“I did talk to Laurie,” Ravenette said smoothly. “I’d be happy to talk to her again.”
Exasperated, I finally broke into the conversation. “I’m on the phone,” I reminded her.
“Oh, yes. Yes, you are. Well, Laurie, how are you doing, dear?”
“Come on, Ravenette,” Jack snorted. “Can we just stop this? Laurie doesn’t have the antenna for the radio. She hasn’t even seen it since she was a kid. So you’re just going to have to make contact with your alien overlords some other way, okay?”
“Now I am going to have to tell you that I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Please. I know the backstory, Ravenette. But maybe it’ll make you feel better if I rephrase. If the aliens are our ancestors, I guess you’re just going to have to wait for them to call you instead of the other way around because Laurie can’t help you out there. So maybe we should get off the line. They could be dialing in at any moment.”
“Don’t mock what we believe, Jack.”
“What you believe,” Jack said acidly, “is that you’re the only ones who know the truth and that makes you special. Smarter than everyone else, so you can do whatever you want to anyone else. Well, you know what that really makes you? A bunch of fanatics. A cult. You’ve just got more money—and a better public relations operation—than most.”
I could hear the controlled fury in Ravenette’s voice as she said, “So that’s what you really think, is it, Jack? Then I guess you won’t be inviting me on the show anymore. Such a pity. I do so love taking those piece-of-shit town cars you send to drive me all the way to the ass end of Brooklyn to that palatial studio of yours. Really, I’ll miss the star treatment. I’ll rue the day. But good luck with all that, Jack. The show, I mean. You’ll need it.” And then she hung up.
The bus had now arrived at my stop. Still holding the phone to my ear, I waved good night to the driver and descended the steps. The bus pulled away—a glowing box of light disappearing down the dark road—leaving me standing alone by the chain-link fence that separated the bay and its bordering marshland from, to use Ravenette’s term, the ass end of my particular urban landscape.
It was a mild night, pretty enough, with a sharp slice of moon overhead and the salty smell of deep water riding in on the currents, so I stayed where I was, leaning against the fence as Jack and I finished our conversation.
“I’m sorry, Laurie,” Jack said. “I could have handled that better. I just lost my temper with her.”
“It’s an easy thing to do,” I told him. “I know. Believe me.”
“But I probably just made it worse.”
“Well, I think you just dropped yourself into the blue soup with me. So to speak.”
At least that made him laugh. “What?” he said.
“She likes to make threats. They all do, I guess. What was that she said? Good luck with the show? I don’t exactly think she meant it.”
“No, probably not. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next. If we’re lucky, nothing will. And if we’re not, we’ll deal with it.”
“Maybe I’ll just have to find another fire escape to climb out on and ask whatever shadow is lurking around to intercede. If I can find him.”
“I thought you didn’t believe that,” Jack reminded me.
“You know what? It’s late, I’m tired, I’ve had a weird night and a long ride home. I’m liable to say anything right now.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “Let’s leave it on that note. Good night,” he said.
“ ’Night,” I replied, and clicked off my phone.
I crossed the road and started to walk down my street, past the locked body shops and garages. As usual, a big rig was parked on the block, though someone had made more of an effort than usual to hide it. Beyond the sodium glow of the streetlamps, I could just make out the dimmed-down running lights of the Peterbilt cab nosing out of the end of an alley beside a scrapyard. As I walked by the truck and approached my building, I happened to glance up at my window and thought I saw a pair of twitching ears framed behind the dark square of glass. Since Digitaria was usually positioned by the front door when I came home, I wasn’t surprised that he was waiting for me, but that he had figured out that he could stand up on his hind legs and watch out the window for me was something new. It made him seem anxious, peering out into the night like that. I quickened my step and was in the building, up the stairs, and unlocking my front door just a few moments later, greeting my dog with a pat on the head. In response, he uttered a soft yip.
It was the first time I had ever heard him make a sound. “You can stop worrying now,” I said to him, since I realized that having lingered outside to talk on the phone had made me later than usual in getting home, and perhaps that had disturbed him. Maybe I was attributing to him qualities of mind and heart that he didn’t have—he was, after all, just a dog, not a person watching a late-night clock tick off the time that a friend should be home—but I assumed that all people who owned pets did that. And so I patted him again.
~X~
Over the next couple of weeks, I noticed that my dog—and he was definitely my dog now, as bonded to me as I had become to him—seemed to remain in a heightened state of anxiety, or at least alertness. He was eating less and often, in the night, jumped off the bed to pace back and forth between the bedroom and the front door of my apartment. And every night, when I came home from work, I would see him in the window, ears twitching above his wedge-shaped skull, seemingly poised to leap through the glass and come looking for me if I didn’t get home exactly when I was supposed to.
I began to worry about him a bit, so decided it was time to take him for a checkup. When I’d gotten him, I’d been so overwhelmed by everything that had happened—the break-in on the previous night and then the visit from my neighbor and her cousin, the somewhat grim professor of French literature, Dr. Carpenter—that it had never even occurred to me to ask questions like whether or not the dog needed vaccinations or anything like that. So I made an appointment at a nearby veterinary clinic, and brought him in on a quiet Tuesday afternoon when I was off from work. The vet, a Dr. Tyner, who turned out to be a serious young guy with lots of snapshots of his four-legged patients in the waiting room, earnestly shook my hand after an assistant ushered me into an exam room. Then the doctor took a good, long look at my dog and asked his name.
When I told him, he asked me to spell it and then carefully corrected a mistake in how his assistant had entered it on the chart she had started for Digitaria.
“That’s an unusual name,” he said.
I didn’t want to try to explain the whole story—visitors from the interstellar neighborhood of Sirius and the dark star that was its invisible companion star seemed like a bit much for a first visit to a vet’s office—so I just said that it was a Dogon name, and explained that the Dogon were an African tribe.
“That makes sense,” Dr. Tyner said. “He has the look of a pariah dog. He’s narrow, and has that curled tail.”
I probably looked like I was not happy to have my dog called a pariah, and that made Dr. Tyner smile. “It’s not an insult,” he said. “It just means that they’re hardy animals. They live with nomads and tribespeople who follow their herds. When life’s hard for the people, it is for the dogs, too.”
As he spoke to me, Dr. Tyner was examining Digitaria, who he had hoisted up onto an examining table. All the while, the dog kept his eyes focused on me. And I got the message: he was only enduring this going-over for me, because I wanted him to.
“Well,” Dr. Tyner said, “we’ll give him the regular inoculations, but otherwise, he seems fine. In fact, he seems like a particularly hardy fellow. He is a little thin, but that may be natural for him.”