Aleksandar Hemon - The Book of My Lives

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Once a marriage ends, what is left is the heavy-footed dance of dissolution. I could not bear staring at the cold fireplaces, and within a week I was looking for temporary, furnished lodgings, where I could stay until the mess was sorted out. My funds were limited, which meant the places I was hurriedly considering were rather dismal. Each of the dreadfully furnished apartments was shown to me by a building manager who despised the people desperate enough to live in such places; each had a door opening directly into the world of thick, gloomy loneliness. One studio available in the fancy Gold Coast neighborhood looked as though someone had just been murdered in it and the management had been considerate enough to whitewash the blood-spattered walls.

After a few days’ search, I settled for a studio on the top floor of a three-story building on Chicago’s Northwest Side. The landlady — let us grace her with the name Mary — lived on the second floor. She was an adoption lawyer; she showed me pictures of happy, overlit couples, the babies bewildered by their new destiny in their adoptive parents’ laps. Mary appeared to me as a generous, embracive woman, the kind that accepted derelicts, canine and human. She didn’t ask too many questions and had no interest in my unimpressive credit history, so I gallantly wrote her a check on the spot. Check in hand, she said she hoped I didn’t mind dogs, for she kept several and was active at a dog shelter. I loved dogs myself, I confessed, and told her a little bit about Mek; she oohed and aahed. Her place seemed as good as any for my upcoming bouts of self-pity.

I went back to my former home, packed a couple of suitcases, loaded them into my Honda Civic along with my stereo, and rode west into the sunset.

One of the few tapes in my car at the time was Hank Williams 40 Greatest Hits , and I listened to it every time I drove. The sense of entering a new life can make almost anything seem significant or prophetic, and I couldn’t help imagining myself as a ramblin’ man —the man old Hank had written the song about — as I drove to Mary’s mansion on the hill .

The signification haze, however, somehow failed to envelop the overwhelming stench I noticed a couple of days after moving in. I tried to remember whether I’d smelled anything when Mary showed me the studio but I could recall nothing irking my nose. I spent a lot of time parsing the stench, as though understanding it would make it bearable — a common intellectual fallacy. Besides the expectable dog shit and piss, there were other perplexing ingredients: generic miasma, a touch of rank cat litter (for there were, it turned out, a couple of cats as well), fetid coffee, a whiff of weak disinfectant. Most dominant was cheap dog food, somehow tucked inside the smell of Crisco, as though Mary deep-fried it for her puppies.

Ready for any and all new challenges, I thought I could get used to the odor, but it was getting worse by the day. At some point it was so intense that I went to a supermarket on the spur of a particularly stinking moment, determined to splurge on luxurious air fresheners. But slouching toward a divorce made me cheap — I found Air Wicks on sale and I bought enough Green Apple and Honeysuckle to offset the reek of a house full of rotting cadavers. At first, there was nothing but the sugary scent in my studio, but then the two smells merged. I’d never before known anything like the olfactory concoction of the deep-fried dog food and Green Apple and Honeysuckle, and I hope I never will again.

Soon I met the dogs themselves. As I was going down the back stairs to the laundry room, I was intercepted by three proud mutts. Two of them were overweight, with wide hips and dull eyes; the third one was small, skinny, and manic, and quickly recognizable as a humper — indeed he instantly tried to fuck my shin. Mary introduced them to me, and I’m afraid I can remember only the name of the biggest one — he was Kramer. On my way back from the laundry room, they followed me, and the moment I stepped into my studio, before the door was even closed, Kramer pissed at my doorstep.

Almost every time I went down to the laundry room I had to slalom between shit piles and piss puddles, only to encounter the dogs. Occasionally the trio would be reinforced with a new mangy mutt Mary’s neighbors had dropped off in her backyard, which appeared to serve as a makeshift dog shelter. New mutts came and went, but Kramer and Skinny Fuck (as I referred to that adorable little creature) and the Third One were a steady lineup.

They, I learned, had distinct, well-defined personalities. Kramer was the decider, Skinny Fuck was a skinny fuck, the Third One was slow and lazy. It was easy to differentiate among them as I lay sleepless in bed and they performed their nightly repertoire of howling and barking. They would start their recital with a choral piece, often set off by a passing bus, but after midnight they usually performed solo, in sequence: the Third One kept me awake for a few hours with a steady, slothful yelp; Skinny Fuck was as enthusiastic about his excitement at two a.m. as he was at any other time; and Kramer covered the early-morning shift, his deep, obdurate voice driving me crazy through the dawn, at which time I was prone to fantasizing about canine crucifixion, one at a time. Once or twice, I spent part of the night remembering Mek and his quiet Irish setter manner — the way his eyes widened when my father whispered something in his ear, or the way he put his head on your thigh, demanding nothing in particular.

Kramer, on the other hand, was my nemesis, the reigning male of the house. He liked to let me know who the big dog was by sniffing me authoritatively every time I walked by, or by defecating disdainfully at my door. Mary mentioned a husband every once in a while, but all the mail was addressed to her and I’d never seen or heard any man on the premises. It was hard to imagine anybody — other than Mary and, with the dubious help of Green Apple and Honeysuckle, me — putting up with the fetid air, but the husband was rhetorically and mysteriously present. I wondered about Mary’s missing hubby the day I found the front door of her place wide open, Chief Kramer patrolling the entrance hallway like an Arizona Minuteman. I’d never seen the inside of Mary’s apartment. Whenever I’d knocked at her door to deliver the rent check or ask a question, she would open it ajar, because, she would claim, she didn’t want to let the dogs out. I was on my way to put in a shift of writing at a fresh-smelling coffee shop, but the open door troubled me. I yelled Mary! from the hallway, reluctant to step in lest Kramer tear at my throat, but there was no response. I could see Skinny Fuck stretching and yawning contentedly on top of a laundry pile mounted on the sofa. Mary! I envisioned Mary’s partially devoured body on the kitchen floor. Cautiously, I went in, Kramer close at my heels. To the right, there was a bedroom, and from a pillow on the bed, the dull snout of an unknown mutt stared at me indifferently. All over the apartment, on every surface, including the floor, there was aged, unfolded laundry, ancient newspapers and coupons, food wrappings, and stuff whose shape and purpose were indeterminable. A body could be hidden anywhere in the apartment and safely rot away, the dogs preferring the fresh cadaver to the fried shit notwithstanding. Mary’s apartment looked like one of those places that would have to be razed upon the owner’s death because it presented a health hazard and could never be cleaned. I ventured deeper into the apartment, closely monitored by the sovereign Kramer, who seemed confident that I could be easily neutralized if I found anything compromising in his domain. A couple of cats sat high up on the kitchen cabinets, glaring at a cage with two birds. The Third One lounged on the floor in the kitchen, where there was a lot more crap — unwashed dishes and Tupperware full of mold, more unfolded laundry and things unknown, the stove buried under a heap of pans, the cat litter I could smell but not see. I was steadily retching by this point. I had discovered the mother lode of the stench, but there were no visible bodies, and I didn’t wish to investigate any further. If there were things to be sniffed out, I was going to let the neighbors and the police deal with it. I left Mary’s den and went on my way.