strong hands to wrest a rifle from a soldier’s grasp, and before she turned the rifle on him she told him her mother’s name, and made sure he heard it clearly.
Q?
Her father was taken prisoner and died a few months later at Omdurman, poisoned by a bad batch of cell-brewed liquor.
Q?
How do I feel about it? Let me answer you this way: I’ve never returned to Khartoum, or any other place where people gather. I live as a normal dog, though hunting by myself is difficult and I’m often lonely. I haven’t spoken to a person since that night, until now. That’s how I feel about it.

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Ronald F. Currie, Jr. has published stories in Glimmer Train, The Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, The Sun, The Southeast Review, and Night Train.