André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

— You’re sure you’ll be okay? she asked. I left the bag of dry food out, in case you get hungry. There’s more in the pantry. There’s steak in the fridge on the bottom shelf. I made sure the tap outside was oiled. You shouldn’t have any trouble if you get thirsty. Are you sure you’ll be okay?

— Yes, he said.

At times like this, he preferred Miguel’s attitude. Miguel was not as caring as Nira, but neither did he make Majnoun nervous.

Nira ran her fingers through the hair on Majnoun’s flank.

— We’ll be back Sunday afternoon, she said.

Then she was gone, the last sounds he heard being her key in the front door and her fading footsteps as she walked off the porch.

+

A day passed. And then another.

As previously noted, one of the worst aspects of the dogs’ change in intelligence was their new consciousness of time. The state of bliss in which one moment is a thousand and a thousand moments one was something all the dogs had taken for granted. After the change, each of the fifteen had had to fend for themselves against a new Time, a Time that knew how to make its passage felt. Majnoun had done better than most, because he’d had Nira to help him lose track of moments that passed. Walking with Nira along Roncesvalles or by the lakeshore was time that he would happily have prolonged. If anything, their hours together passed too quickly. With Nira gone, however, there was little to protect him from the excruciation that duration can be. To keep himself occupied in the first twenty-four hours, he had written a poem for Nira, something to surprise her with on her return.

Summer is full of smoke,

and endless lawns. Quietly,

whether across moss or on algae,

knee over the railing of the little porch,

fate comes.

Then, as Nira had left Tannhäuser in the CD player for him, he’d listened to the opera, slept, listened to it again, gone outside and wandered around the edges of High Park away from people and dogs, slept, listened to Tannhäuser again, slept again. On Monday morning, he woke and was confused to find himself alone. The kitchen clock seemed to be working — the second hand jumped as it always did — but Nira had not returned. This was as strange as if the sun had risen in the west. He ate little that day. And though he knew Miguel and Nira did not like it, he lay down in their bed, the place in the house where the smell of them was strongest.

If Monday was bewildering, Tuesday was strange beyond language. Some time in the afternoon, he heard a key turn in the front door. The sound made him immediately alert. Someone was trying to invade their home. He knew the rhythms, the voices, the very weight of both Nira and Miguel. Neither of them was at the door. He ran to the front hall growling, ready to attack whoever entered. But he did not attack. Could not. The intruder was someone familiar but ‘wrong,’ and Majnoun could not help himself.

— Who are you? he asked.

The man — Miguel’s brother — stood a moment staring at Majnoun before pushing the door wide open. To the people behind him, he said

— Christ! That was weird. I could have sworn the dog spoke.

Behind him, someone said

— Nothing’s right without Miguel here.

Majnoun could barely keep himself from attacking the man who’d spoken Miguel’s name. It seemed to him that no one else had the right to make such an important sound. He retreated into the house, however, moving backwards, tail down, to let Miguel’s family in.

No sooner did she enter the house than Miguel’s mother began to weep.

— Oh lors! she cried.

Her sons held her up and the four of them remained in the front hall, huddled together. Their emotion — which Majnoun experienced as if it were his own — provoked the most conflicting feelings: pity, dislike and resentment. Why should these people be here instead of Nira? Nor did they look like leaving any time soon. They took their time in the front hall, the men finally helping the old woman into the living room, where she collapsed on the sofa, still overcome by emotion.

What a strange invasion it was. No one paid the least attention to him. No one spoke. They went through the house at a funereal pace, looking for whatever: clothes, letters, boxes. Miguel’s brothers did most of the searching, until their mother found the strength to rise from the sofa and help them look. Majnoun remained in the living room, sitting quietly, unmoving. It was a kind of torture not to speak, not to ask when Nira was coming home.

— What about the dog? said one of the brothers.

— Maybe Sarah will take it, said another.

— It was Nira’s dog, said Miguel’s mother. One of her friends should have it.

Those were all the words Majnoun needed to hear. He understood at once that Miguel’s family were nothing to do with him, that they were unfaithful to Nira, and that they meant him no good. With a minimum of fuss or urgency, he rose from where he was sitting and walked away from them. Once in the kitchen, he opened the back door, crossed the yard, opened the back fence and, before anyone so much as thought to stop him, he was halfway along Geoffrey, heading toward Roncesvalles. From there he went into High Park, returning to what had once been his pack’s den, the only place left to him, though it was haunted by the spirits of dogs who were gone.

Early the next morning, Majnoun’s vigil began a new phase. He returned to the house and warily waited for Nira, choosing a vantage across the street, far enough away that he could run, if he had to, but near enough to see all the comings and goings.

+

Over the years that followed, Majnoun had much time to wonder if he’d been hasty running out when he had. Perhaps, if he’d stayed, he might have overheard something about Nira, about her whereabouts. Not that hearsay would have changed the course of his life. Whatever Miguel’s family might have said, Majnoun would likely have done what he did in any case. That is, wait for Nira.

The beginning of waiting was, in its way, complicated. Not the decision to wait. No real decision was necessary. He knew he would wait for Nira because Nira would return. It would have been unthinkably cruel to force Nira to search for him. But waiting itself required that he make a number of choices. He had to eat, for instance. Belonging to Nira in the way he did, he could not allow himself to die, though he resented the time needed to keep himself fed because it was time spent away from the place Nira would expect him to be. Most mornings, he scrounged in High Park, eating whatever he happened upon. If he was still hungry, he waited until the place that sold squeeze toys and dog food opened: the Kennel Café. There, they inevitably put out biscuits and a bowl of water. More than enough to keep him going for a day.

Then there was the strategy of waiting.

In the beginning, the place was overrun by Miguel’s family. Whenever one of them saw Majnoun, they’d run after him. Why they wanted him at all was unclear. They seemed to think he was theirs. But he’d be off before they finished plotting their course. He’d run half a block, wait to see if they’d followed, run off half a block more, and so on until they gave up. It hurt his old bones to run, but he would not be caught.

Also in the beginning, he could not a find a place that hid him while allowing him to look out for Nira. Whenever he stayed in any one place for too long, there was inevitably a human there to disturb him. The closest he came to capture was when someone called the Toronto Animal Services to come and get him. Animal Services, he knew, were serious business. Nira had warned him about them. They killed inconvenient dogs. So, no sooner did he see the Animal Services van than he was off, darting behind houses, hiding, slinking, hiding until he made High Park, where he hid in the coppice for two whole days, two whole days away from home, worried that Nira would come or that she had already come and was upset that he was not there.