Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Dog

Mase came in looking like a plateful of slow-fallen molasses, and sat at the bar instead of his usual table. He looked bookish and blank, as if he'd recently awoken from a nap at the library.

"Maserati," I said, "get out of my bar. What time do you think it is? The salon doesn't start for six hours, you oughta be at home eatin' spaghetti out of a blue-and-white china plate with a big carafe of red wine at your elbow, arguing basketball with the old man. Out. Begone with ye."

"Liam," he said, "it will not do. Not today. It will not do."

I had to raise my eyebrows at that. Then I headed out quickly to the dining room, where our usual temporal glitch appeared to have developed a supernumerary glitch, setting things seventy years and four hours off. "I got a man in there with a problem," I murmured to the bartender, who nodded understandingly. Half a minute later she handed me a faintly bubbling glass filled with what resembled moonrocks and distilled X-rays. "What's in this, kid?"

"Happy memories," she said.

The drink went ploop as I pushed back through the swinging doors, shielding it from sudden impacts. I gave it to Mase and waited patiently, stacking glasses, writing the specials up on the chalkboard, shining the glass behind the bar, puttering, pondering.

"Now me I don't know Churchill as well as I know some other people," he began suddenly. "So I wonder sometimes about the way he used 'the Black Dog.' It is so apt."

"He meant clinical depression."

"That much I know," he said quietly. "Keep 'em coming."

"Finish what you've got. Do you mean did he come up with it? Was it maybe a Plato-ism, a Tacitus-ism, inspired by his extensive readings in ye olde antiquity? You ask yourself: did Genghis Khan ride with a Black Dog? I think it's a pretty common British folklore term, if you want to know. Used to be associated with witches or something."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I'm just curious. Not curious enough to look it up though. No, I do not wish to acknowledge it overmuch."

Not women trouble. I watched the shivering liquid in his glass down to the final quarter-inch, and finally turned and got down my own shaker and a fresh glass. I knew there was a cocktail called a Black Dog but since I couldn't remember what was in it, I made him a Thor's Hammer instead.

"But it's a perfect analogy," he said, accepting the new drink. "I have been custodian of a Black Dog at a handful of points in my short life, Andrews, not owner - how do you own one? - and the analogy, it is perfect, I tell you."

Behind him, another surprise: Cal slinking in, snaking in, and sitting at the bar one seat over from Mase. They glanced at each other once, professionally, like union men passing each other on shift-change at the bottlecap factory. I knew them to be friends of old, had passed many Duck Hunt and Tron days in dank basements, the advent of Virtua Fighter they had overcome together, and the rise and fall of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Almost at once I knew what he would say.

"Depression is the Black Dog, Mase," he began, "of whose company you swiftly weary, so you drive it deep into the woods, pull over and guide it out of the car. 'Sit,' you tell it, 'stay,' and you slam the door and leap back behind the wheel and race off. But it is a dog, its loyalty is unbounded, and you lie awake every night for a month in the dread that you will hear it one night pawing at the back door. Depression is the Black Dog that will follow you home no matter where you leave it, no matter where home is. Depression is the Black Dog that does not love you any more than the killer Dobie at the junkyard loves its employer. Loyalty does not require love. Often, yes, for a dog that is a pet or a companion, you will find both love and loyalty. For a working dog, you may not. The Black Dog, of course, is a working dog."

"I have known a small handful of dogs in my time," Mase said, tranced, into his drink. "Matt down the street had that sweet, brainless cocker spaniel. You remember that dog?"

"Gizmo. Sure."

"My uncle's hyperactive lapdog, a study in contradictions," he went on, unhearing. "But one of my favourites was this dog owned by a woman I worked with when I went to Upland for that research job."

"Remember that."

"I say owned," he said. "For the sake of convention - really, she and her family, they lived with him in what would otherwise have been a roomy bungalow in the suburbs."

"What was he?" I said, pouring Cal a house beer.

"Some kind of Siberian-Husky-Sumatran-Rhino cross," he said, "about the size of a young apatosaur, and it was not uncommon, you understand, to come over and see the nine year-old sprawled across his back while he pulled the seven year-old across the lawn on a Flying Saucer, at a stately trot. Like one of them Tennessee horses. You could come pat him, burdened as he was, and he would crane his huge head to your touch - 'Hello hello boyo, how's tricks?' like how Ron says it - even as his eyes would be squeezed shut with pain from the kids' endless tugging and gnawing."

"A good dog," I said.

"He was the gentlest monster alive. If he stooped to pick up a puzzle-piece or dropped ring from the floor, you could pry his jaws open and fish it out completely without fear. He'd stand and wait there patiently, mouth ajar, just incapable of biting down on human fingers."

"But an owned dog," I said. "A pet."

"This was no mere slavish pack obedience," Mase insisted. "It was love. Every hair on his body, every sharklike tooth, every ashamed grin spoke of love. Once he chewed the leg off their oak kitchen table - collapsed it like a deckchair. It was done with love."

"No," I said. "Every dog used to be a wolf. He's got instincts to obey."

"You never met him," he said. "I tell you this story so you know what I mean when I say the Black Dog would bite down. That if a child approached the Dog too suddenly there would be a whirl of dark fur and a bloodcurdling shriek."

"You said it," Cal agreed. "Andrews, what I can see is that you have lived free of this animal. This is a creature who will maim you, then lie at your feet, loyal to the last. Day in and day out he will pace beside you, ready to snap if you should forget your place in the pack. When you despair of ridding yourself of him, he will know, and press ever closer, and jump up on the bed with you even with the No Animals on the Furniture. What does he care for house rules?"

"Churchill said something similar," I said. "How bad is it? How loyal is he?"

"I will tell you," said Mase. "My Black Dog was successfully dropped off in the woods two years ago; and again four years ago; and again seven years ago; and again twelve years ago; and again sixteen years ago, when I wasn't old enough to even understand the nature of my tormentor. Each time, I swept up the dog hair and threw out his accoutrements and went around telling everybody he had died. But he has never died. It has always taken him a long time to sniff his way back."

He fell silent then, rolling the glass in his palms. I took it away and replaced it with an Allan-a-dale, heavy on the ice. Cal finished his beer and asked for a water under his breath. Behind me, in the kitchen, Julio started up the gasfired deep-fryer; Mase's next words were spoken over its ghostly roar.

"I feel it, you guys, I feel it. Every day now I worry about his return. I panic. I feel like I can hear him breathing outside my third-storey window and I don't want to get out of bed. As if staying under the covers would fool him into thinking I wasn't here, and he would move on. We custodians, we are accomplished dreamers indeed."

"Did you talk to your doctor?" asked Cal.
"It is not a malady of the clay, I feel," said Mase. "It is of the spirit that lives in the vessel. It must be."

I wanted to tell him he was right, if by spirits he meant neurotransmitters and vessel he meant prefrontal cortex. I knew he had a gun hidden under his mattress. But what can a man do, when another man suffers? For an hour we had spoken of it in abstract terms. Now, to hear the dog pacing outside his door, my own reaction was rawest panic - but there was nothing to say, nothing to do except keep the booze coming. I cursed my inadequacy and wondered what Churchill would have done.