Fifteen Dogs

by André Alexis

  To think that so necessary a thing could pass from the world so completely!

  Was there nothing he could do to save it? Was there no way to pass it on? As he considered what might be done, Prince began to regret his attitude toward human language. He had avoided foreign languages, so that they would not influence his own. But had he learned another language, he might now have passed on his own. He had been selfish in trying to keep his language pure; better it had been influenced by another tongue than that it disappear altogether.

  Though these thoughts brought him a real regret, Prince did not despair. He thought of what he had endured to reach the home he now had and he drew inspiration from what had been, in effect, a victory over blindness. It seemed to him that, frail though he was, it might not be too late, that he was perhaps fated to pass his work on to these people. That is why, in an heroic effort to preserve his language, Prince began to speak his poems to the woman. Whenever he could feel her presence or hear her voice, he would begin reciting.

  – Grrr-ee arrr err oh uh ai

  Gr-ee yurr ih aw yen grih yoo ayairrr …

  No surprise: the woman took the sounds Prince made for the grumblings of an old and frail dog. She would pet him or hug him or scratch him behind the ears whenever he spoke. Prince found this distracting, but he persisted, reciting the same poem over and over, waiting for her to recite it back to him.

  The more Prince did this, the more the woman tried to comfort him, because it did sound as if he were complaining about something. For one thing, like most poets, Prince’s way of reciting his work was eccentric. He would sit up, trying to face the woman. Then, staying as still as he could, he would recite the first line, pause, then recite the second line, and so on. This in itself was strange for the woman. It would have been strange for any human who was not a poet.

  – Are you okay, Elvis?

  she’d ask, but as Prince had no idea what she was saying, he would simply carry on. He carried on until, eventually, it occurred to the woman that he was neither grumbling nor choking, but that he was doing something. In fact, after a week, she thought she recognized a pattern to his growls.

  – Elvis isn’t growling, she said to one of her sons. He’s singing or something.

  Her son, however, would have none of it.

  – Mom, he’s old and his mind’s going, that’s all.

  – I suppose you’re right, she said.

  But she was not convinced and, one day, as a kind of lark, she repeated Prince’s grumblings back at him. Prince immediately stopped and barked happily. He repeated the passage she had repeated to him. And again, the woman spoke (poorly and with a strange accent, but still …) a few lines of his verse.

  – Grrr-ee arrr err oh uh ai

  Gr-ee yurr ih aw yen grih yoo ayairrr …

  Here was a real breakthrough. Prince was profoundly grateful. It seemed to him that a great boundary had been crossed. But Apollo, ever implacable, was not finished with him. The woman’s version of his verse was the last thing Prince heard on earth. He then became stone deaf. He could not even hear himself, feeling only the vibrations his body produced when he tried to make a sound. This was a devastation. The world and all his versions of the world were taken away from him at once.

  Prince was not one to lose hope, but now hope abandoned him. He was alone in endless grey silence, his sense of smell and balance the only acute senses left to him. Now and then, he would be picked up by one of the men and put somewhere. This was the most disconcerting thing of all. Without warning, he would be at someone’s mercy, in someone’s arms. It helped that he could recognize the men by their smell, but it did not help much. Tired, old, deaf and blind, Prince knew his time had come and he tried to meet his fate with as much dignity as he could muster.

  He stopped eating and drank little. He retreated into the depths of himself and waited for a death that did not take long. One morning, he was picked up by the woman. He could feel her emotion. They were going somewhere, but Prince was too weak to mind. Outside, he felt the air on his muzzle. The lake came to him, its presence like a long-forgotten dream. It was a consolation. Then they were travelling in a car, a sensation that reminded him of Kim, and that too was consoling. And Prince allowed himself to be consoled, his mood little influenced by the smells of the veterinary clinic, though he knew this – the smell of soap, chemicals, other animals – was almost certainly the end.

  One would have said, just before Prince died, that Apollo had won his bet, that none of the dogs had died happy, that they had died as miserably or more so than humans did. Lying quietly on a metal table, too tired to object, Prince was despondent about the loss of his language. But then, as those around him went about the business of killing, one of his last poems returned to him. He heard it in his mind as if someone were reciting it, almost as if it were not his at all. At that exact moment it struck him again how beautiful his language was. Certainly, if he was the last of his pack, it was sad that no creature alive knew it. But how wonderful that he – unexceptional though he had been – had been allowed to know it as deeply as he had. He had not explored all of its depths, but he had seen them. And so it occurred to Prince that he had been given a great gift. More: it was a gift that could not be destroyed. Somewhere, within some other being, his beautiful language existed as a possibility, perhaps as a seed. It would flower again. He was certain of it and the certainty was wonderful.

  And so, against all expectations, Prince’s spirits soared.

  In a word, he was happy as death came for him at last.

  As Prince lay dying, Apollo and Hermes were once again at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern.

  Speaking of the dog, Apollo said

  – All right. I concede. The creature dies happy. It’s all been very instructive.

  – No, no, said Hermes. Two years of servitude, that will be instructive.

  – You do remember that you owed me ten, don’t you? This just brings it down a little.

  – My luck’s changed, said Hermes. I can feel it.

  – You’re right about it being luck, said Apollo.

  And he protested, theatrically, that the wager had been unfair. His protests were not serious, however. Yes, it annoyed him that he had been cruel to one of his own, that a poet should be the reason for this loss to his brother, but, really, it was a matter of pure chance who died happy and who did not. Which is why, of course, he and Hermes had bet on the outcome in the first place.

  The bartender, a devout young woman, approached, her head bowed, unable to look at the gods directly.

  – Is there anything I can get for you? she asked. Anything at all? I would be honoured.

  – I like this Labatt’s, said Apollo. Give me another.

  – You like it? said Hermes. It’s a waste of perfectly good water.

  – Philistine! said Apollo.

  The brothers laughed. The bartender went off to get a Blue.

  – It would have been different if we’d given cats this so-called intelligence, said Apollo.

  – It would have been exactly the same, said Hermes. What we should have done was give a human the intelligence and capacities of a dog.

  – I’m tired of this business, answered Apollo. Let’s talk about something else.

  For a moment, they talked about Olympian matters, but then Apollo said

  – I wonder what would happen if we gave one of these creatures our language?

  – Our language? said Hermes. No mortal could learn so many shades of silence.

  – I didn’t say teach, said Apollo. I said give.

  – You’ve been down here too long, answered Hermes. Let’s go home. Hephaestus owes me some of his winnings.

  – You go, said Apollo. I’ll stay a little longer.

  +

  The sky was a light red as Hermes left the Wheat Sheaf. A car stopped, blasting music so loud that its chassis shivered as it idled at the corner of King and Bathurst, waiting for the lights to change. Inside, the driver was immobile, save for t
he index finger of his right hand, which tapped the steering wheel in time to the beat.

  What was there to say about these creatures, really? He knew almost infinitely more than did the man at the wheel. He knew more about him than the man knew about himself. He knew more about every human, insect and animal the man would ever come in contact with. Beyond knowledge, he also possessed power no mortal could fathom. Had he wished, he could have crushed the car, or the city block on which it stood. Had he wished, he could have broken one of the man’s fingers or torn a single hair from one of his eyebrows. He could have granted the man everything he wanted or taken everything from him. For all the creature’s ‘humanity’ or ‘dignity’ or whatever it was they congratulated themselves on possessing, the man in the car was an almost insignificant aspect of the god’s being.

  And yet, a divide existed between them, one that the god could not breach, despite his power, knowledge and subtlety: death. On one side, the immortals. On the other, these beings. He could no more understand what it was to live with death than they could what it was to exist without it. It was this difference that fascinated him and kept him coming back to earth. It was at the heart of the gods’ secret love for mortals. Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair. Being one of those who longed for death, Hermes found the earth and all its mortals fascinating, perhaps even at times worthy of the depths he allowed himself to feel for them. It is this, of course, this ‘feeling’ whose nature surpasses language or human understanding, that kept Hermes – that kept all the gods – from wiping mortals out.

  On the one hand, power; on the other, love.

  The light changed. The car drove off, and Hermes, imperceptible, rose above the city. To the south, the lake was a light mauve. The clouds above the water were airy and white. Hermes’s thoughts turned to Prince. How odd that such a perceptive creature had imagined the death of a language would mean the death of its poetry. For the immortals, all true poetry existed in an eternal present, eternally new, its language undying. Having once been uttered, Prince’s verse would live forever. At the thought of the dog, Hermes was pleased. And, feeling magnanimous, the god of translators rewarded Prince for his artistry and his unwitting service.

  Prince’s soul, which had almost entirely extricated itself from the world, returned briefly to consciousness. He was in a stretch of green and ochre prairie that smelled of Ralston. He was young again, and how thrilling it was to have his senses alert and vivid. It was a late afternoon in summer, somewhere around four o’clock. The sun had just begun to cede its ground to darkness. In the distance were the yards behind the houses on Cawnpore Crescent. He could smell the spore of a gopher, urine, pine gum, dust and the burning flesh of lamb that wafted toward him from god knows where.

  Suddenly, he heard a voice that he loved.

  – Here, Prince! Here, boy!

  It was Kim, the only human whose name he had ever bothered to keep. Prince could see him in the distance, Kim’s silhouette unmistakable for any other. And Prince’s soul was filled with joy. He ran to Kim as he always did: with abandon, bounding over the prairie. This time, though, he ran having caught every nuance in Kim’s voice, understanding him fully.

  In his final moment on earth, Prince loved and knew that he was loved in return.

  Toronto, 2013

  Quincunx 2

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The poems in Fifteen Dogs are written in a genre invented by François Caradec for the OULIPO. It was invented after François Le Lionnais, a founder of the group, wondered if it were possible to write poetry that has meaning for both humans and animals. In Fifteen Dogs, each poem is what Caradec called a ‘Poem for a dog.’ That is, in each poem the name of a dog will be audible – to the listener or to the dog – if the poem is said aloud, though the name is not legible. Here is an example by Harry Mathews. It is a poem written for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, Flush:

  My Mistress never slights me

  When taking outdoor tea

  She brings sweet cake

  For her sweet sake

  Rough, luscious bones for me.

  In Mathews’s poem, between the words rough and luscious, the name Flush can be heard. In the same way, each of the poems in Fifteen Dogs contains one of the dogs’ names.

  The poem containing the name ‘Prince’ was written by Kim Maltman:

  Longing to be sprayed (the green snake

  writhing in his master’s hand),

  back and forth into that stream –

  jump, rinse: coat slick with soap.

  As well, Kim collaborated on the writing of two other poems (‘Ronaldinho’ and ‘Lydia’) and edited all fifteen ‘poems for a dog.’

  The song Majnoun hears beside High Park is based on lines written by Roo Borson.

  Prince’s metaphysical ‘riddle’ was suggested by Alex Pugsley.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness,Ingrid and the Wolf, and, most recently, Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

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