There was a man I saw, most days, in the alley, in the morning as I walked out the front door and turned right toward Market Street. He was gone in the evening. He wore a buckskin jacket and his face was lobster red and pocked with deep marks that I could see even from a distance. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully, every time he saw me pass. He was sitting against the building, usually, or leaning up against it. I said nothing, not because I didn’t like him or had a particular attitude toward his presence there, but because the morning comes to me like a box of puzzle pieces without the box; it takes me until noon to construct any reasonable or recognizable landscape.
Some days, I would attempt language; I would lift my head slightly and open my mouth. He seemed to understand. He would put up one hand. Once he said, “It’s all right.”
“Good morning,” he said one morning after I’d lived there for a few months, and then he said, “Wait. Wait.”
I stood on the street. A pair of men’s underwear—so clean it must have fallen out of someone’s laundry bag—lay crumpled to the left of my foot.
“Come here,” he said. “Just come close enough so I can toss you something.”
The day was so cool—usually I didn’t notice things like that on my walk to work, but the stopping made me feel the coolness of the air. I pulled my watchman’s cap down over my ears and backed up a few feet. The man crouched in the entrance of the alley, about ten feet away from me, his back against the brick. He had one watery gray eye, tender and whale-like. I was surprised to see that the other eye was missing, but I couldn’t look long enough to create a memory and describe it now, except to say there was wrinkled skin where the eye should have been. How had I missed such an injury? Later, he would tell me he had a sister in Berkeley and cousins in the City who owned a gas station. When he was a kid and worked there, he became addicted to the fumes.
He sat up and threw something, and I instinctively reached for it. It was clean. A stuffed animal, a little donkey with gray haunches and a white belly. A name was stitched into the belly with red thread.
“Are you Russell?” I asked.
“No, I’m Zach.”
There was a tree on that street, a fat happy ficus that blew and blew in the wind, and the sun rose from behind a building and cast the tree’s shadow, a thick branch, over the man so suddenly. Then a big leaf cast over and covered his red nose and leaves rippled over his buckskin jacket and he looked at me with his one eye, squinting in the momentary sun.
“Thank you,” I said.
He pulled his coat up over the back of his head, making it into a shelter, and the tree, that marvelous, oblivious beast of rubbery green leaves, grew fatter over the years and is still there.
Every day during the summer, at about three o’clock, a shadow shaped like a dog appeared on my writing table. It was a small dog; I could see the head, the two pointed ears, the fluffy tail. The dog sat across from me at the far end of the table and then slowly approached until it disappeared at six o’clock.
I couldn’t locate where the dog came from; it seemed disconnected from the dark rooming house across the alley, from anything in all the inhabitants’ bleak dusty windows. I know this lack of source makes the dog unreal, but the dog was as true and constant as anything else in my apartment. I waited for the dog to arrive, and when it did I would sit working on my thesis with the dog for company. But some days, the dog felt like a bad omen, a nomadic wraith, and on those days I felt as if my apartment had somehow detached from the center of things, and were floating somewhere to the left of anything that mattered. I suppose I could’ve experienced those days as freedom, but I didn’t.
Other things appeared in that apartment over the alley. Once, returning from work, I found a piece of paper near an open window with a handwritten verse on it:
The merrier we be
The sunnier we see
and blinded by the light
becomes a melody
The writer had scratched out melody and written tragedy.
Another time, when cleaning, I found a multicolored rubber ball under the couch; a week later a child’s sock, though there were no children in the building or in the rooming house next door. In fact, I don’t remember seeing a single child the three years I lived there. The sock was lime green with a picture of a horse face over the toe; if you put your hand inside, the horse’s face bloomed into three dimensions and stared at you under droopy lashes. Another time, nearer the end of my stay, the sudden smell of lilacs hit me as I walked through the door, again with no apparent source.
Some days, the dog appeared to be sitting up, alert; other days the dog’s head hung low; still other days the dog seemed to be sleeping, its head resting on its small paws.
One day the dog appeared with only one ear. I didn’t notice the missing ear immediately—it was only when I looked up a third time, during the middle of a long and arduous thought, that I saw the one ear clearly sticking up and the other ear gone. The next day half of its tail was missing, leaving a fluffy stump. The next day it seemed to be missing a paw.
That night, in my bed, I began to imagine the dog outside my apartment, roaming the streets and scavenging, sleeping in doorways or maybe in alleys. I lay awake worrying about the dog, but of course there was nothing I could do, and I knew the dog wasn’t real, and that there were real dogs out there getting hurt and I should worry about them. Nonetheless, I worried about my shadow dog.
I woke in the morning late, took a shower, and read another book. At one o’clock I sat at my table and tried to write, but I couldn’t concentrate. I began instead to think about the dog. I had read an article about dogfighting in the City, about gambling rings and people who stole dogs off the street and out of cars to use for these fights. I imagined a basement with concrete floors and oil stains and a walled arena surrounded with chairs, the men in T-shirts smoking and drinking whiskey. And I imagined my little shadow dog in a cage in the corner, sitting quietly, shaking.
That’s where I had to stop; it was too sad.
I had imagined the dog in the worst situation, but I could just as easily have imagined it roaming through the park, sniffing eucalyptus leaves, sleeping under the trees and stars.
At three o’clock, the dog appeared with one ear, half a fluffy tail, all four paws intact, and a shorter snout. But it looked content, its head tilted slightly to one side. I was happy to see it. I said hello, and then I went back to work. Now the apartment was brighter; there was a glow in my small room as there always was when the dog appeared. Every time I looked up the little dog was there, in its own way steadfast. Just as the air began to thicken and prepare for dusk, the dog vanished, and I wondered what shape it would be in the next day, what it would be missing, or if it would appear at all.
What kind of suffering are we off to? What kind of joy?
Every few months, when I lived in the apartment over the alley, I called my mother. Always on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, more often in the summer and on warmer days, when I was home from grocery shopping or had finished cleaning my two rooms. We talked about the weather where I lived and the weather where she lived, though the weather where I lived was often the same, sunny or foggy,