children’s book.
When he emerges from the restroom you’ve been guarding his food for a couple of minutes, as you rise he showers you with gratitude and the mingled fumes of malt liquor and tooth decay.
“God bless you, God bless you,” he says, overdoing it, you’re embarrassed, and when you leave him you return to the place where he found you, to finish your time with the puppies, who once again compete for your affections. Seems like everybody’s glad to see you today.
You tap on the glass and it stirs their blood, with furiously wagging tails they swat each other’s faces, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and you know if the world works the way it’s supposed to, these are just the ones who should inherit it.
*
It always comes back to canids for you, nothing else on earth as untarnished as the societies of dogs and dingoes, jackals and hyenas, coyotes and the progenitors of them all, the wolves, the beautiful wolves, with their tender and baleful eyes, said by an old Indian legend to have been the only human attribute to take when the gods tried to turn the animals into men. But human beings can only wish that their rites of dominance and submission were as pure.
You’ve always been entrenched on the canine side of that wide and irreconcilable schism between cat people and dog people, where each camp recognizes the inferiority of the other but only the dog people are right. Cat people laugh, haughty, say that they prefer felines because of their independence, their autonomy and self-reliance; say that dog people crave brainless obedience. But the true dog people know just how far self-reliance goes when trying to escape a pack on the hunt; know that what cat people are really identifying with is sleepy-eyed lazy indolence. Most cats, if they could, would be on welfare.
Since childhood you’ve preferred the company of canines, you sense a kinship that transcends species and they know it too, will defer to your mastery to a degree approaching the telepathic. Your impulses become theirs, their instincts inform your own, when you were a boy the area dogs would gather around you, nuzzling with their long toothy muzzles. You could strip down and roll with them, with young and old, they would accept you into their society of scents and sensibility as if recognizing some better part of you, beneath your hairless skin and flat face, you, the strangely-furred pug who walks on two legs. Cats aren’t the only ones who bring blood offerings, so you pretended you had some use for dead squirrels, for broken-necked tabbies, and no, you never once actually thought you were a dog, no matter what anyone said, and ever since then you’ve understood that the human animal is primarily characterized by arrogant stupidity and soft throats, a combination that constantly courts extinction.
Just as they see into you, so too do you see into them, they are Nietzsche’s abyss with the reciprocal gaze, or maybe the abyss is you. Show you a worthy dog and you’ll see past the millennia of taming, see past civilization’s dulling to the sharp primal edges beneath, the wolf behind those eyes. Except for poodles, pampered and self- loathing inside, and dachshunds, which are less dogs and more sorrel-haired rats.
The rest, it’s why they like you so, you know their ancestral secret and respect it, it’s almost the second Thursday of the month, and already you’re cocking an expectant ear toward the sky, listening for the howl that will split the city, then the world.
*
So enlivened are you by the day’s gift of the panhandler that you decide not to return to work. Instead you walk, not wanting to miss anything now that your senses are primed, you can track down further opportunities for trickery like any efficient hunter, blending into the landscape. You wear lots of gray and black because you live around lots of concrete and asphalt.
Work, too, is camouflage, was camouflage long before you even realized it, after awakening to your deepest nature. You log manifests and dispatch messengers, you help the city stay in touch with itself, for whatever that’s worth, old people do the same when senility takes hold and all anyone ever wishes is that they’d just shut up. If you really wanted to be happy you’d work in a pet store somewhere, but you tried that once already, and were fired when they caught you trying to smuggle all the dogs to freedom, even if they misunderstood everything, suspected you of planning to sell the stock to experimental medical laboratories, although they couldn’t figure out why you’d left the dachshunds behind.
After an hour of feeling the city’s shifting crust beneath your boots you take respite in a neighborhood bar, you’ve never seen or been seen here before, it’s beneath your usual dignity but happy hour begins early and seems to draw a clientele that needs it more than most. Paradoxically, all of them ignore each other.
You’re minding your own business when she comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You’ve had the darkened booth to yourself for less than the duration of your first drink, or the cigarette that she lit around the time she watched you sit down.
“I don’t mean to interrupt or anything, if you’ve got your heart set on sitting here alone, but if you wish you weren’t, I, I know how you feel, you don’t have to anymore, then neither would I, I mean it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”
A refill. She’ll want a refill, it’s as good as predestined.
“We don’t have to talk or anything, not if you don’t want to, it’s just that drinks taste better when you’re with someone.”
She talks with her hands held rigidly before her, a conscious effort to keep them from trembling, and doing a better job with her hands than she’s managing with her voice.
“Would you mind not smoking, that’s all I ask,” you tell her. “I have a very sensitive nose.”
Her nervous hand dives toward the ashtray, she grinds out the butt, not a problem for her, then she’s fanning the wisps away and lands in the booth, across the table, she and her purse and her glass with its lonely, rattling ice cubes.
“My name’s Merilee,” she says.
You nod. “As in, ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream’?”
She looks at you blankly, how could you be making such a mistake? “No, no, it’s spelled—” She catches herself. “Oh, you’re joking, I get it.” She slaps her forehead, lets it slide halfway down her arm, embarrassed.
You buy her another drink to go with your second, making an educated guess that she’s had a two-drink head start on you. When you catch sight of the booth in the mirror behind the bar you scan the reflection for the way you look together, the story it tells.
Two years ago you might’ve belonged together, but no longer, she left you and now she wants to come back, she’s had a rougher time of it than she thought, it shows in the puffiness along her jowls and under her eyes, while you have prospered, triumphed over the pain, and while you feel pity for her you’re not the same person she left, so how could you take her back?
Briefly you wonder who he was, if you’ve envisioned what has been, or what is still to come.
“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I, you don’t have to go anywhere right away?” she asks.
