I’m a dot. My dog’s a white dot. Together we’re held in the police helicopter’s red searchlight. My dog’s a very patient dot—when I stop to think, she sits and waits. I’m remembering: doctor’s appointment at two, lightbulbs and milk, and I don’t know why, but that woman last week going on and on, giving a bad talk to a bored audience. That she didn’t seem to know it was bad. (Embarrassment on behalf of another—a classic dot-trap.) Then, right here in the parking lot: distant laughter; whine of truck brakes slowly slowing like a long, last pull on a fat wine sack; squirrels in dry leaves; hydraulic pops from a building site. Bright, loud civilization-sounds and the pictures they conjure pin a dot down. Hold her in place. There’s a figure eight smear in torn-up ground just ahead on a little rise, cut by a Bobcat—an infinity sign, should a dot want a companion. If a dot is open to companions, in they rain: tree-branch arrows pointing the way; fallen, blackened chewing-gum stars.
A dot is a point where life is confirmed. A sign that the parking lot’s not a wasteland. (And here comes the copter’s red beam again. That faraway eye, looking and looking.) Alone, I don’t indicate teeming or throngs like biotic stuff might: those ever-tempting Sea-Monkeys advertised at the back of comic books, so happy, so lusciously drawn. (What kind of person makes a living by disappointing kids?) Opening a packet, you’d find a spoonful of comma-sized Monkeys; after a few days, they’d fatten up and wiggle around in their jar of warm water. After a week, the Kingdom was a colloidal mess, and not a single Monkey visible. And they never grew those cheery faces. Lesson learned, the ad man says, or the illustrator who drew pink, chubby cheeks (and tiara and lashes) to distinguish the princess Sea-Monkey from the guaranteed one-per-pack crowned prince with scepter. Not one developed human-webby feet. “So eager to please they can even be trained!” (Actually, they were eager to eat, so when you tapped in a dose of dusty food, they’d flagella right to it. Even a brine shrimp knows which way is up. When the food ran out—at about the time you were fully sad—the Monkeys were done for.) A dot, though, is not going to disappoint—countable, bodied, roseate if the helicopter’s flying at dawn, or as the beam sharpens out of the gloaming against true night, and holds a dot still.
I won’t be reviewing dots in pop culture or nostalgically musing on connect-the-dots books, Candy Dots, Dot the nickname—I’m sticking with the original premise: from air, I’m a dot. My dog’s a white dot. We’re nothing much until brought into focus. And since it’s a state-of-the-art police copter, somewhere up there are precision sights—inset in goggles, or dashboard-mounted. A set of crosshairs where I might be centered in lenses so powerful that actual hair (even a nimbus like mine) could be tuned in very finely. The pilot might aim the red beam through my dog’s curly tail, which looks like the handle of an old teacup. Or exactly like the tail on a milch cow pitcher. My grandmother’s beautiful porcelain one was shaded with brown spots which somehow were rough and suggested real hide. Her cow wore a bronze bell around its neck that tinked when I poured its milk into my cocoa, into everyone’s coffee around the table (best little kid job) and made the cow live.
That cow’s a dot I hover over—in mind, because my uncle now has it. It isn’t gone; it just requires an aerial view. As the past often does. Danger does, too: skulking, milling, suspicious dots a police helicopter doubles back on. Bigger dot too close to smaller? Copter flying lower to check: Big dot throttling smaller dot? Dots in train yards, busting out windows? Single dot running with … what? TV? Dot hauling sacks of dot belongings—across tracks, across fields, to dot camp under highway?
At the end of our walk, standing and thinking (my dog’s chasing squirrels and out of the scene), I’m so still I might be a splotch of old paint where the lot-lining went wrong. A pile of construction junk. A tangle of branches downed in a storm. But the pilot’s trained in dot discernment, in reading shadows and movement so as to reveal a dot’s identity—like swinging binoculars up to track birds. Which is way more interesting than birds-at-a-distance. Just last week, I turned a dot into an eagle. It was hanging out with the other eagles at the head of the Conowingo Dam, pinning a fish to a rock and eating. I could tune in the precise stab and tear, then the pulling of a long, fresh strip of pink. And the way the bird swallowed, head up and gulping, meat in the gullet slowly moving, the bird finished and resting, warmth filling the body, the bird held there, stilled at the center of its day.
For a moment, I’m what the copter’s after, what its red eye is tracking. I try to project nonchalant dot behavior. And soon it’s clear; I’m not what they want. I’m what the dot they’re looking for wants.
I’m a dot’s dot. A target, a bullseye.
To a dot on the lam, I’m a mark. A hit.
For dot spotters, I’m only a blip.
Since the cops have lingered overhead, they’ve reviewed my curious stance, my head inclined, the way just now I bent down to a low rustling, a vole leaving its nearby vole home. They’ve watched me watch a vole eating something. How it used its long nose and needly claws, and dug and paused and looked around. There’s the little trail it made. There’s the skirmish mark in dirt where it wrestled with an apple core and took a few successful bites. I’m completely on the up-and-up. Just out vole-spotting. Learning something about vole life.
Steal with your eyes, my grandmother said.
That’s what I’m doing.
Though I did not see this elegy coming.