Kirsten Bakis

The photo showed a dog, standing on its hind legs, being helped from the door of a helicopter by a serious-looking man in a down vest. The dog seemed to stand about the same height as the man, and looked like a Malamute. The strange thing about it, besides its larger-than-average size, was the fact that it was wearing a dark-colored jacket which looked like part of an old-fashioned military uniform, and a pair of spectacles, and that it appeared to have hands instead of front paws. In one of those gloved hands it held a cane, which was pointed at an awkward angle, probably because of the way the man was holding on to that foreleg just above the elbow. The other hand gripped the side of the helicopter doorway. The expression on the animal’s face was one of terror. Its lips were slightly parted, its ears were pointing straight backward, and its eyes were wide.

At the end of the parade, on a stage under the Washington Square Arch, Klaue Lutz (the Malamute whose blue-eyed, bespectacled face is familiar to anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the past year) announced that the dogs plan to construct a building on the Lower East Side—not just any building, but a huge, white, turreted castle, which is to be a “gift from the monster dogs to the people of New York.” It will be patterned after the famous Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, which is also the model for the Disneyland castle. But the dogs’ version, Lutz said, will be much better, a replica of the original that will take up an entire city block.

During my lifetime, when puppies were born they were taken to the operating theater at once, and then many times subsequently at decreasing intervals until they reached maturity. In general it seemed that brain surgery was performed only immediately after birth, though a few dogs I knew were experimented upon afterward; but usually the later operations involved only replacing our prosthetic hands with larger, more intricate ones suited to our greater size and abilities as we grew. In any case, we were never given any information about what was done to us in the great laboratory.