Chapter 0 #2
little circuit board tower, entombed in flammable plastic—or maybe it’s brick—let’s argue that it’s real brick, sure, it looks
real convincing but it’s just plastic composite, just aerated fiberglass, blowing off in the wind, buckling in the heat, up
in flames in seconds, all sense of permanence, of nesting and community nothing but big fat adverts on scaffolding because
look, it’s a new month and your Singaporean landlord would like another two thousand pounds and you have to give it to them. God forbid they take it themselves.
(I don’t think I’d be able to kill a Yorkie. That was a joke.)
Messages started appearing on my phone.
“Are you on your way?”
“Where’s my Luna?”
“Did you forget to send your pic of Daphne today?”
These sick freaks actually demanded photos of their dogs on their walks. No, I can’t send a “pic” right now because me and
Luna and Daphne and the other two bitches are climbing through bushes, sloshing through weeds. I pulled them along, forcing
them to be the wild animals they didn’t know they were until we reached the deer enclosure in the far corner of the park.
I searched the bushes along the fence. The deer on the other side were fascinated by us, these desperate barbarians.
“Ryley! Matilda!” I called into darkness.
The dogs by now had abandoned all possibility of trust. Luna, the Boston terrier, was dragging on her lead, refusing to go
any farther but luckily she weighed about the same as a squirrel. More messages appeared on my phone. The owners had to use
the dog walking app to communicate with me, which was a battery-suck, and I had already spent so much time talking to the
internet people. 17 percent now 10 percent. Someone called, I answered. It was the Russian.
“Sorry yeah we’re just on our way, sorry.” I said. “Got a little sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked by what?”
“By, um . . .” I stopped. And there she was. Twenty yards away. Long-limbed, long-haired, with her hellhound sunken face.
Matilda.
But she was behind the fence. Matilda was inside the deer enclosure. She was standing among the deer as if she were one of them, just as limber and gallant, only furrier. They didn’t seem to mind.
I hung up on the Russian and went to the fence. I walked along it, looking for a way around. I could climb it easily but what
would I do on the other side? The dog was too big to climb back over with. I called her name and tried to lure her over, but
she stayed put, watching me with her skeletal smile, taunting me.
I cursed aloud and decided to climb over. I could at least get ahold of her, then figure a way out of the enclosure. I tied
the leads of the four other dogs to the chain-link fence—they were all in varying degrees of bafflement and peril but I shushed
them, reassured them it was all fine. The Yorkie was trembling. The Shiba Inu was reverting into something more feral and
wolflike, flinching at every sudden move. I made sure their leads were securely tied, then climbed over.
I landed on the other side and the deer scattered.
“Stay!” I said to Matilda. She turned her head and contemplated running off with her new friends.
I pretended I had a treat in my hand (I never had treats) and slowly approached.
As soon as I was within reach I grabbed her by the collar and put her back on the lead.
She shook herself and wagged her tail, letting her long hair wave and flutter like a 1970s glamor model.
Her eyelashes were thick and coy. Her teeth were white and haunting against her black lips.
I walked with her around the enclosure, looking for a way out.
There was a large brick wall along the far side with no doors or easy exits, but farther down the meadow was a work shed and a garage where I could see a large wooden gate.
The gate was locked up with chains, but there was a significant gap between it and the ground—this had to be how she had gotten in here in the first place and now we’d both have to squeeze back out.
I headed toward it. The deer continued to scatter.
More calls and messages chimed on my phone.
And then something happened.
Four things happened, actually, but all at the same time. These four separate events occurred at the exact same second and
created what I can only describe as a rip or a kind of smear, like the world around me had boiled itself to an evaporated
state and formed this millisecond injection of pure undiluted stress that I think would have killed my body if it hadn’t done
what it did instead. These were the four events:
First, Matilda growled at a passing deer and I was afraid she was going to try and attack one of them, so I reached and grabbed
her collar instead of just her lead to keep her closer to me.
Second, it wasn’t Matilda that had growled, it was the Shiba Inu, back at the fence, and he hadn’t growled, he had barked.
He was fighting with one of the other dogs. I turned and looked and all four of them were in a sudden, ferocious brawl.
Third, a security guard entered the enclosure and called out to me. Light from a torch flew across the meadow. The eyes of
the deer flashed yellow and red and I couldn’t stop and explain what I was doing there because I had to turn back, I had to
run back to the fighting dogs.
And fourth, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing and chiming with angry dog owners, internet providers, boyfriends, lawyers.
Every one of these things happened at once like the artful dropping of four synchronized divers from the sky, causing no splash, just undulating ripples.
A chain reaction of paradoxes. I had to stop the dogs from fighting but they were on the other side of the fence but I couldn’t let go of Matilda because she was spooked and lurching forward, trying to escape, turning and biting my hand gripping her collar, and I tripped and fell.
The policeman yelled. My phone rang. And all this time I couldn’t stop thinking about my misaddressed internet bill, the shit flat I couldn’t afford, the job I had lost, and the gig work I had found myself lost in the middle of.
I fell and kept falling through these things, the world becoming liquid, slipping out from under me.
I didn’t land on the ground. But I felt pain—it was Matilda’s teeth gnawing at my wrist but then it wasn’t. Sensation—pain,
sounds, the night air—it all flushed out of me. The policeman’s voice was farther away. The snarling dogs were somehow above
me, as if I had fallen down a well and for a second I thought that I had, that I had fallen down a hole in the ground, but
that couldn’t be true because everything was white, flashing, iridescent, and somehow below me, not above, looping and inverted.
Matilda’s fur swirled out like grass as we careened into each other. The policeman was below me. The dogs were above me. The
park was spherical. The sky was inside me. I felt sick and vomited but the only thing that came out was myself, flipping over
myself, regurgitating my own body like the flipping panels of an old alarm clock. Bells ringing. My hearing blurred. My vision
split. My nervous system, my fingernails, my hair, my skeleton, all displayed themselves like jars of separated herbs, sealed
off, naked, preserved, then shattering back together again, too fast, too hard and somehow, in a way, disgustingly sour.
When everything finally settled, when the tingling across my body stopped, when my mind unclenched its pulsing and my lungs
gasped for life, it was as if whole days had gone by. But in reality, they were yet to come.