I sat at the top of the park’s hill, throwing the ball anew every time Clint Dempsey returned. The park spread out in front of me, lush and green. A paramedic lay in the grass, napping while his partner wandered around, listening to headphones. A couple held hands and meandered downhill. Four young men—flannel-shirted, beanies pulled down over their ears, fingers black from a day’s work on the row crops east and south of town—gathered around a park bench, a joint passing between them. Ancient flat gravestones caught the occasional flash of the waning sunlight. These gravestones had long been abandoned by loved ones, the graveyard too spooky to build on but too beautiful to leave alone. Hence, this park. On the horizon, the sun scraped the ridgeline of islands on the horizon, leaving the Pacific aglow in orange.
A beer would taste good right now. Clint Dempsey brought me the ball. I threw it. He darted off. A woman jogged by on the sidewalk below me. The #6 city bus shuddered to a stop in front of the park. The farm workers crushed their joint and hurried over, bus passes visible before the doors were open.
I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to look. Eric was back. He had a plastic bag from the nearby convenience store. “What’s the law on drinking beer in this park?”
“I guess that depends on who’s drinking it and how much they’re drinking.”
“You and me.” Eric pulled a large bottle of brown ale out of his bag and handed it to me. He stripped the plastic bag off a second, identical bottle. “And one apiece.”
I dug my key ring out of my pocket. I’d kept a bottle opener on the key ring from the days when drinking used to be a bit of a hobby. The bottle opener still came in handy occasionally. I opened my bottle and traded with Eric. He handed me the unopened bottle and I solved that problem. “I guess it’s all right,” I said.
Clint Dempsey came back and I threw the ball again.
“Tell me about metaphysics,” I said.
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s up with the camera you installed in my apartment?”
“Didn’t Dr. Bishop tell you?”
“She gave me a form to sign. I didn’t read it, though.”
“But you signed it?”
“Yep,” I said. “I didn’t care what the form said. I just wanted the dog.” Which was half the truth. I still wasn’t fully ready to face the other half. Just as I hadn’t been able to bring myself to drive to Fresno for Nietzsche’s last day, I couldn’t bring myself to read the form Dr. Bishop had given me. That little something in my psyche prevented it. For the third time, I acted counter to my typical self. The third presence of that little voice in my psyche left me a little worried.
“He’s a good dog,” Eric said.
I watched Clint Dempsey leap over the napping paramedic and snatch the ball on a short hop. “That he is.”
Eric lifted his baseball cap, scratched his gray-blond hair, and replaced the cap. He sipped his brown ale. He dug his work boots into the park grass. He did not say anything more about the camera. Clint Dempsey came back. I threw the ball again.
“Southpaw?” Eric asked.
“I don’t know what kind of dog he is,” I said. “Mostly mutt, I think, but it looks like you can see a bit of hound in his face. Those droopy eyes, you know.”
“Not the dog. You.” Eric mimed a throw with his left arm.
“Yep. I’m left-handed.”
A moment of silence passed. In honor of what, I don’t know. The earth kept spinning to fill the space between the sun and me. I asked Eric again, “What’s up with the camera?”
“I’m not good at explaining it.”
“Do your best. No judgment here.”
Eric fiddled with the bill of his ball cap. “Dr. Bishop is doing an experiment about the way we talk to one another without talking. Nonverbal communication.”
“Okay.”
“Like, do we talk to our dogs?”
“We give them commands. I know that’s verbal but I don’t think they speak the language.”
Eric smiled. “But beyond that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure our body language says a lot.”
Eric shook his head. “Dr. Bishop is looking for something less direct. She’s trying to figure out if we talk to them in another realm of communication. Like, do they know when we’re coming home? Can they somehow sense this?”
“How could they?” I asked.
Eric paused and took a sip of beer. Clint Dempsey returned with the ball. I tossed it down the hill. He took off in hot pursuit.
I asked, “So what’s this other realm of communication? Telepathy?”
Eric winced. “Not telepathy. Dr. Bishop hates that word.”
I smiled. “Okay.” A little, embarrassed laugh slipped out. “So she’s not testing to see if we’re all sending telepathic messages to animals like we’re Aquaman. But she is seeing if there is some sort of non-verbal, non-physical communication that we have with our pets.”
“Something like that.”
It all seemed silly to me. I didn’t want to say so to Eric. Something in Eric’s wince signaled that he was somehow invested in this research. I backed off a little. “So you set up the camera to click on at a certain time, right before I’m supposed to come home, and film to see whether the dog reacts?”
“Exactly.”
“But wouldn’t there be obvious problems? Like, how do you know that the dog isn’t reacting to the sound of the camera turning on?”
“That’s what the packing foam is all about. To muffle the sound.”
“Dogs hear pretty well.”
“There is an element of classical conditioning,” Eric said. “To get around that, Dr. Bishop has me set the time to click on a few hours before you typically get home. Mostly we want to see if the dogs react.”
Clint Dempsey reacted. He dropped the tennis ball between Eric’s legs. Eric tossed the ball downhill. Clint Dempsey pursued.
I took this little break to come to a quick conclusion. I analyzed the comfort with which he used the term “classical conditioning.” I chewed on his use of the second person plural pronoun. We. As in “we want to see.” Not that Dr. Bishop wanted to see. Eric wanted to see, too. He must’ve had some kind of stake in this research. So I tested him. “Does this have anything do with the collective unconscious?”
“Yep. That’s exactly it,” Eric said. The orange light of the sunset settled into the crevices on his face. He stared off toward the Pacific. He didn’t say more. It seemed like he’d given me my first
