Cosmic Crust

by Alex Sherman

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  Bhu walked his dog five times a day and this demanded his full attention. An overweight bulldog crossbreed, she spent much of her time splayed sluglike on a small leopard-print pillow, breathing in and out in shallow, gulping snorts. Always he needed to be careful not to overexert her when he lifted her onto the wheeled prosthesis that supported her back legs.

  Her name was Lucy.

  There was no need to keep her leashed as she squeaked up and down the cracked sidewalk, though Bhu kept a vigilant watch for the black dogs that roamed his street, aggressive strays that worked in packs and barked with intelligent diction. They stood in the grass of vacant lots between boarded buildings, in the shadowed awnings of long-shuttered storefronts. They followed Lucy with their eyes and muzzles as she worked her way to a place that suited her refined olfactory palate—never the same place twice—where she relieved herself, at length, and with difficulty.

  Bhu had to make sure that the door closed securely. Sometimes it hung open, and Bhu didn’t feel safe knowing anyone—or even the dogs—could walk right in.

  Not only a picky walker, Lucy was also a picky eater. Her tastes narrowed when her age hit double digits and most of her teeth fell out. She never lost weight, even when she refused to eat for days at a time. She only reliably ate ground beef that Bhu bought in five-pound packs at escalating prices from the last remaining supermarket in a five-mile radius. He chopped it with a wooden spatula in a badly dented pan. Lucy watched from her pillow, eyes and nose wet with tears and mucus, slimy as something dredged from an ocean trench.

  The beef gave off no odor; instead the kitchen smelled perpetually of the wax that he used to make candles in case the power went out.

  Bhu lived on the first floor of a now mostly-empty co-op. The last thing the super told him, before she went on an indefinite sabbatical, was that Bhu could take any apartment that he wanted, if it was empty. Eventually he relocated to a place on the first floor because he got sick of carrying Lucy up and down the stairs. No one else lived on the first floor. All the shuffling old ladies who took great care to avoid him went up and down the stairs without complaint.

  Most of the lights in the hall had burned out. Every time Bhu changed one, another would go dark the next day.

  Bhu’s cough worsened. Five-foot-two and always wiry, his cheeks hollowed and his hair fell out in tufts. Bhu often ran his fingers along a patchy goatee which was the only place that his facial hair grew at all, reduced to the essentials, much like his life. Work, sustenance, personal hygiene. The care and comfort of Lucy, above all. He spoke to her at length about his days, his thoughts, the things he saw in this festering city. He did often not think about what he would do when she died. It hurt too much. He liked to think, given the state of things, that the world would end long before she did.

  * * *

  Famous Signoretti’s Italian Bistro had operated without a single day off for seventy-five years. No catastrophe of any scale had ever kept its shutters from opening, and this slow-looming cultural decay that Bhu felt in his marrow didn’t seem likely to be the first. Customers still trickled in throughout each day and filled the tables during the dinner rush.

  It was not unusual for a cough or sneeze to slip out unexpectedly, drenching a plate as it went out to a customer, or even a whole pie that Bhu pulled steaming out of the wood-fire oven. Bhu found ways not to care, ways to justify his lack of caring, but one reason won out easily over the rest: Bhu wasn’t going to get anyone sick, because everyone was already sick. He saw the symptoms everywhere. In the customers’ heavy, bloodshot eyes, in their puffy lips and cheeks, the swelling in their necks and fingers, the sweat that coated their hands and the damp bills that they passed to him when he worked the register. He wore blue gloves for when he handled the bills, and at the end of his shift the fingers were stained and corroded, the latex pocked with small blisters. He told this to Phan, his boss, who took the gloves in his own hands, touched them, sniffed them, and told Bhu that there was nothing to worry about. People got sick because of bad energy, Phan said. Phan had never been sick a day in his life. As he said this he coughed and raised a bent cigarette to his lips. Phan’s eyes bulged anxiously. The thick crescent lines of his fingernails were stained a nicotine yellow.

  Bhu researched contagion and sanitation. Temperatures higher than 140 degrees slow or stop bacterial growth. He stood near the oven and bathed in its purifying heat. Phan noticed this pattern of behavior and took this to be an intellectual interest in its workings. He spoke to Bhu about it at length. The mystical aspects of its form and structure, the temple shape of the dome, the holy vortex of the internal flame. An engineer by trade, if not philosophy, Phan married into an Italian restaurant family. When his wife inherited it, he took it over, replacing the smaller and more efficient gas oven with the bulky and inconvenient wood-fire oven. He did this largely on his own, using simple tools and materials, what he called the methods of the ancients.

  Phan talked about energy and sickness in his slurred Chicago growl. He had designed the oven to be a generator of positive, healing energies. On the wood-fired bricks that he shaped and baked with his own hands he had inscribed a lexicon of powerful signs and sigils: harvest prayers from ancient Slavic carvings, healing passages from Babylonian tablets, Greek hexes that predated Homer by three thousand years. Buddhist prayers in a dozen languages, Chinese ideograms, his favorite mathematical figures, the names of all the players on the 2016 World Series–winning Chicago Cubs.

  “It’s a universal lexicon,” he said one day. “You take the sides of all those bricks, you unfold them like so”—he demonstrated with his hands, turning them back and forth—“and it all fits together. I planned it for years, the placement of every mark in perfect, universal harmony. I thought it might help. I thought that this oven might change things for the better. Refocus the world’s energy, just a little bit.”

  As Phan spoke a customer doubled over in a fit of violent coughs on the other side of the fiberglass panel that separated the checkout line from the kitchen. Bhu and Phan turned to watch. The coughing man fell to the ground and spat up a mouthful of blood and bile. Phan shook his head.

  “And now, look.”

  Made confident by Phan’s attention, Bhu worked his lips in a silent question, then repeated it out loud. He asked if Phan had any raw meat that he might be willing to sell cheaply. Bhu thought that Phan didn’t hear him because the spry old man rushed away, vaulting clean over the register to attend to the sick customer, who now held his hands to his throat, choking.

  But Phan heard, and he didn’t forget. He called Bhu over at the end of his shift and asked what his question was. Bhu had to think for a moment, to center himself, before answering.

  Bhu wanted meat. Raw meat, as fresh as possible, the cost of
which would be taken out of his wages, whatever the cost may be.

  Phan’s face shifted, softening into something wounded and pitiful. “You know, real meat’s hard to come by. Us, we use the synthetic stuff. They send it here in big loaves wrapped in foil. Some kind of foam full of fake blood, but it tastes real enough.”

  Was that true? Bhu didn’t think so. There was something different about what came out of Signoretti’s kitchen. In the middle of a city drowning in malaise people swarmed to this spot, a global culinary migration, fresh foreign currency taped to the walls daily, crinkly fresh bills from all the countries that still had paper money. It was why the locals still dragged themselves here, half-dead and dripping with caustic sweat.

  Phan turned away, slowly nodding. “What kind of dog you got?”

  * * *

  Phan liked bulldogs. Royal animals, he said. Protectors, like the ancient lion dogs, the shih tzus and Lhasa apsos and chows and mastiffs who guarded palaces and holy places throughout Asia. European breeds like bulldogs weren’t related, but they were bred for similar traits, physical characteristics which Phan thought represented a Platonic canine ideal. He talked to Bhu about this at length as he led him to a reinforced and padlocked door near his office. It opened into a dark stairway that Phan descended without turning on a light. Bhu waited at the top of the stairs while Phan continued to speak, describing astral figures, the holy names of various household pets, until he passed out of view and his voice faded to inaudibility. After a moment, a reddish rim of light glowed along the steeply slanted ceiling over the stairs.

  The sounds Bhu heard made him sweat: There was a sound of something large and meaty, hacked at with a heavy blade. Shrill metallic sighs and squeaks. A wet squelch, a spraying release of pressure. A vague murmur of melody.

  Bhu smelled something hard and metallic, and an acrid animal musk that wafted up the steps and made him gag.

  The crinkle of plastic, the rip of tape.

  Phan appeared at the base of the stairs, stopping briefly to scrape the bottoms of his shoes against the first step. A lit cigarette danced in his lips as he stomped up the stairs, continuing a thought begun long before. “—But none of that would have mattered if the US hadn’t subsidized oil production for so long and artificially inflated demand. Let me know what your pooch thinks of this.” He handed Bhu something wrapped in black plastic and many layers of tape. It weighed ten pounds, at least, and it was very warm. Bhu’s fingers sank into something tender and wet through the plastic.

  Bhu stood silent for a moment.

  “No charge.” Phan squinted, taking deep breaths through his flaring cigarette. “I just hope she likes it.” Then he turned, and closed and locked the basement door. Bhu said thank you and left. Phan followed him out to the street. The shutters came rattling down, and Bhu looked back to see Phan at the edge of the sidewalk, smoking and staring. Bhu looked down at the black plastic in his hands. His shadow circled him as he passed from one streetlight to the next.

  * * *

  Bhu unwrapped the parcel on the counter of his cramped kitchen. He stepped back to stare at it. Phan had given him what looked like a pristine pork loin: a cleanly sliced, pink and juicy hunk of meat. The smell made his mouth water. A shuffling sound drew his attention to Lucy’s pillow. She had heaved herself over its edge with her front paws, and now she raised her nose high into the air. Her nostrils flared and contracted.

  It was the most that Bhu had seen her move in three days.

  Using a dull knife, he cut into the flank of the tender meat with almost no resistance. He seared it in his skillet with a splash of oil and it filled the air with a buttery sweetness.

  Lucy tried to drag herself along the floor, back legs splayed behind her. Instead Bhu moved her pillow so that it was next to the counter. He diced the cooked meat and dropped it into her dish, and then set the dish on the floor. She ate until nothing was left, and then she licked the bowl clean.

  That night Bhu cooked five servings for Lucy, almost half of what Phan had given him. She would have eaten more, but Bhu wanted the meat to last. He was also afraid that if she ate too much she’d just throw everything up.

  Both Bhu and Lucy slept soundly, and in the morning her poops were firm and healthy.

  * * *

  Bhu made Phan’s meaty parcel last until the end of the month. The final meal, scarfed up by Lucy with snorting gusto, seemed to trigger a seasonal shift. That night there came a sudden, drenching downpour, a thick coagulate rain. The next day a black cloud descended on the city from the East. It swirled in the air, spreading over the sky like an ink spill, and then it fell, a plague of small, black, biting flies that settled, thick and ravenous, over the city’s nests and hollows. On her walks Lucy performed her usual nonchalance, oblivious to the flies as she was to nearly everything. Bhu, with his face and hands covered, swatted at the spiny bugs that flew into his eyes and bit at every spot of exposed skin. The stray dogs nipped them out of the air and ate them by the mouthful, or they lay down and endured the masses of biting insects that settled on them like a second coat of black fur.

  Already Lucy was stronger. When Bhu pressed his fingers to the muscles in her back legs he felt firm fibrous tissue, taut under her scruffy fur and loose skin. When he pulled back her lips, he found her tongue and gums pink and healthy, her remaining teeth strong and white.

  She walked unaided for the first time in two years.

  * * *

  Signoretti’s opened every day, as they had for seventy-five years. Bhu walked to work through the fog of biting flies.

  “You look like chewed gum,” said Phan, when he saw him. “Bad energy, I’m telling you. These animals, they’re like bacteria. If you’re susceptible, they know. The ancient Greeks, they called it sperma. The seeds of disease. Cum simene, in Latin. They thought it was inherited.”

  Phan went on smoke breaks in a t-shirt and shorts. The flies ignored him completely.

  “The Chinese,” he said, “call sperm j?ng z?. The element of essence. Qigong masters teach you not to masturbate. Drains your life energy.”

  Bhu told him how much happier Lucy was, how she ate well and she was more alert and energetic. She looked healthier every day. Phan smiled at this, and he continued to give Bhu the taped parcels of raw meat at no charge. “I never met this dog,” he said, “but I like her.” His gaze wandered over the candlelit space of the restaurant, the windows that were dark with the clouds of flies. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything left that’s pure. Then I think about that dog, how she must look at you when you feed her.” His eyes flicked over a mulling crowd of evening patrons. “Not like these animals. No matter how much they eat, they just waste away. There’s no love in their lives.”

  Bhu came home and Lucy ran up to greet him. He held her and cooed at her as she licked his face and panted happily. He felt soft new fur growing where she’d had bald patches on her legs from licking. She was taller. It wasn’t just that her legs were strong again. She was, implausibly, taller.

  Something thumped against the wall hard enough to make glassware tingle. Lucy shot out of Bhu’s lap and cowered under a flimsy wood table, where she growled and barked. Bhu stared at the wall, unaware that anyone had moved in next door. He heard the low murmur of voices, and then laughter.

  Lucy barked louder, faster.

  On the other side of the wall, a deep, bellowing voice barked back.

  Lucy cocked her head. Soon other voices joined the first, a whole pack of voices, woofing and growling and howling through the wall, growing in volume and ferocity. Lucy barked louder herself, even though Bhu took her in his arms and shushed and petted her, trying desperately to quiet her down.

  Only when Bhu prepared her dinner did she grow silent and attentive. Her appetite had improved, and she had been going through each parcel more quickly than the last. Bhu tossed the last large steak from the fridge into the pan. Their new neighbors continued to shout, now at each other. Someone stumbled and fell with a crash, and
after the silence that followed Bhu felt grateful to hear laughter again, although it was a harsh laughter, bitter and shrieking.

  He turned the stove off and left the meat in the pan to cool. He bent to pick up Lucy’s dish. Seeing her beside it, sitting, panting, he bent to scratch at the bunched rolls of skin around her neck, which were always itchy.

  Someone knocked on his door.

  Bhu stared at the door, then at the wall, trying to remember when he had last heard any sound from the neighboring apartment.

  The knock came again, harder, rattling the chain of the door guard. Bhu heard muffled voices, stifled laughter.

  He went to open it, leaving the chain attached. In the darkness of the hall stood a man not much taller than Bhu himself. Hard-edged features and deep-set eyes peered at Bhu under a hairless, pitted scalp. He looked like something handmade, carved with sharp instruments that worked with great precision, except for the tip of his nose, where they must have slipped; it was split almost vertically by a recent wound, now scabbed over.

  “Hey neighbor,” he said, and his head fell, casting his face in shadow. “Hey. I just want to—” His mind seemed to wander, and he looked off down the hall. “I just want to apologize about all the noise. My friends and I, we’re in the place next door. Still settling in, and by the way, that’s a cute dog you got. Good guard dog.” He laughed, and Bhu heard a woman laugh also, somewhere out of view. The man leaned in and inhaled the aroma of Lucy’s dinner. His eyes met Bhu’s; one iris drifted slightly askew. “What are you cooking in here?”

  Bhu explained that he was cooking dinner for his dog. He was met, again, with laughter.

  The woman spoke from the hall. “For his dog? Is he for real?”

  The man laughed again.

  “I just haven’t smelled anything that good in a long time,” he said. “Fact is we haven’t eaten since yesterday. We just found this place, you know, came in here because of the flies and the dogs and shit, and we didn’t even know yet if there was anyone else on this floor. So here we are sitting right there in the next room wondering where we’re gonna get our next meal, and then the whole place smells like a steakhouse because our new neighbor is making dinner for his pooch.”