Chapter XXVIII: The Strange and Unfortunate History of P. Lootoh C. Razy, the Rat, and the Burden Carried by Goopheek (Part 4)

It is a curious thing about problems. They rarely announce themselves as such when they first arrive. The great disasters of history seldom enter through the front gates carrying banners proclaiming their intentions. They do not introduce themselves at public gatherings. They do not politely request an appointment with the appropriate authorities before explaining that they intend to alter the course of civilization for generations to come.

No.

More often they arrive quietly sitting unnoticed beneath a pastry cart as they wander into a kingdom with dirty paws, and an appetite for unattended food. They appear as small inconveniences that everyone has already learned to tolerate all because the world possesses an unfortunate habit of disguising its most important events as ordinary ones. These dissmeyizens of Dissmey had long believed that history was something that happened elsewhere, usually involving kings, wars, inventions, and occasionally a particularly impressive speech delivered by someone standing upon a raised platform while wearing clothing considerably more expensive than the clothing of those listening. They rarely considered that history might begin with a dog sleeping beneath a flower merchant's table, and not because the people of Dissmey lacked imagination. Quite the opposite. They possessed far too much imagina…

What they struggled to imagine was that the small arrangements of everyday life might possess any importance whatsoever. A baker leaving scraps near the back door. A widow expecting a certain visitor each morning. A child kneeling beside a cart to encourage a creature that could not possibly understand encouragement. Such things appeared too ordinary to matter and yet ordinary things, when repeated often enough, possess a strange ability to become permanent.

Mi-Ki understood this better than most as this was both his greatest strength and, as future historians would eventually argue, the beginning of his greatest mistake, because  Mi-Ki had spent his entire life observing arrangements.

Where others saw a merchant selling bread over their linen cloths upon their wood stained tables, he saw a relationship between supply, demand, reputation, habit, and expectation. Where others saw a festival, he saw thousands of small agreements occurring without anyone having formally agreed to anything. Where others saw a crowd of citizens enjoying an afternoon together, Mi-Ki saw invisible threads connecting one person to another. He had always been fascinated by those threads. The things nobody wrote down. The rules nobody voted upon. The customs nobody remembered creating.

The silent agreements that shaped lives more effectively than any law ever could. This talent had made him wealthy. It had made him respected. It had made him, according to many citizens of Dissmey, one of the most perceptive creatures to ever walk beneath the kingdom's painted skies.

Unfortunately, perception possesses one dangerous limitation. A person can become very good at seeing patterns while slowly forgetting that patterns are not always problems waiting to be solved, but rather they are simply the shape of things. 

Mi-Ki did not understand this yet.He only understood that he had discovered something, and discoveries, especially among ambitious creatures, have a tendency to demand attention.

The first sign that something had changed was not noticed by the citizens of Dissmey.

This was hardly surprising.

It's inhabitants rarely took notice of the importance of even the subtle changes occurring within the things they have become accustomed to. A road does not announce when it has become the road everyone uses nor a building does not request a ceremony when it becomes the place where everyone expects to meet. Even old friendships often transform quietly, with neither participant able to identify the precise moment when a stranger became familiar and familiarity became something closer to obligation. A sad fate for a dog who can't look up.

Mi-Ki's new habit entered Dissmey in much the same manner. He would ask himself, "oho. How long had P. Lootoh been sleeping behind the bakery?"

He would ask other questions  from his curiosity such as, Who had first begun leaving food near the marketplace? Was Mrs. Bumble still angry about the rose garden, or had anger itself eventually become part of their arrangement?

Such answers were received rarely precise. This was not because the people of Dissmey lacked information. In fact, they possessed an extraordinary amount of it. The difficulty was that information throughout Dissmey had never traveled alone. It traveled accompanied by interpretation, exaggeration, memory, and occasionally a small amount of personal resentment that had somehow survived several decades without finding a suitable place to retire.

A baker did not merely explain that P. Lootoh occasionally received scraps. He explained that the dog had been receiving scraps since before his youngest son was born, though his youngest son was now old enough to operate the bakery himself.

A merchant did not merely explain that P. Lootoh wandered through the marketplace. He explained that the creature had once stolen an entire basket of pastries, though after further questioning it, became unclear whether the basket had contained pastries, vegetables, or a collection of items the merchant had simply decided deserved to be remembered as pastries because the story improved considerably in that form.

This was the nature of history throughout Dissmey. Facts rarely disappeared but merely became surrounded by distractions.

Mi-Ki found this fascinating. Most people became frustrated when answers became complicated. They desired clear beginnings and endings. They wished to know who had started something, who was responsible, and who ought to be thanked or blamed.

Mi-Ki had always been more interested in the middle. The middle was where things became interesting. The beginning was often forgotten. The ending was often rewritten. But the middle, the slow accumulation of small decisions, made by ordinary creatures who never imagined anyone would care, was where civilizations truly revealed themselves. And P. Lootoh had a very large middle.

By the end of the second week, Mi-Ki had learned more about the mutt than anyone had ever bothered to record. Not because he had discovered anything extraordinary about P. Lootoh himself. The dog remained exactly as he had always been. He slept and wandered about and sometimes bathed in the canal with it was dry to the bone, happily rubbing his back on the dead bodies of yesterday's unfortunate accident before the authorities discovered it and quickly moved on to tell the crowd there was nothing to see, but thanked P. lootoh with a biscuit for the discovery. He ate things that probably belonged to someone else and offered companionship without understanding that companionship was what he was offering. No, the remarkable discovery was not the creature, but everyone else.

The kingdom had spent years discussing what P. Lootoh lacked. Yet almost nobody had considered what the kingdom itself had gained. That question remained unanswered for the moment.

And Mi-Ki being Mi-Ki, had never been particularly good at leaving unanswered questions alone.

The first thing Mi-Ki discovered was that asking questions throughout Dissmey was considerably easier than receiving answers. This was not because the citizens lacked opinions. Quite the opposite. The people of Dissmey possessed opinions in quantities that would have impressed even the most ambitious philosopher, and unlike philosophers, they were generally willing to provide them without requiring payment, recognition, or even the slightest evidence that anyone had requested them.

The difficulty was that every answer arrived carrying several additional passengers. A simple question such as, "Who began feeding P. Lootoh?" appeared harmless enough. One might expect a name. Perhaps a date. Maybe even a small story concerning a hungry dog and a kindhearted citizen. Instead, one received an entire history.

The baker claimed it had been the old butcher, though he admitted he only knew this because his father had told him so, and his father had been a man who once insisted, for nearly ten years, that a particular goose possessed the ability to recognize dishonesty. The butcher's family, when questioned, claimed the baker was mistaken and that the first person to feed P. Lootoh had actually been a widow who lived near the marketplace, though nobody could remember whether she was the current widow or the widow who had lived there before her.

This distinction became surprisingly important because the people of Dissmey had a habit of referring to every elderly woman near the marketplace as "the widow," regardless of whether the woman in question had ever been married, widowed, or even particularly interested in the title. Titles, after all, were among the kingdom's favorite inventions. They allowed people to organize one another without the inconvenience of actually knowing one another.

Mi-Ki found this fascinating. Not the confusion itself. Confusion was common throughout Dissmey. A person could become lost while walking to a location they had visited every day for twenty years, if enough neighbors offered conflicting directions along the way. The remarkable thing was how comfortable everyone had become with the confusion. Nobody seemed bothered by the fact that nobody could agree how P. Lootoh had become part of their lives. They simply accepted that he had. This was perhaps the strangest answer of all.

The citizens of Dissmey could spend entire evenings debating matters that had no practical consequence whatsoever. They argued over whether the Great Bell of Fellowship represented unity, tradition, or merely an unfortunate architectural decision made by a previous generation with too much enthusiasm and not enough supervision. They could spend weeks discussing whether a particular festival needed a new name while completely ignoring the fact that nobody remembered the original purpose of the festival in the first place. Yet when it came to P. Lootoh, there existed a rare moment of agreement.

He was simply there. The baker knew it.The flower merchant knew it.The children knew it. Even the merchants who spent their mornings explaining in great detail why P. Lootoh was a terrible inconvenience somehow knew it most of all. This was because complaints throughout Dissmey rarely meant what outsiders assumed they meant.

A complaint was not always a request for change. Sometimes a complaint was merely a tradition performed aloud. The baker complained about P. Lootoh because the baker had always complained about P. Lootoh. To stop complaining would have created an uncomfortable silence, and uncomfortable silences were among the few things in Dissmey that nobody had developed a proper method for managing. So he complained. And then he fed him. The merchant complained, and then he allowed the dog to sleep near his stall. Mrs. Bumble complained about the rose garden and then, every spring, she quietly planted a few extra flowers because she knew perfectly well that P. Lootoh C. Razy would eventually destroy some of them.

The kingdom had developed a remarkable talent for creating arrangements nobody would admit to creating. Mi-Ki had seen similar things before. A business that continued because nobody wanted to be the first person to admit it was outdated. A tradition that continued because nobody wished to be remembered as the person who ended it. A rule that remained long after everyone agreed it, made little sense because removing it would require someone to explain why it existed in the first place. Dissmey was filled with such things. 

But P. Lootoh was different. The dog had no intention of becoming anything and that was what made him so unusual.

Most institutions throughout history at least possessed the ambition to become institutions. They announced themselves. They created symbols. They found important people willing to explain their importance. P. Lootoh had done none of these things. He had merely wandered around being hungry. And somehow an entire kingdom had done the rest.

Mi-Ki found himself increasingly curious about the matter, though he was careful not to mention this curiosity publicly. Curiosity was generally respected throughout Dissmey when it involved discovering something interesting about someone else. When curiosity involved questioning something everyone had already accepted, however, it became considerably more suspicious. The people of Dissmey did not dislike questions. They disliked questions that arrived too late. 

A question asked before something became tradition was called intelligence. A question asked after something became tradition was called unnecessary trouble.

Mi-Ki, unfortunately, had always possessed poor timing when it came to unnecessary trouble, and P. Lootoh, the happy mutt sleeping beneath bakery steps and appearing wherever food happened to exist, had become the most interesting unnecessary trouble he had encountered in years.

To be continued in part 5 of ?