Radiomen (16 page)

“Sassouma heard people in your apartment last night when she knew you were at work,” Dr. Carpenter said. “She guessed that they were thieves but she was afraid to call the police. She believes that you will understand why.”

I did understand, and I said so. Dealing with the police for any reason was about the last thing she and her family needed, since their immigration status was likely not something they wanted to draw attention to. I certainly didn’t blame Sassouma for that and would have been horrified if anything had happened to anyone in her family because of me. That wasn’t because I was any kind of sweetheart—I surely wasn’t—but because my old hippie self still suspected that karma might yet turn out to be an operating principle on this particular plane of existence and I wouldn’t want anything like people being deported to be on my particular Akashic record.

So I tried to smile at Sassouma, though I still felt a little too shell-shocked to be completely genuine about it. Turning back to Dr. Carpenter, I said, “The burglars left more of a mess than anything else. They didn’t even really take very much. Just some old electronics,” I added, thinking I was being generous in downplaying the real effect that the break-in had had on me. Besides, there was no reason to explain what the electronics were; the story was too involved and wouldn’t have meant much of anything to my visitors.

“Well, Sassouma feels very guilty. We are both Dogon people,” said Dr. Carpenter. “For us, caring for one’s neighbors is very important.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dogon? I don’t know what that means.”

Surprisingly, it was Jack, not Dr. Carpenter, who answered me. “They’re from Mali,” he said. Jack was suddenly sitting forward in his chair, looking very interested, though I didn’t find his information very helpful.

Dr. Carpenter, however, nodded in agreement. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “But to clarify, I’ve been in this country for many years. I took my degree at Columbia University,” he said. “And now I teach there. French literature.” He seemed to relax a little now that he had established his credentials with us, as if we might have thought something less of him were he not a university professor. I stifled my instinct to explain that he was talking to a bartender and a guy who interviewed people on the radio about how they’ve seen signs of the end times in the grill marks on a cheese-melt sandwich. He probably had us both outclassed by a mile.

Now that he had more properly introduced himself, Dr. Carpenter also revealed his relationship to my neighbor. “Sassouma’s husband is my cousin,” he said. “As the eldest in the family, I am, to some degree, responsible for them.”

I thought that his qualifier—“to some degree”—further helped to explain why he seemed unhappy to be here. He was carrying out some kind of familial duty that he would have preferred not to be required of him.

“In any event,” Dr. Carpenter continued, “Sassouma has asked me to perform a task for her, which is why I am here. This dog,” he said. “As my cousin’s wife has requested, I have brought it for you.”

Up to now, the dog had been so quiet and the conversation so odd that I had pretty much forgotten about the animal. But the moment Dr. Carpenter mentioned him, the dog, which had been lying flat on the floor—as flat as the floorboards, I thought—sprang to attention. And again, looked straight at me.

Now I understood what this visit was about, or at least I thought I did. Because she felt bad about not calling the police last night, Sassouma was trying to make it up to me by getting me a watchdog. Not that this dog seemed particularly suited to that job. He certainly seemed alert enough, but otherwise, he hardly seemed like a substantial presence.

“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” I said, “but I don’t think I really should have a dog.”

At last, Sassouma spoke. “But this
is
your dog,” she said. “Yours,” she repeated, gently but firmly.

“I’m out so much,” I told her. “At work. He’d be alone most of the time.”

“He will wait,” she said. “He is a Dogon dog.”

Everyone—Jack included—now fixed their eyes on me as if something very significant had just been said, something grave and serious that I should have understood. But I didn’t. True, the dog did seem like a somewhat strange creature with its wedge-shaped head and its way of looking at me as if we’d met before, but otherwise, I couldn’t see anything special about it. So it was a Dogon dog. So what?

Perhaps Dr. Carpenter knew what I was thinking because he said, “We have very few of them here. And Dogon dogs don’t take to everyone. This one, however, seems to be willing to live with you.”

Really
? I found myself wondering.
Had they asked him?
Because it almost sounded like just that kind of conversation had somehow taken place.

Dr. Carpenter handed me the leash, which at first I managed to avoid taking from him. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said. “I mean . . .”

I was about to give all sorts of reasons why I didn’t want the dog but Jack suddenly interrupted me with a discreet elbow in my rib. “Laurie,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Take the dog. Say thank you and just take it.”

There was something in his tone that made me pay attention. He wasn’t making a suggestion, he was issuing some kind of urgent directive. “Okay,” I said, speaking to Jack but really addressing everyone. I took the dog’s leash and he came to sit beside me. He tilted his wedge-shaped head to look up at me once more and then stretched himself out on the floor again. In my mind, I now decided that there was another difference between him and Sassouma’s dust-colored dog: this one was somewhat darker. He was really the color of a shadow.

“Thank you,” I said, and then asked, “What is his name?”

“His name is yours to decide,” Dr. Carpenter replied.

Well, he wasn’t a puppy, so surely somebody had called him by some name previous to his sudden appearance in my life. But if so, apparently from this moment on, that name was erased and I was supposed to come up with something with some resonance for me—and, I assumed, for the dog.

A list of dog’s names went through my mind:
Pepper, Petey, Benjy, Bullet—
I was relying heavily on old TV shows and movies. But none of them seemed to suit this particular dog.

“I’m going to have to think about it,” I said. A look of concern passed across Dr. Carpenter’s face, so I added a qualifier. “I’ll come up with a name today.”

That seemed to be a satisfactory, if temporary, resolution to the matter. “Very well then,” Dr. Carpenter said. He rose from his chair as did Sassouma, still holding her baby, who had slept through the entire visit. “The dog will alert you to any further dangers,” Dr. Carpenter added. “And he will be loyal to you.”

“Thank you again,” I said to Dr. Carpenter. “And thank you, Sassouma.”

She beamed at me as she followed her cousin-in-law out the door. As soon as they were gone, I locked the new deadbolt, which slid into place with a comfortingly heavy click. Dog or no dog, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Still, I couldn’t help but turn my attention to the dog, who remained stretched out on the floor. Jack, I saw, was looking at him, too.

“I feel like I’ve just been inducted into the Knights of the Round Table or something like that,” I said. “He will be loyal to me? I mean, I would hope so, but he’s just a dog.”

“Not exactly,” said Jack. He bent down to pet the dog, who barely reacted to him. “I’ve never seen one of these before,” he said to me.

“One of what?”

“A Dogon dog.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Why did you look so freaky when you heard that?”

“You really don’t know who the Dogon are, do you?” Jack said.

“Never heard of them.”

“Well, like I told you, they’re from Mali. That’s in West Africa.” Seeming to address the dog directly, he said, “I wonder if that’s where you were born.”

But the dog, right now, was paying no attention to either one of us. He closed his eyes and appeared to drift off to sleep. Jack though, became pretty animated as he launched into an explanation about Dogon lore, which seemed to be something else he had picked up from a guest on his show who had written a book about Dogon culture.

He told me that the core belief of the Dogon was that somewhere back in the dim mists of time, alien beings had come to Earth and had stayed for a brief while in some kind of encampment near where the ancestors of the Dogon people lived. The visitors told the Dogon that they came from a universe that they described as being
next
to ours. Apparently, they were able to cross back and forth between the two using an entry point—a kind of bridge in space—near the star Sirius.

“That’s it?” I said. I wasn’t impressed. I had watched enough late night cable TV to have seen a dozen programs—more—about the beliefs of various tribes and indigenous people all over the world. Lots of them had interesting ideas about dream worlds and alien visitors and spirits who lived in the sky.

“No, that’s not it,” Jack said, sounding annoyed. “If you’ll just let me finish . . .”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me a story.”

He frowned at me, but proceeded to explain that even before the aliens arrived, the Dogon had been interested in the stars and other objects—comets, meteors, the starry white river of the Milky Way—that they saw in the heavens every night, and had compiled rudimentary star charts for themselves. Perhaps because they took note of this interest, the alien visitors revealed a secret about the night sky that the Dogon didn’t know: the great, bright star Sirius has a companion star, a white dwarf that is tiny but immensely dense. The white dwarf and the great star are so closely aligned in space that their mutual gravitational pull causes them to be constantly exchanging gases with each other. The Dogon were frightened by their visitors, who they described as being aloof and rather unpleasant, so they were surprised that these strange beings had bothered to share any kind of special knowledge with them. The Dogon decided to mark the occasion by giving the secret star a name that had meaning to them. They called it Digitaria, after a tiny seed indigenous to their territory. Over time, they seem to have incorporated its story of faithful companionship into many of the ceremonies marking important milestones in Dogon culture such as births, marriages and deaths. What is perhaps most controversial about this tale, Jack said, is that Digitaria is invisible to the naked eye. It can’t be seen without a telescope—in fact, no one else knew about it until an astronomer using a telescope discovered the white dwarf in 1862. And no photograph had been taken of this star, which is now officially known as Sirius B, until 1970. Though current-day astronomers scoff at the idea that the Dogon knew about Sirius B—Digitaria—generations before they did, the fact remains that the Dogon people have hand-drawn star charts dating back hundreds of years that show it positioned near its larger companion. And their “Digitaria” ceremonies also go back many centuries.

As I listened to all this, I was able to fit a little piece of my own into the story. I had spent too many nights waiting at bus stops, watching the progress of the seasons mapped out in the slow movement of the constellations across the great, dark grid of the sky, not to have been curious enough to look up their names. And because of that, I knew what other name Sirius went by. Orion, the hunter, with the Three Sisters stars in his belt, was accompanied all night by two star-marked hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. Canis Major—the Great Dog—contains Sirius, which is also called the Dog Star.

Then I said the words aloud. “Sirius is the Dog Star.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Now you’re getting it. But there’s more. The Dogon say that when the visitors came from the universe they described as
next
to ours, the one with an entry point near Sirius, they brought dogs with them. Or anyway, some kind of companion being that seemed like a dog. When they left, they took all these—well, for the sake of argument, let’s call them animals—with them, except for one, which had become attached to a Dogon boy. The boy wouldn’t part with his pet and the animal wouldn’t leave the boy, so it was allowed to stay. The dogs that the Dogon have now are supposedly descended from that animal and the camp dogs that lived with the Dogon people, but they aren’t like any other dogs in one other respect: they have very few offspring. A Dogon dog may only have one or two offspring in its entire lifetime. So they’re relatively rare. And the Dogon never give them away to anyone. I didn’t even know there were any in the United States.”

We both now looked over at the flat little dog lying at my feet. He seemed suddenly to be aware that he was the object of our conversation because he opened his eyes and rose to his feet. He stretched and then jumped up to sit beside me on the couch. He looked at me, blinked, and leaned against my side. With the weight of him against me, I was surprised by how substantial he seemed to be; he looked like he was made of thin sticks and that odd wedge-shaped head, but he didn’t feel that way. He felt heavy, and he felt strong.

I put my arm around him and he leaned even harder. “Hello, Digitaria,” I said.

Jack laughed. “That’s a good name,” he said. “Your secret companion.”

“Not so secret,” I said. “But very quiet, don’t you think? He’s barely made a sound since he’s been here.”

“More thoughtful than vocal,” Jack said. “A good quality in people—and in a dog.”

“I guess I’d better go out and get him some food,” I said. “Want to come?”

“No, I’d better get back to Brooklyn,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of material to go over for the show tonight.”

I asked how he was going to get home and he told me that he’d driven here last night—which explained how he’d gotten to my place so quickly—and had parked his car a few blocks away. As he was getting his things together and putting on his coat, he paused to give me an appraising look. Then he said, “You seem a lot better than when I got here last night.”

“I do feel better,” I said, agreeing that my mood seemed to be settling. The sense of craziness I had been feeling since I’d walked into my ransacked apartment last night was definitely dissipating. I still had a lot of putting-things-back-where-they-belonged to do, but the task seemed less impossible now. Another few hours’ work and everything would be back the way it was—almost.