Sam Munson - Dog Symphony

But I had no intention of showing up, no intention of running into the boy who looked like Che or a new set of student agitators. No, I went back to campus because I planned to enter Ana’s office, to batter its door down if necessary, to break its chiropractic glass. Like all second-rate thinkers I played out two opposing scenes in my head.

The first: Ana alive and well, dressed in her simple and opulent clothing, laughing her hoarse, proleptic laugh at my concerns. You are adrift, Boris Leonidovich. Her normal rebuke. Thereupon I would chastise her, demand explanations for her absence, for the night dogs, for Sanchis Mira, for the Department itself, for Luxemburg, for the vans and for the occluded night I had plunged into.

The second: pure void.

Students flowed through the first floor of the social sciences faculty, the divisions between the tag wearers and those with naked necks yet more evident. Among them, security officers ambled and strutted, laughing and calling to each other. They held up their right hands and tapped their rigid fingers against the thumb, like a maw opening and closing, in time with the drumbeats of the Dog Symphony, now playing openly from radios students carried. The tag wearers mimicked this gesture, and I did as well. One officer caught me in his gaze. Not malicious, just curious.

The elevator door opened on eight and revealed a pristine wall, painted delicate blue. The floors no longer puce tile but sealed concrete, brutally gleaming (and tinted a deep night blue). Cool, sweet air moved lightly around me. The ventilation system had been improved as well. The blues, like sea and sky, accompanied me. The reception area was painted in the same two shades; the desk was new, it looked like ebony, and the visitor seats were Barcelona chairs, crisscrossed by leather straps. They lacked the golden, rabbit-shaped label. I knelt on the cold floor to check. The east wing of the department, which did not contain Ana’s office, stretched openly to my right. All the piled boxes, all the ossification, the shoes and laces, the spectacles, all these had gone. The hallway was vacant and utterly still. The doors, white, all stood open, and the odor of drying paint came from them. The black-and-gold names gone, though the rippling glass itself remained.

The west wing was under construction. Opaque plastic drop cloths hung from the ceiling, covering whole sections of wall. Here, the blue sealed concrete flooring had not been completely installed. A black seam divided it from the old puce tiling. Wooden sawhorses (stenciled DSP in sky blue) stood poised in their obscene manner along the walls. The air stank of ozone, fresh sheetrock, sawdust. The corridor stretched and stretched, growing dimmer and then fading into complete darkness: I passed through the hall, holding my lighter up as a torch. Either no electricity flowed here or the light fixtures had not been connected. Thuds and sawing noises, filtered by distance, colluded. The hall stretched much farther than I would have thought possible given the size of the building. Then again, I was suffering from a lack of sleep and a more general disorientation.

This corridor ended in a false wall made of sky-blue duvetyn and black metal struts; a door, also of cloth, was set into it. I opened it halfway, and the duvetyn door revealed more puce linoleum and planted upon it two legs in sky-blue pants with silver piping. I pushed harder, the panel swung fully outward. There, diagonally across this improvised exit, was Ana’s office. Its door now stood ajar. Beyond, the room itself was empty, empty of everything except its old desk and faint squares on the walls. I knew from a photograph she’d sent me what had once concealed these whiter patches: her own photographs of Juan Filloy, the only Argentine writer she respected (I always pretended I knew who he was to oblige her). The names on the doors to either side — Zinny and de Gandia — gone. Ana’s name still remained. In part. A lackey in sky-blue coveralls was effacing it with a rag and a glass beaker of solvent. The lackey wore a silver badge like those I’d seen flashing on the chests of the University police, but he was a lackey and nothing else, I could tell from his loose lower lip and dull stare. A short silver whistle on a leather thong hung from his loose-skinned neck. To the thong was affixed a golden label: GENUINE PAMPAS HARE. The silver whistle beat time against his concave chest as he spread solvent, rubbed, and clucked.

Ana’s name was hard to eradicate. The lackey slid a putty knife from his pants pocket and began to chip at the gold-and-black paint. He chastised himself under his breath: Be careful, be careful, man, if you break this you’ll be lower than shit. The noise of the knife against the glass, the insupportable and reverential noise — that’s what made me finally speak. Excuse me, I said, but what are you doing? Such a question cannot be asked without sounding like you have just shambled on stage in a hideous, wooden play of domestic life. I knew that, yet I asked it. And even asked it again. The lackey looked at me. His knife stopped. Then he smiled a smile punctuated by a golden incisor and said: No need to worry, sir, it’s all authorized. The knife scraped and scraped. More shreds of Ana’s name flaked down to the tiling. The lackey went back to work with his rag.

I told him to stop, at once. He did, though he tried — by a series of blinks and grimaces — to mask his instant obedience as surprise. This is fully authorized, sir, whined the lackey, I have full authorization. From whom, I said, making sure to be grammatical. From the boss, sir, he said. What boss, I said. From Dr. Sanchis Mira, he said. And where, I said, is Dr. Mariategui? The lackey shrugged. I heard she went on sabbatical. He returned to scraping and rubbing, and I walked past him into Ana’s office. I caught an esteric whiff of his solvent. You can’t go in there, he mumbled. I didn’t respond. Even her scent — soap and sand — had dissipated. The lackey started whining again when I tore open Ana’s desk drawers. You can’t, sir, you just can’t, moaned the lackey. The first one empty. In the second, gray grit. In the third: an enormous canine taken from a jaw, its root intact.

The lackey froze, rag aloft. The silence deep enough to reveal the slopping noise the solvent made against the sides of its jar. It doesn’t concern me, it doesn’t concern me, sir, I’m just here as maintenance, just doing construction, said the lackey. What is this, I shouted. My voice had taken on a nauseating, false-thunder rattle. The lackey dropped his solvent beaker. The glass splintered and an acrid, brief gust made my eyes water. The lackey was already running off down the hall. On the glass panel only the letter E remained.

In Ana’s office, I found nothing else. There was one window, which overlooked from eight floors up a deep concrete service area crammed with sky-blue dumpsters holding construction debris. This view explained nothing. And neither did the white patches once screened by Filloy. My throat burned, stinging tears careened down my face. I wept into my hands.

A loud, curt noise startled me. The doorknob striking the bared office wall and leaving a lunar dent. Four legitimate representatives of sky-blue authority now crowded the open doorway. Two men and two women. Their faces gentle and, so to speak, nullified. Their apparent squad leader, a woman with sharp, high cheekbones and an inky, minuscule mole at the upper-right-hand corner of her rich lips, called back into the hallway: This is the one? It was Luxemburg, who had first accosted me in this hallway the night of the cocktail reception. Mr. Pasternak, said Luxemburg, put it down. Her command baffled me and I stepped forward to ask for clarification. Put it down, you fucking faggot, she said — her voice level and velvety — or are you deaf? She pointed at the tooth.