André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

The old man — Zeus in mortal guise — walked south to the end of Roncesvalles, crossed the street on a diagonal and stepped onto the waiting streetcar. Abandoning caution, Benjy followed and jumped onto the streetcar just as its doors were closing. He easily found the old man — who was sitting at the back — and stood up to put his paws on the man’s leg. As if it were unexceptional to be importuned by a dog, the old man helped Benjy up onto the window seat.

Benjy’s feelings were mixed. He was not used to streetcars and he found their motion and noise disconcerting. (He had last been on a streetcar years previously, with his mistress, and he had not at all enjoyed the ride.) But then, there was the old man beside him: a peculiar presence but kindly, and if there was one thing Benjy knew, it was that kindness could be exploited. In the end, though, the thing that settled him down — or distracted him from his disquiet — was the window. It was open just enough for him to stick his snout through and take in the scented districts of Queen Street: from the musty oleo of Parkdale, past a bridge that smelled as if it were made of pigeon shit, past grasses and urine-saturated posts, past boutiques that exhaled dust or perfume or the smell of new cloth, back to old neighbourhoods, sumac trees and maples; the fishy-mineral lake a constant, intoxicating emanation. It was all intoxicating; so much so that Benjy was in Leslieville before he knew it and before he realized that the old man was no longer beside him, had disappeared god knows when.

Though the streetcar was not full, someone must have complained about Benjy, because at Woodbine, just past a place that smelled of human shit (in all its lovely complexity, but adulterated by something that reminded him of a garden of death), the streetcar’s driver strode toward him.

— Whose dog is this? the man asked the air.

You could tell he was not friendly.

Benjy jumped down from the seat before the driver could grab him. He scampered to the front of the streetcar and, the doors being open, tumbled down the steep steps and into what was, in effect, a new country: unknown, a little frightening. Walking past a gas station, he went south, instinctively heading toward the lake.

It wasn’t long before he was on the beach. The trees were still skeletal, their just-budding leaves like lime-green nubs. This time of year especially, a dog couldn’t help himself: one just needed to bite something. It was as if one’s teeth had desires of their own. So, snapping up a supple and tough twig, Benjy set off along the shore with no destination in mind, the sand stiff and cold beneath his paws.

Of the fifteen who’d been changed by Apollo, Benjy was the dog who had best made peace with the new way of thinking. Essentially selfish, he used his intelligence almost uniquely to serve his own wants, needs, desires and whims. He was not often troubled by pointless speculation. Yet, there were moments when, in a manner of speaking, his intelligence took on a mind of its own. Now, for instance, looking out at the great expanse of water, Benjy wondered why it was there. Why should this bluish, non-land be? And how far did it extend?

These thoughts reminded him, briefly, of the dog who had disappeared:

The leaves, they run like mice,

while birds peck at the ground.

The wood has rotted in its bin.

The grim axe has come round

But Benjy’s mind was soon on to other, more important things. What would he eat and where would he stay for the night? If the humans here (beside this stretch of the endless water) were at all like those near High Park, he would surely find one to take care of him. Biting down on the tough stick, he continued along the beach, heading east.

Happy, Benjy was too distracted to notice a mutt who cautiously approached. By the time he saw the dog — and was almost overcome by panic, because he could not immediately read the dog’s intent — the mutt was all over him, jumping up and down, sniffing at his anus and genitals, barking like one about to die of pleasure.

— You are the small dog from my pack! said the mutt, tail wagging madly.

At those words, spoken in a language only one of the fifteen could have understood, Benjy recognized the dog who had disappeared. That is, Prince. (How unpredictable life is, thought Benjy. I was just thinking about this dog.)

— Dog who was gone, where have you been? Benjy asked.

— He remembers! cried Prince. You remember our way of speaking!

His joy surpassing his capacity to express it with words, Prince began to run in wide circles around the beagle, tongue lolling out. It was as if he were chasing the delight that animated him. Benjy knew what Prince’s running meant, of course, but he did not share the feeling. He had lived through strange times with Majnoun and, before that, with the pack he had killed off. That Prince was a member of that nearly extinct group did not make Benjy glad.

— Dog, he said, stop running.

— I have been in exile for so long, cried Prince, I thought I’d lost our language.

— Our language isn’t important, said Benjy. The human language is what matters.

— The human language? asked Prince. It is all noise. Do you speak it?

— I do, said Benjy. I will teach you what I know, if you like.

— Perhaps a few words, if you like, said Prince without enthusiasm.

Benjy walked toward the lake, taking in the tang of it. What did it matter, he thought, if the dog clung to his ignorance.

— Where have you been? Benjy asked.

Prince had been many places since they’d last seen each other, but none of the places he’d been was as significant to him as the place he’d fled (High Park, the coppice) or the pack from which he’d been driven.

— What has happened to the other dogs? Prince asked.

With little emotion, Benjy gave him a severely truncated version of events. The others were all dead, he said, all poisoned by some unknown hand. And he himself had barely escaped with his life. In this way — brutally, with no mention of Majnoun — Prince learned of his pack’s devastation.

O, what it was to be swept so suddenly through such a range of feelings! From joy to despair in a matter of moments. Prince sat up and keened. And his cries were such an unfettered expression of grief that even the humans in the distance stopped to listen.

— We are the last, said Prince.

— Yes, said Benjy. It is all very sad. But tell me what has happened to you.

Benjy was not curious about Prince’s fate. What he wanted to know was whether or not Prince had learned anything useful. Prince, garrulous by nature, answered Benjy as best he could. But having just been devastated by the knowledge that he’d lost almost all of those who spoke his language, his heart was not in it.

+

After following Hermes out of the coppice, Prince began what was, unbeknownst to him, a long trek east. He hadn’t wanted to abandon his pack or lose the thing that mattered so much to him: the new language. He thought to remain in the park, avoiding the others until time had passed and their rage had quelled, but it was as if an undercurrent drew him farther and farther from the den.

To begin with, that winter, he was adopted by a family in Parkdale. He was happy, but when the spring came he lost them as he chased after a squirrel in a neighbourhood he did not know. The loss was not painful. He did not look for the family again. For a time, he was fed by a human whose breath and ear canals smelled of rancid fish. The rancid human lived east of Parkdale. Farther east still, in Trinity-Bellwoods, he was attacked by a German shepherd and then taken in by a sympathetic human who fed him until his wounds healed. She had smelled of a breeze coming in off the prairie and he would have stayed with her, but, after a time, she stopped letting him in.