So I started walking uptown, leading the dog. I was a little worried about him, concerned that he’d be tired since he was still pretty banged up, but he seemed to be doing fine as he trotted beside me, swiveling his head now and then to take in some new sight or odor. It took about fifteen minutes, but eventually, the blocks began to get a little less tidy, the buildings less grandiose, and there was more street life around, more people, music, restaurants.
It was amid the noise and traffic—more or less hidden in plain sight—that I found what I was looking for. With few exceptions, the unspoken rule in New York was that gypsy drivers and dollar vans kept to the outer boroughs and weren’t supposed to operate in the heart of the city, But they were always around; you just had to know how to identify them, and I did. Here, at the edges of an edgy neighborhood, I spotted a black car with a certain hard-bitten look about it slipping, like a black ghost, in and out of the stream of traffic. I flagged it down and climbed in beside another passenger who didn’t even glance at me or the dog as he jumped in after me, fitting himself into a space between my legs and the door. We soon crossed the bridge over the East River and began driving through the back-door neighborhoods of Queens, dropping off the other passengers and picking up new ones. Apparently, as seemed to be my luck lately, my stop was going to be last. I expected the dog to fall asleep, lulled by the movement of the car, but he didn’t. He stayed awake all through the long drive, alert and watchful. Once in a while he would lift his head to look up at me and I could see his eyes glittering in the dark.
~XIII~
I waited until the next day and then called Jack to straighten things out. He didn’t answer so I left a message, and then another one in the late afternoon before I went to work. When he still hadn’t called back the day after that, I decided that I wasn’t going to chase after him. If he wanted to hold on to what was obviously some huge grudge against me for not following him, then so be it. We weren’t teenagers who had to test each other’s loyalty. If he decided to get back in touch, I’d talk to him. If not, well, a chapter in my life seemed to have closed when I left the Blue Awareness headquarters and if Jack Shepherd was part of that chapter, I didn’t think there was much I could do. I didn’t leave any more phone messages. The summer days went on.
Toward the end of July, every day seemed to grow warmer than the one before. Temperatures, the TV news reported, were soaring to record highs. When I walked the dog in the morning, by the fence near the bay, I took to carrying a bottle of water with me. Digitaria never seemed to mind the heat but I did, and often found myself trying to cool off by splashing water on my face. Later in the day, waiting for the bus under the hot city sky was an endlessly uncomfortable experience. I kept the small air conditioner in my bedroom running on a timer so that when I returned at night, at least one room in the house was habitable. Once I did get home, I would change into shorts and a tee shirt and then take the dog out again. It was actually quite awhile before I could leave the house at night without worrying about being outside with him in the dark, but finally, my anxiety began to subside. Time passed and there were no more incidents. I traveled back and forth to my job through the hot, pale days, walked the dog beneath a harvest moon that rotated through its phases, disappeared, and then showed up again, looking like a thin, bright scimitar hanging low on the horizon. Amazingly, it would soon be fall.
Every morning I woke up expecting to feel fine—after all, except for the fact that I now owned a strange little dog, my life was pretty much back to exactly how it had been before I had called in to Jack’s radio show. But I didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t quite identify it, but some part of me felt empty. Somewhere deep inside myself there was something I wanted, but I couldn’t say what it was. Now, during the day, my thoughts were often foggy. At night, my dreams became unsettled, though I could never remember what they were about. I would wake up and see the dog at the end of the bed, sleepless, as he always seemed to be in the darkest hours of the night, and listen to him breathe. It was like listening to a shadow breathe. A little gray ghost.
On a Sunday when I didn’t have to work, I took the dog out in the morning intending to walk no farther than we usually did. It was already hot, and I wanted to get back into the air conditioning as soon as I could. But despite what I thought were my own firm intentions, at the point where I normally would have pulled on the dog’s leash to turn him around and head back home, I found that I had changed my mind and instead, continued on, heading toward a neighborhood about half a mile away.
For quite a while now, an old church around here had been undergoing renovations. The last time I had gone shopping at a nearby supermarket, I had noticed that the ever-present scaffolding around the church had finally been taken down and a sign outside proclaimed that there would be a number of celebratory events to mark the conclusion of the building’s restoration. This particular Sunday, there was going to be a blessing of the animals and, though I wasn’t aware that I had consciously thought of it before, I realized that I now had a particular destination in mind. I was on my way to have my little Dogon dog blessed by a priest.
A Catholic church was about the last place I thought that I belonged, so I felt more than a little bit uncomfortable as I lined up on the sidewalk outside the church behind a couple of dozen other people, including families with children who also had brought their pets to be blessed. Many had dogs on leashes, but some were holding cats or birds in cages, or a variety of small animals such as hamsters and gerbils. A few people had even brought lizards and snakes.
I couldn’t remember what the church had looked like before, but it had emerged from its scaffolding with a surface of dark, rough stone scoured so clean that it seemed freshly quarried. Topped by a small bell tower, the building seemed to belong to some bare western landscape, not this busy urban neighborhood, with its mix of ethnic-food shops and brick-faced apartment complexes.
Around noon, the church doors opened and people began to file in with their pets. I could hear music playing inside and the soft, pleasant sound of murmuring voices.
The line moved slowly, so it took about twenty minutes for me to make my way past the front door. My first reaction was to be relieved that it was cool inside. It was also pleasantly dim in the candlelit interior, where an orderly procession of people and animals—myself and Digitaria included—was making its way down the center aisle of the church toward a priest, flanked by several servers, who was quietly blessing each animal presented to him.
When it was our turn, I found myself facing the priest, a gentle looking man of middle age, wearing some sort of white vestment that bore an elaborate cross stitched on its front panel in maroon and gold thread. Despite the smile he gave me, I was still feeling very out of place and not quite sure what I was doing here. Maybe it was just another symptom of the vague anxiety that had gripped me lately that I thought it would be a good idea to have the dog blessed. Or maybe I was just developing a belief in some kind of otherworldly magic, even religion. Even if it was not my own.
Just as the priest seemed ready to bend down in order to lay his hands on my dog and deliver the blessing, he unexpectedly paused for a moment and addressed me—something I hadn’t noticed him doing with any other pair of pets and owners.
“Isn’t that an African dog?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied, startled that he recognized this.
“When I was younger, I spent some time in Mali,” he explained. “I was in the Peace Corps. We visited the Dogon tribal area once, and I saw dogs like that. I thought they tried not to let anyone outside their own people have one.”
“You’re right,” I said. “He is a Dogon dog.” And lest the priest think I had somehow acquired him in some nefarious way, I added, “He was given to me. By a professor at Columbia,” I added, as if that certainly put matters on the up and up.