These damn dogs. That small outburst seemed almost amusing to me, and I was grateful for it. At last, something in this conversation didn’t seem like armed combat. But the moment passed quickly and almost immediately Dr. Carpenter’s forbidding persona reassembled itself. “Well?” he said testily. “Is there anything else or may I be permitted to go back to my work?”
I didn’t think that I deserved to be treated so dismissively. So perhaps I was just being stubborn, but I wasn’t ready yet just to get up and walk away. Besides, I had something more to tell him.
“I took the dog to be blessed by a priest,” I said. “It was actually kind of an accident. But maybe that’s the point. I happened to walk into a church in the middle of Queens and found the one priest—I bet you, the one priest in the entire city—who had been to Mali, to the Dogon lands, and could recognize that I had a Dogon dog.”
“Well, that’s what they say, isn’t it? God moves in mysterious ways.”
“Who brought up God?” I demanded, feeling just as prickly as Dr. Carpenter sounded. But then I remembered—the priest did. He had referred to the Creator in his blessing. And that was what had been on my mind all along, what had compelled me and brought me here. Bless this animal. May it carry out the function it has been given, and may it aid us to think of You, its Creator. I was about to repeat these words to Dr. Carpenter when he spoke first.
He said, “You aren’t a believer?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
Dr. Carpenter made a small gesture toward my drawing although this time, he didn’t even deign to touch it. “Then you have something in common with your friends here. In all the pictographs I have ever seen that relate to this myth—and I have seen hundreds—there is no depiction of a deity. None. So if you have come to me seeking some sort of spiritual guidance, then I really do have nothing to offer you.”
“I came here,” I repeated once more, as firmly as I could, “to ask you about the dog.”
“Then asked and answered,” Dr. Carpenter said. “He is a pet.”
That was it; that was clearly all Dr. Carpenter had to say. He returned to reading his book and would not look up from it. I knew that I could sit there for the rest of the afternoon, but he wasn’t going to engage with me anymore. It was time for me to leave.
And so I said good-bye and walked out of the room. I retraced my steps down the hallway and took the elevator back to the lobby. The classroom upstairs had been warm, but not uncomfortable; downstairs, however, it was sweltering. The security guard, sitting in front of a huge, rattling fan, once again checked my ID before letting me leave the building. I was glad to get outside, where there was something of a breeze.
It was a long way back to the subway, but I was still going to be early for work. I bought a newspaper and read it as I first waited on the platform for the subway, then rode out to Queens where I transferred to the monorail that took me out to the airport.
I had an hour to kill before I had to get into my pseudo-hipster outfit and turn myself into the cheerful bartender welcoming the traveling public to The Endless Weekend. I had finished the paper, so I sat by one of the gates for a while, watching airplanes lifting themselves up into the sky.
All the while, of course—even when I had pretended to myself that I was deeply absorbed in every column inch of news, gossip and opinion in the paper I had read so assiduously—I was going over and over the conversation I’d had with Dr. Carpenter. I tried to replay it in my mind but it was already slipping away, as conversations tend to, even the most intense. But while I could not repeat to myself every word we’d spoken, every exchange, the general sense of what Dr. Carpenter had to say to me remained strong. He had clearly told me that in essence, he had nothing of any importance to share with me—or that he wished to share—except that Raymond Gilmartin was deluded and I was chasing a myth.
Well, maybe. I might even have let myself be convinced of all that except for one particular point that nagged at me. Even if I accepted that everything Dr. Carpenter said was correct, particularly about the insignificance of the picture that I had reproduced for him, he had misled me about something. Maybe deliberately, maybe not. Or perhaps the fault was mine and I had just misunderstood his implication. I thought he had meant that because there was no god of any kind represented in any of the pictographs to be found in the Dogon lands—or on the stone that Raymond had shown me—then it was likely that the shadowy beings did not believe that one existed. But it wasn’t the visitors from the stars who had recorded the encounter by scratching pictures on rocks and cliff walls; it was the Dogon people. Dr. Carpenter had said so himself. And since they could barely communicate with their visitors, how did they know what the people who had pointed out the Dog Star to them actually believed in? Other, of course, than a need for the companionship of dogs.
~XIV~
Was it a mistake to have gone to see Dr. Carpenter? Maybe, I concluded as I thought about it over the next few days, because I didn’t feel any better after visiting him. In fact, I felt worse. He had been cynical and unpleasant and left me with the impression that he thought my questions were stupid. Delusional. But since even his dismissive attitude had not chased them from my mind, the only result was that now I felt even more confused. And I felt that the way forward—wherever I was headed—had become even murkier.
I became depressed, edgy, far out of my comfort zone, which was to know exactly what I was doing day after day, and why, and where I was supposed to be. I did not, for example, think of myself as the kind of person to ask for the blessings of priests. I did not entertain the ideas of New Age crazies, which—until I had met him, and maybe still—was exactly what I considered Raymond Gilmartin to be. I did not wonder about the function of dogs or their relationship to a creator. And since I was now doing all these things, I began wondering about myself. Though I was capable of holding two ideas in my mind at the same time—for example, that the world was exactly what it appeared to be while, at the same time, maybe there were inexplicable things going on beyond the human line of sight—the balance seemed to be shifting, and I was concerned about which way it was going. Granted, I had been flirting with a lot of strange ideas these past months, but now I was afraid there was the potential that they might take over my life. I was fighting it, but you never knew. And if they did gain more than just the foothold they currently had, what would become of me? Would I wake up one morning and decide that joining the Blue Awareness suddenly made sense? Or maybe I would become religious, or dedicate myself to some alien-hunting group. In other words, little by little, I was beginning to lose trust in myself, in the inner control I had learned to depend on to keep me going. Maybe I lived at the margins of the economy and sometimes struggled to keep my head above water, but so far, I had managed. It had taken me long enough, but I had created some stability for myself. What would happen if I put all that at risk? It did occur to me that maybe I already had.
To some degree, I could distract myself from these thoughts at work—the baseball playoffs were underway and since the Yankees had made it to the postseason, pennant fever was cranked up to an eleven out of ten at The Endless Weekend—but once I got on the bus to head home, everything came back to me. On those long, late-night rides, I did a lot of deep breathing and hummed the great Om to try to center myself, but since I didn’t know where that center was, I was mostly unsuccessful. At home, I ate too much and watched infomercials, pretending to myself that nut choppers and oxygen-infused cleaning solutions would make my life better. And then I went to sleep, to the world of haunted dreams.
I dreamt about the dog, Zvezdochka, the little star orbiting Earth. I dreamt about Buddy, the dog who had come to me in the mausoleum. I dreamt about the dog scratched into a rock, standing between a human and something that was not a human being. In my dreams, all these dogs visited me—even Zvezdochka, safely landed on Earth and stepping out of her capsule—and I would pat them on the head, greeting each in turn. And then I would wake to see my own dog, my sleepless shadow, positioned at the edge of the bed. Many nights now, when I woke, I saw that, instead of watching the door, Digitaria was watching me.