‘Pretty much. And in this particular case, he had cast his lot with biking off. So what if? What would happen? What he decided to do was keep pedaling, zooming blocks and blocks beyond his neighborhood, miles, with the greyhound chasing the whole way. He tells me that the fantasy became explicitly surreal and dreamlike, at this point. In no time at all he had biked outside of city limits altogether. He entered some deserted Hitchcockian countryside, pedaling down a narrow dirt road in the middle of vast cornfields, all while the indefatigable greyhound—which he still couldn’t see but could hear the horrible huffing of—heaved its body behind him. And here a terrible realization struck MacDougall, he tells me. For at last he understood: the greyhound was never going to give up the chase. It had been bred to keep up the chase. Any other dog, any other breed, and he might have been fine. But all MacDougall had accomplished by mounting the bike was transforming himself into a racetrack rabbit, a robotic bait zooming away on a tantalizing circuit, which the greyhound was happy to chase for dozens and dozens of miles, at top speed, if it had to. Because this and nothing else was what it—the dog, down to its very DNA—had been bred for centuries if not millennia to do. MacDougall says that the logic of his dread was vertiginous. The fantasy was infinite now, he realized: it never could reach a conclusion. He would be stuck in his own head, being chased by the greyhound, forever. For the harder that he pedaled, the more determined the greyhound would be to catch him; and the more determined the greyhound was to catch him, the harder he would have to pedal. His terror of the dog spurred him to flee, which spurred the dog, which spurred his terror, ad infinitum, until MacDougall became mired in this morbid Möbius strip almost, self-perpetuating and impossible to stop. Even as his fear of being fed on fed into his flight, his flight was feeding into the dog’s desire to feed on him, which fed right back into his fear, creating this like literal feedback loop of—’

‘All right all right I get it.’

‘He says that in the fantasy he kept biking farther and farther through the Hitchcockian cornfields until finally the fantasy selfaborted. When his mind couldn’t compute the feedback loop, he suddenly snapped his eyes open: the street was empty. In real life, the guy and his greyhound were long gone. But MacDougall’s heart was pounding and his palms were slicked with sweat, and he had to stand there another ten minutes before he’d calmed down. That was when he realized that fleeing the dilemma would always be worse than facing the dilemma.’

‘The dilemma?’

‘Okay, recall the thought experiment from earlier. The old lady in the white tennis outfit and sun visor with the golden retriever. The retriever is still sprinting toward him and MacDougall’s still standing there standing his ground, because he knows—from his unspeakable experience with the greyhound—never to try running in the fantasy. So the dog is about to attack MacDougall while its owner watches, and the dilemma is that he has two options. One, he can spare the dog. Instead of killing this woman’s pet before her very eyes, he can be manly and self-sacrificing: just shield himself as best he can and bravely let the retriever have at him until the woman calls it off. Figures the worst-case scenario is a bite wound or two. Maybe the woman doesn’t call it off, and MacDougall has to wait for some bystander on the street to intervene.’