By Peter Atkinson/ copyright November 2007 (excepted from a novel “The Death Of Wallace Wren”
A beam with a bud back. Thanks. Esau leaves his change on the counter and opens the door against the wind. Packed snow on a dirty street. Stamps his feet like a horse almost for pleasure. Looks around. The Italian Deli had been bricked up and the Ukrainian dinner become a dry goods store, yet every part of the neighborhood was still recognizable and nothing reminded Esau of the green city buses he had ridden to school as a boy. He puts his heavy hands in the high pockets of his jacket. Or of football. He blindly passes the park in which they had played. Newspapers catching in the corners. But he is not thinking about scrimmages with his brothers on fall afternoons.
He watches an old woman walking south on the other side of the avenue. Is that she? He folds up the distance. Oteria. She keeps on straight ahead as if she had not heard him call. Perhaps she hadn’t. He says her name again. This time she turns. Don’t you recognize me boy? Of course I do. She looks two hundred and sixty seven years old. Of course I do.
Oteria and her husband had known Esau since he was born and were the last people on the island whom Esau might have called familiar. But Oteria had looked more familiar from across the street. Why was she so aloof?
How are you? Oteria looks downtown as if she might ignore him. Shaking her head she stares off walking saying ‘Merkin’ almost in a whisper and now she is saying the name again—more slowly this time as if only a trace of the referent remained in the word. She is mouthing the name of her husband as if it were the cud of some other thing and then with a broadcast of something like disgust across her features she turns away once more and takes off walking. But she had not been disgusted. She was counting.
Esau calls to her again. He might as well have asked the middens of cobblestones heaped along the avenue to explain how they had come to be there—which of course he would not have been able to explain and later would wondered about just those stones—instead Esau watched the crepe soles of Oteria’s shoes slide over the icy sidewalk. She is postponing each commitment of weight as long as she is able. Her muscles suspect the brittleness of her bones. He starts after her and catches her for a second time. His voice having grown trumpet-like at the dental tonk of the ‘t’, which, he thought, breaks her name in two, she faces him on command. What’s the fuss boy? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t yell. Probably not. I only wanted to say hello. You already did, boy. Esau is genuinely puzzled. Oteria continues. What’s the point of talking? The point? Yeah the point? She reads the confusion crazing his expression. You asked me about Merkin. Don’t you remember? Of course I remember. But what is the matter? There is no point in talking about Merkin. She pauses without looking away. Esau doesn’t know what to say. Merkin’s gone, boy. Dead and gone, and just about forgotten. Eight years now. Haven’t thought about him in a month. And not thought about you in better than a year. Esau reaches out and touches her arm. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. She looks at him as if he were a lost cause. Sure you didn’t boy. But being sorry ain’t the point. Esau hears the apostrophe trailing behind her as she goes. No, it ain’t the point and not nearly enough.
A couple of dogs are chasing one another through the traffic. Playing? They are snarling up the flow of cars and donkey-carts. Nobody wants to hit them. The traffic backs, eddies and pools around each disturbance. Second Avenue seems the very stream into which one steps each time anew. Esau has his attention taken to a donkey shaking its head and neck and then is left staring at the movement of traffic on the avenue as if at the surface of the river near his cabin in Montana, as if he were tracking the bulge of water draped over the dorsal of a big rainbow trout retreating from his step—you must walk more carefully to catch these beauties—a rainbow that had been working under the plane of confused surface, working below a riffle in the deeper slower water of a difficult world. With one beat of tail the trout is gone and Esau is worrying about the dogs darting about in the street. They won’t be hit. He notices that they are not much more than ribs and noses and half-marks a murder of crows lifting from an alley like the ashes of a newspaper being blow off a grate. And there is a dead dog in the gutter.
He stares until his attention wanders into the green-bronze quills set along the tops of lintels and along the ledges of a bank’s grand expression and opulent welcome—crows by hundreds, maybe thousands—but not a single pigeon. Not one. Pigeons. Esau hadn’t really understood the conversation at the dinner table the night before, but had recognized the word for ‘pigeon.’ The girls were chattering away in ‘the speak’ and used the word pigeon again and again.
The language school had arranged for his room. At the moment there were also two college girls in the apartment studying the ‘speak.’ One had said to the other: I read an article in Time about the pigeons and from her sentence he was only able to pick out the word for pigeon. Nothing more. But it pleased him to be able to do so. Esau had come to the island because he worried he might live too long and run out of money. To work one needed to know the language or at least, he reasoned, his chances of getting a job were better. Learning ‘the speak’ was the least he could do to preserve himself. Just a year ago an avian plague struck to which the crows were almost immune, but to which the rock doves, and that is, the girl explained, the correct name for the common place pigeon one sees, or at least used to see, in nearly every city on the planet, succumb in great numbers. On the island, and this was the mystery that was most interesting, both the crows and the rats had all at once and for no reason that had been understood became much more intelligent. Was it a local phenomenon or something more? Nature loves to hide.
The girls had been attending the Union League Language School up on 38th and Park for six months and jabbered away in ‘the speak’ with considerable fluency. Esau had somehow imagined that learning ‘the speak’ would have been easier than it was. He worried that the difficulty was his age when he realized he couldn’t memorize words in lists anymore. Of Greek verbs, as a boy, he had learned them in lists with their principle parts like songs children sing in the nursery and now discovered that anything he was to learn had to be absorbed in context. Abstraction is a young man’s game ironically at its peak when the capacity to forget is both at its strongest and at the same time so little appreciated—no doubt another example of youth being wasted on the young.
Anyway the pigeons on the island are gone. Gone like the Dutch elm. No that’s not quite it. In an old garden apartment complex built around a city block, buildings facing out, and contained within the pale of apartments is a great garden of trees and flower, the Dutch elms tower up over the six story buildings. Each of these trees is a survivor of the fugal disease spread by the elm bark beetle. No the situation with the rock doves was more like the circumstance of the passenger pigeon. But that’s not right either. The absence of the city pigeons was by no means as certain as the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Gone without a trace for more than a century. There might still be a few pigeons left where nobody can see them. No the disappearance of the rock dove was like more like that of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. The Peterson’s Guide had listed the Ivory as ‘probably extinct’ for almost thirty years. Then there was a reported sighting in Cuba. That’s what I mean about the pigeons. No one is, or can be sure about their extinction. One could still show up.
There has never been a shortage of food on the island and yet at any given moment there is never more food on her shelves or in her refrigerators to sustain the population for more than eight hours. That is how dynamic the food supply system to the island is. No one would believed the number at first. It seemed impossibly low. But the estimate had been published by a famous economist, who had recently received an important prize in Amsterdam for his application of certain regressive analysis techniques developed years before by an academic group at MIT. This economist had refined the method considerably when he was at Cal Tech and applied his improved technique to various new problems, including the present case. Esau had read about the award in the paper some years before. Holland. And now he thought about the Hague and the silly miniature city he had seen there as a boy when his father took him by ship—the Goote Beer, a student ship, a converted liberty ship—to see their homeland. The absurdity of being Dutch, the idiocy of wooden shoes, of going Dutch, of a Dutch treat, of Peter keeping his finger in a dike. The absurdity of being Dutch struck him on that trip in a way that never left him. Fifty-four years ago. The thought of so much time carried him off until he remembered the economist had assembled a team that put together a body of facts about food and its distribution on the island. The idea of regression is to argue from the effect to the cause. From the particular to the general or from facts to their agents, if you will. Esau had studied mathematics as an undergraduate. So some imagine that, theoretically speaking, it might all be possible, which is to say, if you were to gather together every fact in the world you might just be able to calculate the future—though it is hard to imagine what the last fact collected would be. The study presupposed a great deal about the nature of the future and a fact and did so without much consideration for what the consequences of such presuppositions might be. Fact. There are eighteen bridges, seven tunnels and a couple of high-wire gondolas leading on and off the island. These are facts or things done every one. The team assembled libraries of data. The facts were examined. Indexing schemes were devised. Then each fact was entered into a Brobdingnagian database. Special programs were written to cope with, sort and sift the data that had been entered in quantities that are usually idiomatically expressed by comparing the quantity to geological features, such as oceans, mountains and the like. The most surprising fact turned out to be that there had not been a single administrator in the history of the island, which was a history of more than 300 years, to have been charged either with planning or maintaining a system for food acquisition and distribution. This lack, felt the economist, was more surprising because, like Vienna before power had been wrested from the Hapsburg’s grip, a grip weaken by years of trench warfare, poison gasses, a grip that ultimately relaxed in death when the people were forced to suffer the inevitable consequences of losing such a horrendous war, like Vienna the island on which Esau had been born and to which he had now returned so many years later to learn ‘the speak,’ a language Esau had once thought was not much more than street-slang and now seemed to be one of the minimum requirements for survival in the modern commercial world, so many believed, that island had once been—as Vienna had once been with her wide boulevards and imposing public buildings—the absolute center of the western world. And like Vienna, the island’s population had fallen drastically. The island had less than a quarter of the population she had had when Esau had last lived there thirty-five years before. And yet even in her salad days making sure there was butter, jam and fresh bread to eat every morning for the island’s millions and millions of citizens had simply been left to chance, by which I mean, there was no administration of the process of food supply and distribution. Naturally one of the questions the famous economist asked was why? The most obvious reason is that every time the city unbuttoned her shirt her bunched and swollen nipples were positively dripping milk and on the other, when one went to look for a healthy snack in the fridge and found the carrots were gone, it had not occurred to anyone that a lack of carrots in the refrigerator was a municipal matter. ‘No carrots’ meant a trip to the market, not a call to city hall. The fact is that groceries had been hitting the selves with a certitude that was completely transparent and, until that Dutch mathematician came along—he wasn’t Dutch—with his improved recursive methods—he only won a prize in Holland—and his battalion of fact-finders—and he was an economist—no one had even bothered to consider the issue of food and its distribution as a mechanism that worked, and so, naturally, as something that might not work. The results were as frightening as mirrors in New Guinea. No more than eight hours of food piles up in the natural occurring just-in-time distribution system. Eight hours and that’s it. Think of proximity of the panic. The island is living on the edge of famine. But there’s still another angle one might take to explain this astounding lapse, another possibility as to why no one had been appointed to establish and then supervise a food acquisition system. No one had thought to look into the matter of food distribution not only because there was always food there but also because everybody already knew where it came from. It came from blueberry hill. The strawberry patch. From the garden state. The potato state. It came in trucks, in cars and on the backs of ambitions men. And those skinny but savory trout that are so good after smoking in hickory are best had from Lake Girard. In Texas and Vietnam there are swimming pools filled with shrimp to be cleaned by women wearing blue paper hats. And a lot more sea-food than you would imagine comes from Iraq. Chicken from Thailand. Beef and pork from the Midwest and lately, South America. Under racks of glowing halogen south of San Pedro, ship after ship gets poured into a river of trucks. Take rice for example. A truck is loaded, then hits the highway system going east. Near the island the truck stops at a swap-station and there its contents are parsed into the trunks of various old Nissans and Kias. Later the rice is re-packaged downtown, put into jars and even paper cups covered with plastic wrap further secured with a rubber band. A hearty, more northern breed of guinea pig has been developed and is now being raised locally in semi-heated basements of the island. Doña Marian’s pig-stew with rice is now an Island favorite. And the corn used to make the tortillas everyone likes to have with the dish comes from a county in Georgia that hates everything Mexican as much as it loves hot sauce, a county that is infamous and has, for many years, tested the tolerance not only of the state but the nation. The county’s eccentricities are endless, the greatest being that it has never quite accepted defeat in the war of northern aggression. For instance, despite all sort of reprimands, periodically the county votes to secede from the State and, very recently, passed an ordinance that made hunting large animals with spears legal. Moments after the story hit the wire, the State of Georgia released a statement: counties do not have the authority to make or change hunting laws. They went on to say that hunting laws are the prerogative of the State, except where migratory birds are involved, in which case their hunting is also regulated by federal law. The wire story swept the nation after a certain movie star became upset when she saw the picture that appeared on a back page of the Los Angeles Times of a red-neck in camouflage and face-paint holding a fiberglass rake handle that had been fitted with a fluted arrow head. The actor got on the phone with her agent and between one thing and another a televised benefit got scheduled to raise consciousness and money to fight every effort to hunt with spears. Things are a lot better on the West Coast than anywhere in the East right now and practically speaking, the issue was born moot. The only large mammal left in those north Georgia woods to spear are the hunters themselves—clearly the issue of spear-hunting was a matter of principle. Anyway the corn that makes those wonderful tortillas—‘torties rik-cos’ as they are called on the island—the corn comes from the county in question and is transported all the way north by train to the island. Toothless young men from that anarchical southern county ride the coal cars north with a few bags of corn tied to the sides of the cars. No one stops them anymore. What’s the point? They get off at the end of the line at the town, interestingly enough, from whose name the term ‘hobo’ derives. If on a first trip north, one of these good old boys eventually find his way to the island by following the crowds. These young men, who have left wives and children behind, sell their wares to the small dealers “cart-side” that grind and resell the corn “by the cob” to the tortilla “cottage industry.” Of course the corn is actually taken off the cob down on the farm—“by the cob” is a term of art. One cob is usually the volume of the smaller of the two sizes of Dixie cup still around. These are merely an example of some of the harder facts the team tracked down. It was much easier for the scientists to track the food that came onto the island and was distributed by the Supermarkets. Much less detective work was needed. Those operations function otherwise—everything in the Supermarkets is delivered from central hubs built out beyond the edges of where the old suburbs were and each of these centers seemed to have had enough paper work to keep a team of accountants busy for weeks sorting the sources and the rates of sale for each and every one of those goods. There is not as much food in the supermarkets as there once was and what is there costs van Gaugh’s ear, which is why most folks on the island tend to buy what they need in the store fronts or from the cart-flotillas that raft together on certain blocks down town at certain times of the year sort of like the geese used to raft out on the Chesapeake to pass the autumn nights unmolested by foxes. Eight hours. As I said a few minutes ago, the economist had been able to calculate the amount of food stored on the island by improving on a regression method developed originally by another group at MIT. That group had been able to calculate that, amongst other things, the steady decrease in crime in the last two and a half decades of the 20th Century could and, then after considerably more research they were able to say, should be attributed to the increased numbers of abortions preformed after the Roe vs. Wade decision was handed down. Bewildering. A ballet of strange consequences. The unwanted babies that were scraped and flushed—like little alligators put down the toilets, which, by the way, live to great age and size only in urban fairy tales and are actually dead as lumber long before they hit the cold sewers of any big northern city—anyway, these babies, as the wildly creative regressive analysis demonstrated, were mostly on their way to becoming the very armed robbers, muggers and crack-heads that seemed not to be there. I bring it up because the study indicates that Oteria had been helping the crime rate all along—even before the decision got turned over or over turned, she had always been willing to clean a girl out for around fifty bucks or so. She had done some for less, and a few for nothing at all. She had been scraping girls when they missed for years. A third and even fourth generation had come to her door. Back when things were still pretty good you went to Oteria if you didn’t have insurance and the poor girls never did. In the old days she gave each a piece of the Dutch licorice Merkin brought home from work. Merkin. Go for a walk. Where do I go? To the park. You could feed the pigeons. Oteria always got her husband out of the apartment before a girl was scheduled to show up. It’s bad enough for those kids to have to come to a strange place for such a procedure without having to worry about some old man in a stained undershirt peeping about. A ring came at the door and the kitchen was already full of steam. She did them on the kitchen table, but first scrubbing them up standing in a galvanized tin before putting them down on a clean sheet or two. More fun puttin’ ‘em in than it be takin’ ‘em out ain’t it little one? No, no, no, don’t cry. It’ll be fine. I know. I know. Don’t fret. Suppose you think I don’t know what its like to want a boy in you? Well some things don’t change missy and you’ll find it out if you live long enough. But don’t waste your tears here. What’s in store for you is a big pinch all right, but not much more. Bite it. That’s it. Bite down. Just one minute more. No tears puppy. It’s a woman’s lot being empty as a gourd. Bite it. Try to smile. Grin and bear it. Everything I put in you is as boiled as a brisket. Clean as a whistle. Won’t leave a trace. Done a thousand and one of you girls and everything has always worked fine when we’re done. Just give it a month or so. You’ll see. Sore yes. But soon you’ll be working fine. Half you girls were born out of wombs I’d scrapped just a few months before you were conceived. Think about it. Eight hours is it. The economist said that the food distribution network is as alive and even more intelligent than the telecommunications system, which is infinitely more evolved than—I’m not sure what. But I do know that if you happen to break a fiber-optics line say in Ohio, the packets of information racing down that fiber, wrapped with electronic codes in more layers than a birthday cake get un-stacked, unpacked, read and then re-routed as eager as sperm to get up a pretty girl’s pussy. They go around any problem anywhere they need to because the information is simply not attracted to dead ends, and so the little packets wind up going through Tijuana, Tegucigalpa, Timbuktu, Thailand. No plan. No system. None made, none needed. And it happens at near the speed of light. At that speed time just about stops. Just after NASDQ crashed, you know after the first internet build out blew-out and the internet was becoming as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola the clock actually did stop for two full days in February of 2002, or it would have stopped had there been a clock not stopped somewhere with which to measure how long the one’s that actually did stop stood still. And when the clocks all started up again, Darwin got most of the credit for considering the possibility of a system or organization without a telos. The intelligence is not in the system, it is the system. And ain’t it the truth. For Darwin it was much harder to put forward his ideas than people realize these days. Why? Because what he had to say was about one fat greasy inch from admitting that what was important in this life, besides a glass of good whiskey or a cute piece of ass, which is the turmoil, the joy and the difficulties one encounters in the eternity that opens between birth and the grave—in short, what he was saying was that change happens without a plan and so what about God? You see, and of course you don’t see because now who knows what the hell anyone means when he says “God.” Let’s try. “God.” See? Nothing but confusion and ignorance or, worse the obstinate belief that destroys whatever it imagines contradicts it. “Emergent order” that’s what they were calling it in the information age and it always meant something cool, something fashionable like telecommunications, or gross like maggots cleaning up a dead dog, or natural like water cutting rivulet’s down a steep hill—or, and this is the whole point, the food distribution system on the island. The food distribution system is an example of an order that has emerged, of a complex system without a designer, an intelligence that holds the supply of food at precisely eight hours and does so without respect to anyone’s plan. What we have in ‘emergent order’ is a theory-like-thing about why stuff that works actually works. And the answer is so simple it numbs the mind: systems work because systems are what you call those interrelated complexes that work. Like the old bitch serpent coiled around of the great ash of the world, that snake grabbed a hold of her own ass with a pair of needle teeth and started digesting herself in the first moment the world began, that is, when she first began to spin out the time and space we imagine we are living in today. But for us there is no beginning and no end. Boggling to consider the endless finitude of being here in a moment and yet in any given eight hours there wouldn’t be a soda cracker left in Balducci’s.
Esau could remember when Balducci’s was just a fruit stand. Anyway he was blowing his nose on 10th Street when he realized he liked being sick. Who looks forward to having the flue? Then as he reached for the big glass of orange juice he had set on his night table, quite out of nowhere he was overcome by a vague and pleasant awareness of his mother, as if she were sitting near his bed. He remembered that she had been nice to him as a little boy, yes, especially when he had been sick. On that day at that moment with an arm stretched across his body holding still the weight of a glass of orange juice, the rehabilitation of his memory become a formal project and eventually became his work, that for which he lived. He had not noticed yet that he had come back to the island, the site of his youth, without respect to his memory project. He understood his presence there only in terms of his anxiety about the future, not being able to cope with the modern world without control of ‘the speak.’
A month or after he formally declared his interest in recovering his memory, he found he was talking out loud to his mother. He thought about it and kept on talking. An soliloquy here and there satisfied some basic urge for appeal. Like prayer this urge seemed to Esau more basic than any appeal for justice. No, he was not praying for justice, much less some species of democratic fairness the Pharisees had been selling in the temples as the country went down the drain—he was begging for a kind of readiness, some sort of capacity to bare what was there to be born. Justice, even Platonic justice—the well working of this or that—is a miserable substitute for the capacity to bare what must be born, which is why, at bottom, nobody really cares about justice. But this causes a lot of misunderstanding. Just because justice ultimately cannot save one from suffering does not mean that it does not matter if one is just or unjust—just the opposite. The failure of justice to bring about what matters most—and what would that be—means one must strive to be just in all things even to have a chance.
So, bit by bit, Esau began to recall the weight of his bed clothes when, as a child, he had been home sick with a cold or the flue. Cool drinks, soup, stories: Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Swiss Family Robinson. He couldn’t call up exactly when they had been read to him. She had read to him. Right? Who else? But one day he remembered the books themselves. How they had lain on the shelf near his bed, and then, how once, a long, long time ago everything in his room was bathed in tones of red light. The blinds had been drawn. Sunrise? Sunset? No, he had had measles. That’s right. Measles are red. There were long days of fever that took him like a sedative. And there she was—in a chair near his bed. I was so miserable. She was always there when he had looked. That had to matter. I am miserable. He continued to work through the layers of his mind, for fuel, for fossils and for he knew not what. How could he know. Forgetting is the origin of memory like a light that vanishes because no light is needed to find that which cannot be sought.
The two college girls that were there when Esau arrived shared a room. The shared just about everything and then fought about it. On the third night he was on the island Esau dreamed a madam in a feathered boa had come to him, shook him awake and said: “Wake her, fuck her brains out with that burro’s cock the devil gave you as a reward for cowardice and stinginess.” He looked and there was a naked girl in his bed next to him. And then he woke. The madam’s words would not leave his head for days and neither was the thought that there might be a naked girl in his bed. Sometimes it hurts him just to see the long bare necks of his roommates or their smooth bellies peeking out from underneath their tee-shirts or most painful of all is to see their nipples hardened against the fabric. Having a body is shameful, if for no other reasons than there must be so many who want it uninvited to share it. Original sin. Once at breakfast, at the sight of those girls bursting out of their clothes, he had allowed himself to follow out a strange and upsetting fantasy to drag each out of the apartment by her hair one at a time, with her hands bound behind her back, to drag each out into the street and into an alley, and there with her huddled near the ground, stone her to death against the back wall of the Chinese restaurant. No sooner had he allowed the whole scene to develop in his imagination than a tear rolled over the lower lid of his eye for he realized then and there that each half-brick of clay hurled by him and seeking the soft skin that covered the bones and organs of the living children, the skin he could hardly look at without fainting from desire, was only a kiss that had grown heavy, clumsy, and unwelcome. And so despite the fact that his ‘house mother’ made the best stuffed cabbage he had ever tasted, almost right away he started to eat out several times a week just to get a little break from the girls. And besides, Esau liked to buy a chocolate bar for himself at the corner store and then feed certain stray dogs what tidbits he saved from his meal at the restaurant on his way back to a bed that was hard enough to keep his lower back from acting up too much, hard enough he almost woke with bruises, a bed for which he was very grateful.
The day Esau woke from his dream with a raging hard on, he knew he was better. He had been so sick he had been forced to stay in bed long enough to feel his back begin to go out of square even on that rock hard bed for which he was so thankful. It’s my own fault. He got sick because he could not remember. Don’t drink the tap water. The water on the island was once the best water in any city anywhere in the world but now after a good gulp you’ll puke until you are dry, and then keep on convulsing until you think you are going to die and no longer care.
No. Merkin’s not dead. Just because his wife says so does not make it true. He’s as hale as heather living uptown at the Y on 93rd Street. He left Oteria at the age of eighty-two without a word simply because he didn’t know what to say. He had it in is mind that he wanted to try living alone before he died. He had no idea what he meant and could never really make a plan. He had married Oteria at eighteen. Gotten her pregnant and then the child was still born and Oteria never worked right again. He had no idea how to bring up the subject with Oteria or what he might say to her if the issue were actually broached, and well—really he only half-knew what it was he wanted to do anyway. It happened eight years ago after Oteria had sent him out before one of the girls she was going to clean came by. After he had said ‘good bye’ he walked out of the apartment building. It’s now or never and he kept walking. He sometimes thinks about going back to her.
Merkin’s day begins early and begins by reading a little in bed. The last few weeks its has been fairytales from a big picture book he got at the library. The week before he had been reading about economics of tropical dairies because he had read about ConAgra the week before. Corn is even used to make plastic bottles. Imagine that. Then he gets dressed and walks downstairs where he has coffee in the lobby with some of the other residents. Good morning Merkin. Hello Charlie. They both smile and talk about the state of the world. After lunch Merkin is in the habit of going for a walk and then usually finds his supper at a mission ten blocks north of the YMCA. He helps out in the kitchen at the shelter and on his way back to his room at the Y, he feeds a few of the stray dogs he has gotten to know with whatever scraps he manages to collect during the day. He has favorites of course. But the fact that he has these favorites is an endless puzzle to him.
A few days ago he discovered a dog with an case of mange that had just about done in the old boy. For the second day now Merkin has given the dog a little water and something small and sweet. The dog can barely eat, but seems to enjoy a piece of cookie or bit of muffin. Merkin obliges. He talks to the creature a little, scratches his ears, but the dog has trouble finding the strength to lookup. Merkin’s eyes sometimes moisten. Good boy, he says and thinks about the dogs he has had in his life. My god, it’s a hard place this world. He pats the mangy dog very gently. After the dog has had his snack he finds the floor of the alley again and puts his head back on his paws. Once his eyes close, Merkin rises and continues on.
Merkin’s other favorite is a spooky little female. He’s known her almost a month. Not much more than a pup, she moves within a million apprehensions—a more wary creature does not exist and still Merkin’s worries sometimes that she will not learn to deal with the traffic. Over the course of the last few years, since he started to feed some of the dogs, he has noticed that some learn about traffic and some don’t. He tries not to think about it, but panics when he cannot find her. He tries to remember to ask himself why he cares. He knows he does cares, and by no means is he trying to “not care” or get over caring about her. No. He is grateful that he cares. He is baffled about the nature of a heart that tightens over the one in front of it and hardly misses a beat over the ten thousand others near death through neglect in some barrio of some broken city somewhere else in the world. What is the ‘face to face’ of caring? He is in love with the little bitch. He sometimes thinks about Oteria. How she had been so beautiful, and how she glides over the avenues in her crepe bottomed shoes with more care than he was able to imagine. He doesn’t miss her much anymore but thinks fondly of her. He tries to bring the spooky black and white bitch a piece of meat and a hunk of bread or a biscuit. She is hungrier than usual. Are you pregnant? He can’t tell. She won’t let him touch her. Once, while she was cleaning up the crumbs of a muffin he had brought her, carefully cleaning each speck from the concrete with a kind of attention and completeness he found incredible, Merkin smiled broadly thinking about Esau’s father and how much the old man had loved his Dutch licorice—yes he was living in the country for almost four hundred years and still thought of himself as Dutch. Merkin smiles. Wonder what happened to that boy of his? Troubled creature. Very troubled. Ah silly me how world goes round and round. Ah there you are my girl. Oh what a muffin you are. See what I have for you tonight. Will you take it from me? And oh how the lovely dog comes up low and stayed to have the gobbets from his fingers. It took three weeks before she would tolerate his hand and he knows hunger is more her master than he. From under her dark eyes that are always reaching out-of-her-head to the corners of all there is, his good girl brings her sweet gob softly around the bits in his palm, closes on them and backs off gently to slug the food with those deep peristaltic gulps that always bring the old man’s mind around to that one moment that holds all the others.
Tags: literature, peter l. atkinson, Short story
