Sam Munson - Dog Symphony

Better still, I had no obligation to anyone, to any place, any instant. I could turn aside from my path whenever I wished and adopt an entirely new route. Going along one street did not tether me to that street; passing a turnoff did not foreclose on that turnoff. A ceaseless and mindless improvisation, without the sickening awareness of improvising that improvising itself creates. Action followed action, event followed event. I paced along, and the calm moon came out. I lapped at a bowl, and a newscaster shouted from a radio. Some corpuscles slipped through my heart and lungs. The tall, rust-spotted crimson mailbox I was at rest behind cooled my neck. The human in the gray cloth jacket walking toward me as if in a dream stopped when I slipped out from behind the mailbox and sauntered past him toward Camacuá. Around us, the drilling whines of mosquitoes passed through the damp air like current.

I had no evil intent but the human regarded me with surprise all the same, and I wondered if he was another traveler, another visitor to the pension. This brief encounter took place between two lakes of pure night on a pavement gleaming in places with rain. I smelled the heartbreaking scent of wet pavement, first, and the dragged scent, the smeared scent shod feet leave behind, as well as urine, which electrified me, and feces, a contemplative scent, dust (which smells the way moonlight looks) and the fragrances of combustion, ozone, and burning esters.

The footsteps of the jacket-wearing human faded in the distance, beyond the last penumbra of streetlamp light. From Thorne I passed to Curapaligüé, from Curapaligüé to Pumacahua, Carabobo, and Lautaro. The pavement was giving off warmth and the meat bowls, which shone in semiregular lines extending along either curb, were piled with meat. I knew precisely what this meat was. But the meat quivered in the bowls, and I quivered in answer. I lowered my blunt muzzle to the meat and chewed as my saliva spurted and my hind paws scraped the sidewalk. The meat was fresh, strong smelling, and fibrous. Each water bowl I lapped from showed me my blunted face, my night-colored fur, my yellowed eyes. I listened for the whistles and drumbeats trailing from radios, and I interrupted my meal to scan Bonifacio for MAN’S BEST FRIEND SOCIETY vans, but without fear, without even any “interest,” to use the human phrase. I did not see one, not one, not a single van. Though absence proves nothing to a dog.

Before I reached Camacuá, I smelled them: Macedonias. The empty night carried their scent to me. Hard and perceptible as cement, for example, or as the limestone steps gleaming in the jaundiced light five yards, six yards ahead. I paused to observe these steps. A poplar’s bent shadow lay across them, and above them the coal of a cigarette glowed. At the top, where the tree shadow ended, sat Violeta. She had not noticed me yet; she sat with her knees raised and her arms on her knees, her hair restrained by an amethyst band. I trotted forward and my nails tapped the sidewalk. That Violeta heard me approach I knew, though she did not turn her head. Her eyes, the whites and the dark pupils, slid wetly, that’s all. Her meat bowl full. A white blot afloat on the surface of the water in the water bowl: the streetlamp in reflection. This image shattered as I plunged my muzzle in.

Two colleagues passed by, a pug and a Labrador, both shuffling along with their muzzles close to the cooling sidewalk. The Labrador sank (as a joke) his canines into the rugose pelt covering the short neck of the pug, a vague pinkish-gray like worn wallpaper. The pug danced away and snapped his own jaws shut, but his asthmatic breathing destroyed the effect. Both dogs ignored Violeta and me, and she did not look at them, she kept her dark gaze on my dark fur, watching me as I ate. The meat slabs in her bowl were cold, slightly stiff. This made them harder to chew but it masked their flavor. The minuscule, wet noise her bowed lips made as they left the cigarette butt accompanied my vigorous chewing. I finished eating, I drank again, I inhaled some smoke that was drifting my way, and I scraped at my muzzle with my left forepaw. (Curiously, my metempsychosis had changed my dominant “hand.”)

I looked up at my former hostess expecting nothing and I received nothing. She stared into my eyes. Were it not for my inability to speak, I could have conveyed my true being. I am Pasternak, despite this form, I am Pasternak, your former client and guest. Though I was not Pasternak, I was a dog, a black bullmastiff, broad in the shoulder and chest as I had been during human life, with a blunt face and one torn ear, weighing (I estimated) sixty pounds. Violeta ground out her cigarette and returned to the parlor, and I ate the last red fragments from the bowl. My legs wanted to go on, but I was at the mercy of no one and nothing, not even my legs, so instead I trotted around the side of the pension to the wooden garden gate, which I saw was ajar. Beyond, leafy darkness. I pushed it open with my muzzle and my left paw. On the other side, two ceramic roosters, both sky blue, stood guard.

From the garden, you could see into the back parlor. (I was reclining near her lush tomato patch, amid the strong, narcotic smell of their vines and leaves.) Six strangers gathered there, in the lacquerous light. They had Northern European accents; Danish, I thought, because their heads had the square, nobly stupid quality Danish skulls possess (shaped by the wind, the sea, and other such healthy elemental phenomena). The Spanish they spoke, while technically sound, flowed from their mouths in the accents of a stone fish. Their voices, stiffened by burgherly excitement, floated out above me in the warm darkness. Violeta was explaining to them, as she had once to me, that she did not understand the origin of the night dogs, but that she herself had never been affected by them adversely. I hope they will not lower your opinion of our city, she added. The guests all chimed in to assure her that such a thing would never occur, that in Copenhagen (had I been a human, this confirmation of my theory would have gratified me, as a dog I felt nothing, nothing at all) dogs also ran wild at night. It was a new phenomenon, said a female guest, but we have all gotten used to it and indeed would not know what to do in a city where dogs did not occupy the streets after sunset. But here, added a man, here it is like something from a story, whereas at home we could not say that. No, no, said the female guest, it is nothing like a story, you cannot compare real life to a story. Violeta’s face I could not see. She had turned her back to the window. Light poured through her thin shirt, revealing her dark, ample, erect body.

The man had spoken loudly. His North Sea voice echoed through the dark garden. An embarrassed silence rose among the guests. Violeta filled it by observing that she had to go begin her nightly struggle to sleep. She pointed out three wine bottles on the sideboard and informed the guests that they were welcome to drink them, as she could not due to her barbiturate consumption. Soon, in her bedroom, the lights came on. I looked upward. She was undressing, removing her white shirt and purple lace brassiere, freeing her heavy, lightly deflated breasts, the left much larger than the right, the areolas broad and dark. In the flesh beneath them a red dent from the brassiere’s wire. She concealed these philosophical breasts again beneath a green T-shirt with a white logo across it: JUMBO. Her window was open, so as the guests fell into vinous silence I listened for her voice. Inner instinct pricked me, alerting me that she would soon begin to speak, and she did. It was clear that she was speaking into a telephone. She was asking for the twenty-four-hour service line, waiting, repeating her request, and thanking the operator. She then explained that she had a problem she wanted to report. At that point she moved away from the window and I lost her voice. As a merely existent being, I did not concern myself with this.