Yet no. The rooms weren’t going to tell him who he was. They weren’t his. This was a dog’s apartment, only the dog hadn’t come yet. Biller had explained to him that though it was preferable that Perkus keep himself invisible, he had only to call himself a “volunteer” if anyone asked. The real volunteers had come to a tacit understanding with those, like Perkus, who’d occasionally slipped into the Friendreth Canine Apartments to stealthily reside with the animals. Faced head-on with the ethical allegory of homeless persons sneaking into human-shaped spaces in a building reserved for abandoned dogs, the pet-rescue workers could be relied upon to defy the Friendreth Foundation’s mandate and let silence cover what they witnessed when they entered the building. Snow and cold only made sympathy that much more certain.
Perkus, for his part, hadn’t encountered another soul in the hours he’d been installed in the apartments, had only gazed on minute human forms picking along drifts on the Sixty-fifth Street sidewalk seven stories below, through immovably paint-sealed window frames, the city a distant stilled terrarium. This corner of York Avenue, where Sixty-fifth abutted the scraps of parkland at the edge of Rockefeller University, formed an utter no-man’s-land in the winterscape. There might only be dogs living in the apartment buildings for several blocks around, that’s how it felt to Perkus. Biller informed him he shared the building with three other human squatters among the thirty-some dogs, though none on his floor or immediately above or below him. Perkus felt no eagerness to renew contact with his own species. He listened at the walls, and through the spasmodic barking imagined he heard a scrape of furniture or a groan or sigh that could be human, but no voices to give proof, until the morning when the volunteers began to come to take the dogs for walks, calling them by name each at their individual doors, praising them as “good boy” or “good girl” on their way out to use the snowdrifts as a potty.
Even those voicings were faint, the stolid prewar building’s heavy lathe and plaster making fine insulation, and Perkus could feel confident of remaining undetected if he wished to be. When clunking footsteps and scrabbling paws led to his threshold, his apartment’s unlocked door widened to allow the dog inside to take occupancy, Perkus hid like a killer in the tub behind the shower curtain, slumping down to sit against the porcelain’s cool shape. He heard Ava’s name spoken then, by a woman who, before leaving her behind, set out a bowl of kibble and another of water on the kitchen floor, then cooed a few more of the sweet doggish nothings a canine lover coos when fingering behind an ear or under a whiskery chin. Perkus had never lived with a dog. But much had changed just lately, and he was open to new things. He couldn’t think of a breed to wish for but had an approximate size in mind, some scruffy mutt the size and shape of a lunch pail, say. The door shut, the volunteer’s footsteps quickly receding in the corridor. Perkus had not done more than rustle at the plastic curtain, preparing to hoist himself from the tub, when the divider was nudged aside by a white grinning face-slavering rubbery pink lips and dinosaur teeth hinged to a squarish ridged skull nearly the size of his own, this craned forward by a neck and shoulders of pulsing and twitching muscle. One sharp white pink-nailed paw braced on the tub’s edge as a tongue slapped forth and began brutalizing Perkus’s helpless lips and nostrils. Ava the pit bull greeted her roommate with grunts and slobber, her expression demonic, her green-brown eyes rimmed in pink showing piggish intellect and gusto, yet almost helpless to command her smacking, cavernous jaws: from the first instant, before even grasping his instinctive fear, Perkus understood that Ava did her thinking with her mouth.
The next moment, falling back against the porcelain under her demonstrative assault, watching her struggle and slip as she tried and failed to hurtle deeper into the tub after him, he saw that the one front paw with which she scrabbled with was all she had for scrabbling, as she braced and arched on her two back feet: Ava was a three-legged dog. This fact would regularly, as it did now, give Perkus a crucial opening, his only physical edge on her, really. Ava slid awkwardly and fell on her side with a thump against the tile. Perkus managed to stand. By the time he got himself out of the tub she was on her three legs again, and flung herself upward once more, insisting that boxy skull, with its smooth loose-bunching carpet of flesh, into his hands to be adored. Ava was primally terrifying, but she persuaded Perkus pretty soon that she didn’t mean to turn him into kibble. If Ava killed him it would be accidental, in seeking to staunch her emotional hungers.
Those first days were all sensual intimacy, a feast of familiarization, an orgy of, yes, pair-bonding, as Perkus learned how Ava negotiated the world, or at least the apartment, and how he was to negotiate the boisterous, insatiable dog, who became a kind of new world to him. Ava’s surgery scar was clean and pink, an eight-or ten-inch seam from shoulder blade to a point just short of where he could most easily detect her heartbeat, at a crest of fur beneath her breast. Some veterinary surgeon had done a superlative job of sealing her joint so she appeared a creature naturally like a muscular furry torpedo there, missing nothing. Perkus couldn’t guess how fresh it was or whether Ava’s occasional stumbling indicated she was still learning to walk on three legs-mostly she made it look natural, and never once did she wince or cringe or otherwise indicate pain, but seemed cheerfully to accept tripod status as her fate. When she exhausted herself trailing him in this manner from room to room she’d sometimes charmingly sag against a wall or chair. More often she leaned against Perkus, or plopped her muzzle across his thigh if he sat. Her mouth closed then, as it rarely did otherwise, and Perkus could admire the pale brown of her liverish lips, the pinker brown of her nose, and the raw pale pink beneath her scant, stiff whiskers-the same color as her eyelids and the interior of her ears and her scar, and the flesh beneath the transparent pistachio shells of her nails. The rest, albino white, with a single, saucer-sized chocolate oval just above her tail to prove, with her hazel eyes, she was no albino. More usually, that mouth was transfixingly open-even after he’d persuaded himself she’d never intentionally damage him with the massive hinged trap full of erratic, sharklike teeth, Perkus found it impossible not to gaze inside and marvel at the map of pink and white and brown on her upper palate, the wild permanent grin of her throat. And when he let her win the prize she sought, to clean his ears or neck with her tongue, he’d have a close-up view, more than he could really endure. Easier to stand was her ticklish tongue baths of his toes, anytime he shed the ugly Nikes, though she sometimes nipped between them with a fang in her eagerness to root out the sour traces.
Ava was a listener, not a barker. As they sat together on the sofa, Ava pawing at Perkus occasionally to keep his hands moving on her, scratching her jowls or the bases of her ears or the cocoa spot above her tail, she’d also cock her head and meet his eyes and show that she, too, was monitoring the Friendreth Canine Apartments’ other dwellers and the volunteers that moved through the halls. (As Perkus studied the building’s patterns he understood that the most certain proof of human visitors, or other squatters, was the occasional flushing of a toilet.) She listened to the fits of barking that would possess the building periodically yet felt no need to reply. Perkus believed this likely extended from the authority inherent in the fantastic power of her own shape, even reduced by the missing limb. He guessed she’d never met another body she couldn’t dominate, so why bark? She also liked to gaze through the window, when he moved a chair to a place where she could make a sentry’s perch. Her vigilance was absolutely placid, yet she seemed to find some purpose in it, and could spend an hour watching the street below without nodding. This was her favorite sport, apart from love.