The Ghost in Love (10 page)

“Shhh, be still now,” Pilot said.

The mist drifted lazily past them and was gone. Both dogs drooped, their relief palpable.

“When I was young, things like that never bothered me. I'd see cancer coming but never give it a second thought. I was young; it wasn't there for me.”

While the guide dog spoke, Pilot peered around for signs of any other danger. Almost immediately he saw one coming. “Look at that! Let's get out of here.”

As soon as the Rottweiler saw, it dashed off down the street, heedless of the dog it had been hired to guide across the city.

When any current moment is over, it immediately begins to lose all shape and color. Like a fish pulled out of the water and left to die on land, its colors pale and it flops helplessly around until its life energy ebbs beyond a certain point and it dies. However, there are some moments that refuse to die. As they weaken, they stumble and lurch through the now, wreaking havoc. Colliding with lives and events, they leave their mark, aroma, their
scales
, on everything they touch.

Human beings cannot see or sense these rebellious pieces of dying
time, but again, animals can. They try to avoid them because they know any moment other than the present is at best a distraction and, at worse, treacherous.

That is why animals behave so strangely sometimes. Why they leap up from a sound sleep and run out of the room for no apparent reason. Or they stealthily stalk something no one but they can see. The truth is they're not stalking something but trying to escape without being seen. They know very well what they're doing.

With his old, slow legs Pilot knew that he could not outrun this thing, so the dog stood as still as possible and waited.

This particular piece of past time had no concrete shape or color, which meant that it must have been dying for a long while. Inside it, untold numbers of concrete and obscure images swirled. Seeing them, Pilot knew that he was witnessing some part of history, but which one? The past is immense and complicated. Encountering this small fading fragment of it was like seeing a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle and trying to envision what it came from.

“Your name was Dominique Bertaux,” the past said to Pilot as it passed.

On hearing this, the dog's eyes widened in disbelief. He had to hurry to catch up with the past as it drifted away down the street. “What? What did you say?”

“I
said
your name was Dominique Bertaux. You lived in Mantua, Italy, until you fell off your boyfriend's scooter, broke your back, and died. That was seven years ago.” The voice of the past was cordial but plain. It spoke perfect unaccented Dog. “Would you like to see for yourself?”

Before Pilot could reply, the images inside the past slowed to reveal a grinning, ordinary-looking young woman riding on the back of a bottle-green Vespa scooter. She had long brown hair tied back in
a ponytail and wore a sleeveless white dress that contrasted nicely with her tanned skin. A knapsack hung on her back while her arms were wrapped tightly around the waist of the scooter driver.

“That's you in your last life.”

“I was
human
? That's the worst thing I've ever heard. It's a nightmare. You're sure I was human?”

“Yes. As I said, your name was Dominique Bertaux.”

Aghast at this dreadful revelation, Pilot asked shakily, “But then, why don't I understand people when they speak now? I don't understand human language at all.”

“Because you're a
dog
now. Dogs don't understand people. But that's about to change. After tonight you will understand human beings. You'll even be able to speak to them if you want.”

“Why are you here?”

The past said, “Because I was sent to find you. They know about your sneaking out at night recently and the reason for those meetings that you've been attending. They don't like it. Animals are not supposed to spy on human beings. That's not why you're here and you know it. Besides, these people have been nice to you. Haven't they given you a good home?”

Alarmed at having been discovered and ashamed for his recent shifty behavior, the dog yawned to mask his shame. “Am I in trouble?”

“Yes, Pilot, I'm afraid you are.”

Ben Gould woke with a shudder
and then a startled gasp, something he almost never did. Heart thumping in his chest, his mouth was so dry that it felt as if his tongue were stuck to his palate with Velcro.

Blinking up at the dark, he kept licking his lips repeatedly, as if he'd just eaten peanut butter. He tried to will his galloping heartbeat back to normal, but it was difficult. What had he been dreaming
about to have caused such a reaction? Ben didn't have big dreams. He didn't have many nightmares, either. He never knew if that meant he was dull or only well balanced.

“I woke you up. It was me.”

Hearing an unfamiliar male voice registered somewhere in Ben's mind. But he was still sleepy enough not to understand that it made no sense because no one else had been in the apartment when he went to sleep: just him and the dog.

“Did you hear me? Wake up!”

Now it began to seep into Ben's head. His tongue stopped halfway outside his mouth as it was about to lick his lips again.

“We have to talk.”

He turned his head slowly, slowly, to the left. Pilot was standing next to the bed.

“Right now,” the dog said to him in a clear tenor voice. “There's all kinds of things I have to tell you.”

Pilot had lived in the apartment a little over a month when he was forced to spy on the couple and the ghost. While out one day on a walk with German Landis, they encountered a Weimaraner and its owner. Pilot had never seen them before. At first glance the big silver-brown hunting dog appeared to be only another rambunctious, playful goofball. That irritated Pilot because he didn't like to play. After several attempts at trying to get the older dog to chase him, the Weimaraner walked straight up and asked in an arrogant know-it-all's voice, “Are you really so witless? I guess I had better spell it out then: Please follow me over to that corner so we can talk in private.” Pilot was offended and disliked the other dog right away. But he went to the corner of the fenced-in dog zone nevertheless to hear what this wise guy had to say.

Their conversation lasted no more than two minutes. To human
eyes it appeared as though they were just doing the familiar circle-and-circle-while-smelling-each-other's-butt routine. But the truth is dogs communicate thirty-seven times faster than human beings. We think when they sniff each other that it's only a hello-how-are-you thing. In reality it's their equivalent of reading every page of the
New York Times
Sunday edition.

The Weimaraner made Pilot an offer he couldn't refuse. The old mutt liked both Ben and German very much and was genuinely grateful that they had adopted and treated him like a canine king. They gave him free rein to sleep on whatever comfortable furniture he liked in their home. His bowl was regularly filled with yummy things to eat. Both people were loving, affectionate, and never unkind to him.

So why did Pilot betray them? Because the Weimaraner said, “Here's the deal: if you
don't
spy on them for us now, in your next life you'll come back as a human being again.”

Aghast, Pilot immediately said yes because no fate was worse than that. When it walked back into Ben's apartment that day, the dog was a spy in the house of love.

Wearing only underpants and a T-shirt, Ben Gould followed Pilot the talking dog now from the bedroom into the kitchen. It was three o'clock in the morning.

When they got there, the dog said to the man, “Open the refrigerator door. I'd do it, but it's easier for you.”

Ben swung the door open. The single dim light inside was bright enough in the night-dark to make them both squint. Pilot peered into the fridge.

“Clear off that bottom shelf. We'll need it completely clear. Don't leave anything on it.”

Again Ben followed orders without protest. When all of the food was either moved to other shelves or put on the nearby counter, Pilot
walked up to the refrigerator and put his head inside. Ben thought the dog was going to take food but that wasn't it.

“Come over here. Put your head in here like me.”

“I can't, Pilot, it won't fit. It's too big.”

Pilot's tail wagged impatiently. “Then, put it in as far as it will go, Ben. Come on, get in here with me.”

Ling stood two feet away, closely watching and listening. The ghost did not know what was happening. Like Ben, it had no idea what Pilot was doing. The dog had not said a word to it since waking Ben. Ling had been taken aback to hear Pilot speak the man's language and
to
the man, no less. While they were walking down the hall to the kitchen, Ling asked what was going on, but Pilot ignored his friend and kept moving. They had never been rude to each other, but this silence was unquestionably rude. That hurt Ling's feelings, on top of everything else. In any event, there was nothing the ghost could do at that point but watch, wait, and hope things would eventually come clear. But the dog held all the cards.

Ben got down on his knees and awkwardly slid forward on them up to the refrigerator. He felt like a complete fool, but what else could he do after what Pilot had divulged in the bedroom? The cold from inside the refrigerator was immediate, sending a shiver over his skin. Hesitantly, feeling ridiculous, he pushed his head forward until his face was almost all the way in.

But that didn't satisfy Pilot. “No, farther—as far as you can go. You've got lots more room.”

From behind, it looked as if the dog and the man were worshipping the contents of the refrigerator. On tiptoe, Ling tried to see over their shoulders in case there was something inside the appliance that might explain everything.

“From now on, whenever we need to talk about this subject, we
have to do it in here. They can't hear us when we talk inside a refrigerator. I don't really understand why, but I was told it has something to do with the chlorofluorocarbons in the Freon.”

Ben turned his head slowly and looked at the dog. The deadpan expression on his face asked,
What
are you talking about?

Pilot saw the look and understood the other's consternation. “I don't understand it, either; I'm just repeating what they said. Whenever we want to talk about this, we have to do it in the refrigerator.”

“Any refrigerator?”

“I guess so, Ben. A fridge is a fridge, right?”

“I thought maybe there was something special about this one because—”

“Can we drop that subject now and talk about more important things?” Pilot's voice was brusque; dogs often get frustrated with human beings.

Ben's eyes flared in anger. Suddenly he wanted to wring the dog's neck. How
dare
it be curt, especially after what it had just done to him. And what had it just done to him? Oh, only turned Benjamin Gould's world—his entire system of beliefs, his vision of reality, his perspective on the past, present, and future, God, the Afterlife, redemption, eternal damnation, et cetera—inside out, upside down, and everywhere else but loose. That's all.

Taking a deep calming breath, Ben stuck his head farther into the refrigerator and said, “Tell me the whole thing
again
, very slowly.”

Pilot toned down his own impatience with the man and tried to choose the words more carefully this time. “All right: like I said before, in my last life my name was Dominique Bertaux.”

Hearing her name again, Ben closed his eyes and kept them closed while the dog spoke. If there had been more room to maneuver in the refrigerator, he would have put his head in his hands.

Dominique Bertaux was Benjamin Gould's girlfriend when he lived in Europe. They met at a Van Morrison concert in Dublin and later she moved with him to Mantua, Italy, when he went there to study cooking. She was charismatic, wickedly funny, and as aimless as a door swinging back and forth in the wind. Ben was never in love with her but most of the time he loved being around her. Dominique was aware of his mixed feelings for her. Yet she chose to remain with him until the next someone or something caught her fancy and she hopped that bus on its way through her life.

Then one day Ben killed her. When they moved to Italy, he bought a brand-new Vespa motor scooter that he had been saving for for a long time. He always went too fast because it was so much fun and liberating to drive. Especially in Mantua, where the streets are ancient, windy, and narrow, and most Italian drivers consider any paved surface okay for motorized vehicles. The machine cost almost nothing to maintain, and having it allowed Ben to revel even more in his European experience. As a joke, Dominique bought him a pair of cheap fake Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses to wear when he drove the scooter to complete his “Mr. Cool” image. Ironically those sunglasses were the cause of her death.

Driving to lunch at a friend's house in the countryside between Mantua and Bologna, they whizzed past a field full of grazing cows. Dominique cried out loudly, “Ciao, cow!” The wild way she shouted it sounded hilarious. Ben snapped his head back, laughing. In doing so, he dislodged the sunglasses from his nose. When they started to slip down, he took one hand off the handlebars and grabbed for them. That caused the scooter to swerve violently. Dominique flew off backward because she had been waving at the cows with both hands instead of holding on to Ben's waist. The scooter was
going forty-five miles an hour. When she hit the road, the impact snapped her back as if it were a pencil. She died before the ambulance arrived.

What Pilot said a few minutes before in the bedroom to convince Ben that he was telling the truth was “Ciao, cow.” No one else on earth but Ben knew that those were Dominique Bertaux's last words before she died.

“Now I have to tell you something else,” Pilot said.