“You bet,” Alexander said and lifted the cup to his lips. The cold comforted him. It was like a water-flavored sno-cone: a kid’s treat with all the sweetness gone. He remembered something about the ancient Greeks thinking the afterlife was like that, just the same as life, but with all the sensation and color turned to gray. That’s how he knew he wasn’t dead. The pleasures might all be gone, but the pain was exquisite.
After the nurse left again, Alexander thumbed the morphine drip. A few seconds later, the pain lost its edge, and the tightness in his throat went a little softer around the edges. He closed his eyes and let the nightmares come play for a while—dreams of formless dread and shame, more like an emotional cold sore than a real dream—and when he woke, Erin was there. Sandy hair. Sun-scarred face. She was wearing a lumpy flight jacket that made her look massive.
“Hey,” Alexander said.
“Hey, you. You’re looking better.”
“This is better?”
“There was some room for improvement,” she said. This was what they did. Joked, like if they laughed about it, nothing would have happened. It felt dishonest, but Alexander didn’t have words for the things that wanted to be said. Even if he did, he didn’t want to put it on her. She was dong so much for him already. They had been friendly acquaintances before. She was the newest draftsman in the office. He was the guy who checked the prices and specifications on materials for the architects. She’d watched Dickens for him when he went to his father’s funeral the year before, and it seemed like that was enough to make a little bond between them. No one else from the office had even visited. “I got your mail in. Pretty much just bills, ads, and credit card applications. Figure it’s all stuff that can wait.”
“Thanks for that,” he said, pulling himself slowly up to sitting. His crotch shrieked in pain, and for a moment he thought the skin around his scrotum had popped open like an overcooked hot dog. It only felt that way. “How’re the salt mines?”
“The usual. Too many projects in not enough time. Joey’s covering for you, but he takes twice as long with everything. Everyone’s looking forward to getting you back in,” Erin said. “There’s a collection to get you a welcome-back present, but don’t tell ’em I spilled the beans.”
“Just glad they remember who I am.”
On the intercom, a professionally calm voice announced, “Code seven in the pediatrics lobby.” Code seven meant someone was dying. Someone was doing worse than he was. He felt a pang of guilt for taking the bed space, the doctors’ attention. He wasn’t dying.
“Brought a surprise for you,” Erin said with a grin, and unzipped the flight jacket. “Had to smuggle him in, right?”
Dickens’s head popped out, nose black and wet and sniffing wildly. His expressive eyebrows shifted anxiously back and forth, but he didn’t bark or growl. When he saw Alexander, he tried to scramble out of the half-zipped jacket, his legs and paws flailing wildly. Erin grunted as she lifted the dog up and set him gently on the bed.
“Hey, boy. Did you miss me?” Alexander said, trying to keep the tone of his voice gentle and happy, the way he would have with a child. Dickens looked up at him, eyebrows bunched in worry, then at Erin, then back again. The sniffing sounded like hyperventilating. “It’s all right, boy. It’s okay.”
But the dog, hind legs shaking, only looked around the room, distress in his eyes. Distress, and a question he couldn’t ask and Alexander couldn’t answer.
It had happened on the walk from his apartment to the bus stop. The morning air was clean and crisp. The leaves of the trees still held the rich green of summer, but the morning chill was autumn clearing its throat. Running late, Alexander trotted along the familiar streets the way he did every morning. Past the corner deli with its hand-drawn signs, past the dog park where he’d take Dickens to run on the weekends, past the little strip mall with the head shop that never seemed to be open and the Laundromat that always was. There was a meeting scheduled for ten o’clock with the interior designer. He had the pricing on three different brands of paint, and was waiting on the technical specifications of the fourth. Alexander’s mind ran, preparing for the day ahead.
The dogs started following him at the park, and at first, he saw them but didn’t particularly take note. There were three: a buff-colored hound with long, loose ears and a joyful canine smile; a Dane cross, broad-jawed and tall; and a bull terrier whose white fur was so short that the pink of its skin showed through. They were facts of the landscape, like the grass pushing up from cracks in the sidewalk and the smell of garbage from the Dumpster.