by Meg Rosoff
Jonathan had once given Dante a Kong stuffed with kibble and peanut butter. The dog had emptied it in under a minute and then kicked it under the couch with what had looked to him like contempt.
He shook his head sadly. ‘A Kong won’t help. Something’s missing from their lives.’
‘Could you be more specific?’
Jonathan looked downcast. ‘Not really.’
They both stared at the dogs.
Jonathan continued. ‘I have other concerns. What if Dante’s boredom reaches a peak and then one day, suddenly and for no particular reason, he takes a dislike to some small child and lunges, ripping its face off? And someone films it on their phone and it goes viral and there’s a massive lawsuit and it makes the cover of New York Magazine. I’d probably end up in jail and they’d make an example of Dante. You couldn’t really blame him, but he’d probably have to be put down.’
She looked at him appraisingly. ‘Has he ever ripped anyone’s face off before?’
‘Of course not!’ Jonathan felt outraged at the suggestion. ‘But that doesn’t mean he never will. The nature of the other is unknowable.’
Dr Clare considered Dante. ‘I’m a fairly good judge of dogs,’ she said at last. ‘And he doesn’t look as if he’d rip the face off a child.’
Jonathan slumped. ‘I don’t think you get it.’
‘Possibly not. I think, however, that you might stop worrying about the what-ifs.’
Jonathan said nothing for a long moment. ‘What if he hates his life?’
The vet peered at him. ‘The good thing about dogs is that they tend not to be unhappy without cause.’
‘Do you have a dog, Dr Clare?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you ever get a sense that your dog’s life isn’t entirely satisfactory?’
She hesitated. ‘Well . . . my dog doesn’t love being left alone so I try to bring her to work when I can. We had beautiful parks in my London neighbourhood and I suppose she misses them. I miss them too.’ The vet looked thoughtful. ‘It’s true that New York isn’t an ideal environment for dogs but the compensations are pretty special. It’s not perfect, but we all adapt.’
‘Do we?’ Jonathan frowned. ‘Maybe we just think we adapt. Maybe your dog loved London and all the beautiful parks full of roses and nannies and, and . . .’ He searched for something else English parks might be full of.
‘Ducks,’ she said. ‘All different types. And herons.’
‘OK, ducks. Maybe she misses all that, looks out at the steel and glass and concrete and feels sad all the time. Maybe we twist ourselves into a semblance of conformity so everyone thinks we’ve adapted, when in fact all we’ve done is make the best of an untenable situation. Maybe we shouldn’t be living this way, without grass and trees and ducks, always under pressure, always trying to catch up, never enough time or energy for the things we love, if we can even remember what those things are. Maybe that’s true of dogs as well as humans. Maybe it’s all just one big lie we tell ourselves.’
Dr Clare stared, her eyes wide.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jonathan said, with dignity. ‘I won’t take up any more of your time.’
‘I understand what you’re saying.’ She struggled to salvage her professional bearing. ‘But we do the best we can. Unless you’re planning to move to London or Montana, you and your dogs will have to make the best of it.’
Jonathan laughed, bitterly. ‘And that’s your answer?’
‘I’m afraid it’s the best I can do.’ She shook her head and turned back to her computer. ‘Do feel free to contact the office, Mr Trefoil, if you have any further concerns.’
‘Jonathan.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Please call me Jonathan.’
She sighed. ‘Do feel free to contact the office, Jonathan, if you have any further concerns.’
Only not strange abstract concerns like these, Jonathan thought. Not concerns that can’t be dealt with by a vet. You want a broken leg, Dr Vet. Or a gash that can be sewn up. Or a twisted gut. Or a limp.
Not angst or ennui. Not canine weltschmerz.
Jonathan paid the bill, wondering why all the words for his dogs’ conditions existed only in foreign languages. Was the English language so uninterested in descriptions of spiritual disquiet? Was the Anglo-American psyche too indifferent even to contemplate states of philosophical dismay? In English you had to say something woolly like ‘I don’t feel quite like myself.’ Or ‘I have a vague sense that the world is not as it should be.’ Or, simply, ‘I’m depressed.’ As opposed to weltschmerz, a word which precisely described the deep psychic unease caused by a realization that the world is a terrible place, shot through with an incurably flawed atmosphere of cruelty incompatible with human (or canine) psychological wellbeing.
In English you could go to the doctor, disappointed beyond human endurance at the state of reality, and all you could say to describe your state of mind was ‘I feel low.’ What a totally crap language.
He couldn’t figure out why Allegra had recommended Dr Clare so highly. She seemed to care nothing for the inner life of his dogs. How typically English to shun psychological insight in favour of a stiff upper lip. ‘We adapt,’ she’d said. But do we? Do we really, Dr Vet? Do we adapt to a relentlessly hostile environment from which all human comfort has been leached?
He found himself increasingly indignant. What kind of doctor had no interest in the mind-body problem? He, a rank amateur in the pet-owning hierarchy, could read infinite complexities in those doggy eyes. Perhaps dogs lacked the intellect to invent dumdum bullets and destroy the oceans, but Jonathan wasn’t at all convinced that this made them psychologically inferior to, or less complex than, humans.
He left the vet’s and headed back home with his dogs. A young violinist stood on the street corner playing something that he vaguely recognized and he stopped to listen. She had a sign on her open violin case that read, ‘Saving up for Juilliard.’
Jonathan looked at Dante and Sissy, who looked back at him, expectant. In terms of musical talent, humans definitely outperformed dogs, though he wondered where he would be on a scale that included this girl at the top and, say, razor clams near the bottom. He and the dogs would be somewhere in between, perhaps not as far apart as he might hope.
He imagined that clams led quite contented lives, while this poor girl had to practise for thousands of hours, striving day after day to play tunes on a bizarre construction of wood and stretched sheep gut for the entertainment of a jaded audience, many of whom surreptitiously dozed. Jonathan reached into his pocket and dumped all his change into her violin case. Clams might be the wiser choice, if choice were available. She nodded her thanks and launched into an elegant arpeggio as he walked on with his dogs, wondering what it might feel like to live buried in wet sand.
5
The next morning he discovered that someone had eaten his mail. Jonathan always left it on the shelf by the front door, but now it was gone, with the exception of the tiny remnants of his payslip poking out from under a chair. His newspaper looked unmolested but leafing through he found that the sports section was missing. When the dogs ran up to greet him, Jonathan thought he could detect traces of papier mâché around the corners of Dante’s mouth. An untouched circular from Privileged Pets, a virtual VIP club for city dogs, leant at a tidy angle to the wall as if someone had placed it there on purpose. As a joke? Jonathan stared at Dante, who seemed intent on the view outside the window.
With a sigh, he poured himself a cup of yesterday’s coffee, added milk and drank it cold before snapping on leashes for the morning walk and trotting down three flights of stairs.
It was one of the last cold days of winter, when the temperature plummets and no one’s wearing the right clothes, but at least it wasn’t raining. At the dog run, he huddled down on a bench and rubbed his hands together while the dogs stood stock still, heads lowered, gazing at him. Could this possibly be normal dog behaviour? Why weren’t they frolicking? He wondered
if the dogs knew how much he had to accomplish today. To pass the time, he pulled out a pencil and notebook and began sketching out a new chapter for his comic-novel masterpiece, The New York Inferno, in which a Border collie spirit-guide accompanies a young poet through the nine circles of the New York underworld. Jonathan glanced at his own Dante, catching the slight curl of the lip, the one ear cocked, thinking how perfect he would be for the job of shepherding a clueless tourist such as himself through hell.
Back at home, he prepared breakfast for the dogs, who ate and then wandered over to their beds to lie down, Sissy with a soft spaniel sigh, Dante with a slow shake of his head. Jonathan wondered if they went through his emails when he was at work. Or read the mail before they ate it. He gave each of them a rawhide bone and set off on his bike for work.
Jonathan’s bicycle was the most expensive thing he owned. It had a frame of ultralight defence-grade carbon steel, an integrated computer for speed and cadence stats and he lived in fear of it being stolen out from under him. The only way to solve this was by moving too fast to be caught and never letting it out of his sight.
The ride to work took him through a hundred shortcuts and evasions. He felt like an Olympic skier in the giant slalom; speeding along, head low, steering by imperceptible shifts of thought. It was his goal never to slow down, never to stop, and when at last he pulled up with an exaggerated flourish in front of Comrade, having evaded taxis, pedestrians, death and injury in a thousand different forms, he felt as clear and fleet as a beam of light.
He carried his bike up two flights of stairs and locked it to the railing on the landing.
A girl in very tight jeans and a tiny T-shirt passed him on her way in. ‘Hey, Jonathan.’
‘Hey, Shay.’ Shay was the boss’s assistant.
‘Cool lock,’ she said, balancing her tray of coffees on one upraised palm, like a comedy Italian waiter.
‘Thanks,’ he said, pleased that she’d noticed. ‘It’s a Skylock. Smartphone activated. Wanna see how it works?’
‘No,’ she said, and twirled away.
His carbon-soled road shoes clopped across the floor donkey-style, just in case anyone hadn’t noticed that he was the last one in this morning. In the men’s room he changed from Italian team Lycra into jeans, a T-shirt and a 1960s lemon alpaca and wool Brooks Brothers cardigan from Downtown Vintage. He suspected his grandfather had owned hundreds of sweaters like this and felt annoyed at his parents for making him buy them all back from pretentious boutiques at inflated prices.
‘Meeting at three,’ Shay reminded him, entering Ed’s office and setting the coffees on the desk with a little pirouette.
Shay liaised with Ed (founder, owner and executive director of Comrade) during lunch hour and the noises that emerged from the executive boardroom (locked) inspired a deep melancholy in the rest of the staff. The fact that Ed, not yet thirty, owned a loft in Williamsburg and drove a 1972 silver-blue Mercedes 280 SL had already decimated office morale, but noisy sex with his assistant at work was the last straw – a daily reminder of the life that most of his employees would never lead. Not that any of them particularly wanted to have sex in the boardroom with Ed.
Comrade’s offices were situated in a second-floor loft that had once been a lighting showroom. During renovations, the insulated drop-foam ceilings had been removed to reveal wooden beams, plasterboard was ripped right back to bare brick walls and cracked 1950s linoleum revealed wide oak floorboards. It would have looked nice just like that, but in order to convince clients that Comrade was a highly creative organization, Ed purchased an entire communist-era Russian railway station at auction – from signal board to ticket office – and had it installed in the Tribeca loft. The concept almost worked but not quite, spawning too many jokes about Siberia and the inevitable comparisons between Ed and Stalin. The huge Eastern Bloc station clock ticked so loudly, it drove one employee to smash it to smithereens with an industrial-size stapler one quiet Sunday. She left a note referencing rage and despair and never returned to collect the twenty-two china rabbits she kept on her desk.
Work tables at Comrade were arranged more or less at random to give the place a flavour of openness and spontaneity, although openness was refuted by cubicle walls desperately improvised out of piles of books, an antique hat stand, office easels and a shower curtain attached to a metal clothing rail.
Jonathan was responsible for Broadway Depot, Comrade’s most lucrative account. They advertised daily specials in local newspapers all over the city and in online banners and pop-ups that required a constant river of mindbendingly dull copy with headlines like ‘20% off all pens!’ and ‘Printer paper, cheapest in town!’
It was the kind of writing designed to drive anyone insane. Jonathan daily attempted to craft headlines that were just a bit wittier than the status quo and, every day, Broadway Depot rejected them. To be more specific, Louise Crimple, his opposite number at Broadway Depot, rejected them.
‘Hi, Johnny. All good?’
‘Great, Louise.’ Wait for it.
‘I need to wrongside yesterday’s headlines. Reverse the buy-sell pendulum. Avoid disasterfication.’
Disasterfication? ‘You don’t like my headlines?’
‘Love ’em! But I’m thinking we cul-de-sac yesterday’s work for the immediate now? No blamestorming.’
He was used to this. ‘You don’t like my headlines.’
‘Praise for ideation, Jonathan.’
‘I’ll redo them.’
‘Win-win! Up, up and away!’
Louise was infinitely enthusiastic and not at all unattractive, but she had a broken wind-up toy for a brain, a passion for triple-speak and the imagination of a sink plug, something Broadway Depot did not sell.
Not that his ads were great, or world-changing, but they were marginally better than ‘Pens: $2.99 today only!’ He’d argued passionately over the phone, on email and in person with Louise Crimple that the eternal truths embedded in his version of headlines suggested (on some subliminal level) that Broadway Depot understood consumers’ deep emotional relationship with office supplies. That it built brand loyalty and repeat business on top of sales, improving the lives of both BD employees and its customers. But his arguments fell on deaf ears. Louise was not interested in abstractions.
‘No one relationships a pen,’ she said with the world’s brightest smile. ‘It runs out, you sequence up. End of!’
Jonathan hated the expression ‘end of’. He hated all of her expressions. Once, he took her out to lunch and tried to explain the ties that writers and artists had with pens, how writing with a gel pen felt like slipping around in mud or transferring lines straight from brain to page, while a ballpoint indicated a frugal no-frills personality, someone you’d barely want to know. At the Vietnamese fusion restaurant (carefully chosen for its subtle flavours and textures), Louise ordered a steak well done, then gazed at him so intently and for so long, he had to check to make sure his face hadn’t turned into a macaroon.
‘Louise,’ he finally said, doing his best not to shout. ‘Aren’t you bored? Aren’t you bored to death with your crappy job at this crappy company doing crappy ads day after boring crappy day?’
She listened, thought for a moment, then met his gaze with her own beautiful blank grey eyes. ‘How about cake? Are you desserting?’
Don’t tempt me, he thought.
Raw data for today’s Broadway Depot ads pinged on to his desktop and he opened the file. Plastic folders 30% off, one day only! Just in! Inkjet cartridges all the way from China! A special on executive chairs! High- or low-back! Filing cabinets in five new designer shades! (When was the last time any human being had bought a filing cabinet?) The list went on. He couldn’t quite bring himself to read it, so he went straight to the dashboard. His first job: update the website from which each store printed its fliers. He was trusted enough to enter snappy headlines direct to the files without approval from a higher authority, so he did: ‘EXECUTIVE CHAIR DEAL OF THE DAY! DON’T YOUR
BUTTOCKS DESERVE THE VERY BEST?’ and ‘YOUR USELESS LIFE-WASTER REPORT LOOKS BETTER IN A 20% OFF PLASTIC FOLDER!’
With a sigh of regret he erased the headlines and set to work. At noon precisely, Max came in from a shoot and they headed out to lunch.
Few Comrade employees left the office for lunch. Many brought edamame hummus in tiffin tins and ate it with home-style organic pitta bread and beetroot coleslaw garnished with rice vinegar. Some had pear and pomegranate salads or salmon-skin hand rolls in elaborately folded Japanese containers delivered from OriGami. Jonathan and Max ate gigantic roast-beef sandwiches with mustard on white bread bought from the last unreconstructed deli in Tribeca. They dined separately at adjacent desks, Max emailing Jonathan websites like befilthy.com and dirtymoms4U under the subject ‘Possible Wives’ while Jonathan sent back pictures from 1950s pulp fiction with titles like Gay Blade and Fanny’s Hill.
They could trace the banter back fifteen years or more, when an eight-year-old Max renamed himself Neo (after The Matrix, a film he was not allowed to watch and so committed entirely, frame by frame, to memory) while Jonathan took on Solar, Man of the Atom, as his alter ego. With whatever money the boys had, they bought comics, and when they ran out of money they created their own: Maxman, starring a superhero who vanquished evil and always got the babe, with his sidekick, Jay Solar, a muscled-up ex-con with a vendetta against the Russian tattooist who’d ruined his face. Solar’s motto was Gazoom! Jonathan couldn’t remember why.
Living two doors apart in leafy Larchmont, the friends spent so much time together that Max’s mother habitually set the table for five, six if James (CEO ex officio of Maxman Enterprises) joined them. Max’s mother served macaroni and cheese and called them Heckle and Jeckle, while Jonathan’s parents tutted and wished their comic-obsessed sons would do something normal like play basketball or read Playboy.