On ANIMAL SHELTER

February 10th
On ANIMAL SHELTER
Memoirs – Part VII
Upon arrival in New York Penelope got a job with the F.B.I. and I looked up one of my old communist associates, B.F. Ingleman, who was now the CEO of a very large sugar company. While Penelope, on her first day as the F.B.I.’s receptionist, shredded and burned all the F.B.I.’s documents relating to me and my murder and arson charges, and we had had our faces changed in Denver to disguise ourselves, I still didn’t feel completely secure. I asked Mr. Ingleman to give me a job in the sugar factory, which I complemented by volunteering at the local animal shelter. At the factory I met one of the children I had befriended in the sewers below Washington, Stella Cruise-Cruz, who had run away from home at the age of sixteen. One of her eyes was twice as large as the other, as a result of the battle under the World War II Monument.
At the animal shelter I was surprised to meet Jorge Sanchez, the artist who had created the giant lizard’s foot in Central Park. He was creating a new art project by painting all the former pets in the animal shelter the same colour: a slate grey.
A wise man (who I assume lived in New York) once said “Everyone ends up in New York.” If these first two encounters with characters from my past hadn’t convinced me, the next dozen or so would. Many of them I had presumed dead: Wally, the Lambs’ hyperintelligent dog, had escaped the Lambs’ basement and travelled to New York, only to find himself in Jorge Sanchez’s animal shelter and painted grey. Gwendolyn, my love from my teenage years, was a co-worker of Penelope’s at the F.B.I., and they immediately became rivals. Gwendolyn didn’t know Penelope and I were common-law married, but her personality was naturally antipathetic to my lady love. The foreman at the sugar factory was none other than the man I had though died in the avalanche in the Rockies, who had offered to adopt me and whose house I had burnt down. The Mayor of New York was John Mortimer, writer of Rumpole of the Bailey and presumed dead. He was living under the alias of Willowcrisp O’Hara. Our next-door neighbour in our brownstone house was none other than the former Dean of the Constabulary University in Salem Oregon, who, unbeknownst to me, had only accepted my application because he had planned to murder me and eat me upon my arrival.
With all these former friends and enemies revealing themselves in different aspects of my life, it was only a matter of time before things came to a head. Seven weeks after we had been re-introduced to New York society, Gwendolyn, the former object of my teenage affections in Louisiana, who had meanwhile become a powerful witch, attempted to poison Penelope in her morning coffee at work. Penelope detected the poison and realized something was up. She immediately called my former secretary, Thea, who used her psychic powers to see that the old man from the mountains and Wally the dog were travelling to my house, where I was sleeping. They were disguised as motorcycle enthusiasts and accompanied by an army of middle-class dads who felt ripped of from buying “Bayou Treats” from me at the State Fair when I was young. They weren’t that angry themselves, but felt they had to prove something to their wives, who didn’t respect them. The former Dean of Constabulary University let them into the tunnel that led from his house to mine. Immediately Penelope phoned Stella Cruz-Cruise, and Stella lit a beacon above the sugar factory, calling all the former Spider Children from around the globe to assemble for war. Meanwhile, Jorge Sanchez got his army of grey-painted former pets to hunt and kill all the snakes that had been trained by the one-eyed Bolivian whom I had thrown from the top of the Metropolitan Opera house so many years ago.
Because Wally and the old man and their retinue were delayed by a series of traps I had lain in the tunnel to prevent this very occurance, the spider children were able to arrive in time and stop them. Penelope arrived home from the F.B.I. just in time to fight Gwendolyn to the death in our living room, where she had teleported. Soon, Willowcrisp O’Hara, the mayor of New York, arrived on the scene, just in time to stop Isabelle Devereaux, who had been my old boss at Salisbury-Wigginton, and coincidentally had run against me for mayor of Washington under the name Teapot Faraday. I didn’t even know she disliked me, but she wanted to kill me. The battle continued in this way, in a series of lethal duels, to an incomprehensible level of complexity.
When I woke up from my mid-day nap that day, I walked down to my living room to find the corpses of all of my most dread enemies, and several of my friends. There was much weeping, and conflicting stories, and it was impossible to sort out who had been trying to kill me and who had been defending me, mostly because so many whom I thought were my friends were my enemies, and vice-versa. It’s one of those moments where you feel the need to sit down and take stock of your life, and so I did, composing my memoirs, which you are holding in your hands. I am pleased to say that Penelope and I are still together, and, due to an 11th-hour conversion on his part, we have adopted Wally the dog. We have renamed him Benedict Arnold, for obvious reasons.