The weather in the room has shifted. Alf jumps off the couch and comes over to James. He reaches down to pet the dog, but cannot take his eyes off of Katherine. She looks very young, fingering the ring.
James believes Katherine might give the ring to Brenda. It might matter more to Katherine to be able to give the ring away than to possess the ring itself. But she’s visibly incapable of making up her mind. The ideal thing to do in this moment would be to laugh Brenda’s question away. But Katherine continues to finger the ring, to bite her lip. Even James can see that Katherine wants the ring in a way so visceral and so personal she can’t bear to give it up. The struggle goes on and on. James can sense in the air, as vital as oxygen, Brenda’s restless cruelty. She is making Katherine reveal something about herself that she would not, in a million years, have wanted to reveal: that she wants nothing in the world as much as this ring.
Brenda is smiling.
“I would never take the ring if it means so much to you, Katherine,” she says softly, and James hears beneath this softness another kind of cruelty that makes his blood tingle. He can bear it no longer. He stands up.
“I don’t think either one of you loves Dagou!” he shouts. “This isn’t even about Dagou, for either of you.”
He hurries through the kitchen toward the back door, desperate to leave. He shoves his feet into his wet shoes.
“Come on, Alf.” He pushes the door open, and the cold air swirls inside.
For a minute, Alf stays at Brenda’s feet. He doesn’t want to come. Then, all at once, he wriggles away and shoots past James.
“Alf!” James stumbles onto the porch.
Brenda says, “Come back, James.”
“I’ve got to go after him!”
“You need your coat,” she says. “Don’t worry. Seeing you reminded him to go home. I bet he’s halfway there by now.”
She’s holding out his coat. He spares a crucial moment to grab it. Then he turns and rushes down the snowy steps.
“Alf!” The narrow street is an unrecognizable landscape of shapes and shadows. There is no sign or sound of the dog. In the light from Brenda’s porch, he makes out a set of paw prints, which he traces past a neighbor’s house and into the back alleyway. James follows the paw prints east, toward home. Snow is drifting up against the back porches and garages, making the alleyway a tunnel of white. The prints are filling with snow. He hears the church bell again, but faintly. His lashes, frozen stiff, press together as he squints into the swirling white. Alf’s trail is gone.
The Doghouse
An hour later, inside his father’s house, behind the closed door of his room, James seals his phone into a plastic baggie of dry rice. He props his wet sneakers against the heating vent. He tunes the radio to FM 88.8. Outside, snow swirls thickly against his bedroom window. Leo, downstairs in his chair, grunts something at the television set. The house is emptier, lonely, without his mother. And Alf—after a long and unsuccessful search, James did not find him safe at home. Where could he be? Perhaps, returned to Brenda’s. At this very moment he might be curled on her soft red couch. Brenda might have texted James; it’s possible this reassuring text is simply locked in his nonfunctioning phone.
James opens his laptop, checks his email. A thousand miles away, a deep freezer has malfunctioned in the laboratory where he worked during the semester. Several years’ research is in jeopardy and his supervisor wants to know when he can return to campus. An undergraduate ski club is being organized for January. His suite mate wants to know if anyone is still in the dormitory; he’s left a charger in his room. At the thought of his suite mate, an Oregonian with a surfer haircut and a beard, James feels a part of his mind rekindle almost physically; he’s almost forgotten the dorm, the laboratory. Going to college has split him cleanly in two. There’s no overlap between his college self and his identity as Snaggle, the third Chao brother. Is it possible for either of these two parts to fade away, disappear? Is it necessary to choose between them?
He puts his laptop away, turns out the light, and buries his head in his familiar, musty pillow.
He’s woken by the sound of static. Cacophonous, otherworldly, tooth-jarring static. James dives for the volume knob on the radio and, before he can master it, Dagou’s deep baritone fills the room.
“This is FM 88.8, the Doghouse.” There’s stock audio of a dog barking. “Music, news, bad metaphors, and original broadcasting.”
It’s like seeing Dagou from outside his window, glimpsing him alone at night in a lighted room.
“And now a word from our sponsor. Are you bored? Tired of boiled string beans? Tired of turkey? Searching for strange flavors, ethnic exoticism, a little family hostility, immigrant anxiety, served up with a heady dash of self-hatred? Then come to the Fine Chao Restaurant! I’ll be your waiter and chef, and I’m happy to provide you with all of that. That’s D-A-G-O-U, Big Dog in Mandarin, for those of you who know me and were always wondering.
“And now back to our regular evening show: A Dog’s Life.
“Let me begin with a story—let’s say it’s one of my fondest childhood memories.”
The Package
In his hotel room, halfway across town, Ming is tuning the clock radio, setting the station to rouse himself for an early morning conference call. He has trouble sleeping in Haven, and trouble getting up. He doesn’t trust the hotel’s wake-up system, and his phone alarm is too quiet. He’s searching for a station with especially irritating music, slipping from a sermon to pop, when a familiar baritone speaks into his inner ear.
“It’s about twenty-five years ago …”
Ming stops his fingertips against the dial.
“… and I’m about six years old.
“I’m standing in the Haven Post Office with my father. You might remember me from those days: I’m the stout boy at the restaurant, black hair sticking out like a puffball, nose in the kitchen. In case you were wondering how my hair got like that, my mother buzzed it on setting three and it grew out in all directions. I never had a professional haircut as a kid.”
For about a minute, Ming doesn’t move. Dagou’s radio project, a complete surprise, is also inevitable. It’s like a blog, except that a blog is recorded online, forever; whereas this pirate radio project is unrecorded, spooling fugitive words into the dark, impermanent and fleeting, words that might as well have never been, unless they’re overheard. The project is so Dagou, talking into the reeds: indiscreet, self-absorbed, self-destructive, and a waste of personal resources. Not to mention under the table; Ming is sure the equipment is contraband. He lets go of the clock radio and sits back in the bed, letting his brother’s story fill his ears.