Human for a Day (9781101552391) (14 page)

“You heard her,” he snarls. He puts his arm around her and she buries her face in his shirt. “S'okay, honey.
Go on
,” he adds to me. “Take that—
thing
—and beat it back to hell.” And then a change comes over his face. He says, “No, wait there.”

Turning he bellows behind him, something in Spanish. It sounds like something about paper, or a letter; my Spanish ain't that good. But the round woman suddenly comes rushing back and in her hands is a folder and she pushes it at him and he shoves it against my chest, so I kind of grab it, not meaning to. The next second the door is slammed again and through it he yells at me, “Read that, you idiot. Don't come back or I'll see you in the jail. You hear me?”

“Sure,” I say softly to the door.

Crickets, which have been quiet as stones, start their singing again as I head back to the pickup. The dog is lying in back, his head turned away from the house.

I need a damn beer.

 

We went to a diner, and like before, the dog sat quiet outside in the pickup. When I was done, I brought him out some of the steak in a napkin, and poured him more water. He ate and drank like a machine, like a robot that somehow still needs food. Then he lay back down. He put his long golden head on his long gold paws and closed his sad, dark eyes. I drove someplace just off the road and parked.

And then I opened the folder.

I don't like reading. It never holds me, not now. Though when I was younger, with Della, I'd read whole books.

In the folder were these two things: a cell phone, a model like the kids want to have, takes pictures and plays music, that kind of thing; and some sheets of paper. They were printed off a computer.

I sat and stared at the paper. And then put it down, because the words wouldn't stick together. Then I tried the phone. But something had gone wacky with it; it'd only make a kind of buzz, and then show me just these two pictures. One was out front of the low white house with the palms. Nothing in this picture but the dog. The golden dog. He was sitting on the dry front lawn, slim and shining, and his tongue lolled out, and his eyes all big and bright . . . and happy. It was the same dog, with different happy eyes. And then the second picture would snap on. This one was taken at the back of the house, right by the sky-blue bowl of pool. The dog wasn't in this picture. Only . . .

Only the moment I saw it first, this second shot, I looked and looked at it. And after I did that maybe seven, eight, nine times, I turned off the phone and picked up the papers again. And read them.

 

I don't know how to properly start this. So I'll simply begin. I'll be totally honest. Or there's no point.

I remembered everything when I woke. But somehow I wasn't fazed. It didn't really affect me. Which is mad, but that's the only way I can put it. Or the only way I can, here. There isn't much time now. I know that. Or much space, come to that.This was all the paper I could find, to print this out.

Please try to believe what I say.

Basically, yesterday—and all the days, weeks, the entire three-and-a-half years before—I was a dog. I forget the name of the breed. Funny I don't recollect, when I seem to remember so much else. And to know. I can read and write for example—self-evidently. I can use a computer, just like, if if I wanted, I could make a sandwich, and eat it, without a single eyebrow being raised. I mean, how is that possible? And I can talk. From the moment I opened my eyes this morning, when I stretched and stood up, stood up that is the way a young man would do, and not as a dog, from then I knew all these things, had all these human skills. I don't know why.

But then, I don't either know why I turned from being a dog into being a man. Just knew I had done. Also, I knew how to operate the human body I was in, just as if I'd done it for seventeen years. I knew and recalled how it had been when I was the dog—only, weirdly, at once removed. The dog, to me, had become, instantaneously with the transformation, he. Not I.

I can confirm, I don't think or feel or react like a dog, now. My emotions are a man's. A young man's. How can this be? I've no notion.

It's the same with the other strangeness. Like this truly peculiar fact—I seem to remember having read certain books—say Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
, or listened to pieces of music: Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto, Panic! At the Disco's song “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.”

How is that? Did the dog get read to? Get music played him? Come to that, did he watch them use the computer? I don't know.

How can I? Every minute of this day I've moved farther and farther from being the dog.Though I still know the people I'd known as the dog. Oh yes. But he wasn't me. I'm not him.

So I guess I'm just going to have to leave that as it stands. I can't add anything to it. I don't have the answer. Or no answer that is sane. As I don't have—never did, never will—any choice.

 

Mornings, Concha gets up at about five AM. She is the Mc-Calls' maid-of-all-work. Thing is, she undoes the kitchen door that opens on the backyard, which lets out the dog. That morning (today), Concha came down and undid the door.At that point the dog, if still asleep, generally sprang up and bounded out, racing up and down the lawn, sniffing and rolling, staring in the pool, gazing up at birds, or any neighborhood cats.Today, though, the dog didn't wake straight off. He lay there sleeping, it seemed, just twitching a bit, perhaps. She saw nothing to concern her in this, put on the coffee and set out the ironing.

Concha always irons in the mornings, before any of the family drift down around seven. This is because she often irons the clean clothes of her three sons, along with the family stuff. One of these sons is eighteen. Lucky for me.

I came to when she'd gone off to the bathroom, which regularly happens after her first mug of coffee. (How do I know? Because the dog had seen it day after day for almost two years.) And that is when I
woke
. When I woke as
me
, how I am now. The clock on the wall showed 5:30 AM. And the morning light showed me myself, young, male, human, and naked, lying out from the dog basket on the tiled floor.

I didn't have a second's disorientating doubt. I got myself to my (man's) feet. I grabbed a pair of jeans, underpants, a white shirt, and—
nearly
like the dog I'd been—rushed out into the yard. There was a cluster of palm trees. In there I dressed myself. (How did I know?
Instinct
?) And here is the other weird thing. Before I woke,just as I became human, I'd had access to some kind of—
psychic
?—bathroom. I'd done all I'd needed to, and was now showered clean, had used some okay deodorant, washed my hair. I'd brushed my teeth. The taste of mint mouthwash wasn't alien at all.

Concha came back soon after. I'd been given just enough time. She called for me (the dog-me). “Scott!
Iprisa
, Scott!” But he didn't,
I
didn't, always come when called. Depended how interesting the morning backyard was that day. She'd gotten upset though when she couldn't figure where the extra clothes had gone to. Then I heard her tell herself, in Spanish, which I partly understood, as the dog had probably learned to, that she was
idiota
for leaving them behind yesterday, when she'd visited her sons.

I'd gone wandering by then. I'd gotten over the low wall. I investigated adjacent spaces, paths, walls, the road. A mailman passed me and waved. I waved back. I was just somebody's teenage son he must have met before, clean, good haircut (it is, I've seen it) dressed casual the way kids dress from well-off homes; a friendly, well-raised boy.

I don't know what I might have done. Or I guess I do know. I just had a walk and rambled back. Like a dog does, if if he likes the house where he belongs. And this time the sun was an inch or so higher. I could smell cooked eggs and bagels. And the . . . I could hear her voice. I knew it.
He
did.

Rosalie.

“Dad? Wonder where Scott is—”

I stayed by the palms. I never felt that before. The way a human heart can seem to stop, but it never has.And then it beats like a drum.

 

When finally she came out to look for me (for the dog) she had on her bathing suit. She had a day at home, no school, and Dad had already taken off for town. I'd heard the car.

Her suit was pool-blue. She doesn't tan, it never takes. She has great skin. That had never mattered. Now it did. Everything about her. She was lovely.

She glanced around and called out “Scott?” a couple times. Then she shrugged. She dived into the pool. Cleaved the sapphire surface with hardly a ripple. Her wet hair spread rich black. When she came out, she
shook
herself. Waterdrops scattered like pearls from some necklace I must once have seen. Did she learn to shake off water like that from
him
? The one I'd been—

That was when she saw me.

She stopped still.

I thought, she'll scream for Concha. But she didn't.

“Who are you?” she asked, dead neutral.

“Excuse me,” I said,“I came in from the front, mistook the house—” They are alike here, to the human eye.

She didn't look scared. Her eyes had opened wide as wide was all, but no fear in them.

I said,“We moved in around a week ago—that new place up the side track.” The dog had a memory of that from previous wanderings.

She nodded. She said, “So who are you looking for? I know most of the people around here.”

That music, the book, started swirling in my brain, it was all I could think of to coin some—really stupid—name. “Uh—Disco Bradbury,” I said.

She looked blank.The intelligent response.

“No, never heard of him.”

“Oh, okay. Well I guess I have it wrong. Guy from school, thought he lived here, meant to look him up—”

She said then, “What's your name?”

“Scott.” I said it before I could hold it back.

And her dark eyes went even wider as she laughed. “That's the name of my
dog!
”

“Oh boy. Hmm. Should I be destroyed or pleased?”

“Pleased. He's great. Only—” she looked around now, “he's gone slightly missing . . .”

“What does he look like?” She told me. “I think I
saw
a dog like that,” I said. I described it as a dog trotting along one of the paths down the block, causing no trouble.

She said he never did, but still he shouldn't be out there. But yes, it had happened before.And so I said, if she wanted I would go try to catch him. She said that it was fine and he always comes back, but maybe we could both go. She'd just go change. Or would I like a cup of coffee first, Concha had just made a fresh pot. She laughed again, pretty, and like the way I hadn't been able to not answer. “
Scott
,” she couldn't seem not to say, “You're just his color scheme, you know. Your tan and your hair.You have
great
hair.” Then she blushed. It was beautiful.

 

Would you believe, Concha liked me too. I think so. But I had to make up a whole history of really terrific if slightly forgetful parents to satisfy her. I longed for the old novels I'd somehow read, where you could be a man at fifteen, or younger, and no one expected you to still be attached to a family, collar and leash, for your own protection and happiness.

The dog had loved Rosalie.And she'd loved—
loved
—him.

Inside one quarter hour I knew that I, whoever, whatever I was, loved Rosalie too. It doesn't rattle me to say it, even now, with the sun only about an hour off rising for another morning. I loved, I
love
her. The way only one human can love another. I want to know her. Get to know her really slowly, gently, intensely. I want time—a year, two years. Moment by moment, day by day. Until that perfect season, some unearthly hour—and then. Oh, yes.Time. I want time.Wanted. She took a picture of me on her phone, in the backyard. I didn't realize she did this until she'd done it. “Is that okay?” she asked me. She blushed again. She showed me the photo and I looked at it with some interest. Could I be objective? Who knows? I was tall, fit and athletic-looking for seventeen, and very tanned, like she said, and my hair was thick and shiny and the exact color of the dog's coat. And my eyes were dark, like hers.

We went looking for the dog. It was getting hot, but what did we care? We went by the parched lawns and under the palms and through a plaza with some stores. Lots of people. Plenty of them she seemed to know, and she introduced me sometimes, the new guy just moved in. We asked if anyone had seen the dog. Nobody had. (Some surprise, of course they hadn't, had they? The dog was standing in front of them. Only he wasn't.)

Finally, we bought some Cokes—or she did, no coins in my pockets. We stood in the shade under a palm, and her eyes went wet. “He's never been gone so long.”

I took her hand. She let me. “Listen,” I said, “I know he's okay.”

“How do you
know
?”

“He is. I just do. Rosalie, he's fine. I wouldn't say that if I didn't—sorry, I can't explain.”

“You can see things, feel things other people can't? Sort of psychic?” she asked, hopefully.

“If you like.”

She smiled. She trusted me. Her hand in mine. We didn't let go until some more of the neighborhood came walking by.

I wish I could have stopped time. Just stood forever holding her hand. For the very first time I wondered maybe if this is why I'd—
he
—had changed. Like—what's that story—the guy who's a frog, but when the princess kisses him he becomes a man.