In the study across the hallway from the bedroom, my compact cellular phone was recharging. I unplugged it and clipped it to my belt, at my hip.
Orson was not in the study.
Earlier, Sasha had stopped by the house to feed him. Maybe she had taken him with her when she’d gone. If Orson had been as somber as he’d been when I’d left for the hospital — and especially if he had settled into an even blacker mood — Sasha might not have been able to leave the poor beast here alone, because as much compassion as blood flows through her veins.
Even if Orson had gone with Sasha, who had transferred the 9-millimeter Glock from my father’s room to my bed? Not Sasha. She wouldn’t have known the gun existed, and she wouldn’t have prowled through my dad’s belongings.
The desk phone was connected to an answering machine. Next to the blinking message light, the counter window showed two calls.
According to the machine’s automatic time-and-date voice, the first call had come in only half an hour ago. It lasted nearly two minutes, although the caller spoke not a word.
Initially, he drew slow deep breaths and let them out almost as slowly, as though he possessed the magical power to inhale the myriad scents of my rooms even across a telephone line, and thereby discover if I was home or out. After a while, he began to hum as though he had forgotten that he was being recorded and was merely humming to himself in the manner of a daydreamer lost in thought, humming a tune that seemed to be improvised, with no coherent melody, spiraling and low, eerie and repetitive, like the song a madman might hear when he believes that angels of destruction, in choirs, are singing to him.
I was sure he was a stranger. I believed that I would have been able to recognize the voice of a friend even from nothing more than the humming. I was also sure that he had not reached a wrong number; somehow he was involved with the events following my father’s death.
By the time the first caller disconnected, I discovered that I had tightened my hands into fists. I was holding useless air in my lungs. I exhaled a hot dry gust, inhaled a cool sweet draft, but could not yet unclench my hands.
The second call, which had come in only minutes before I had returned home, was from Angela Ferryman, the nurse who had been at my father’s bedside. She didn’t identify herself, but I recognized her thin yet musical voice: Through her message, it quickened like an increasingly restless bird hopping from picket point to picket point along a fence.
“Chris, I’d like to talk to you.
I put a new message tape on the machine. I hid the original cassette under the crumpled sheets of writing paper at the bottom of the wastebasket beside my desk.
These two brief tape recordings wouldn’t convince a cop or a judge of anything. Nevertheless, they were the only scraps of evidence I possessed to indicate that something extraordinary was happening to me — something even more extraordinary than my birth into this tiny sunless caste. More extraordinary than surviving twenty-eight years unscathed by xeroderma pigmentosum.
I had been home less than ten minutes. Nevertheless, I was lingering too long.
As I searched for Orson, I more than half expected to hear a door being forced or glass breaking on the lower floor and then footsteps on the stairs. The house remained quiet, but this was a tremulous silence like the surface tension on a pond.
The dog wasn’t moping in Dad’s bedroom or bathroom. Not in the walk-in closet, either.
Second by second, I grew more worried about the mutt. Whoever had put the 9-millimeter Glock pistol on my bed might also have taken or harmed Orson.
In my room again, I located a spare pair of sunglasses in a bureau drawer. They were in a soft case with a Velcro seal, and I clipped the case in my shirt pocket.
I glanced at my wristwatch, on which the time was displayed by light-emitting diodes.
Quickly, I returned the invoice and the police questionnaire to the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop. Whether it was more evidence or merely trash, I hid it between the mattress and box springs of my bed.
The date of purchase seemed significant. Suddenly
I kept the pistol. Maybe this was a setup, just like in the movies, but I felt safer with a weapon. I wished that I knew how to use it.
The pockets of my leather jacket were deep enough to conceal the gun. It hung in the right pocket not like a weight of dead steel but like a thing alive, like a torpid but not entirely dormant snake. When I moved, it seemed to writhe slowly: fat and sluggish, an oozing tangle of thick coils.
As I was about to go downstairs to search for Orson, I recalled a July night when I had watched him from my bedroom window as he sat in the backyard, his head tilted to lift his snout to the breeze, transfixed by something in the heavens, deep in one of his most puzzling moods. He had not been howling, and in any event the summer sky had been moonless; the sound he made was neither a whine nor a whimper but a mewling of singular and disturbing character.
Now I raised the blind at that same window and saw him in the yard below. He was busily digging a black hole in the moon-silvered lawn. This was peculiar, because he was a well-behaved dog and never a digger.
As I looked on, Orson abandoned the patch of earth at which he had been furiously clawing, moved a few feet to the right, and began to dig a new hole. A quality of frenzy marked his behavior.
“What’s happened, boy?” I wondered, and in the yard below, the dog dug, dug, dug.
On my way downstairs, with the Glock coiling heavily in my jacket pocket, I remembered that July night when I had gone into the backyard to sit beside the mewling dog….
His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.
He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell, the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.
When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away, only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me intensely. In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me — holding my gaze as only he among all dogs is able to hold it — and looking at the sky, now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed despair.
When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine despair, that their emotional lives are as simple as their intellectual lives. When I insisted on my interpretation, Bobby had said, “Listen, Snow, if you’re going to keep coming here to bore my ass off with this New Age crap, why don’t you just buy a shotgun and blow my brains out? That would be more merciful than the excruciatingly slow death you’re dealing out now, bludgeoning me with your tedious little stories and your moronic philosophies. There are limits to human endurance, Saint Francis — even to mine.”
I know what I know, however, and I know Orson hated me that July night, hated me and loved me. And I know that something in the sky tormented him and filled him with despair: the stars, the blackness, or perhaps something he imagined.
Can dogs imagine? Why not?
I know they dream. I’ve watched them sleep, seen their legs kick as they chase dream rabbits, heard them
