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.