by André Alexis
– 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.
His life changed. The waiting changed.
Interest in Majnoun died down with the ‘For Sale’ sign that appeared on the lawn of he, Miguel and Nira’s home. Evidently, Miguel’s family were selling what did not belong to them. In a matter of weeks, the sign came down and strangers began to enter and leave his home: a woman, a man, two small children with blond hair.
Rather than staying on any one lawn or waiting in any one place, Majnoun varied his vantage points: across the street, two houses down, one house down, and even – once he was certain the woman and her children w
ere not violent – in the backyard that had been his. As the years passed and he grew older and thinner, Majnoun learned to worry a little less that he might miss Nira’s return. He grew more confident that Nira would look for him when she came home and, what’s more, that he would know she was looking. When she came back, he would know it.
As his life settled into a routine, the world slowly changed around him. Two years after Nira had gone, the people on Geoffrey began to leave food out for him: a piece of meat or chicken, bread, carrots, whatever was leftover from their own meals. They kept their distance, because Majnoun was still a little intimidating (black with some grey, inscrutable, alert), but no one ever called the Toronto Animal Services again. The dogs in the area left him alone as well. Not out of fear, not because he was unnatural, but because the purity of his attention commanded respect. No dog could have doubted or misunderstood Majnoun’s resolve or the depths of his longing. They all knew what it was like to wait and, every once in a while, one would join Majnoun, silently sitting at a slight remove, sharing his task as a mark of respect.
To keep himself alert as he waited, Majnoun thought about things. Over the years, he thought about a thousand things, but two questions occupied most of his time. The first was about humanity. What, he wondered, did it mean to be human? The question was, ultimately, impossible for him to answer. He had been born outside of the human and, so, was ignorant of the implications of a world created by their limitations. What would it be like, for instance, to be unable to distinguish the smell of snow in winter from the smell of snow in early spring? What kind of world was it in which one could not, blindfolded, distinguish the great range in the taste of water or smell when a female was in heat? To be so limited? Inconceivable. And, of course, it was impossible to know a state (to know the human) by subtracting things in oneself, as if ‘human’ were what is left once the best of dog has been taken away.
This question was a way to think about what made Nira Nira, to try to imagine the world as she saw it, to feel it as she felt it, to think about it as she might.
The second question was about himself and what it meant – if it meant anything at all – to be a dog. What was he, really? Where did he fit in the world? Was he waiting for Nira because it was in his nature to wait, or was his dedication unique and noble? Most days, he felt only that waiting was right. Every once in a while, however, he imagined waiting was only the expression of an instinct, something he had to do. This thought, whenever it occurred, saddened him, mere instinct being unworthy of Nira, who was not his master but, rather, a being who completed him, made him more than he would otherwise have been.
And so, speculating about the canine brought him closer to Nira as well.
Though it is far from obvious, the gods are not inevitably indifferent to the suffering of mortals. At times, mortal suffering is amusing to them, at times diverting; at times, though rarely, it is touching.
When Majnoun’s vigil had lasted five years, Zeus allowed himself to notice that the dog had lived well beyond its span, that its suffering was unnecessarily prolonged. Moved by the dog’s nobility of spirit, he visited the hall of the Fates.
No one enjoys visiting the Fates. They are haughty and beyond petition. They are eccentric in their views, and the hall where mortal lives are spun is itself unpleasant: white, exactly one millimetre less than infinite in length, ten metres tall and ten metres wide. Eleven white urns – each filled with the essence of a particular emotion – sit in a row near Clotho’s spinning wheel. As a life is spun, it is dipped in each of the urns by Lachesis before being cut by Atropos. (In principle, Lachesis dips each and every thread in each of the jars, assuring that every life has the same generous emotional range. Lachesis is unpredictable, however, dipping some threads in one or two emotions alone, rendering a life monotonous or unbearable. It is through Lachesis that suicides are born.)
Given their mansion and their personalities, it is not surprising that most of the gods avoided them entirely, that the sisters had only each other for company. So, it was with a mixture of secret pleasure and open defiance that Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos received Zeus into their hall.
– I hope you haven’t come to blame us for anything, said Atropos.
– I have known you since the beginning of time, said Zeus. You’ve never been anything but blameless.
– He’s right, said Clotho. We do what no other immortals can do. We must be blameless.
The sisters laughed.
– And yet, said Zeus, your tasks are not always rightly done. It seems some mortals have had their lifespans shortened while others have had them prolonged.
– The king of the gods must be at fault, said Atropos, if an injustice has been committed.
– It isn’t I who decided to extend Majnoun’s life, said Zeus. You three have drawn out the suffering of an innocent being. You have interfered where I expressly forbade it. But I’m sure you have your reasons and I’d be honoured if you shared them with me.
– Fuck you, said Atropos.
– If the being you refer to is suffering, said Clotho, talk to your sons about it. They’ve always been meddlers. I’m sure you’ll find they’re to blame, though some might blame you since you’re unable to control your children, O great and powerful Zeus.
Zeus bowed his head.
– The least you could do, he said, is end Majnoun’s suffering.
– That we will not do, said Atropos. It is out of our hands and yours.
– Would you have him wait forever?
– It won’t be forever, said Lachesis. The dog is not immortal.
– Fifty years at most, said Clotho.
– That is a long time for a dog, said Zeus.
Atropos, who had, despite herself, been moved by Majnoun’s fidelity to Nira, relented.
– If you can convince the creature to give up his wait, we will allow his life to end. Perhaps next time we come to you for advice, you will listen.
Having got all he could from the Fates, Zeus summoned Hermes and Apollo.
– This game of yours has cost me more than it has cost you two, he said. One of you will convince Majnoun to give up his vigil. If you fail, both of you will suffer until his suffering ends.
– There’s no need to threaten us, Father, said Apollo. Haven’t we always been good sons? We’ll do whatever you ask.
Which is how, after Zeus’s sons had fought about it and Apollo had alluded to Hermes’s well-known tendency to meddle in mortal lives through dreams, Hermes was tasked with setting Majnoun free. As to their wager, both gods agreed that Majnoun could not, without Nira, die happy. Prince – himself on the verge of death – was Hermes’s last remaining hope.
– You know, I’m looking forward to the years of servitude you’ll owe me, said Apollo. We’ll see how you like being chauffeur to a ball of fire.
By allowing Nira and Majnoun a divine intimacy, Hermes had made his task more difficult than it might have been. It was no use simply asking Majnoun to abandon his vigil. He did not have the rhetorical skill needed to convince the dog that Nira would not return. The god of thieves was further hampered by his admiration for Majnoun. He would not consider obvious trickery. He would not disguise himself as Nira, for instance. And yet, knowing that Majnoun could not be happy without Nira, knowing that Majnoun’s vigil was futile, Hermes had incentive to accomplish this small mercy: to allow Majnoun to accept his own death.
One day, as Majnoun sat in the yard opposite the house that had been his home, a black poodle – almost Majnoun’s double, save that this one had bright blue eyes – greeted him in the language of his pack.
– Do you mind if I sit with you? Hermes asked.
Pleased to hear the language of his pack, Majnoun said
– I do not mind, but how do you know our language?
– I am well-travelled, said Hermes, I know many languages.
– Even the human ones?
– Yes, said Hermes, I have lived many places.
In English, Majnoun said
– You must be very intelligent.
In English, Hermes answered
– I am, but I don’t like to talk about my virtues.
Majnoun knew then that this was the being he had seen in dreams.
– You are not a dog, he said. I know you. What do you want with me?
– I am here to help.
– Tell me where Nira is, said Majnoun.
– I can take you to her, said Hermes, but you will have to leave this place.
Majnoun looked over at the house he had been contemplating for five years: red brick, tall chimney, pyramid roof, a window with shutters on the third floor, a bay window on the second floor, front porch with its own roof, blue spruce in the front yard, different kinds of bushes that served as a hedge. You might almost have said that he loved its bricks, aluminium and wood, but, of course, they were precious only because Nira had lived within.
– I cannot leave, said Majnoun.
Hermes said
– Then I will keep you company, if you’ll allow it. Is there anything I can do for you?
Majnoun considered the question. There was nothing he wanted, but he was curious about the visitor’s influence.
– Make time stop, he said.
– It is very unpleasant, said Hermes, but as you wish.
And time stood still. A bird that had alighted on the branch of a tree two doors down stopped singing but went on producing the same note it had produced at the moment time stopped. No sound having had time to decay, the noise around them was unbearable, the earth a deafening alarm. A butterfly hovering above the leaves of a flowering shrub seemed stuck in a jelly of air, the light-blue dots on its wings clearly visible above a yellow fringe. Even the smells stood still, so that when Majnoun moved his head ever so slightly, he could smell a vein of scent and then another and another, each scent like a layer in mica.
– That’s enough, said Majnoun
