~VIII~

I kept meaning to call Jack and tell him about the dog, but I never quite got around to it. I was pretty much over being angry with him and was, in fact, a little embarrassed about how I’d behaved. I always did seem to overreact when I thought someone was trying to manipulate me, or finesse me into doing something—a holdover, I suppose, from my younger days when the worst thing you could do was cooperate with authority. Well, Jack Shepherd didn’t have any authority over me—I knew that, of course—and it really wasn’t his fault that I had gotten involved with Ravenette and the Blue Awareness. It was my own. Jack had encouraged me to see her, but I’d made the decision to do that all by myself. I was the one who had allowed myself to delve into things I knew nothing about: lost ideas, old mysteries, strange dreams. No one had forced me to do that. At some point, I was going to have to call Jack and apologize for placing the blame on him for everything that had happened. After all, he had even given me the documents I needed for the attorney, and I hadn’t exactly been Miss Lovely during that conversation, either.

These were my thoughts on my way home from work a few days after my visit to the cemetery. I was feeling a little lighter, a little less mired in my own craziness. I seemed to have let some of my darker thoughts depart from me along with the thin brown dog who had walked away. I was looking forward to getting home, plopping myself on the couch and watching a movie or maybe a late-night reality show. I was in the mood for a program about supermodel talent wars or something else on that sort of high intellectual plane.

But that was not to be. When I walked up the stairs of my building and got to my landing, I was shocked to see that my door was open. It was just slightly ajar, but even that was frightening because I never left the apartment without locking up. As I pushed the door open, my hand was trembling. Badly.

Inside, the scene that confronted me looked as unreal as a movie set. The apartment was in shambles. Everything I owned seemed to have been strewn around. Closets and drawers were open and their contents dumped on the floor; even the cabinets in my seldom-used kitchen had been raided and the few pots and pans I owned had been swept from the shelves. It was a scary scene—very scary, and maybe that was the real intent of the invasion because it was quickly apparent that nothing seemed to have actually been taken; even my laptop and television, the only objects that might have had some street value, were still here. I continued to think that nothing had actually been stolen until I walked into the bedroom and saw that my father’s valise, which had been in the closet, was now sitting open on my bed. The old family photo albums it held along with some personal mementos, like my sixth grade autograph book and a stuffed cat with glass eyes that my mother had given me, were still inside. But the Wheatstone Bridge—the erstwhile Blue Box—was gone. As soon as I saw that the valise had been searched, I knew it would be. The only surprise was that the searchers hadn’t left some sort of calling card behind: another smear of blue paint, maybe, or a blue handprint on the wall.

I pulled out my cell phone and, without thinking, dialed Jack’s number. I got a recording at the main number of the studio but the day I’d visited him he’d given me his personal cell phone number in case I got lost, so I hung up and dialed again. I got voice mail on his cell, too, but I left a message—and once I clicked off the line again, I couldn’t even remember what I’d said. I just remained standing in the middle of the room for a while, feeling like I needed to work at focusing my eyes in some way—make them see better—as if that would help to make the situation real, because it didn’t seem like it was. The mess around me, the violation of my privacy, seemed bizarre, impossible. And yet it had happened. I found myself running to the door to lock it, as if that could keep me safe, but it was already clear the lock could do no such thing. And it wouldn’t turn, anyway; it hadn’t just been picked—it had been broken.

I was trying to shove my couch up against the door when my phone rang. It was Jack, calling back. I quickly told him what happened, including the backstory about the letter from the Blue Awareness attorneys and the blue paint splashed across Victor Haberman’s storefront office. I think I was beginning to babble about the cemetery and the dog, when Jack finally cut me off.

“Laurie,” he said. “Calm down, calm down. First of all, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I mean, they were gone when I got home.”

“You didn’t know that,” Jack said. “You shouldn’t have walked into the apartment alone.”

“I didn’t think . . . I wasn’t thinking.”

“Well, thank God they were gone. Have you called the police?”

“No. Should I?”

“Of course you should. You’ve been robbed.”

“They’ll never believe what happened. Who did this.”

“It’s New York,” Jack said. “They’ve heard crazier stories.” Behind him, I heard some kind of New Age music playing that I recognized as the intro to his show when it returned after a break for the news. “I’ve got to go back on the air,” he said. “But I’m coming over there as soon as the show’s over. And call a locksmith,” he said just before he hung up.

I did both. I called the police and then went online to find a locksmith with a twenty-four-hour emergency service. They all arrived about the same time—three young men with wary faces: two in blue uniforms, and one in jeans and a leather jacket over a tee shirt decorated with grinning skulls.

While the grinning skulls replaced my lock with a more secure deadbolt, the two policemen listened to my story—the same one I’d told Jack, only I went back even farther to include my telephone call to the radio show and all that had followed. As Jack had said, they’d probably heard even stranger stories, or else were just very well trained not to react to anything they were told with even the slightest sign of surprise, because neither of them even raised an eyebrow when I told them that the Blue Awareness had to be responsible for the break-in. Then, in the middle of trying to explain just what, exactly, had been stolen, since neither of the policemen had ever heard of a Blue Box, let alone a Wheatstone Bridge, I happened to glance over at a shelf in my living room that I hadn’t looked at before and saw a big, empty space between two piles of books.

“My radio,” I said. “They took my radio, too.”

That really shook me. As upset as I was about the loss of the device I still thought of as a kind of electrical toy, the theft of the radio was even worse because it represented a much more direct and visceral connection to my childhood. I remembered how many times I had listened to it with Avi, how many times it had burped out strange, tinny beeps and hisses that were the voices of satellites—to me, the voices of the stars. And maybe it was because the image of the thin brown dog in the cemetery was still so much with me that I suddenly thought of another dog—Zvezdochka—orbiting Earth in her space capsule so many years ago. It was the telemetry signal of Sputnik 10, the satellite with the dog aboard, that Avi and I had been listening to on the fire escape of the Sunlite Apartments on the night that presented me with the radioman. The loss of the radio made me feel as if little Zvezdochka had just spun off into the cold wilderness of infinity, never to come back. That’s not what happened, I told myself. Stop it, stop it, stop it. You’re making it worse.

So I forced myself to focus on my voice, on what it was saying to the young policemen with blank, carefully composed faces. I told them about the radio—that it was actually more like a ham receiver built from Haverkit parts. Then I had to explain what a Haverkit was, since it was something they had never heard of.

Finally, everyone left. I put the new key to my new lock on my key ring and then started to clean up my apartment. Nothing was broken—the intruders had been oddly careful about that—but it seemed like every single thing in the place had been taken from its rightful place and tossed somewhere else. Maybe I didn’t own a lot, but the disarray still looked monumental to me. I picked a random corner of the living room to start with and mechanically began to put things away.

I was so deep in some automatic pilot state that when the buzzer near my door went off, announcing that there was someone downstairs, I almost jumped out of my skin. I went to the intercom and asked who it was, expecting anything from alien invaders to more policemen, but it was Jack. I had completely forgotten that he had told me he was coming over when he finished his show.

I buzzed him in. Realizing that I had completely lost track of time, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was three A.M.—Jack’s program actually had another hour to go. He must have put on a tape for the last segment and rushed all the way from Brooklyn to my end of Queens.

I let him into the apartment and he took a quick look around. “Jesus,” he said. “They really ransacked the place.”

“I’ve been trying to straighten up,” I replied. “But I don’t think I’ve made much progress. I keep finding myself wandering around holding things I thought I’d put away.”

“Yeah, well. This is a pretty shocking thing to come home to,” Jack said. “It’s going to take awhile.”

Awhile for what? Until I felt less like I was going off the rails? Because that was how I felt right now. Really, really shaky.

“They took the radio,” I heard myself say to Jack.

“What radio?” he asked.

I realized that I had never told him I had Avi’s Haverkit receiver. “My uncle’s,” I said. “The Haverkit receiver he always used.”

“The one from the night on the fire escape? You still have that?”

I nodded. “I did. But I’ll probably never get it back.”

“No,” Jack agreed sympathetically. “The cops will send someone to the Blue Awareness headquarters in Manhattan but they won’t get anywhere. No one ever does, with them.”

“Monsters,” I said, feeling a surge of deep rage.

“They can be,” Jack replied. “But at least they’re gone for tonight and I doubt they’ll be back.” He looked around the room then and noticed that my couch was still near the door. “I see you were setting up the barricades,” he said. “How about if I stay here tonight? Would that make you feel better?”

It made me feel a little ashamed, actually—I was not used to needing anybody’s help to get through even the worst situations. But since he had offered, I realized that yes, it would help a lot if there was someone else in the apartment overnight besides me. It would be daylight in just a few hours but still . . . I didn’t think I was quite ready to tackle the monsters by myself if they came back, even though Jack was right—it was unlikely.

We pushed the couch back where it belonged. I gave Jack some sheets to cover it, and a blanket. Then he took off his shoes, stretched himself out and said good night. I think he was asleep in a few minutes. I lay down in my bedroom and didn’t expect to be able to sleep at all, but I did. Not restfully, though; for the rest of the night, I was fighting blue meanies in my dreams or running away from faceless robbers without finding anyplace to hide.

I finally got up around nine. In the living room, I saw Jack stirring as well. I made coffee and toast while Jack got up and washed.

As we ate breakfast, he said, “Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

“You’re supposed to do whatever will help you let go of this.”

“That’s the problem; I don’t know what that is. Half of me wants to call the lock guy back, tell him to put half a dozen bars on the door and just sit in here and hide, but the other half wants to go punch somebody in the nose.”

“Like who?” Jack asked.

“I could start with Ravenette. It’s about time someone gave her a black eye.”

“Should I apologize about all that again?” Jack asked. “I still feel responsible.”

“It’s my fault as much as yours. I didn’t have to tell her about the Blue Box. It’s just that she seemed so . . . arrogant. I hate people like that.”

That made Jack laugh. “I bet there are a few other categories you could add to that list.”

“Yeah, probably,” I agreed. “I’m not exactly a big fan of people. Most people, anyway.”

“We seem to be getting along,” Jack pointed out.

“Well, now we are,” I agreed.

We lingered over our coffee for a while. An hour later, as Jack was finally getting ready to leave, my doorbell chimed.

I froze. My mind ran a warp-speed checklist of who could possibly be ringing my doorbell without having to be buzzed in downstairs, and I came up with exactly nobody. Jack glanced over at me and seeing what I suppose was a look of abject fear on my face, went into the kitchen, picked up an old iron frying pan—probably the only potential weapon he could find—and went to the door.

He peered through the peephole and then turned back to me with a perplexed look on his face. “It’s a woman in some kind of head scarf,” he told me. “She’s holding a baby. And there’s a man in a suit.”

“Sassouma,” I said, with relief. “It’s my neighbor.”

I didn’t know who the man was, but I told Jack to let them in. Sassouma smiled at me but then settled herself and the baby on my couch. Whatever the purpose of this visit, it was apparently going to be explained to me by the stranger who was with her—who had brought with him yet another unexpected guest, a small, thin dog the color of dust.

For a moment, I thought the dog was Sassouma’s, but then I realized that it was a little larger than the animal I sometimes saw with her children. And this one also had another feature that differentiated it from hers: it had an odd, almost wedge-shaped head. When it looked up at me, which it did immediately upon entering the apartment, it regarded me with dark, glittery eyes. And, it occurred to me, that much like the dog I had encountered in the cemetery—the elusive Buddy—it seemed to be sizing me up.

I finally turned my attention away from the dog, and took a good look at the tall, dark-skinned man of indeterminate age who accompanied my neighbor. There seemed to be quite a contrast between the image he presented, which was all business—the suit, the serious demeanor that almost seemed to precede him into my living room—and the fact that he was holding the leash of a peculiar-looking dog.

Everybody said hello, and the man introduced himself as Dr. Carpenter. I got the feeling that he was not in a good humor. Well, that wasn’t my problem; I had enough things to deal with already.

I asked Dr. Carpenter to sit down, which he did, stiffly, on a kitchen chair that had somehow wandered into the living room during what I was now thinking of as the ransacking of my apartment. Jack and I sat down, too, as did the dog. Sooner or later, someone was going to have to start talking about something, and it was going to have to be Dr. Carpenter, since apparently he and Sassouma had some sort of errand they had come to carry out.

Finally, Dr. Carpenter cleared his throat and began an explanation. “Sassouma asked me to come here,” he said. “You know her English isn’t all that good, so she would like me to speak for her.”

Admittedly, my neighbor and I had only interacted on a sporadic basis—and that was generally when I was doing some small thing to help her out, like lending her the space heater—but when we did, we seemed to be able to communicate well enough. So, I was surprised that she felt she needed some sort of middleman to help her say whatever it was she needed to convey to me. “Is there something wrong?” I asked, since the first thing that came to mind was that somehow the goons who had broken into my place had caused some trouble for her, as well. But that turned out not to be the case.

“Sassouma heard people in your apartment last night when she knew you were at work,” Dr. Carpenter said. “She guessed that they were thieves but she was afraid to call the police. She believes that you will understand why.”

I did understand, and I said so. Dealing with the police for any reason was about the last thing she and her family needed, since their immigration status was likely not something they wanted to draw attention to. I certainly didn’t blame Sassouma for that and would have been horrified if anything had happened to anyone in her family because of me. That wasn’t because I was any kind of sweetheart—I surely wasn’t—but because my old hippie self still suspected that karma might yet turn out to be an operating principle on this particular plane of existence and I wouldn’t want anything like people being deported to be on my particular Akashic record.

So I tried to smile at Sassouma, though I still felt a little too shell-shocked to be completely genuine about it. Turning back to Dr. Carpenter, I said, “The burglars left more of a mess than anything else. They didn’t even really take very much. Just some old electronics,” I added, thinking I was being generous in downplaying the real effect that the break-in had had on me. Besides, there was no reason to explain what the electronics were; the story was too involved and wouldn’t have meant much of anything to my visitors.

“Well, Sassouma feels very guilty. We are both Dogon people,” said Dr. Carpenter. “For us, caring for one’s neighbors is very important.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dogon? I don’t know what that means.”

Surprisingly, it was Jack, not Dr. Carpenter, who answered me. “They’re from Mali,” he said. Jack was suddenly sitting forward in his chair, looking very interested, though I didn’t find his information very helpful.

Dr. Carpenter, however, nodded in agreement. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “But to clarify, I’ve been in this country for many years. I took my degree at Columbia University,” he said. “And now I teach there. French literature.” He seemed to relax a little now that he had established his credentials with us, as if we might have thought something less of him were he not a university professor. I stifled my instinct to explain that he was talking to a bartender and a guy who interviewed people on the radio about how they’ve seen signs of the end times in the grill marks on a cheese-melt sandwich. He probably had us both outclassed by a mile.

Now that he had more properly introduced himself, Dr. Carpenter also revealed his relationship to my neighbor. “Sassouma’s husband is my cousin,” he said. “As the eldest in the family, I am, to some degree, responsible for them.”

I thought that his qualifier—“to some degree”—further helped to explain why he seemed unhappy to be here. He was carrying out some kind of familial duty that he would have preferred not to be required of him.

“In any event,” Dr. Carpenter continued, “Sassouma has asked me to perform a task for her, which is why I am here. This dog,” he said. “As my cousin’s wife has requested, I have brought it for you.”

Up to now, the dog had been so quiet and the conversation so odd that I had pretty much forgotten about the animal. But the moment Dr. Carpenter mentioned him, the dog, which had been lying flat on the floor—as flat as the floorboards, I thought—sprang to attention. And again, looked straight at me.

Now I understood what this visit was about, or at least I thought I did. Because she felt bad about not calling the police last night, Sassouma was trying to make it up to me by getting me a watchdog. Not that this dog seemed particularly suited to that job. He certainly seemed alert enough, but otherwise, he hardly seemed like a substantial presence.

“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” I said, “but I don’t think I really should have a dog.”

At last, Sassouma spoke. “But this is your dog,” she said. “Yours,” she repeated, gently but firmly.

“I’m out so much,” I told her. “At work. He’d be alone most of the time.”

“He will wait,” she said. “He is a Dogon dog.”

Everyone—Jack included—now fixed their eyes on me as if something very significant had just been said, something grave and serious that I should have understood. But I didn’t. True, the dog did seem like a somewhat strange creature with its wedge-shaped head and its way of looking at me as if we’d met before, but otherwise, I couldn’t see anything special about it. So it was a Dogon dog. So what?

Perhaps Dr. Carpenter knew what I was thinking because he said, “We have very few of them here. And Dogon dogs don’t take to everyone. This one, however, seems to be willing to live with you.”

Really? I found myself wondering. Had they asked him? Because it almost sounded like just that kind of conversation had somehow taken place.

Dr. Carpenter handed me the leash, which at first I managed to avoid taking from him. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said. “I mean . . .”

I was about to give all sorts of reasons why I didn’t want the dog but Jack suddenly interrupted me with a discreet elbow in my rib. “Laurie,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Take the dog. Say thank you and just take it.”

There was something in his tone that made me pay attention. He wasn’t making a suggestion, he was issuing some kind of urgent directive. “Okay,” I said, speaking to Jack but really addressing everyone. I took the dog’s leash and he came to sit beside me. He tilted his wedge-shaped head to look up at me once more and then stretched himself out on the floor again. In my mind, I now decided that there was another difference between him and Sassouma’s dust-colored dog: this one was somewhat darker. He was really the color of a shadow.

“Thank you,” I said, and then asked, “What is his name?”

“His name is yours to decide,” Dr. Carpenter replied.

Well, he wasn’t a puppy, so surely somebody had called him by some name previous to his sudden appearance in my life. But if so, apparently from this moment on, that name was erased and I was supposed to come up with something with some resonance for me—and, I assumed, for the dog.

A list of dog’s names went through my mind: Pepper, Petey, Benjy, Bullet—I was relying heavily on old TV shows and movies. But none of them seemed to suit this particular dog.

“I’m going to have to think about it,” I said. A look of concern passed across Dr. Carpenter’s face, so I added a qualifier. “I’ll come up with a name today.”

That seemed to be a satisfactory, if temporary, resolution to the matter. “Very well then,” Dr. Carpenter said. He rose from his chair as did Sassouma, still holding her baby, who had slept through the entire visit. “The dog will alert you to any further dangers,” Dr. Carpenter added. “And he will be loyal to you.”

“Thank you again,” I said to Dr. Carpenter. “And thank you, Sassouma.”

She beamed at me as she followed her cousin-in-law out the door. As soon as they were gone, I locked the new deadbolt, which slid into place with a comfortingly heavy click. Dog or no dog, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Still, I couldn’t help but turn my attention to the dog, who remained stretched out on the floor. Jack, I saw, was looking at him, too.

“I feel like I’ve just been inducted into the Knights of the Round Table or something like that,” I said. “He will be loyal to me? I mean, I would hope so, but he’s just a dog.”

“Not exactly,” said Jack. He bent down to pet the dog, who barely reacted to him. “I’ve never seen one of these before,” he said to me.

“One of what?”

“A Dogon dog.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Why did you look so freaky when you heard that?”

“You really don’t know who the Dogon are, do you?” Jack said.

“Never heard of them.”

“Well, like I told you, they’re from Mali. That’s in West Africa.” Seeming to address the dog directly, he said, “I wonder if that’s where you were born.”

But the dog, right now, was paying no attention to either one of us. He closed his eyes and appeared to drift off to sleep. Jack though, became pretty animated as he launched into an explanation about Dogon lore, which seemed to be something else he had picked up from a guest on his show who had written a book about Dogon culture.

He told me that the core belief of the Dogon was that somewhere back in the dim mists of time, alien beings had come to Earth and had stayed for a brief while in some kind of encampment near where the ancestors of the Dogon people lived. The visitors told the Dogon that they came from a universe that they described as being next to ours. Apparently, they were able to cross back and forth between the two using an entry point—a kind of bridge in space—near the star Sirius.

“That’s it?” I said. I wasn’t impressed. I had watched enough late night cable TV to have seen a dozen programs—more—about the beliefs of various tribes and indigenous people all over the world. Lots of them had interesting ideas about dream worlds and alien visitors and spirits who lived in the sky.

“No, that’s not it,” Jack said, sounding annoyed. “If you’ll just let me finish . . .”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me a story.”

He frowned at me, but proceeded to explain that even before the aliens arrived, the Dogon had been interested in the stars and other objects—comets, meteors, the starry white river of the Milky Way—that they saw in the heavens every night, and had compiled rudimentary star charts for themselves. Perhaps because they took note of this interest, the alien visitors revealed a secret about the night sky that the Dogon didn’t know: the great, bright star Sirius has a companion star, a white dwarf that is tiny but immensely dense. The white dwarf and the great star are so closely aligned in space that their mutual gravitational pull causes them to be constantly exchanging gases with each other. The Dogon were frightened by their visitors, who they described as being aloof and rather unpleasant, so they were surprised that these strange beings had bothered to share any kind of special knowledge with them. The Dogon decided to mark the occasion by giving the secret star a name that had meaning to them. They called it Digitaria, after a tiny seed indigenous to their territory. Over time, they seem to have incorporated its story of faithful companionship into many of the ceremonies marking important milestones in Dogon culture such as births, marriages and deaths. What is perhaps most controversial about this tale, Jack said, is that Digitaria is invisible to the naked eye. It can’t be seen without a telescope—in fact, no one else knew about it until an astronomer using a telescope discovered the white dwarf in 1862. And no photograph had been taken of this star, which is now officially known as Sirius B, until 1970. Though current-day astronomers scoff at the idea that the Dogon knew about Sirius B—Digitaria—generations before they did, the fact remains that the Dogon people have hand-drawn star charts dating back hundreds of years that show it positioned near its larger companion. And their “Digitaria” ceremonies also go back many centuries.

As I listened to all this, I was able to fit a little piece of my own into the story. I had spent too many nights waiting at bus stops, watching the progress of the seasons mapped out in the slow movement of the constellations across the great, dark grid of the sky, not to have been curious enough to look up their names. And because of that, I knew what other name Sirius went by. Orion, the hunter, with the Three Sisters stars in his belt, was accompanied all night by two star-marked hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. Canis Major—the Great Dog—contains Sirius, which is also called the Dog Star.

Then I said the words aloud. “Sirius is the Dog Star.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Now you’re getting it. But there’s more. The Dogon say that when the visitors came from the universe they described as next to ours, the one with an entry point near Sirius, they brought dogs with them. Or anyway, some kind of companion being that seemed like a dog. When they left, they took all these—well, for the sake of argument, let’s call them animals—with them, except for one, which had become attached to a Dogon boy. The boy wouldn’t part with his pet and the animal wouldn’t leave the boy, so it was allowed to stay. The dogs that the Dogon have now are supposedly descended from that animal and the camp dogs that lived with the Dogon people, but they aren’t like any other dogs in one other respect: they have very few offspring. A Dogon dog may only have one or two offspring in its entire lifetime. So they’re relatively rare. And the Dogon never give them away to anyone. I didn’t even know there were any in the United States.”

We both now looked over at the flat little dog lying at my feet. He seemed suddenly to be aware that he was the object of our conversation because he opened his eyes and rose to his feet. He stretched and then jumped up to sit beside me on the couch. He looked at me, blinked, and leaned against my side. With the weight of him against me, I was surprised by how substantial he seemed to be; he looked like he was made of thin sticks and that odd wedge-shaped head, but he didn’t feel that way. He felt heavy, and he felt strong.

I put my arm around him and he leaned even harder. “Hello, Digitaria,” I said.

Jack laughed. “That’s a good name,” he said. “Your secret companion.”

“Not so secret,” I said. “But very quiet, don’t you think? He’s barely made a sound since he’s been here.”

“More thoughtful than vocal,” Jack said. “A good quality in people—and in a dog.”

“I guess I’d better go out and get him some food,” I said. “Want to come?”

“No, I’d better get back to Brooklyn,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of material to go over for the show tonight.”

I asked how he was going to get home and he told me that he’d driven here last night—which explained how he’d gotten to my place so quickly—and had parked his car a few blocks away. As he was getting his things together and putting on his coat, he paused to give me an appraising look. Then he said, “You seem a lot better than when I got here last night.”

“I do feel better,” I said, agreeing that my mood seemed to be settling. The sense of craziness I had been feeling since I’d walked into my ransacked apartment last night was definitely dissipating. I still had a lot of putting-things-back-where-they-belonged to do, but the task seemed less impossible now. Another few hours’ work and everything would be back the way it was—almost.

But then something occurred to me. Jack was already out the door, so I hurried after him and caught him on the stairs.

“You left something out of the story,” I said to him.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You didn’t tell me what they looked like. The visitors.”

I waited to hear what I thought was inevitable: the words shadow, faceless, flat, but Jack had no such description to offer. He said, “As far as I know, the Dogon never passed on a description. But they do seem to have some sort of collective memory of what they sounded like. Mostly, they hissed.”

I paused before responding. Jack remained on the stairs, waiting.

“That’s was Gilmartin’s description too, wasn’t it?” I said finally.

Jack shrugged. “I’m just telling you what’s been told to me.”

He raised his hand, signaling a brief wave good-bye, and then continued on his way.

I went back to my apartment and got the dog. He trotted along beside me amiably enough, so I took him for a walk to the nearest bodega and bought a few cans of dog food. I hadn’t asked what he ate—though as I thought about that on the way back home, I realized that I probably would have gotten the same nonanswer as I did about the dog’s name.

In my apartment, I put some water in a bowl and scooped some of the canned food into a dish. The dog walked over to the dish and immediately started eating, so I left him in the kitchen while I went to the bathroom to begin getting ready for work. A little while later, when I stepped out of the shower, the dog was sitting on the bath mat, waiting for me.

I patted him on the head, dried myself off, and went into the bedroom to get dressed. He followed me and sat patiently while I pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt. Then he followed me out to the living room, where I gathered up my jacket.

I had started to feel anxious again and very tired. I really shouldn’t have gone to work, but if they were going to get another bartender out to the airport, I would have had to call in hours ago, and I hadn’t thought of it, so I felt responsible for showing up. Why? I asked myself. It wasn’t like anybody who signed my checks—people at the corporate headquarters in Cleveland—would ever feel responsible about me. But I decided that it was going to help me to stick to my usual routine, and so I unlocked my massive new deadbolt and started out the door.

But before I left, I stopped to give the dog another pat on the head. “Digitaria,” I said, “guard the house.”

His eyes seemed to glitter even more brightly. He really was a small dog, thin and narrow. But as I looked down at him, with his wedge-shaped head tilted slightly to the side as if he were listening, processing my directive, I had a definite feeling that if anyone so much as tried to get back into my apartment tonight, he would eat them alive.