Time to buy a dog. I’ve previously planned this move in the direction of independence, it’s just taken me a while to follow-through. A dog will keep me occupied until I meet Dorian Blood on Monday.
Months ago I was cleared by the animal shelter. It’s interesting with so much dying the strict regulations we place on animal safety. When the volunteer inspected my apartment she went, “This it?” and moved in a stationary circle, clutching her clipboard.
I don’t really have things. My apartment post-divorce is what considerate guests would call minimal. People talk like this now, and I don’t really know what looks nice. Everything I purchase is blue or black.
There was some hesitation in my application because I imagine a single, nearly forty-year-old man fits the profile of someone who would burn an animal. When I told the volunteer I was divorced she said she understood because her boyfriend, Brandon, had recently dumped her for Crystal. Then she touched my wrist and approved my paperwork.
I didn’t need to, but on the way down the stairs to the sidewalk I blurted out that I’ve loved animals ever since I was born, like, I came into the world loving animals so give me one to love now before it’s too late.
The animal shelter is bright lights and barking dogs and worn leashes dangling from hooks. Two women sit on yellow chairs against the windows comforting cats. I’ve asked to walk Rudy. No one wants Rudy because he’s disgusting. Also, in a world of Max’s, Oreo’s, and Winston’s, he’s Rudy.
Long brown fur that isn’t curly, but knotted with dirt. Where it looks like he has long toenails growing from his paws it’s filth-bundled hair, and around his eyes there’s so much gunk it’s permanently sleek. His left rear leg and part of his hindquarters has been shaven pig-pink because the leg, according to the volunteer, was coated in ticks when he was discovered in a dumpster behind a pool store.
Rudy is so undesirable. Probably doesn’t have teeth. His breed is terrier mixed with a half-dozen others, who knows, no way anyone will adopt him before his day comes. They do a countdown until an animal is adopted, or not, and a dog like Rudy has little to no chance. Even before we go outside with everyone else testing out dogs, I decide he’s for me.
There’s a real sadness to the way he jumps, frightened by other dogs barking. When a man in the passenger seat of a convertible starts singing on a nearby road, Rudy cowers between my legs and I tell him, “I’ll protect you from him,” which is something you can only say truthfully to an animal.
When Dad was busy being a cop, Mom collected animals. She was lonely and filling her reality with things that had hearts. Don’t believe what other people will say because plants don’t work and fish don’t count.
So we had nine cats, three dogs, four turtles, twin rabbits, three hamsters, a one-winged pigeon named Helio, and a squirrel, Bibb, who lived in the garage. Mom made Bibb a hammock above the workbench which Dad kept filled with peanuts. For their size, squirrels are skilled fighters. Is there a star constellation of a squirrel? If not, you could create one. For Bibb. That’s what’s so amazing about the world now – you can make anything up, and if you’re confident in your stance some others will believe you, and if you have yourself and some others, it’s all you need.
Alice never met my parents but the animal stuff she thought was so weird. She was careful about what she said about Mom and Dad and I don’t blame her. How do you comment on two people who were dead from such an accident? Besides, if you don’t grow up with animals as pets you tend to just eat them.
“Rudy?” says the volunteer at the counter. This one isn’t as pleasant as the one who visited my apartment, this one is talking while eating chips. In the future everyone will be eating chips, constantly, all day and night.
A dog costs two hundred dollars.
The volunteer licks his fingers. “We can’t understand why his tongue is bleeding.”
“Right,” I nod.
“He’s eleven-years-old with a life expectancy of thirteen.”
“Where do I sign?”
I imagine Rudy tossed slow motion like into a basement clouding with green gas, too late for my saving hands. The death syringe plunging into his fur and the black bag. My brain is killing Rudy. My imagination is powerful. On occasion, it has gotten me into trouble.
Alice said I was incapable of living in reality. She said I spent too much time in my head, which is impossible because my reality was Alice, planning our days together. We spent weekends in bed eating sushi, reading the first ten pages of novels, binging shows, sleeping to no clock, no rules, no guidelines, no sense of time. If my imagination did wander, it always included her.
Rudy comes out, dragged on his leash across the smooth-as-glass linoleum floor by an unaware volunteer until he reaches me and Rudy leaps, injected with sudden energy, his unclipped nails scratching my thighs.
How I landed my job when I turned thirty is all Alice, recommended by her brother-in-law who worked for a Leader. He said they were looking for “creative types.” I no longer consider myself a creative type. My pants are so much bigger now. Imagine working thirty years so you can live twenty years.
The reason why my brother-in-law recommended me as a creative type was because I had a minor painting career before I met Alice. I’m not sure it was even a career, but people did buy them and it always surprised me. My paintings became boring around the time I settled into working an office job. Some new painters doing new things pushed me out of the way. The art world is a trap unless you have rich parents.
My parents had money, but not power money. They signed me up for lessons when I was ten and didn’t say a thing when I brought home an oil painting the teacher herself had spent two hours on. She wanted to impress my parents so they thought I was excelling and would sign me up for more lessons. Mom and Dad were too smart for that. Where I had signed my name, in the lower right corner, were tall chunky blocks of smeared black paint and both of them ran their fingers lightly over the letters.
I started to feel embarrassed when Alice looked in on me, in the basement, dripping paint onto the canvas in uninspired ways. The shame of not selling paintings made me give up. Steve, on occasion, still calls me Hollywood because I once sold a painting for a thousand dollars to Scott Rudin in Los Angeles.
I’m not really sure where you bring a dog that has been living in a cage, and survived in a dumpster licking chlorine tablets, but my favorite park is twenty miles from my apartment, near Mom and Dad’s old house.
Shortly after the divorce I drove to the house and asked the owner if I could see my childhood bedroom. This was the behavior of someone who had cracked, I don’t deny this now, but I did then. I denied everything around me. Some hesitation, but the family felt sorry for me, because they let me in after discussing it in the kitchen.
I followed them through the living room and up a carpeted staircase and down a dim hallway with ascending school year portraits. Each room had a leather couch or leather chair like it was a requirement. A table at the end of the hallway held green candles, a mason jar full of pennies, and a picture of an elderly woman presenting a plate of spaghetti.
“Probably changed from when you lived here,” said the mother who wore coffee-stained sweatpants and an Under Armour sweatshirt the color of dried blood.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “There’s a lot of leather.”
My childhood bedroom was now a room for Family Guy memorabilia. A home is only walls, it doesn’t matter how many years of your life you put into the space, it will eventually just become something else by someone else. But my childhood was in those walls. Too bad a house can’t remember you. The mother said, leaning in the doorframe, that if you added up everything in the room it would be worth fifty thousand dollars, maybe more depending on the buyer.
“That’s amazing,” I said, and touched a doll of Stewie Griffin that was reclining in a mini leather chair.
Behind her, I could see her children in the hallway, watching us.
“No one will admit it,” she continued, palm-packing Marlboros, “but Family Guy is better than The Simpsons.”
As I’m driving Rudy is sticking his head out the window with his blood-tongue hanging loose, drool streaming backwards into an SUV with the wipers on. He either doesn’t care what anyone thinks, or he doesn’t know how he looks so he can’t care. Who was it that said animals have no interior life, that they can’t recognize their own image in a mirror? How is that even provable? Either way, I wish I was more like Rudy.
I park the car. Neighbors spend hours blowing leaves from one house to another and telling their dogs to stop barking, who for years, don’t stop barking. Cars get dirty so you have to clean them. Looking around, carrying Rudy in my arms until we reach the grass, this is what I see. I need to be more positive. Move into my future. But sometimes people just sit outside and watch traffic.
Two men in the baseball field are scratching lottery tickets as their kids wrestle under the monkey bars. I throw a tennis ball that Rudy runs toward, then right past, his head turning like the ball is stuck in the sky.
I have to carry him to the car he’s so exhausted. I did a little running too. I’m so out of shape. I should start jogging like everyone else. Just run around the neighborhood until I can’t think anymore.
I get in the back seat with Rudy on my lap snoring, a wet puddle from his mouth to my pants. He trembles, sprinting through the dream of what just happened, and I’m falling asleep too, the sun warm on our faces. Some people don’t like dreams because they say they aren’t real – those people shouldn’t exist.
At home my boss calls again. He’s never called me on the weekend before. He says for the Dorian Blood meeting to fast beforehand, no food after midnight tomorrow, get at least six hours of sleep, and don’t do anything to, “compromise my normal routine come Monday morning.”
I ignore how weird the request is, and instead look at Rudy in the kitchen who slobbers-up a half-gallon water dish then waddles to the corner and vomits.
“Okay,” I finally respond.
“You’ll be working here again like before, that’s all I have right now,” says my boss. “It’s another program funded by the State.”
“Same cubicle?”
“Steve put in a request for it, which I denied. See you Monday.”
A rush of excitement comes over me knowing I’m going back to the Zone. Now if I can just get my life on track, no more Alice thoughts, I can relax and head towards retirement. Reaching ten years is so close then just two more decades, but then what? Alice has a massage license, a degree in biology, references from a dozen cafes and restaurants, a yoga certification, and works for a nonprofit, RISSE, helping refugees. One location is right around the corner from my apartment. Sometimes on my way to the grocery store she’d be on the front lawn kicking a beach ball with kids who had survived bombs from their own government.
Rudy sleeps the rest of the night. I can’t sleep, my mind piecing together what Dorian Blood looks like, what the meeting is about, where my life is going.