Paul Auster - Timbuktu

He heard Pat Two calling out for him to come back, and a moment later her voice was joined by those of Beth and Pat One. A little after that, he heard the engine of the car turn over and the sound of wheels skidding on dirt, but he was far into the woods by then, and he knew they would never find him. Darkness came early at that time of year, and in another hour they wouldn’t be able to see.

He kept going north, trotting along through the frozen underbrush as the dim winter light faded around him. Birds scattered as he approached, soaring up into the high branches of the pines, and squirrels ran off in all directions when they heard him coming. Mr. Bones knew where he was going, and even if he didn’t know exactly how to get there, he was counting on his nose to point him in the right direction. The Joneses backyard was only ten miles away, and he figured he would arrive by tomorrow, the day after that at the latest. Never mind that the Joneses were gone and wouldn’t be returning for another two weeks. Never mind that his food was locked up in the garage and he had no way of getting at it. He was only a dog, and he wasn’t capable of thinking that far ahead. For now, the only thing that mattered was to get where he was going. Once he did, the rest would take care of itself.

Or so he thought. But the sad truth was that Mr. Bones thought wrong. If he had been at full strength, there’s no doubt that he would have reached his destination, but his body wasn’t up to the demands he was making on it, and all this jumping and running soon took its toll. Ten miles was not a long journey, not when compared to the monumental treks he had undertaken as recently as three and a half months ago, but he was traveling on an empty tank now, and a dog could go only just so far on pure willpower. Remarkably, he managed to cover almost two miles in that weakened state. He went as far as his legs could carry him, and then, between one step and the next, without the slightest premonition of what was about to happen, he sank to the ground and fell asleep.

For the second time in two nights, he dreamed about Willy, and once again the dream was unlike any of the others that had come before it. This time they were sitting on the beach in La Jolla, California, a place they had visited on their first trip together, before he was fully grown. That meant it was years and years ago, and he was back in the days when everything was new and unfamiliar to him, when everything that happened was happening for the first time. The dream started in the middle of the afternoon. The sun was shining brightly, a small breeze was stirring, and Mr. Bones was lying with his head on Willy’s lap, savoring the feel of his master’s fingertips as they moved back and forth across his skull. Had any of this really happened? He couldn’t remember anymore, but it felt vivid enough to be real, and that was all that concerned him now. Pretty girls in bathing suits, ice cream wrappers and tubes of suntan lotion, red Frisbees wobbling through the air. That’s what he saw when he opened his eyes in the dream, and he could smell the strangeness and the beauty of it, as if a part of him already knew that he was beyond the boundaries of hard fact. It seemed to begin in silence, silence in the sense of no words, with the sound of the waves washing in and out on the shore and the wind flapping the flags and beach umbrellas. Then a pop tune started playing on a radio somewhere, and a woman’s voice was singing Be my baby, be my baby, be my baby now. It was a lovely song, a lovely and stupid song, and Mr. Bones got so caught up in listening to it that he failed to realize that Willy was talking to him. By the time he turned his attention to his master, he had already missed several sentences, perhaps whole paragraphs of vital information, and it took a few moments before he managed to piece together the gist of what Willy was saying.

“Make amends” was the first thing he heard, followed by “sorry, old boy” and “test.” When those words were succeeded by “ugly business” and “charade,” Mr. Bones was well on his way to catching on. The devil Willy had been a trick, a ruse to tempt him into hardening his heart against his master’s memory. Wrenching as the ordeal had been, it was the only way to test the permanence of the dog’s affections. The prankster had tried to break his spirit, and even though Mr. Bones had been scared half to death, he hadn’t hesitated to forgive Willy when he woke up in the morning, to shrug off his slanders and false accusations and let bygones be bygones. In this way, without even knowing that he was being judged, he had passed the test. The reward was this dream, this visit to a world of languorous, unending summer and the chance to bask in the warmth of the sun on a cold winter’s night, and yet pleasurable and well-crafted as this dream was, it was no more than a prelude to something far more important.

“What thing is that?” Mr. Bones heard himself say, and suddenly he was aware of his ability to speak again, to form words as clearly and smoothly as any two-leg yapping in his mother tongue.

“That, for one thing,” Willy said.

“What that?” Mr. Bones said, not understanding at all. “What thing?”

“What you’re doing now.”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m just lying here with you on the sand.”

“You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“It feels like talking. It sounds like talking. But that doesn’t mean I’m really doing it.”

“And what if I told you that you were?”

“I don’t know. I think I’d get up and do a little dance.”

“Well, start dancing, Mr. Bones. When the time comes, you don’t have to worry.”

“What time, Willy? What are you talking about?”

“When the time comes for you to go to Timbuktu.”

“You mean dogs are allowed?”

“Not all dogs. Just some. Each case is handled separately.” “And I’m in?” “You’re in.”

“Don’t kid me, master. If you’re joking now, I don’t think I could stand it.”

“Believe me, pooch, you’re in. The decision’s been made.”

“And when do I get to go?”

“When the time comes. You have to be patient.”

“I have to kick the bucket first, don’t I?”

“That’s the deal. In the meantime, I want you to be a good boy. Go back to Dog Haven and let them take care of you. When the Joneses come to pick you up, remember how lucky you’ve been. You can’t ask for more than Polly and Alice. Those two are as good as it gets, take my word for it. And another thing: don’t fret about that name they gave you. You’ll always be Mr. Bones to me. But if it ever starts getting you down, just put it in its Latin form, and you’ll feel much better. Sparkatus. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Sparkatus the Dog. Behold yon Sparkatus, the noblest tail-wagger in all of Rome.”

Yes, it did have a nice ring to it, a very nice ring to it, and when Mr. Bones woke up just after dawn, the sound of it was still rattling around in his head. So much had changed while he had been asleep, so many things had happened to him between the closing and opening of his eyes, that at first he didn’t notice the snow that had fallen during the night, nor did he recognize that the tinkling noises caused by the word Sparkatus were in fact the ice-coated branches overhead, slowly creaking in the wind. Reluctant to leave the world of the dream, Mr. Bones only gradually became aware of the intense cold around him, and then, once he began to feel the cold, he became aware of an equally intense heat. Something was burning inside him. The cold was outside, and the heat was inside; his body was covered with snow, and inside his body the fever was back, as fierce and paralyzing as it had been the day before. He took a stab at trying to stand up to shake the snow off his fur, but his legs felt like sponges, and he had to abandon the effort. Maybe later, he told himself, maybe later when the sun came out and the air warmed up a little. Meanwhile, he lay there on the ground and studied the snow. No more than an inch had fallen, but even that was enough to make the world feel like a different place. There was something eerie about the whiteness of snow, he found, something both eerie and beautiful, and as he watched two pairs of sparrows and chickadees pecking away at the ground in search of something to eat, he felt a small ache of sympathy flutter inside him. Yes, even for those useless featherbrains. He couldn’t help it. The snow seemed to have brought them all together, and for once he was able to look at them not as nuisances but as fellow creatures, members of the secret brotherhood. Watching the birds, he remembered what Willy had told him about going back to Dog Haven. That was good advice, and if his body had been up to the task, he would have followed it. But it wasn’t. He was too weak to go that far, and if he couldn’t count on his legs to get him there, then he would have to stay where he was. For want of anything else to do, he ate some snow and tried to remember the dream.