Сигрид Нуньес - The Friend

One night I come home to find my desk chair on its side and most of what had been sitting on the desk scattered. He has chewed through a whole pile of papers. (I would honestly be able to tell my students, The dog ate your homework.) I’d gone out for drinks after class with another teacher, and we had lingered. I was gone about five hours, the longest I’d ever left him alone. The spongy guts of a couch pillow litter the floor. The fat paperback of the Knausgaard volume I’d left on the coffee table is in shreds.

All you have to do is connect with Great Dane groups online, people tell me, and you’ll find someone to take him. But if you get evicted you won’t find another apartment you can afford, not in this town. You might have trouble finding a place anywhere, with that roommate.

I keep having fantasies like episodes from Lassie or Rin Tin Tin . Apollo foils burglars during attempted break-in. Apollo braves flames to rescue trapped tenants. Apollo saves super’s little girl from would-be molester.

When you gonna get rid of that animal. He cannot stay here. I got to report.

Hector is not a bad person, but his patience is thin. And he doesn’t have to say it: he could lose his job.

The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation assures me that it can take quite some time for a New York landlord to evict a tenant. It’s not like you’ll be put out in the street overnight, he says.

There’s a certain kind of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?

Googling reveals that Great Danes are known as the Apollo of dogs. I’m not sure if that’s why you chose the name or if it was a coincidence, but at some point you probably learned this fact, probably the same way I did. I would also learn, in time, that Apollo is not an uncommon choice as a name for a dog or other pet.

Other facts: The breed’s precise origins are not known. Its closest relation is thought to be the mastiff. And nothing Danish about it: Great Dane , it seems, was used by a misinformed eighteenth-century French naturalist named Buffon. In the English-speaking world the name stuck, while in Germany, the country with which the breed is most closely associated, it’s the Deutsche Dogge, or German mastiff.

Otto von Bismarck adored the Dogge; the Red Baron von Richthofen used to take his up in his two-seat plane. First bred for hunting wild boar, later as a guard dog. And yet, though of a size that can reach over two hundred pounds and over seven feet tall standing on hind legs, known not for ferocity or aggression but rather for sweetness, calm, and emotional vulnerability. (Another, more homey epithet is “the gentle giant.”)

The Apollo of all the dogs. After the one known as the most Greek of all the gods.

I like the name. But even if I hated it, I wouldn’t change it. Even though I know that when I say it and he responds— if he responds—it’s more likely to my voice and tone than to the word itself.

Sometimes I find myself wondering, absurdly, what his “real” name is. In fact, he might have had several names in his life. And what, after all, is in a dog’s name? If we never named a pet it would mean nothing to them, but for us it would leave a gap. She doesn’t have a name, someone says of an adopted stray, we just call her Kitty. A name, for all that.

I like that, well before T. S. Eliot expressed himself on the matter, Samuel Butler stated that the severest test of the imagination was naming a cat.

And your own LOL-inspiring thought: Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?

I know people who strongly object to pet-naming. They are of the same ilk as those who dislike the very idea of calling an animal a pet . Owner they don’t much like, either; master makes them see red. What irks these people is the notion of dominion: the dominion over animals that humankind has claimed as a God-given right since Adam, and which, in their eyes, has always amounted to nothing less than enslavement.

When I said I preferred cats to dogs, I didn’t mean that I liked cats better. I like the two species about equally. But aside from being unsettled by canine devotion, I, like many other people, balk at the idea of dominating an animal. And there’s no getting around the fact that, even if you find calling dog owners slave masters ridiculous, dogs, like other domesticated animals, have been bred to be dominated by people, to be used by people, to do what people want.

But not cats.

Everyone knows the first thing Adam did with the animals that the Lord formed out of the freshly created earth—the first sign of his dominion over them—was to give each one a name. And until Adam assigned them their names, some say, the animals did not exist.

There is a story by Ursula K. Le Guin in which a woman, not named but unmistakably Adam’s partner Eve, undertakes to undo Adam’s deed: she persuades all the animals to part with the names they’ve been given. (The cats claim never to have accepted the names in the first place.) Once all have been unnamed, she can feel the difference: the downing of a wall, the closing of a distance that had existed between the animals and herself, a new sense of oneness and equality with them. Without names to separate them, no more telling hunter from hunted, eater from food. The inevitable next step is for Eve to give back to Adam the name he and his father gave her, to leave Adam and join all the others who, by accepting namelessness, have freed themselves from domination. For Eve alone, though, the act entails another renunciation, that of the language she shared with Adam. But then, one of her reasons for doing what she did in the first place, she says, was that talk was getting them nowhere.

He must have had obedience training early on, Wife Three said the vet said. Judging by his behavior, he’d been socialized both to people and other dogs. There were no signs of serious abuse. On the other hand, those ears: entrusted to some butcher who’d not only left them uneven but cropped each one too much. Those pointy little ears on his enormous head made him look less regal, and also meaner than he was, and were only one of several things that would have disqualified him from being a show dog.

Who could say how he’d come to be in the park, clean, well fed, without collar or tags? Such a dog would not have run away from its owner unless something highly unusual had happened, said the vet. Yet not only had no one claimed him, no one had reported ever even having seen him before. Meaning he might have come from somewhere farther away. Stolen? Perhaps. That there seemed to be no record of his existence hardly surprised the vet. There were plenty of dogs whose owners never bothered to apply for a license, or, in the case of purebreds, register with the AKC.

Maybe the owner had lost his job and could no longer afford the food and vet bills. Hard to believe that someone who’d had him all his life would end up throwing him out to fend for himself. But: it happens more often than you might think, said the vet. Or say he had indeed been stolen, and the owner, on learning he’d been found, had had second thoughts. Life was easier without him, let someone else take care of him now! Again, the vet had seen it before. (So had I: Years ago my sister and her husband bought a second home, in the country. The sellers, who were moving to Florida, had an ancient mutt. A part of the family since he was a pup, they introduced him. When my sister and her husband went to move in, they were met by the dog, left behind, alone in the empty house.)