Fifteen Dogs

by André Alexis

  only moments after time had stopped.

  – I used to amuse myself doing that, said Hermes. It was a test to see how long I could last. I am like you, Majnoun. I never lasted long. My brother Ares could take it for days, though.

  – Your brother must be strong, said Majnoun.

  – No, said Hermes. The noise reminds him of war, and he likes it.

  At that, Majnoun understood how completely his companion transcended the world. Though he was intimidated, he asked

  – What is it like to be a god?

  – I am very sorry, said Hermes, but the only language in which I can truly express this is one that mortals cannot learn.

  – Do you feel as we do? asked Majnoun.

  – No, said Hermes. For me, what you call feeling is of a different order and nature. It is palpable, like steam or smoke.

  – How strange, said Majnoun.

  For a time, the two sat quietly together, contemplating the houses, the sky, and the world. The people who passed saw Majnoun in one of his usual spots, staring fixedly ahead, as he usually did. They did not see Hermes. The dogs, cats and birds, on the other hand, saw Hermes before they saw Majnoun and all were spooked.

  There were a thousand questions Majnoun would have liked to ask. Are dogs greater than humans? Which beings are smartest? Why is there death? What is the purpose of life? Most of these questions were interesting, but their answers were now unimportant to Majnoun. Majnoun wished to know one thing and one thing alone: Nira’s whereabouts. But he was afraid to ask the question or, rather, afraid of its answer. And Hermes – out of respect for Majnoun – did not speak of Nira. He waited, rather, to be asked.

  Despite being unable to broach the one subject that mattered to him, Majnoun was more or less at ease in Hermes’s company. They spoke (silently) of a number of things, the god at home in the mind of the dog. And the day passed in what seemed moments.

  As the sun set, Majnoun reluctantly left his station. He and Hermes wandered along Roncesvalles, drifting toward High Park. Majnoun sniffed at things on the ground, before Hermes led him to an alley behind a delicatessen. There, they found stale bread and a link of Polish sausage. Majnoun ate as much as he wanted, before wandering west to High Park. He was now well past the age of moving quickly and – in warm weather – he rarely went much farther than the park’s perimeter: the playground, the duck pond, the trees near the streetcar roundabout.

  When, at last, he and Hermes sat beneath the boughs of a pine tree, the question he’d avoided forced its way into his thoughts and Majnoun could not hide his anxiety.

  – I can see, said Hermes, that you’d like to ask me something.

  – Can you tell me what love means? asked Majnoun.

  The sun had almost completely set. A crimson line lay just above the trees. The noises of night – subtler but more intriguing than those of day – had come, and the park was lit here and there by street light and moonlight. The shadows deepened.

  – Your bodies are so graceful, said Hermes, and your senses are magnificent. I regret that you’ve been changed, Majnoun. If you were as you’d been, a dog like other dogs, the question you asked would not have occurred to you. You would know the answer already.

  – The word reminds me of Nira, said Majnoun.

  – I understand, said Hermes. So let us make a pact. I’ll answer your question, but, in return, you’ll consider leaving this place.

  – I cannot leave without Nira, said Majnoun.

  – I ask only that you consider it, said Hermes.

  Majnoun agreed, then he sat up straight.

  – What you want to know, Majnoun, is not what love means. It means no one thing and never will. What you want to know is what Nira meant when she used the word. This is more difficult, because Nira’s word is like a long journey taken by one woman alone. She read the word in books, heard it in conversations, talked about it with friends and family, Miguel and you. No other being has encountered the word love as Nira has or used it in quite the same ways, but I can take you along Nira’s path.

  Which the god of translators did, taking Majnoun, in a handful of heartbeats, through every encounter Nira had had with the word love, allowing Majnoun to feel her emotions and know her thoughts each and every time she had heard, thought about or spoken the word: from the tiniest flicker of recognition to the deepest emotion and all points between. As Majnoun’s understanding of Nira’s ‘love’ deepened, so did his distress. Nira was restored to him as if she were there with them, but she was far from him as well, and it was suddenly unbearable to be without her.

  Majnoun could not even keen, so overwhelmed was he by grief. All he could manage was a sigh. He lay down on the rust-coloured pine needles and put his head on the crux made by his paws.

  – There’s no need for you to wait any longer, said Hermes. I will take you to her.

  At that moment, Majnoun would have done anything to see Nira again. And so, trusting in the god of thieves, he gave up his vigil. And his soul travelled through the evening with Hermes as its guide.

  5

  TWO GIFTS

  Had there been a hint in Prince’s poetry, a clear hint, that his was a soul on which a god might safely wager? No, not really. There was no clearly compelling reason to be optimistic about a dog that spent its time composing (and remembering) poems in a language unknown to all but a diminishing handful of dogs. In fact, by the time Prince composed his final poems, he was the only being on earth who could have understood them, the language of his pack having vanished almost as suddenly as it had come into being.

  Running through the grey-eyed dawn

  with last night’s trash in mind,

  the brown dog scuttles

  through fluted gates

  while birds sing on above the world

  about a bit of fallen cheese,

  the shish kebob he ate

  and all the vagaries of plates

  that wait for him at home.

  And yet, there was something. Prince’s wit, his playfulness, was a curious element within him, a glittering depth. It was this, in the end, that the god of thieves had chosen to protect. Prince’s spirit was a kind of quicksilver. The dog was as liable to die happy as it was to die miserable.

  Prince was whelped in Ralston, Alberta, a mutt born to mutts born to mutts. It was impossible to say what breeds he had within him. He was medium-haired, russet-coloured with a white patch that covered his chest. There was almost certainly some golden retriever in him, and perhaps a touch of border collie. Not that his breeding mattered to the family that took him in. It certainly didn’t matter to Kim, the youth who fed him, walked him, chased him across the prairie and hunted gophers with him.

  Prince’s character was partly innate, but it was also tempered by Kim, who encouraged his playfulness and his intelligence, and by Alberta itself, which, in its way, created him in its image. That is, the land allowed Prince to be a dog in a way that Albertan dogs are. For two years, Ralston was his home and his entire domain. He loved everything about it and about his life: from the way the prairie smelled in summer to the taste of his canned dog food, from the startling crack of a .22 rifle to the prospect of chasing down a wounded rodent, from the smell of Kim’s bedroom to the affection he received from the entire family. In every way, the first two years of Prince’s life were idyllic.

  Then came exile. Kim moved from Ralston and took Prince with him. The journey itself was progressively distressing. They left on a cold morning in spring. It was early, but Prince imagined they were going to hunt rabbits and he was thrilled. The atmosphere was strange, though. It was unusually tense, and Prince could feel that Kim’s mother was upset. Still, Kim’s mother was often upset for no reason Prince could see, so he jumped into the car, excitedly sniffing at the air to get a whiff of rodent, ignoring the sound of her weeping and the peculiar stiffness of the family’s demeanour.

  Kim, in a shirt that smelled of soap and motor oil, left the window cracked open, so Prince, sneakin
g the tip of his nose out, could smell the dew-wet ground as the sun burned away the morning. How exhilarating it was! But then, familiar smells gave way to unrecognizable monotony: tar, dust, rock. The world began to look different. The beautiful distances of home become an increasingly oppressive closeness. And it began to seem as if they would never stop to hunt. Kim allowed him out of the car – on a leash – so he could pee in a small patch of lawn somewhere in the middle of a world that smelled of gasoline. They ate, eventually, and slept in the car before setting out again.

  From there, the world grew more and more unknown: its sounds, its odours, the look of it as it flew by. All that Prince loved seemed to have vanished, leaving tall buildings, passing cars, an emptiness disguised as plenitude. They had reached the city.

  Then, the city – which, in Prince’s first days, was constantly bewildering – took Kim away from him as well. Perhaps, if Prince had had time to learn how to navigate the seemingly endless, linked mazes that made up the new world, he might have found Kim again. But he had not had time and, what’s more, he could not understand how Kim could disappear. They had been wandering in a ravine through which a small river ran. There were trees and birds and, fatefully, squirrels. One moment, he and Kim were walking together, the next Prince was chasing a squirrel that ran up a side of the ravine.

  The last he heard of Kim was

  – Prince! Stay! Stay!

  Kim was using his serious voice. In most circumstances, Prince would have returned to him at once. But the squirrel in question was insolent. It positively wanted biting. And then the trees and water, the smell of a world he thought he recognized: these things filled him with pleasure. Just running as he did, as fast as he could, was an exhilaration he was not certain he would ever feel again. It was all a wonderful game! So he’d run up the side of the ravine, where Kim couldn’t easily follow, and then explored strange streets, going among houses that smelled of onions, paint and cooked flesh.

  After a time, he stopped exploring. The game had finished. He began looking for Kim, but a door to one of the houses had opened and a woman had called him in and given him water and biscuits. How long he stayed at this house, he could not have said. He had barked to get out, but she had put him on a leash, taken him out for a walk, and kept him. Days or, perhaps, weeks later, he managed to get away. Naturally, he searched for Kim, but all trace of Kim was gone. Prince had wandered far from the ravine and he was lost in a bewildering maze of streets, bedevilled by sensations that were new and distracting.

  The days that followed were grim. Even in Ralston – of which he’d known almost every inch by feel or smell – Prince could not be certain of human kindness. There’d been people around who’d chase him or throw stones. He’d gotten to know the worst of those and avoided them. But here, in this city, he did not know whom to avoid. So, he avoided all of them until hunger or thirst forced him to approach and beg.

  Were it not that Prince had lost everything, you might say that he was, from here on, fortunate. After a week scrounging in the streets, overturning garbage cans, eating whatever he happened to find on the ground, he was taken in by a couple who treated him well. They fed him, gave him water, allowed him to stay in their home. He was disinclined to stay with them, whenever he remembered Kim, but at least they did not try to hurt him. They allowed him in or out of their house. So he returned to them.

  They weren’t entirely trustworthy, though. It was they who left him overnight in the clinic at King and Shaw.

  The change affected Prince differently than it did any of the other dogs. Or it affected him more, in a rather specific way. Prince began to think about language, almost from the moment the change occurred. Names and naming seemed extraordinary to him and extraordinarily useful. It was an abstract idea, assigning a sound or a cluster of sounds to a thing. The concept wasn’t foreign, of course. He associated the word treat with biscuits. In fact, this very association may have been at the root of his joy in language.

  Whatever influenced his thinking about names and naming, however, he was not one to take anything too seriously. It was not his nature. He was the first creator of puns in the new language, as we’ve seen. But he was also the creator of one-liners and riddles. For instance

  – How is a squirrel like a plastic duck?

  – They both squeak when you bite them.

  or, more metaphysically,

  – Why do cats always smell like cats?

  – Oh look! A squirrel!

  To the casual listener, some aspects of Prince’s jokes will, no doubt, be difficult to appreciate. To begin with, the first of anything is likely to be overwhelming, and these jokes, being the first in the pack’s language, were not so much enjoyed as contemplated and admired. (By all the dogs.) The first one about the squirrel, for instance, seemed to be both true and fanciful, a correlation of things not usually correlated. Then there was the joke’s linguistic mark: the word for ‘squirrel’ was extremely pleasurable to say. (All agreed about this as well.) Finally, there was Prince’s performance. He needed to be heard in order to share the joy he took in language, but none of the other dogs were used to listening to the kinds of things Prince had to say. To hold their attention, Prince’s demeanour, his diction and his delivery all had to be compelling. Although he’d had no previous experience as a raconteur, Prince invented a new manner of storytelling. It was for this that he was loved by those who loved him.

  It was also for this new manner that he was hated. Not only did dogs like Atticus dislike Prince’s perversions of their tongue, but neither could they deal with the implications of Prince. Here was a form of status – given through admiration for Prince’s ability to speak and perform – that was so new it was difficult to think how one might combat it. What status was one to give to a dog whom one admired, but whose talents were so different than the traditional canine ones? What influence on the pack should the strange-speaking dog have? Was he dangerous? None of these questions was easily answered and so, in the end, it was fear that turned the conspirators against Prince.

  His second exile – so strange and bewildering, coming as it did in the midst of a dream – was almost as devastating as the first. Prince could be forgiven for thinking that no world wanted him and, for some time, he suffered from what might be called depression. He wandered about the city finding ways to keep himself and his language – the language whose unofficial guardian he now was – alive. Yet, once again, despite his exile and bereavement, one could legitimately call Prince ‘fortunate.’ In the absence of home, of Kim and of his pack, there was at least one thing he loved, one thing that would be with him always: his pack’s language.

  As it happened, Prince’s relationship to the language of his pack so influenced his outlook and personality that, as his time on earth drew to a close, Apollo grew increasingly uncertain about how the dog’s life would end. This uncertainty affected him – god of plague and poetry – more than it did Hermes. Apollo was annoyed that a poet, of all things, might cost him his wager, but he also found it inconvenient not to know if he would win his younger brother’s servitude. If there was one thing he disliked, it was losing to Hermes.

  – Listen, he said to his brother, this creature has lived most of its life in exile. It’s been unhappy for years. It can’t have anything but an unhappy death. Why don’t we settle our bet right now. If you like, I’ll forget you doubled the penalty. Let’s say you only owe me a year.

  – No, said Hermes.

  – You’re sure? I mean, if I were you, I’d jump at the chance.

  – If you’re so sure, why don’t we triple the bet? asked Hermes. Let’s make it three years.

  – You’re not being serious, answered Apollo. You haven’t been serious from the start. The premise was wrong on the face of it …

  – Are you trying to reason with me? asked Hermes.

  – There’s no need to be insulting, said Apollo. I’m simply pointing out that you weren’t being serious when you made this about the moment
of death. If you asked a human to choose between a wonderful life with a terrible death or a miserable life with a wonderful death, which do you think it would choose? The moment of death is not important.

  Hermes smirked.

  – You are trying to reason with me, he said. In answer to your question: the young would choose an exciting life; the old a happy death. But none of that matters, since you agreed to the terms.

  – You’re right that it doesn’t matter, said Apollo. This dog will die as miserably as the others, and I’ll use you like a goat for a few years.

  Apollo was upset, however. And as happens when the gods are angry, he took it out on a mortal. In this case, Prince. Though the dog was in the last months of its life, though Zeus had forbidden his sons from further interfering in the lives of the dogs, Apollo surreptitiously intervened in Prince’s life. Making use of a handful of sand, he sent down afflictions to make the dog – now in its fifteenth year – suffer.

  Over the years, Prince had explored much of the city, but he knew its middle and south best, preferring, in the end, the stretch of Toronto bounded by Woodbine, Kingston Road, Victoria Park and Lake Ontario. Dividing his time amongst a number of houses and masters, he had come to think of the Beach as home. He knew it intimately and loved some of its pleasures; for instance, going down from Kingston Road into the vegetal secret that was Glen Stewart Park. Then again there was the feel of the lakeshore in winter (the sand stiff) or the smell of it in summer: metal, fish, the oils that humans slathered on themselves.

  Prince knew any number of safe paths through his territory: escape routes, shortcuts, diversions. He could – if he had to – sniff his way from Kingston near Main all the way to the bottom of Neville Park, from Kew Beach east and north to where Willow and Balsam meet. Certain streets he knew better than others, of course. Kingston Road, for instance. What a crooked loveliness! The way it meanders among the senses: strange spices, the humid entrances to Glen Stewart Park, fresh bread, unpredictable exhalations from houses, the staid and chemical smell of concrete buildings, the shimmer of streetlights and stoplights and all the illuminations of evening, the humans with their