Sam Munson - Dog Symphony

I first stumbled near the men’s room entrance. A lackey in a coverall was mopping the floor. I caught myself against the jamb. The lackey plunged his mop into the bucket on gray wheels that he would push through the airport and then through eternity. I muttered to him: Be more careful where you splash that water, you fucking faggot. He started mopping again as soon as I finished speaking, he wheeled the bucket away. The axles whined. In the men’s room, I unzipped my windbreaker. The right side of Klemperer’s shirt, hip to armpit, was bloodstained. I unbuttoned it to examine the wound. I pressed the flesh around the neat, dense hole. No pain, just lightness. The male officer with the shovel barged into the bathroom just as I finished zipping the windbreaker closed again over my hastily buttoned shirt. The shovel’s dented head carried crusts of gray earth. One crust tumbled to the white floor and shattered. The noise pure and thunderous, like the initial rumor of a storm. The stall door slammed. The officer started to grunt. I swallowed the blood and bile filling my mouth.

A few droplets, a few ovate droplets. I couldn’t avoid leaving them behind me as I crossed the terminal. I felt them slide down my arm, down my hand, and before I could close my fist and smear them away, they fell from my fingertips. Always some effluvium, Pasternak. Or even refulgence. I was lighter and lighter, lighter with every step. Fortunate, because it allowed me to continue, and unfortunate because the world grew heavier and heavier, so heavy that even the glances of passersby and tourists weighed me down. Someone kept demanding someone else over the announcement system. Would a Mr. Sordini (or Sortini, I couldn’t tell) please report to the courtesy lounge. In Spanish, in English. A white roaring, too, underlay the words. A sea, the hidden sea. I walked, I floated, so to speak, behind a couple with matching haircuts and suitcases.

They ended up in front of me in the line for international departures. They were bound for Portland, a city the ticket agent had never heard of. The couple seemed surprised, they regarded Portland as a western capital. All three laughed at this, loudly and frankly; all three stopped laughing in the same breath and stiffened. The ticket agent directed a shy, defeated glance my way. I dipped my head in salute, leaning on the silver poles connected by moire nylon ribbons, sky blue. The couple hauled their matching strawberry-covered luggage toward the gate entrances, and the red, achene-pricked forms continued to burn among the carbuncles, stars, and assholes.

In the back pocket of Klemperer’s pants was his wallet. I planned to use his credit card — issued by the University’s own bank and the same sky blue as the departmental uniform — but had no idea of its limit, or if the authorities were aware of his death and had alerted banks and other commercial bodies to watch out for transactions made in his name. If this plan failed… yet it didn’t matter. The ticket agent was nodding me forward. I swallowed another copious mouthful of my own blood and obeyed. But the swallowing, this time, made me cough. The red streak my cough painted across the agent’s round, whitening face resembled, I thought, my friend’s letter L in minuscule.

But my head was now bouncing mildly against the cool floor tiles. I coughed up another vivid chevron of blood. Shoes and ankles darted and dodged across my visual field, among the reddish occurrences. Primate voices cried out above me. I could no longer distinguish the words. The beating of my heart, sevenfold, seventyfold. Questions arose. Was this death, “Pasternak” wanted to know. Pasternak murmured and whimpered. And I myself? Well, I had nothing to say.

GRASS-BLADES PENETRATED SO DEEPLY into my nostrils that I leapt up in terror. They carried the scents of: dust, dandelion pollen, loam, and human corpses. Also marble, the rubber soles of shoes, rainwater.

I leapt up and fell back on my side at once, simply because the movement I attempted — to “leap to my feet” — failed. True, my legs locked and prepared to support my thorax and head, but my back would not straighten. The sunset blinded me, so I tumbled back to the grass. I tried to cry out. A desert dryness consumed and degraded the sound.

I tried again to spread my palms on the grass and force myself at least to my knees, and this worked, though I was not on my knees; I was “standing,” a bodily voice whispered. My head and chest pointed forward and my abdomen pointed earthward, my genitals (to my amazement naked) swaying ponderously in the warm breeze. The need to urinate stung my bladder (my soul) and my right leg rose, without effort, from the grassy earth. The urine streamed and sputtered, I heard it, but I could not see it, and my burgherly training seized hold, crept over and crawled over, shouting that I must stop pissing, at once, at once, but I could not stop, I trotted in a tight circle attempting to see my own urination, and my right leg, it is true, participated, but I could not see it, I could not see it, and it ended before I asserted myself over the secret strength of my bladder (again: my soul).

Pistarini: gone. As if consumed by mighty, motionless fire. And the endless white tiles, these were gone as well. No thicket of pampas grasses enclosed the lawn I was trotting in mindless circles around. Klemperer and Luxemburg? The invisible fire had taken them, too. Their absence prompted me to fill my lungs and shout. This time, a cry did emerge, a single, curt, meaningless, fluid monosyllable. To my east, my west, my north, and my south, monuments. Gray marble, white marble, concrete. Cruciform. Some stood at the heads of brick borders demarcating oblong plots, some stood in naked grass, and some on raw earth. Among them larger constructions, spires and plinths, and even (occupying double or triple the land) white and gray stone mausolea. The setting sun visible over the brown wall, not far but not near, like the mouth of a furnace. Or even an eye, Pasternak, don’t forget you can always compare the sun to an eye. In the nothing that flowed between the monuments, the nothing the monuments combed, comb of the so-called hecatomb, dozens of dogs were waking up. They followed the same protocol. They stood, they pissed or even shat, they circled their own axis, and they began to trot southwest, toward Warnes, I realized. Where the gap in the cemetery wall was. These dogs ignored me, as they had during my long excursion among them on my first night in the southern capital. As they passed, their muzzles stayed on the same level as my own face, and their blank, mildly phosphorescent gazes met mine. As the first dog approached me, an obese rottweiler with foamy ropes of saliva dangling from her jowls, I panicked, yes, Pasternak panicked and tried again to rise up, to assume the primate stance of supremacy. I fell once more onto my flank, and the rottweiler let her glance slide over me as I struggled in the damp grass.

I knew where I was. La Chacarita. More dogs rushed between the gravestones, more dogs slipped past me. I lay there, and I attempted to cry. I felt no sadness, I felt nothing at all. But one “ought” to cry over such abrupt transformations. Yes, yes, because of my intelligence (and please recall its true definition) I knew what had happened. The sole possible outcome. A great loss, an irreplaceable loss, all cultural authorities tell us. We humans stand atop the world, the world exists only as our extension, in fact as our extended extensiveness. And now, this loss. So I tried to cry, I failed. Weeping is forbidden to dogs.

The others, my new colleagues, well, they didn’t care that I was just lying around doing nothing. They trotted on past me over the tall, rich grass. The worst was that Fulvio had been correct. He refuted me from the beginning, and pedants suffer refutation as pure torment. Still no weeping, not even a dry, forced sob. I was panting, drooling; my nose snuffled up the mingled and maximal scents the graveyard earth supplied. My colleagues had no difficulty walking. I could not be the only new one, I could not be the only man who had died in Buenos Aires the previous day. So get the fuck up, Pasternak, I thought, get the fuck up.