I began making mistakes at work, which had never happened to me before. I mixed the wrong drinks, I rang up the wrong prices, I gave the wrong change. This scared me, maybe more than anything else, because no matter what had ever happened to me in my life, I had always been able to put those things aside when I was at work and concentrate on what I had to do. Deeply rattled by the fact that I seemed to have lost my ability to leave myself behind when I was at work and act the part of the carefree bartender, I began to make a conscious, concerted effort to focus on every order I got, every transaction I had to process. And I thought I was making some headway until I had an encounter with yet another dog.
It was at the end of my shift. Most of the TVs in the bar were tuned to the sports wrap-up programs and I had announced last call. I started wiping down the bar and stacking glasses in the back. The shops on the other side of the concourse were also closing, pulling down their security gates. The woman who ran the luggage store opposite the bar waved to me as she headed down the concourse toward the exits at the front of the airport.
A few minutes after her figure vanished from view, I suddenly saw something run past the front entrance of The Endless Weekend. Looking out from the dark bar into the overly bright light that bathed the corridor outside could be disorienting, so at first I thought I had been mistaken. But then, whatever it was flashed by again, going in the opposite direction. My mind was having some trouble processing what my eyes had apparently seen, maybe because I couldn’t quite believe it, but when the streaking image—something gray and lean—ran past again, what had just been a vague impression sharpened into unmistakable clarity. A dog was running back and forth outside the bar.
I didn’t have to think about what to do next; my response was automatic. I stepped out from behind the cash register where I was checking receipts and walked into the concourse. At this late hour, with so few people around, the sharp, artificial light made everything in sight—the areas around the arrival and departure boards that no one was looking at, the rows of empty seats by the unmanned boarding gates—seem even more deserted. And unreal.
In the brief time it had taken me to cross from the darkness of the bar into the bright corridor, I had decided that what I’d seen must have been a police dog that had gotten away from its handler and was running around the airport. It didn’t matter to me that this explanation made no sense because these dogs never did things like that—unless, of course, one of them was chasing a criminal, and if that was the case, then probably I should have gone back into the bar, pulled down our security gate and told the waitress and our last few customers to hide under a table. But instead, I simply stood in the corridor, under the bright fluorescent light, and waited. I didn’t see the dog just yet, but I had a feeling he would come back.
And soon, he did. I looked down the long corridor, toward the area where the screening machines were, and saw nothing—not even the personnel who should have been manning the equipment, no matter how late at night it was. But when I looked the other way, in the direction of the departure gates, I suddenly saw the dog, sitting on his haunches, in a carpeted area under a row of blank television screens.
As if he had simply been waiting for me to notice him, he now stood up and started walking toward me. When he was close enough for me to get a better look at him, I could see that he looked like a small greyhound, a dog as narrow as a bone.
It took him less than a minute to pad down the length of the bright, empty hallway, where not a security guard, not a member of the overnight cleaning crew, not even one wandering traveler seemed to be in sight. The dog came right to me and sat down again. Then he raised his head to look at me with dark, glittery eyes.
I didn’t want him to be there. I didn’t want to think about why he was. And most of all, at that moment, I didn’t want to touch him. But then, how can you not pet a dog that walks right up to you and looks you in the eye?
So I patted him on the head. “Hello,” I said. But what I was thinking was, Who sent you?
Just then, the waitress I was working with that night, a young woman named Kim, walked out of the bar and stood beside me. She had a blonde ponytail and a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist—the perfect Endless Weekend girl.
Gesturing at the dog, she said, “Where did he come from?”
I think it was at the same moment that we both noticed the dog was wearing a collar. Kim bent down to look at the tags hanging from the collar, but as she did, the dog whipped his head around to face her and growled.
“Whoa,” she said, stepping back. “Maybe there’s something wrong with him. We should call security.”
But I knew there was nothing wrong with the dog. The problem was that the wrong person had approached him. “Let me see if I can find who he belongs to,” I said to Kim.
Then I crouched down to get a look at his identification tag. With me, the dog didn’t seem to object. I read the information etched onto the little bone-shaped tag attached to his collar and learned that his name was Dax and he belonged to someone named Kelly Branigan.
Was that a man or a woman? Human or alien? Stop that, I told myself firmly. Just start looking.
“Would you hold the fort for a few minutes?” I said to Kim, and then began walking down the corridor, toward the departure gates. I glanced back at the dog just once, and he immediately started to follow me.
I continued heading down the row of gates near the bar; none of the boards behind the desk had departures listed except one at the far end of the terminal, which showed a flight leaving for LA at six A.M. A young man, with long hair and lots of rings on his fingers, was asleep on a bench near the gate, his head resting on a backpack. Beside him was a dog kennel, with its wire door pushed open.
I reached out to shake the young man awake, and as I did, the dog darted past me and slipped back into his kennel. I thought immediately of a dog in a capsule, as if Zvezdochka had decided to appear before me in another form.
“What?” the young man said, opening his eyes. He looked at me and then glanced over at the sign above the gate. I saw the confusion on his face turn to relief. “Wow. I got scared there for a moment. Thought they’d called my flight.” He couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, and had a friendly smile.
“You’ve got a couple of hours,” I told him.
“Yeah, I guess. They canceled the red eye and booked me on the morning flight. They said I could crash here until boarding time. Is that still okay?”
“If nobody’s telling you to move, I guess so,” I said, “but I’m not with the airlines. I’m the bartender from The Endless Weekend. Your dog paid me a visit.”
“My dog?” he said, sitting up. “Dax?” He looked over at the kennel, where the dog had stretched himself out on his side and appeared to be quite comfortable. Reaching over to touch the open latch, the young man looked totally flummoxed. “Hey boy,” he said, “how did you do that?” The dog yawned and turned over.
“Well, I guess he’s not talking. Did you bring him back?”
“Yes,” I said. “When they come to get the kennel, maybe you should make sure somebody ties that latch closed with a rope or something.”
“Thanks. I will. And thanks so much for looking after him. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d gotten lost.”
“Well, I have a dog,” I said, invoking what I supposed was the universal empathy of one dog owner for another.
I watched as the young man locked the kennel and checked the latch to make sure it was secure. Then he lifted the backpack off the bench and placed it so that it leaned against the kennel door.