I don’t remember seeing a single child the three years I lived there. The sock was lime green with a picture of a horse face over the toe; if you put your hand inside, the horse’s face bloomed into three dimensions and stared at you under droopy lashes. Another time, nearer the end of my stay, the sudden smell of lilacs hit me as I walked through the door, again with no apparent source.
Some days, the dog appeared to be sitting up, alert; other days the dog’s head hung low; still other days the dog seemed to be sleeping, its head resting on its small paws.
One day the dog appeared with only one ear. I didn’t notice the missing ear immediately—it was only when I looked up a third time, during the middle of a long and arduous thought, that I saw the one ear clearly sticking up and the other ear gone. The next day half of its tail was missing, leaving a fluffy stump. The next day it seemed to be missing a paw.
That night, in my bed, I began to imagine the dog outside my apartment, roaming the streets and scavenging, sleeping in doorways or maybe in alleys. I lay awake worrying about the dog, but of course there was nothing I could do, and I knew the dog wasn’t real, and that there were real dogs out there getting hurt and I should worry about them. Nonetheless, I worried about my shadow dog.
I woke in the morning late, took a shower, and read another book. At one o’clock I sat at my table and tried to write, but I couldn’t concentrate. I began instead to think about the dog. I had read an article about dogfighting in the City, about gambling rings and people who stole dogs off the street and out of cars to use for these fights. I imagined a basement with concrete floors and oil stains and a walled arena surrounded with chairs, the men in T-shirts smoking and drinking whiskey. And I imagined my little shadow dog in a cage in the corner, sitting quietly, shaking.
That’s where I had to stop; it was too sad.
I had imagined the dog in the worst situation, but I could just as easily have imagined it roaming through the park, sniffing eucalyptus leaves, sleeping under the trees and stars.
At three o’clock, the dog appeared with one ear, half a fluffy tail, all four paws intact, and a shorter snout. But it looked content, its head tilted slightly to one side. I was happy to see it. I said hello, and then I went back to work. Now the apartment was brighter; there was a glow in my small room as there always was when the dog appeared. Every time I looked up the little dog was there, in its own way steadfast. Just as the air began to thicken and prepare for dusk, the dog vanished, and I wondered what shape it would be in the next day, what it would be missing, or if it would appear at all.
What kind of suffering are we off to? What kind of joy?
Every few months, when I lived in the apartment over the alley, I called my mother. Always on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, more often in the summer and on warmer days, when I was home from grocery shopping or had finished cleaning my two rooms. We talked about the weather where I lived and the weather where she lived, though the weather where I lived was often the same, sunny or foggy, or sunny post-fog, or sunny with wind. The weather where she lived was more dramatic so we talked about it a lot. Storms with lightning and thunder, sheets of snow, icy rains, winds that blew things down, like an apple tree in the backyard and a piece of gutter from the roof.
Once, when I called, she was soaking a frostbitten finger in tepid water. Another time she was out of breath from ripping up basement carpet that had molded due to humidity.
After the weather, we would talk about the people in the town, or the people living outside of town whom we both knew. Sometimes she told me sad stories about people I did not remember or perhaps had never met. I liked the sound of her voice, and I liked hearing the details of other people’s lives, people wounded in hunting accidents or run over by farm machinery or their children run over or somehow damaged by farm machinery.
The stories were often harsh. But my mother told them gently. She always said, at the end, “Isn’t that sad?” And she asked me to pray for so-and-so, and I said I would, even though I knew I wouldn’t because I didn’t know how. Sometimes I would stand in my living room and shut my eyes and say in my mind, I wish you all the best, or, I wish you a good day. If I was passing a church in the City, I would step inside and light a candle, or I would see a candle while seated at a table in a restaurant, and I would suddenly remember a story my mother had told me.
I was confused about what to ask for. Happiness seemed too large, given that they had lost limbs or children, or their children had lost limbs, or they had cancer. Once, in a church, I kneeled in front of a statue of some saint or other, the one with the little dog, and I folded my hands and said a Hail Mary.
About my life, in my little apartment in the City, I said very little. “How is your thesis going?” she asked several times. It was going well, I told her, it was always going well, and sometimes this was true, and sometimes it was almost true. More often it was not true.
One day, toward the end of my stay in the building, when the thesis was almost finished and had indeed gone well, though I didn’t know that yet, I called her early on a Monday morning. Her voice sounded different, fainter, and further away. She sounded puzzled.
“Is this you?” she asked several times.
“Yes, of course it’s me,” I said.
“Are you OK?” she asked several times. “It’s Monday morning, you have to go to work.”
She was right about that.
I told her I was not OK, but then, at the sound of her breathing, I took it back and said I was kidding, I was just a little tired.
Her voice remained faint and far away. There was the sound of her house barring the wind and the sound of my two rooms cloistered in fog. And then, the beginning of an even longer silence.
I kept a gun in the bottom drawer of my dresser. The black metal barrel like a dog’s snout. The chamber—which did move and could hold bullets—was empty. If Michelle had been alive, she would never have let me keep it. But, if she had been alive, this story never would have happened.
I found the gun while digging up a plant behind the rhododendron grove in the park. I wanted to bring the plant—the one that bloomed purple flowers she had liked—into my apartment for company. The park was so big, and so many plants flourished there, including many of these unofficial plants, that I didn’t think it would miss the one. I had brought a plastic bag with paper towels soaked in water tucked inside. I had excavated the roots and was ready to put them into the bag when the black metal of the gun glimmered up at me. Without really thinking about what I was doing, and even though I knew I should report the gun to the police, I plucked it out of the ground, unplugged the dirt from its barrel, wiped off the metal with my watchman’s cap, and slipped it into my jacket pocket.
Home in my studio apartment above the alley, I laid the gun on a towel on my small writing table. The plant fit nicely into a clay pot I had found in the alley some time earlier. I put the plant on the table next to the gun.
That night I went to the movies. In the movie I saw, Gregory so desperately loves Clara he can see no other way to be with her but to shoot her husband; the dead man’s blood trickles out from his chest onto the kitchen floor like a red string. They will never be happy, I thought. Yet, in the next scene,
