“You’re not a dog.”
“I know, Chase, but I’m living in their building. I was telling Sadie this just the other day, I think we should pry the digits off the apartment doors. The dogs have means of knowing when they’re at the right door.”
“Did Sadie agree?”
“She said it was fine if I wanted to waste my time that way, but that she’d kill me if I removed the buttons from the elevator, which I also suggested. In retaliation I told her I wanted her to find us a deck of playing cards without numbers, just the pips. It’s healthy for our animal minds to be able to count them at a glance, as easily as we tell the kings from queens, to eschew unnecessary symbolic languages.”
Wasn’t it autistic savants-Asperger’s types, like those rock critics from whom he wished to distance himself-who counted scattered things at a glance? Well, anything could be reversed in Perkus’s system. He who’d once layered his own linguistic chatter onto the urban environment’s screen now seemed to hope to peel such stuff away to reveal preverbal essences, Platonic forms. I suppose he’d decided in favor of the unadorned polar-bear broadside, if he even recalled that old conundrum. If anything, in Ava he seemed to have located his own personal polar bear in distress. Only rather than rescue her, he’d elected to merge with her, here on the floe of the Friendreth Apartments.
Despite the injunction, new objects did appear in Ava’s rooms from time to time, not all of them things dogs needed, some even laden with symbolic language, thanks to Perkus’s raids on the other apartments. One day I found him with a volume of Franz Kafka’s stories, a pale green paperback called The Great Wall of China. Perkus seemed to regard the item as a portent, like the Rolling Stones record. “I hadn’t read Kafka since I was a teenager, Chase, it’s incredible what I’d forgotten or taken for granted, it’s like he’s reading your mind! These storage-space people are a previous vanished tribe of New Yorkers, trying to make us understand something, if we’d only listen.” Perkus launched into narration from the first story, called “Investigations of a Dog”-apparently it was Ava’s mind that Kafka was reading. “How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment… that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow-dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair… Wait, listen, Chase, this part’s amazing, he gets to the heart of Ava’s ambivalence about other dogs: We all live together in a literal heap… nothing can prevent us from satisfying that communal impulse… this longing for the greatest bliss we are capable of, the warm comfort of being together. But now consider the other side of the picture. No creatures to my knowledge live in such wide dispersion as we dogs, none have so many distinctions of class, of kind, of occupation… we, whose one desire is to stick together… we above all others are compelled to live separated from one another by strange vocations that are often incomprehensible even to our canine neighbors, holding firmly to laws that are not those of the dog world, but are actually directed against it. You see, Chase? Kafka’s pointing us to what I couldn’t know until I met Ava, that a domesticated animal isn’t some wild free thing that happens to be living indoors. Thanks to years of interdependence it’s permanently fixed on a grid of human concepts, a microcosm of our own incoherent urban existence. Dogs are canaries in our evolutionary coal mine!”
“I never realized Kafka was such a Communist,” I joked.
He blinked away contempt for my wit. “I used to find it tragic that we turned these pack animals into paranoid hermits,” he said. “Now, living here, I see that dogs like having their own apartments.” Perkus was explaining himself, I thought but didn’t say. “What’s astonishing about Kafka is that reading this you’re suspecting he’s never even met a dog and at the same time it’s the greatest handbook to living with one I could ever imagine!”
This might be Perkus in a perfect nutshell, taking Kafka as a resource guide to pet ownership. “Does he say anything about how to cure her hiccups?” Ava’s hiccing seemed to be getting worse-or perhaps I should say more persistent, since it didn’t appear to bother the indomitable animal.
“She’s fine,” he said. “At night they go away so she can sleep. I hug her around the chest and sort of squeeze them away.”
“Is that prescribed in Kafka? Maybe we should take her to see Strabo Blandiana.” I teased, but again, it was Perkus I wanted to have Strabo take a stab at. Maybe the medicinalist knew the right points for a needle to enter the human body and trigger self-awareness, pride in one’s appearance, as well as species pride, the desire to rejoin the human race. Then I felt ashamed for preferring Perkus’s Beau Brummell phase to his present guise as a Staten Island garbageman-it wasn’t as if the first had been geared to impress others or me personally, or signaled any high regard for the opinions of the human race. What had drawn me to Perkus was his absence of any calculation, except in figuring how to persuade me of his next urgent theory or ephemeral fact.
Still, I worried about his health. I’d already snuck aspirin and floss into his bathroom. He boasted he was cluster-free since the hallucinatory and epochal headache that, with tiger and blizzard, had ushered him to this new life. He didn’t smoke pot-it was now as if he’d never smoked pot. I didn’t ask if ellipsis had departed him, too. Who was I to judge that he looked hungry, hunted, harrowed? Maybe being out of his apartment had only revealed an underlying truth, and I, fatally callow, had romanticized his former appearance. One thing I was sure of, Perkus’s temples looked flattened, dented, without the disguise of floppy hair. Once he’d had only the wrecked and reckless eye. Now his whole cranium looked imbalanced to me, though possibly this was birth trauma, a forceps impression. Perkus had, after all, gotten from there to here like the rest of us. But where was he going?