“Who are you?” she asked, dead neutral.
“Excuse me,” I said,“I came in from the front, mistook the house—” They are alike here, to the human eye.
She didn’t look scared. Her eyes had opened wide as wide was all, but no fear in them.
I said,“We moved in around a week ago—that new place up the side track.” The dog had a memory of that from previous wanderings.
She nodded. She said, “So who are you looking for? I know most of the people around here.”
That music, the book, started swirling in my brain, it was all I could think of to coin some—really stupid—name. “Uh—Disco Bradbury,” I said.
She looked blank.The intelligent response.
“No, never heard of him.”
“Oh, okay. Well I guess I have it wrong. Guy from school, thought he lived here, meant to look him up—”
She said then, “What’s your name?”
“Scott.” I said it before I could hold it back.
And her dark eyes went even wider as she laughed. “That’s the name of my dog! ”
“Oh boy. Hmm. Should I be destroyed or pleased?”
“Pleased. He’s great. Only—” she looked around now, “he’s gone slightly missing . . .”
“What does he look like?” She told me. “I think I saw a dog like that,” I said. I described it as a dog trotting along one of the paths down the block, causing no trouble.
She said he never did, but still he shouldn’t be out there. But yes, it had happened before.And so I said, if she wanted I would go try to catch him. She said that it was fine and he always comes back, but maybe we could both go. She’d just go change. Or would I like a cup of coffee first, Concha had just made a fresh pot. She laughed again, pretty, and like the way I hadn’t been able to not answer. “Scott,” she couldn’t seem not to say, “You’re just his color scheme, you know. Your tan and your hair.You have great hair.” Then she blushed. It was beautiful.
Would you believe, Concha liked me too. I think so. But I had to make up a whole history of really terrific if slightly forgetful parents to satisfy her. I longed for the old novels I’d somehow read, where you could be a man at fifteen, or younger, and no one expected you to still be attached to a family, collar and leash, for your own protection and happiness.
The dog had loved Rosalie.And she’d loved—loved—him.
Inside one quarter hour I knew that I, whoever, whatever I was, loved Rosalie too. It doesn’t rattle me to say it, even now, with the sun only about an hour off rising for another morning. I loved, I love her. The way only one human can love another. I want to know her. Get to know her really slowly, gently, intensely. I want time—a year, two years. Moment by moment, day by day. Until that perfect season, some unearthly hour—and then. Oh, yes.Time. I want time.Wanted. She took a picture of me on her phone, in the backyard. I didn’t realize she did this until she’d done it. “Is that okay?” she asked me. She blushed again. She showed me the photo and I looked at it with some interest. Could I be objective? Who knows? I was tall, fit and athletic-looking for seventeen, and very tanned, like she said, and my hair was thick and shiny and the exact color of the dog’s coat. And my eyes were dark, like hers.
We went looking for the dog. It was getting hot, but what did we care? We went by the parched lawns and under the palms and through a plaza with some stores. Lots of people. Plenty of them she seemed to know, and she introduced me sometimes, the new guy just moved in. We asked if anyone had seen the dog. Nobody had. (Some surprise, of course they hadn’t, had they? The dog was standing in front of them. Only he wasn’t.)
Finally, we bought some Cokes—or she did, no coins in my pockets. We stood in the shade under a palm, and her eyes went wet. “He’s never been gone so long.”
I took her hand. She let me. “Listen,” I said, “I know he’s okay.”
“How do you know?”
“He is. I just do. Rosalie, he’s fine. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t—sorry, I can’t explain.”
“You can see things, feel things other people can’t? Sort of psychic?” she asked, hopefully.
“If you like.”
She smiled. She trusted me. Her hand in mine. We didn’t let go until some more of the neighborhood came walking by.
I wish I could have stopped time. Just stood forever holding her hand. For the very first time I wondered maybe if this is why I’d—he—had changed. Like—what’s that story—the guy who’s a frog, but when the princess kisses him he becomes a man.
That was only this afternoon. Less than fifteen hours ago.
We went back to the house and ate a sandwich. Rosalie thought she should call someone about the dog. Concha said “Wait ‘til Mr. McCall comes back.” That would be around evening time.
So she and I sat on the back porch.You know, she didn’t really get that uptight about the dog. As if in some way she knew what really happened. We talked. She told me a lot about herself, things obviously the dog hadn’t understood. About her mother, some minor actress, who’d taken herself off to L.A. about three years before and now only sent them postcards. I didn’t hear it all. I just wanted to listen to her voice. I think we slept? Or only I did. Suddenly, there were blue shadows hanging veils along the yard fence. I could hear crickets practicing, then a sprinkler coming on someplace. And a car.
“There’s Dad,” she said.
I ought to leave now. But I didn’t. I said,“Will he mind me being here?”
She said no. And I thought, even if he does, I’m already part of the family. I was very sure, confident. Yet as I waited, standing by then, the shadows were knotting themselves like vines around the wall and trees. Then I knew it—at about 5: 15 AM that same moment when, today, I’d switched from dog to man, tomorrow, that would be the moment I switched back. I turned to frozen stone. I don’t know why it came to me right then. Or why, if I could realize at all, I hadn’t gotten wise to it before. It was—the light, the change of the light. I started to shake. I wanted to take to my heels. Run away fast as I could. From the house, from her, from every other thing. From tomorrow. I was me now. Me. I couldn’t go back.
That was when he came out on the porch, Mr. McCall, with his daughter, the girl I loved.
“So,” he said, glaring at me, his shades pushed up on his head and his eyes squinting against the sidelong sun. “So. Who the hell are you?”
“Dad! He’s called Scott.” Rosalie said, soft and anxious behind him. I couldn’t form words. My brain was ringing.Was I going to bark at him? He’d liked me as a dog.The only other male thing, maybe, he would like, after his wife took off.
“Yeah, I know he said his name is ‘Scott.’ I have that correctly, do I, boy?”
“Yes, sir,” I cautiously managed.
“And that’s the dog’s name, right? Perhaps you think that’s funny, huh?”
“No, sir. It just happens I have the same name as your dog.”
“Okay, feller.Where did you hide the dog?”
That threw me, even in the state I was. I think my mouth fell open. “What?”
“You heard me.You’ve hung around, seen the dog, gotten the name, taken him off. So what—you’re holding my dog to ransom, right?”
“Dad—Scott lives just up—”
“No, he fucking doesn’t.That place is still empty. So what’s his game? The hell with this, I’m calling the cops.”
At which point he felt after his cell phone, found he’d left it in the car or the house, and went a worse red before stalking back inside.
Rosalie came at me like a soft beating storm.
“I’m sorry, Scott—oh, he’s been like this since Mom— look, you’d better go—I’ll talk to him. He’s not really like this—but go—just go.” She was holding onto me, even as she pushed me around the side of the house and out along the path to the front gate. “Look, come back around II—can you? He has to go to sleep early; he has an early start tomorrow.When that happens he takes a pill at night. Come back a
t II? Oh, Scott—maybe—please run!”
I must have said yes. She let go of me. I turned and belted up the avenue, under all the palms in their knots of dying dark blue and dark yellow light. About half a mile on I slowed, and saw I’d taken the exact right direction if I really had been living in that vacant property up the side track. And something in all of that made me double over wheezing with laughter. There was an open space there, and some other type of trees than a palm, with thick leaves. When I stopped laughing I leaned on one of them and cried.Young men cry, men cry. Dogs cry, only you don’t see it. They cry inside.
I printed this out as I wrote it, and there’s hardly any paper left. I better be quick. No paper, no time. The sky out the window has that hollow look comes on before first light.
I met her at the front gate where there was a handy palm to hide me. But the lamps were off in the house and in most places around. Oh, Rosalie. The starlight was sharp as steel and you beautiful in it. I can say that now. I couldn’t say it to you then.
You—she—told me Dad didn’t call the cops. He’d had a malt whisky and calmed down, and said maybe he shouldn’t jump to conclusions. And yes, the house up the hill might have a new family in, now he recalled.Which was something I knew too, by then, having sat quite close to that house until the TV in their front room showed me it was 10:30, and I walked back down to Rosalie.
But after she told me all this, apologizing, so soft and kind to me, I had to go ruin it all. Again, no choice.
“Rosalie, I’m sorry. I didn’t lie about the dog—I never took him—but I did lie about me.” Her wide, night-dark eyes. I said,“Look, I can’t go into it now—but, put it this way, I lost my home in a real strange way—no, just listen, Rosalie, please. That happened. And something—horrible—is going to happen tomorrow, too. No. You can’t do a thing. I can’t. And I can’t—I don’t even know how to say—but oh God, I’m scared, Rosalie, I’m so damned scared.” And then she put her arms—your arms—around me and held me. I can’t remember what we said.
I guess it’s been said all over the earth, a billion trillion times and more, one human to another. Then we went inside, quiet and careful of her father, and Concha, passing their bedrooms like shadows. Rosalie’s room was at the back and there was one lamp turned way down.You trusted me fully and you could. You—knew—I wouldn’t harm you, not in any way. I’d have given my life for you. And somehow you saw that. We didn’t have the love we’d had when I was him. But now—the love two people can have, sometimes. If only for twenty-four hours. That kind of a love doesn’t always have to be tried and proven. We didn’t even kiss. Just held each other a while, like outside.
In the end—it was just on midnight—she lay down on the bed. She was too worn out. But I went to her computer, like she told me I could. I said, didn’t I, I’d try and explain it all, clear and easy, so you’d understand. But that’s been so hard, Rosalie, because I don’t understand. That’s why I couldn’t say it face to face. All I know is—around 5: 15 tomorrow, I’ll change again. I’ll go back. I’ll be your golden dog. No choice, no chance. I should run—before you see it happen . I don’t know what you’ll do, how it’ll affect you.
You’ll scream maybe, the world disintegrating for you. It could make you insane, break you in pieces, and your dad will say I played some trick, drugs maybe, then chickened out and returned the dog, who then will be me.
But I can’t leave you. It’s too late. I have to print out this final page. And I’m so tired I can barely see—except I can see you. Sleeping, silent, your lovely hair spilled on the pillow like the core of night just left behind. I want to look at you until my eyes close. Until the end.
I love you, Rosalie. I always will. I think that is what worked the crazy spell on me. Like in the story. Even though we never kissed. I love you, Rosalie. Good-bye.
When I finish reading those papers I sit awhile, there in the cab of the pickup.
Then I get out and go around, and he’s just laying there, the dog. But his eyes are open. I say, “Scott, you wanna come in front with me? I’d like your company.”
For a minute he doesn’t move. Then he pulls himself up, slow, like an old dog does. Then he jumps out and comes around, and we both get up in the cab.
“Guess I’ll sleep here tonight,” I say. “Done it before. Save myself a pocketful of dollars. You okay with that? Then tomorrow we’ll take those tables on to Santa Zora.”
He sits, looking out at the desert, the highway and the hot stars. Then he lies along the seat. I reached out and touched him, smoothed his forehead. After awhile he shut his eyes.
“I don’t know if you can understand me,” I say. “Most the time I don’t think anyone understands anyone else that much. But I’d like your company, if you’d care to stay. I’m just a delivery man; we’ll eat regular. We can work something out, see how we go. Let’s sleep now.”
He did sleep, of course. An animal always can, even when they hurt real bad. It’s a gift we lost, most of us, when we climbed up on our hind legs and started to think about every darn thing.
When Della left me she sat in our kitchen with me for hours and cried her heart out. Said she’d fallen for another guy, couldn’t stay. I never cried until she was good and gone. That was close on five years ago. When we first met, we used to like that song. We were younger then and the song popular, though now you don’t often hear it. I mean the song they played on the radio when I saw Scott by the road.
I guess he must’ve run away. Or they chased him away. His Rosalie hysterical and sobbing—God knows, like he said, what she’d seen happen when he altered back. And her father threatening, too shit-scared maybe even to try reading what Scott wrote on the computer. Just wiped it. Yet McCall kept the printout. Why’s that? Like he had to pass it on, like it was some curse in runes. And the photographs. Scott as a young dog. Scott as a young man. They say it’s around five years, don’t they, an animal year to a human one. Three and a half as a dog must be seventeen for a man. Left to himself now, the dog will live a decent stretch, until he’s twelve maybe, fourteen—in his 60s, 70s. But dogs can die of grief. Birds do, too. Even cats sometimes do. Even people.
He slept and I watched the stars rotating slow over the sky, like they show you in the planetarium. And the words of that song went on and on through my head. “The Dog-Catcher’s Song.” It was kind of like that other one, way back, “The Wichita Linesman,” the guy fixing the phone lines for the county, and all he can think of is the woman he needs. And the Dog-Catcher is the same. He says, this ain’t love to catch and shut them in the pound. But now she’s left him, his heart’s in the pound, even though he’s running free. Like Scott and me. Hearts shut in the pound. No, this ain’t love.
MORTAL MIX-UP
Laura Resnick
I awoke to the feel of sunlight gently kissing my face, bathing me in the warm glow of morning rays.
That was my first clue that something was wrong.
Seeking the safety of darkness, the reassuring cloak of shadow and gloom, I leapt from the bed and—
Wait a minute . . .
Bed? Bed!
“Where’s my coffin?” I cried.
I looked around in frantic confusion. I didn’t recognize anything I saw. The very place itself was completely foreign to me. I was in a room of modest proportions, with purple walls, one large window—through which sunlight blazed—and a few pieces of generic furniture that were mostly hidden beneath a bewildering profusion of rumpled clothes, scattered magazines, stuffed animals, jewelry, cosmetics, and personal electronic devices—a cell phone, an MP3 player, a netbook, a GPS device, and a camera.
There was a dresser, with several of its drawers open and clothes spilling out of them. Atop the dresser there were candles, several little statues, a mirror, a number of framed photographs, more jewelry, some weeds, a bowl of ashes (ashes?), a few books, and a cowbell. The large piece of furniture I was crouching behind as I hid from the terminal rays of the sun was . . . a twin bed, I
realized. Moments ago, I had been asleep in it.
I was alone in a stranger’s bedroom with no memory of how I had gotten here and no idea what I was doing here.
And it was daylight. I was trapped. Wherever I was, it was too late to return now to the safety of my lair and the comfort of my coffin. I would have to wait until nightfall to leave this unfamiliar room and make my way home.
Unless . . . unless I was a prisoner here? Wherever “here” was. Had I been abducted? Was I in danger from something besides the sunlight?
I thought back to the last thing I could remember before waking up in this messy and (frankly) rather garish bedroom. My current paramour César and I had shared a quick bite in an alley next to a club in the East Village. I had become lightheaded soon afterwards, since we’d had the misfortune to eat someone who was exceedingly drunk. This happens all too often, since the inebriated are far more likely than the sober to stumble off alone in the dark and enter the immortal embrace of a hungry stranger. However, at least someone who’s pissed as a newt is unlikely to remember what happened, or even to remember meeting us; this is convenient, since it avoids the need for awkward explanations, especially if we meet again.
In any case, this woman had been so drunk that I didn’t feel very good after feeding from her. I had decided to return to my coffin while the night was still young—and to go there alone, to César’s flatteringly evident disappointment—to sleep it off.
Was our prey so drunk that her blood made me unable to remember what had happened thereafter?
I distinctly recalled going back to my comfortable lair in the subterranean tunnels beneath a Columbia University dormitory (warm in the winter, decently ventilated in the summer, and always plenty to eat if I don’t feel like venturing far from home). Once there, I had relaxed for a while by watching my DVD of Burlesque (Cher, that great diva, is one of the few mortals I’d consider turning, if we ever meet); but the lightheadedness I’d felt ever since consuming that clubber turned into limb-heavy fatigue, and I soon retired to my coffin, where I sank into slumber.
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