Theories for the Eternal Dog — David Nutt

The freakiest thing about Syl’s superbly freakish body isn’t his ruined skin, all pink and burn-pruned, or the lack of hair, or the botched graft seams. It’s the arch of gothic script—Slug Life—tattooed on his pale abdomen that somehow survived the blast. He’s shirtless as always. The camo cutoffs barely cover his scar-mangled legs. Syl invites the gawking, really basks in it. He gets rankled when folks don’t leer. After all, he sat patiently on a small patch of Persian soil and watched two-thirds of his skin bubble off the bone like poorly applied papier-mâché. The least wartime civilians can do is acknowledge what it cost him. 

The dog is hair-heaped on the floor. Syl inherited her months ago from a girlfriend who fled to a celebrity rehab in the desert and never crawled back. The dog—Posh Pantaloons, aka Posh Pants, aka Posh—is one of those swanky Afghan hound dogs. Shrunken head, long drapey coat, bony frame, angular snout. A marvel of non-sequitur engineering. She looks like some kind of poofy glam-rock demigod from the 1970s. Syl’s fanatical obsession with the animal may be a result of his injury and war trauma, a fervor for beautiful, unburned things. Maybe not. I never met the old, unburned Syl. I just know the guy who returned from his first overseas deployment with badly immolated dragon skin, now selling his surplus pain meds to cowards like me.

Before Syl became my pharmacologist, I had a severe nervousness problem. Now I have a severe nervousness-and-pharmacology problem. I also experience abnormal dread about leaving my apartment. Syl’s apartment is situated only a few slummy blocks from mine: a larger abode, cleaner, more habitable, with that ridiculous purebred sprawled on the floor and a stereo system the size of a terrarium always cranking trance-rasta-space-funk on a hallucinogenic loop. A smell of tropical dankness pervades, but Syl doesn’t make the lifestyle seem louche. He’s sitting on the futon with his bum foot at an unnatural angle, an unlit cigarette precariously drool-glued to his bottom lip. He’s using a plastic scrub brush filled with baby oil to massage his skin grafts. The IED shrapnel the army surgeons were too frazzled to remove is still visible under there, nail bits and broken grommets, pulverized bone. At least that’s what I think it is. Maybe his transplanted buttock skin was always an ugly, lumpy gruel. His face is mostly okay. Burnless, pristine. 

It’s the scariest thing about him.

“That’s a smart-looking suit,” he tells me. “Pimp-tastic. Truly.”

It is true. I’m wearing this ritzy pinstripe deal on loan from my father, an owner of a great many distinguished suits. I have a compulsive need to dress well whenever I rally up the bravado to leave the house, a kind of agoraphobic armor. I also brush my teeth until my gums hemorrhage. But the suit gets all the kudos.

“Thanks,” I say. “I am the owner of a great many distinguished suits.”

“Must have some hoity-toity job to dress like that. Stockbroker. Computer scientist. Brain surgeon.”

I’m crouched on the floor with the dog, prodding its silk hair with a nervous finger. I shrug.

“You an animal person?” Syl asks. 

“I think so.”

“What’s there to think about?”

“Animals are fine,” I say. “I like animals. Just not sure I categorize as a person.”

Syl smirks at this. The cigarette wiggles on his lip but miraculously doesn’t detach. His eyes are so bloodshot they register as maroon.

“Ever had a dog?”

“Sure,” I lie. “Lots of times.”

“What are you here for again?” 

“Pot, pills. Anything that will keep my head from spinning off my shoulders like a goddamn flying saucer.”

“Hoorah,” Syl mumbles.

He sticks the cigarette behind his normal ear, not the creepy, plastic one, and reaches under the couch. He eventually comes up with an M18 Claymore antipersonnel land mine, chunky and military green, ingeniously rejiggered. Syl packs the spout thing with a pinch of Kush that he lights with his lighter—a badass Zippo with a lurid bone-and-dagger-and-penis insignia decaled on the side—and he takes a long, heroic suck. The whole topography of his face turns rigid and red. Then he blows a perfect funnel of smoke that hangs over his untamed crew cut like an atomic cloud. I whistle admiringly and hold out my hand. 

He doesn’t offer me anything.

“Me and Posh, we have a special bond,” he says, stirring his good foot in the dog’s straight-stringy fur. The dog accepts the rubdown with lazy submission but very little glee. “Some guys, they settle down, they get married, they take the wife to Olive Garden once a month. I was never gonna be one of those Olive Garden guys. This is the life choice that works for me.”

“She loves you.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Syl replies. 

“Hoorah.” I nod.

He hits the Claymore again, rocking forward and hugging the smoke inside his lungs. The whole lung and the half one.

“I owe my life to a bomb-sniffing dog,” he says, mostly in smoke-choked consonants. “Saved my ass from getting blown all the way off.”

“Iraq,” I say.

“The other one.”

“Afghanistan. Like the dog.”

Syl exhales into my face. “German shepherd, actually.”

“They’re amazing dogs, too.”

“That’s why my tummy ink isn’t torched like the rest of me. Dog took the bulk of the blast. I still see him in my dreams. That gorgeous muscular body soaring through the air. There’s the valor. Sometimes the scent comes back to me, and I wonder, ‘Is that burning-dog smell or burning-me smell?’”

“It is a fascinating tattoo. Slug Life. Is that Buddhism?”

“Just some foolishness I got as an idiot seventeen-year-old blottoed on furniture polish, before military life made me a righteous, upstanding killer of women and children. Probably a few pets, too. Karma and whatnot.”

“Did it live?” I ask. “The dog?”

“You fucking idiot,” Syl says.

I nod agreeably and pull a knot of crumpled bills from my pocket. “Can I buy my drugs now?”

“One condition.” He caps the land-mine bong and shoves it under the couch. When he looks back at me, his eyes have already lost their handsome pot glaze. They look dull and dry, utterly loveless.

“I need you to take Posh for a few days,” Syl says. 

“Like a dog-sitting thing?”

“I got some business shit that needs attending to. I don’t trust kennels. Cops can subpoena those places.”

“They subpoena dogs?”

Syl reaches under the couch again. This time he pulls out a stub-barreled shotgun that he rests upon his lap. “You guard my baby with your goddamn life,” he says, “and nobody’s wick gets snipped.”

I put my hand on the dog’s haunch. The dog growls tiredly at me. 

“Good girl,” I say.

“You get your product when I come back,” he says.

“I have to wait?”

Syl, very nonchalant, cocks the shotgun into my face. My face: sunless skin, cragged lips, a ferocious grin I cannot explain. 

“What kind of dog-sitter gets stoned on the job?” he asks. “You think that would be responsible conduct?”

Before I can answer, Syl loads the shotgun with weed, lights it, and sucks the barrel’s smoky output until an angelic sheen swirls the bloodshot in his eyes.

***

Martha is camped at the kitchen table with the morning paper’s crossword puzzle blackened in blue pen. On the patio, Monk reclines upon his chaise-longue chair, his crossword clutched in his arms, still blank. Through half-slit eyes, he notices me prowling around the shrubs beneath the kitchen window, peering into their home. 

“Since when do morticians make house calls?” he asks, struggling to rouse himself from his aborted nap. 

I lean over and kiss his ravishing gray head. Both of us wait for the other to say something interesting, but neither does, and he slips back into the slumberless purgatory that has beclouded most of his august years. Martha and Monk were successful advertising executives in their middle forties when they inadvertently begat me. Now they’re retired septuagenarians, and their only child is an agoraphobic toothache in a borrowed suit.

“I used to have a suit just like that,” Monk murmurs, eyelids fluttering. “How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?” 

In the kitchen, Martha is toiling for a three-letter word for failure. 

“Son?” I suggest.

“Have you seen Monk?”

“Boy. That’s three letters. Kid.”

“I asked you—”

“Monk’s on the patio,” I say.

“He still breathing?”

“Is that a genuine concern these days?”

She shrugs. “Depends if you’re married to him or just swiping pizza-and-pill money from his wallet.”

“He uses a money clip,” I say. “I also replaced his kidney meds with Altoids and dialed his hearing aid way down.”

“That’s my boy,” she says, looking up from her paper. “The three-letter word is dud.”

“Do I really look like a mortician?”

“It’s a beautiful suit,” she says. She touches the sleeve, my arm somewhere lost inside it. “Then you put the thing on, and I don’t know what happens.”

“I’ve been thinking about joining a gym. Some place I can go, see people, be near them, but not have to talk with them or share their diseases.”

“Maybe you should check on Monk again.”

“Mom?”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Martha?”

She looks up at me, the steep crinkles in her forehead like some rare shrimp that can only survive miles under the lightless ocean, where all other life forms crumple and dissolve in the dark.

“How come we never had a dog when I was growing up?” I ask.

When she leans forward, the flesh crinkles disappear and her cataracts flare over the rim of her reading glasses. “Because dogs are wicked, dear. They’re almost as wicked as people. They have such undiscerning expressions. Look at a dog, and you can tell: There is an animal that doesn’t realize it will one day die. There’s something disconcerting about that.”

She returns to her crossword. I loiter beside the table for another few minutes, nervously picking at my sleeve, the long cursive strands of hound hair there.

“Hey, Martha,” I say. “Boy, do I have a surprise for you guys.”

***

Martha, naturally, says no. Monk says no. Both wear the tired, cramped expressions of cutlery salesmen and vacationless bailiffs. I smile and nod and hug them, and then I fetch the dog from the car and march her through their front door, leash her to their puckered-leather couch, and I give my elderly parents the fifty-pound bag of grain-free, GMO-free, flavor-free, organic dog chow, plus the arthritis pills, the heartworm pills, the healthy-coat pills, the leaky-bladder pills, and I leave without a word.

***

Because Martha and Monk are brilliant, morbid people—and in possession of a sizable private treasury they amassed through capitalistic shiving and mercenary slaughter—they bequeathed me a modest inheritance when I was still an adolescent. Maybe, too, they wanted to be alive to see me squander it on all the worldly frivolities they were too brittle to buy themselves. Rather than splurge on a lavish lifestyle, I’ve behaved frugally. Too frugally. Most days, I am so nervous I cannot leave the runty one-bedroom bunker I have rented the whole of my adult life. I have not entertained a regular girlfriend, on or off payroll, in nearly a decade. Strangers can sniff the jittery juices sluicing around my glands from a radius of a hundred feet, roughly, and this has hobbled whatever paltry social life I once tried to bribe for myself. Every week, I watch the same six movies on loan from the public library. I don’t enjoy talking or thinking about my life much. My closest friend and confidant appears to be my war-burned pharmacologist, and he barely knows me.

At least he trusts me with his dog.

***

The one and only window in my apartment convulses all morning with the clangor and scrape of garbage-truck hydraulics, car stereos, chronic industry. I spent the night sleeping upright and scrupulous on my futon couch, like a dead traveler lashed to an airline seat. The coach aisle, I presume. Sure, I could unfold the frame and sleep horizontal with a pillow and sheets, but I prefer the discomfort because that’s the way I imagine our long-suffering, nomadic ancestors slept on futons. I have a loud, clattery air-conditioning unit I run year-round so my constant weeping doesn’t perturb the neighbors. 

The ringing phone wakes me.

“Hello,” I answer in a robotic voice. “Please leave a message after the dead traveler says beep.” 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Syl asks.

“Good morning.”

“It’s ten o’clock, shithead.”

“Okay,” I say. “I won’t contest that.”

“I told you Posh needs an hour of post-breakfast frolic time to keep her system regular. I wrote it down.”

“Thank you for that.”

“My people at the dog park say they ain’t seen her today.”

“People? What people?”

“Grim fucking reapers. Angels of death, doom, and urban renewal.”

“Narcs?”

“The best,” he says.

“The dog is fine,” I tell him. “We’re having a marvelous time together. Public parks make me nervous.”

“Walk me through your day so far, all the activities and events. I want an itemized list. Is she eating?”

“Check.”

“Her poop look regular?”

“As regular as mine. Although I guess I’ve never wondered if—”

“She doesn’t seem distraught, does she? Because her daddy is gone? Her hair isn’t falling out in clumps, is it?”

“She seems happy. Totally happy.”

Syl pauses. I notice an eerie clicking somewhere inside the phone line. 

“What do you mean happy?” he says. “Happy how? Like, happy-Syl-ain’t-around type happy?”

“What’s that clicking?” I ask.

“I thought you were a solid, responsible citizen. I thought you wanted to earn your drugs the old-fashioned way.”

“Posh is standing at the door,” I say. “She probably needs to go outside and take a normal, healthy, regular-looking poop. Let’s talk again soon.”

“Listen,” Syl says before I can hang up. “There’s been a slight change in plans. I might be tied up a little longer than I anticipated.”

“There’s that clicking again.”

“This is my one free call,” he says. “Next time I’ll be phoning you collect. You’ll need to accept the charges. If you don’t—”

“Are you in jail?”

“I don’t think it’s a long-term situation,” Syl says. “My lawyer is confident they always go easy on charbroiled patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

“Sounds like you have an excellent lawyer.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Syl says. “But I’m starting to suspect my dog-sitter is a total fucking flake.”

I hang up, remove the battery from my phone, and toss the battery and the phone on my hot plate—that indefatigable companion of mine—and slow-cook the technologies to death. Then I get up, shower, dry and dress myself, brush my teeth bloody, and return to my futon, where I will sit and stare at the blank wall the rest of the day.

***

Martha and Monk have never taken a vacation in the tropics or volunteered at a soup kitchen or office blood drive, never enlisted in a golf league or book club or community task force, an adulterers’ circle, a neighborhood watch. Maybe they are too old or too sane. Maybe they’re just not participatory types. I’m sure my life also looks joyless and solitary to skeptical observers, but that’s because my life is joyless and solitary. Somewhere behind the unfinished crossword puzzles and matching flannel pajamas that outgas a spoiled-cabbage smell, Martha and Monk have maintained a fertile interior existence, I’m sure, one that will always remain a mystery to me, their tedious son. Still, I am not prepared for the spectacle of my wizened parents rolling around the backyard on all fours, making kissy noises at my imprisoned pharmacologist’s dog.

“I thought you both hated dogs,” I say.

“This? This isn’t a dog,” my mother replies in a muffled voice, arms latched around Posh’s midsection, her old gray face pancaked against animal flank. “This is a hirsute slice of heaven with an oatmeal-flavored flea-control treatment that is not yet dry.”

“Yum,” my father says, burying his face next to Martha’s. “Yum.”

“But what about dogs not knowing they’re going to die?”

“Well, you know you’re going to die, don’t you? And that hasn’t exactly made you a trophy specimen.”

“Excellent point,” I say.

“It’s not like we’ve become crazy PETA people. You know the type.”

“I probably would see them in the post office,” I say, “but I’ve never been to the post office.”

“These people are everywhere now. Childless, regressive, cupcake types who fawn over their damn cats because they’re secretly terrorized by the idea of other human beings. Just the idea of them! It’s the new misanthropy. And it’s making humanity less observant, less interesting. All because of cats and the people who take constant pictures of their cats.”

“And the dog people?”

“Dogs are different. They just are.” 

“That makes total sense,” I say.

“Staying for supper?” my father asks. “Sasha said we should invite you.”

“Sasha?”

He cradles the dog’s head, that slender arrow shape, in his arthritic hands. He flaps her ears like gull wings. 

“Seagull, seagull, seagull,” he whispers.

“Her name is Posh,” I say.

“She doesn’t look like a Posh. She’s a Sasha all over. Sasha at the cellular level. Sasha genomes and Sasha tumors and Sasha blood.”

“Tumors?” my mother says. “What tumors?”

“Syl’s old girlfriend named her,” I say. “That was before she abandoned the dog and Syl and joined some rehab cult in the desert. It’s a sad story. It’s gonna get even sadder if Syl doesn’t get his dog back. He’s a charbroiled patriot, you know.”

“Of course we’re gonna give the dog back,” my mother says. “Once Monk and I are reduced to a pile of wise old dead dust. If anyone tries to take this baby away from us before then, we will slit the infidel’s throat and bathe in their heretical, Sasha-less blood.”

“Hoorah,” I sigh.

“Now who wants lamb burger for dinner? It’s Sasha’s favorite.”

“You never fed me lamb burger.”

“You’re not a dog,” my father says.

Lamb burger proves to be a popular addition to Martha’s supper repertoire. Throughout the meal, Posh sits upright between my parents, her pointy head at table level, blinkless and unmoving. Monk cannot take more than three chews of his meat without stabbing up a morsel and forking it into the dog’s mouth. I’ve never seen an animal so dainty and diligent about its dinner. By the end of the meal, I too am speaking their childish canine language and spoon-catapulting greasy chunks of lamb burger through the air. Somehow the dog snatches them from their high trajectory while remaining perfectly still and composed, its haunches never leaving the floor. We spend a half hour, in lieu of dessert, finger-tweezing snarls and burger grit out of the dog’s luminous coat and brainstorming synonyms for regal. I feign a headache and ask if I can spend the night on the couch, but my parents pretend not to hear me. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter. Posh Pantaloons, aka Posh Pants, aka Posh, aka Sasha, aka Sasha Baby, aka Sasha the Indubitable and Great, is now sleeping on the guest bed.

I thank my parents for supper and bid them goodbye while they continue to groom the dog on a living-room rug that is a minefield of new squeaky toys, a trounced battalion of stuffed animals, cotton entrails. The dog gives me a stern, disappointed look and then returns to vivisecting a plush koala that does not seem too pleased with me, either.

***

The gentleman occupying my apartment stoop is a mass of filthy sweatshirt-jeans-shoes, huddled under a skullcap that adheres to his scalp shag like a greedy parasite. A shaky package of person air-dropped at random or by mistake. The clothing in my arms is clean because I’m rushing back from my monthly excursion to the laundromat. Perhaps Martha and Monk are right that granting me washer privileges at their home would only stunt my sense of social venture and manifest destiny. It certainly wouldn’t deplete all my spare change. I try to squeeze past the uncouth guy without establishing eye contact, but he grabs my leg and I can’t help but look.

“Oh,” I say. “Hey, Renfeld.”

“Enough chitchat,” Renfeld replies. “You know why I’m here.”

I rehoist the basket in my arms. “Sorry.”

“Think hard, you dog-thieving fuck.”

“Do you see a dog? I don’t see a dog.”

“Yeah, I already had myself a look.” Renfeld thrusts a thumb at the open door. The old lock is broken. The new locks, too. All seven of them. “Doorman let me in.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Big man wants a word.”

“Can I put my laundry upstairs first?”

Renfeld’s other hand releases my shinbone, which I didn’t realize he was still throttling. He’s suffering a very visible case of detox twitches, wither shakes. “This laundry?” He pulls himself to his feet and knocks the basket from my arms. Both of us watch in halfhearted interest as the seven clean shirts I own go tumbling into a rancid sewage puddle that engulfs the sidewalk. 

“The machine didn’t get them very clean anyway,” I say.

Renfeld reaches into his hoodie and takes out a disposable cell phone that my hands are now free to accept.

“Just in case you try going incommunicado again.” He also passes me an AC charger with an eroded cord. “Expect the call sometime after chow time.”

“Sure thing,” I reply, glancing up the street, down the street. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Big man wants me to stick around to make sure you answer that goddamn thing.”

“Can we just call him Syl?”

“We? We? He and me are pals. You’re just—”

“An infidel?”

“Yeah, okay, that works.” Renfeld, swelling with authority, hikes up the grungy pants that are spilling off his malnourished hip bones.

“If you both are so chummy,” I say, “why didn’t you take the dog?”

“I got allergies, man. Also, during Syl’s first deployment he left these kick-ass ninja fighting fish in my custody. Things didn’t go so well for those fish. I think Syl still harbors some grudge. Dogs kinda scare me, too.”

“Renfeld,” I say. “This is all very enriching, but I need to get inside or else the sunlight will make my bones explode.”

I trudge up the common stairs to my floor with Ren shuffle-schlepping behind me, bracing himself on the cracked wallpaper, a bannister gummy with tenant germs. My interior door is busted apart. “Oh, good, you spruced up the joint.”

“Syl would skeez out if he saw this place,” Ren says, trodding through the split door and across the strewn mail, pornographic literature, an overturned stack of empty milk crates that served as shelving for all the books I don’t own, everything rummaged. “Pretty demoralizing.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“He thought you were some high roller because you wore a nice suit, had a decent haircut. But you’re a pathetic schmuck, just like the rest of Syl’s drug lackeys.”

“Thanks, man. That means a lot to me.”

Ren looks glumly down at the screwdriver holstered delicately in a belt loop of his pants. “What a fucking fubar.”

Both of us stand in the middle of my attic apartment with slouched postures, trying to share the little real estate available under the canted ceiling.

I point at the tool. “You planning on doing any more home renovations?”

“Huh? Oh, this thing. I’m currently flirting with the wonderful new world of court-ordered sobriety. This is my emotional support screwdriver.”

“Nice.”

“A few dozen more long stabby items and I might become a halfway stable human.”

Renfeld rakes the dirty muzz of hair away from his eyes and sits down on my futon. 

“Sorry I went haywire on that door,” he adds sheepishly. “You should see the mess I made of my place. Least here I have an excuse. A purpose.”

“Things could be worse. For you, I mean. My elderly mother still barbers me.”

“Fucking fubar,” Renfeld says, the screwdriver in his fist, mirthlessly impaling my futon cushion, whittling his initials into the blond wood.

***

Martha and Monk’s backyard is mostly shrubbery and ungraded dirt interrupted with various amenities my father cobbled together during the early, experimental years of his retirement. Lattice wall, brick path, nylon hammock, a faux-granite bench like some misplaced piece of Stonehenge. Posh is lazing atop the bench with half-slit eyes, panting in rapid percussive bursts, under a partial eclipse of shade. That is my father looming over her with the umbrella for hours. Martha is filming the heartwarming tableau with a digital camera, one of those tiny pricey tourist models, sale tag dangling. 

“Everything is under control,” I’m explaining to Syl on the phone. “I outsourced some of the more banal, caretakery stuff. Ren can verify. I hired the best.”

“He’s got a pair of blue-hairs feeding Posh a gourmet diet that gives her the shits!” Renfeld shouts from the hammock.

“But she’s happy,” I say into the phone. “Very happy.”

“Inbred pinheads,” says Syl. “Both of you.”

“At least I got him to put the screwdriver away.”

“Meanwhile, I’m locked in a concrete shoebox eating rotten carrots and drinking stale milk out of a plastic goddamn bladder. Yesterday, I found some sort of metal coupling afloat in my soup. And people say army food is bad. No wonder prison produces so many hardened criminals.”

“Are you going to tell me why you were arrested?”

“It was all a mistake,” Syl says. “And none of your fucking pinhead business.”

“Hoorah.”

“That word coming outta your mouth is a sacrilege.”

“Syl,” I say. “You’re no Marine, either. You’re National Guard.”

“Yeah, and those idiots still have half of me melted on a Humvee bumper.”

“I could really use those drugs now,” I say. “Any drugs. It’s been a week almost. I don’t know how to talk to people, and I don’t know how to sit alone with myself.”

“Sounds a lot like being in jail.” 

“Here’s something you should know. Martha and Monk are keeping your dog. Sorry, Syl.”

A long pause. No clicking, no beeping. Just the harsh, irritated rustle of Syl’s nasal breathing. “My people will have something to say about that.”

“Your people? Can we just say Ren?”

“Ren will have something to say about that.”

I stir my arm around the plastic cooler and toss a chilled soda into Renfeld’s lap. He nods his appreciation, shuts his eyes, and resumes a slow sway in the oatmeal-flavored breeze. Everything outside reeks of oatmeal. I suspect Martha and Monk are dousing the dead horticulture with flea treatment, too.

“Your drug lackey has basically moved in with my folks,” I say. “He wears my dad’s old clothes. They buy an extra copy of the morning paper so he can do his own crossword.”

“Fucking fubar,” Syl says.

“The good news is I may have found a temporary substitute for pot.”

Syl is holding the phone so tight to his head I can hear the bitter blood thrum around the locked tin of his brain. Or maybe it’s my brain. I drain the last of my beer, gurgling it for cheap effect, then crack open another. Syl stays quiet the whole time. When he speaks again, his voice is inexplicably lighter, vacant. I wonder if he’s suffered a rare incursion of kindness. Or maybe an incapacitating stroke. 

“One thing they have here that’s kinda cool is this small, outdoor garden. Maybe to torture us psychologically or becalm us or some shit. I dunno. There are birds that sometimes visit. Real colorful fuckers. No dogs, though. I’ve asked. Some prisons have special programs where guys on good behavior get to foster puppies. It seems sorta heartbreaking, you know? Raise a puppy and then give it away, and it never gets to see its daddy again. Maybe someday I can get transferred to a place with one of those programs. This place is just birds and lice and child molesters dying of organ failure out in the yard. A bird can’t X-ray your soul, man. A bird can’t deduce the good things you’re secretly capable of, the good things other motherfuckers are too shitty to see.”

“She’ll have a fulfilling life here,” I say. “It’s lamb-burger heaven. There’s an infinite conveyor belt bringing her stuffed toys to maul. And no child molesters, which is always a plus.”

“What about pine trees?”

“Pine trees?”

“They’re bad for dogs. Posh could eat the needles and accidentally puncture her intestines.” He pronounces the word intest-EYE-nes, and some feeble linkage in my chest—a knot of capillaries and brown twine—shakes loose and starts to ache. “I want pictures of the backyard, the parents, any new chew toys that Posh likes—”

“Sasha.”

“Who the fuck is Sasha?”

“Never mind.”

“I want a written status report from her vet, rabies certificate in triplicate, grooming receipts—”

“Sorry, buddy,” I say. “It’s probably best to just cut the cord. Final and clean.”

“How about I slit your throat, final and clean?”

“You sound like my mom.” I lob the phone at Renfeld, but it lands on a barren hammock. Ren is now manning the camera as my father crouches beside the bench, pretending to play ragtime piano on the dog’s rib cage. The dog stares off into the trees in mild irritation. 

In the kitchen, I restock the cooler with soda and ice and a secret reserve of beer buried at the bottom.

“Is your little friend staying for dinner?” my mother asks. 

She’s already setting an extra plate for him at the table, extra napkin, extra silverware, extra screwdriver.

***

The guest room is painted several shades of red agony that waver in intensity depending how often I swallow and blink. Renfeld sits on the foldout couch, which used to belong to the dog before she upgraded to the shank region of Martha and Monk’s bed. Renfeld’s forehead is sickly glistening. He uses his skullcap to blot it dry while slurping an oversized bowl of cereal and watching me with a worried expression. I am on the floor, curled into myself, part tangled in the hammock that I guess I tried to wear around the house like some kind of ascot or cape. I may be technically sober, but my brain is still wringing the residual alcohol from its various nooks and folds with supreme violence. I feel surprisingly lucid.

“I gotta give you big props,” Renfeld says between mouthfuls. “Last night? Telling Syl your folks are keeping his dog? That was ballsy.”

“I did what?”

“The dude was arrested for snapping his ex-girlfriend’s neck, hacking her apart, and scattering the pieces across thirty square miles of sunbaked desert. That is pure evil dedication. I sure wouldn’t want that maniac pissed at me.”

“The girlfriend is dead?”

“I hope you have decent life insurance, man.”

“Sure,” I say. “The best.” 

Renfeld shrugs and licks his spoon, his jowls puffed with breakfast food. My stomach is churning blood like some kind of tidal vortex. I’m near-blind from headache, but I can still see the red dapples on his skin, his rheumy eyes. 

“How are your dog allergies doing?”

“Totally worth it,” Renfeld says with a sniffle. 

***

Posh sits in my parents’ sedan with her upper body packaged in a safety-harness-corset type deal that attaches via Velcro strap and bungee cord to the vehicle’s back seat. It is a jarring sight, the dog’s sleek-beige hair erupting from the contraption in bizarrely tapered fountains, her middle vanished, erased. She is so enthused to be in the car—vigorously panting and lacquering the side window with maximum slobber, several glazy layers—even though the car has not left the driveway all afternoon. My father is hunched against the steering wheel, glancing anxiously at the rearview mirror, monitoring the dog’s salivations. He absentmindedly flicks the turn signal. Toggles the headlight switch.

“I just can’t,” he says. “What if a deer strides into our path, a hailstorm, a stray child? I swerve into oncoming traffic. I close my eyes to avoid the moment, but it’s too late. The dog whizzes past my head and bursts through the windshield at dog-breaking speed.”

“But the safety-harness-corset type deal,” I say.

“It’s not enough.”

“It has a five-year warranty.”

“Sasha doesn’t,” he says. 

“And your son?”

“The world mortifies me,” my father whispers.

“I’ve been saying that all along, but nobody listens.” I clamp a hand on my dad’s shoulder.

He smiles weakly and says, “Don’t touch me.”

“At least somebody looks good in your suits.” 

Across the yard, Renfeld is weed-whacking the curb cut, the mailbox, the driveway edging. He’s dappered inside the old man’s blue seersucker blazer and white ice-cream-man pants.

“That old thing? It was just rotting in my closet,” my father says. “But I do worry about the boy’s allergies. They’re even worse than the D.T.’s. So heroic, his commitment. It’s awe-inspiring.”

“I know he seems sober now, but I once saw Ren get down on his stomach and lick an entire Italian ice off the sidewalk. It wasn’t regular Italian ice. He had mixed codeine, ice water, vodka, and an itty-bitty dose of contraband LSD, then froze it all together in a paper cup. He was so jazzed about consuming his druggy confection that he promptly dropped it. He didn’t leave that sidewalk for three days.”

My father turns to look at me. “Please don’t drink in the car.”

I try my best to manufacture the kind of apologetic expression that also conveys a healthy amount of self-scrutiny, an inward glare. Then I roll down the window and pour my beer onto the slanted driveway. A jagged brown river trickles downhill, mingling with the fresh grass clippings Renfeld has sheared and scattered and not yet bagged up. I crumple the can and lob it out the window, too.

“Where are you trying to go, again?” I ask.

“She loves riding in the car. So we’re riding in the car. There’s plenty of viable places we can visit. Any minute now.”

“After I get my gym membership,” I say, “I think I’m going to transition to light beer. I can almost see myself as a low-calorie kind of guy, weeping alone in his apartment.”

“You always say you’re nervous,” my father tells me. “I love you, but you’re full of horseshit. You don’t covet anything of value. That means your life is entirely void of feeling. You have no idea what real sacrifice looks like.”

I climb out and go inside the house and take a mordant, alcohol-infused nap. Six hours later, my father is still sitting in the car, staring ahead, too scared to drive anywhere. The sun has slunk away, and the streetlamps glow in unison, a congregation of levitating orbs. The dog remains strapped upright and calm in the back seat, her eyelids closed yet squirming, dreaming fruitlessly of distant travel.

I put down the binoculars and walk outside in shower shoes and a towel toga and knock on the driver-side window. Groggily, my father rolls down the glass.

“That Italian-ice story,” I say. “That wasn’t Ren.”

“I know who it was,” my father replies, and rolls up the window.

I go back inside.

***

Tonight is my turn on the foldout. Renfeld has commandeered the floor, an immense flannel blanket triple-cocooned around him, only his pale, hives-riddled face exposed. This small amount of unsheltered skin is further reduced by a painter’s mask and pair of granny-sized bifocals. His fitful snores are garbled, his lungs and sinuses full of gunk. A true martyr for the cause. The guest room has been dark for hours, but I can still hear him scratching and shivering inside his flannel swaddle. I can’t sleep, either.

“Maybe you’d be happier in the car with my dad,” I say.

“Is Sasha with him?”

“My mother, too.”

“Martha and Monk,” Renfeld rasps. “They're the fucking greatest, aren’t they?”

“Sure, sure.”

“Maybe you’re the thing I’m allergic to?”

“I’m not a dog,” I say.

“You’d sure snore less.”

“I don’t snore. I’ve never snored.”

“Did Syl ever share with you his theory for the eternal dog?” 

“Nope.”

“I think he made it up,” he says, pulling off the paper mask. “But it’s a good theory, as far as theories go. Syl’s a real thinker.”

“Lay it on me.” 

“The reason dogs stare so deeply into us,” Renfeld says, “is because they can see all our old reincarnations. Our whole catalog of past lives. It’s available to them, all of them, at the same time. It’s that pack mentality. The group-dog brain. They see all the awfulness we are accountable for, and there’s a wet flicker of anxiety and judgment in their eyes, a beholding. Then they instantly forget it all, because dogs can’t remember shit for more than a few seconds. That part is scientific fact.”

“I guess that’s kinda neat.” 

“My personal tragedy is I went crazy with tulip fever in the seventeenth century.”

“That makes sense,” I say.

“It was a thing in the Netherlands. Look it up in, like, the annals or whatever. There was this farmer who lived down the road from me. He had a whole garden of baby tulips. I wanted them so bad I stove in his brains with a Dutch hoe.”

“That’s odd. You don’t strike me as the manual-labor type.”

“The broken hoe, his broken skull, those beautiful tulips spattered in Dutch blood. It’s so vivid, man. It haunts me. Isn’t that fucking insane?”

“Maybe a little.”

“You need to regulate your alcohol consumption,” Renfeld says. “Martha and Monk deserve better. Sometimes I think you’re not worthy of that animal.”

“I’m a fubar.”

He’s fidgeting inside the snare of blankets, I think, shaking his head. “You still haven’t mastered the term. There’s an art to it.”

“My alcohol consumption is fine. It’s my inability to stay sober while getting blind pissing drunk that is the real issue.”

Renfeld goes quiet. All I hear is a scratching sound, more crinkle. I snap on my keychain flashlight and rove it around the room. The beam catches Renfeld sitting on the floor, legs folded, his feet bloody and outstretched. He’s using a penknife to slice the calloused skin off his foot bottoms.

“That’s horrifying.”

He adjusts his bifocals and squints at me, then returns to his gory chore. “Don’t judge me. A man has to make a living somehow.” 

“So that’s what living looks like. I had wondered.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “I’m making sea monkeys.”

“Oh, okay.”

He holds up the baggie of foot shavings, which in the half-light resemble translucent blood slugs banished from their native ocean, i.e., the sole of an allergy-prone ex-junkie’s foot. He shakes the baggie, making it dance.

“I sell them through mail-order ads in the back pages of comic books, Boy Scout magazines. Live sea monkeys, five dollars a bag. My target market tends to be Midwestern malcontents between the ages of eight and fourteen.”

“So it’s a scam.”

“I like to think I’m stoking a lifelong interest in science and wonderment among this great nation’s snail-brained youth. I’ve never been hit with a single lawsuit.”

“I guess disappointed ten-year-olds from Tulsa rarely seek legal counsel.”

“The problem is I’ve been so busy with Sasha and Martha and Monk that I kinda lapsed on my entrepreneurial stuff. Got a whole backload of orders. Let me know if you care to lend a hand, or foot. This callus farm is almost strip-mined. Do a good thing for once.” He nudges the granny glasses up the bridge of his drippy nose. “Rectitude is a kick-ass trait in snail-brained adults. I hock my plasma, too.”

“Are those my mother’s bifocals?”

Renfeld resumes the slicing and bagging of foot skin. I keep the flashlight trained on him for several more minutes until he finally looks up at me.

“Since when does Monk drink?” he asks.

“He doesn’t.”

“I saw him sneak a bottle of brandy into the car along with the dog.”

I mull this awhile. 

“Fubar,” I say.

“Yup,” Renfeld sighs. “You got it.”

***

A morning mist has rolled up the front steps of the house, submerging the street and driveway and shrubbery, and maybe, too, every bumbling reincarnation I may be unconsciously harboring. Deep in the murk, I can make out the hulk of my parents’ sedan, their gray stately heads, Sasha-Posh and Renfeld in the back seat. The family of passengers is facing forward, blurry and motionless. The dog’s head is cocked at an inquisitive angle. Renfeld’s dirty skullcap looks like a yawning bald spot. The mist soon burns off, but the car windows remain fogged with communal breath. For some reason, my father has planted his foot on the brake pedal and holds it there, the red taillights glowing for hours—a brilliant emergency—until the car battery dies late in the day. I only leave the foyer window to urinate in the kitchen sink and swab-clean my binoculars, and to eventually answer my parents’ phone, which has been ringing at sporadic intervals all weekend.

I sober up and accept the charges. 

“I’m never getting out of here,” Syl tells me.

“That’s not exactly news for the rest of us.”

“It appears the American judicial system couldn’t give a big, soggy shit about the plight of the modern warrior. Our bacon-burned bodies, our damaged psyches.”

“Especially those who dice up their girlfriends and hide the body parts like a macabre Easter egg hunt.”

“That’s a funny analogy,” Syl says. “You’re a funny fucking fruitcake, you know that?”

“I should wear a sign around my neck, something that says Unsteady load. That might help people understand.”

“Make one for me while you’re at it,” Syl says. “I’ve been staying away from the metal shop because it is a den of buggery. In addition to my idiot tattoo and most of my face, you know, my pooper is the last part of me that has any structural integrity whatsoever.”

“Integrity is overrated,” I say. 

“I used to love metal shop, man. Like in high school? I once watched a dude take off a finger with a circular saw and then try to solder it back on. It was his second time losing that digit. The soldering was more painful than the amputation. Fucking DeWalt. One of your screwball brethren. And yet somehow you’re both better off than me.”

“I have another analogy for you, Syl. Do you ever think about God?” 

“All the time.”

“God is like a guy in prison who wants you dead. He can send some minions. He can make a few calls. That’s all. That’s it.”

Syl clucks his tongue around his expensively refurbished mouth—molded palate, gold grill of teeth—chewing on the idea.

“Very clever, professor,” he says. 

I stretch the phone cord as far as it will uncoil, but that only gets me halfway down the hall. No view of the driveway, the car. Maybe a bank of security cameras could be installed, laser sensors, radiograph machines. Maybe they’ll never return inside again.

“Prison isn’t so bad,” Syl says. “I actually enjoy the boredom, the solitude. It’s so peaceful. The only problem is the asshole population. Just like in the free world. That’s why I connect with animals so deeply, you know? Dogs don’t steal your Social Security number. Dogs don’t frag your ass in the goddamn shit-sucking desert. Dogs don’t nag you relentlessly and threaten to move out of your apartment and then come crawling back and apologize and insult and humiliate you until you have no choice but to break their goddamn neck and bury them—”

“I get it, I get it.”

“That’s my true punishment, man. A life without my dog and my dog’s understanding. I’ve asked, I’ve pleaded. I even offered to cut a deal, but I guess they already dug most of Posh’s mom up. They wanna see me rot long and slow, and I’m okay with that part. I am. Skin is just a bag. It lives, it breathes, it turns out to be highly fucking flammable. But it’s just a bag. Now an animal’s love? That’s, that’s…” 

“I’m sorry,” I say. “But I need to bring some dinner out to the car or they’re gonna starve out there.”

“I’m glad she found a good home,” Syl tells me in a wet, roiling voice. “You? You’re a pinhead fuckup. But Monk and Martha sound like decent folk. Please thank them for me. And give Posh an extra big hug and tell her that her daddy—”

I unplug the phone and commence ransacking the fridge. 

***

My parents and Renfeld are buckled upright in their seats, hands in laps like true penitents, heads aslant, asleep. The dog gazes lazily at me through squinched eyelids. She doesn’t bark or bite, or even breathe, really, as I open the rear door and unlace her from her safety-harness-corset deal. She is not enthusiastic about exiting the vehicle but succumbs to the lure of smoked lunch meat draggled before her snout. I coax her from their sedan and down the driveway. Another three slices and I get her into my car, a model similar to Martha and Monk’s but older, moldier, parked on the street. The windshield is papered with a week’s worth of parking infractions. 

The dog decides she wants to ride up front with me. The lunch meat is gone before I get the engine turned over, and she leers at me with fangy expectation all the way to the interstate. My radio hasn’t functioned in years—I operate the car so rarely, I haven’t thought to repair or replace it—so the only soundtrack for our little venture is the dog’s gastrointestinal distress. But I find her to be a great listener and conversationalist. 

Once the sun is up, I pull over at a rest stop and give the dog away to the first person who does not resemble a war-burned psychopath, a dismemberer and discarder of female body parts.

“I always wanted a dog,” the woman says, leaning against her minivan, holding Posh’s leash limply while the dog sits at her sneakers, grudgingly eyeing us. “She looks like a beauty-pageant contestant with that hair.”

“Before you go,” I say, “can I ask you a question?”

“Only if it doesn’t involve you exposing your ying-yang at a public rest stop.”

I retreat a polite distance, hands up, fingering my chin with serious élan. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?”

The woman stares at me a long, awkward minute, a rambled look on her face.

“Okay, mister. You’re wearing a nice suit, so I’ll play along. When I was in my early twenties, I was a pregnancy surrogate for this rich couple. They gave me all the money up front. Then I told them I lost the baby. I went to another couple, and they bought the baby I eventually had. The first couple learned about the ruse and tried to bribe me to find out where the second couple lived. I took the money and told them. They kidnapped the newborn, then fled. The mother ended up dying of appendicitis while on the lam. The dad drowned himself and the baby in a lake.”

“That’s terrible,” I say. 

“You’re the one who asked.”

“Well, I hope this fluffy wonder adds some happiness to your life.”

I lean down to pet the dog one last time, and the woman slaps my hand away. “Don’t touch my dog.”

“That’s fair,” I say.

“Nothing’s fair,” she replies. “I don’t care how many free dogs the world throws at you.”

She packs Posh into her minivan, which also holds a stooped, brooding husband in neck traction and four frizz-haired kids. Their vehicle disappears into a long chain of traffic that tacks rustily up the hillside. 

I return to the safe, claustrophobic confines of my car, jingling the keys, tapping the cigarette lighter, the broken stereo—a fury of diversionary tics—too nervous to drive anywhere.

***
David Nutt is the author of Summertime in the Emergency Room, a collection of stories forthcoming from Calamari Archive in early 2022, and The Great American Suction (Tyrant Books, 2019). He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and dog and two cats.