Without the Man I Die

The man was home. He had been home for more days than I could count. Usually the man was gone in the morning and came back at night but today and for many days before he was staying home all day. He was unpleased by his being home. He muttered words under his breath as he moved from the room with the bed to the room with the food, then the room where he either sits or stands in front of the white chair full of water that sometimes I would drink from. 

He was in the room with the white chair now, standing facing the white chair, with something against his ear and chin. I stood by the open door and watched him. I could hear water splashing, and his voice talking into the little black thing under his tilted head. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but there were a few words he kept repeating. Hause was one of them. Others were rent, jaub and leyoffs. It was the first time I heard the man say these words so much during one conversation. I stood watching him. The man looked at me, still talking, still urinating into the white chair. I wagged my tail.

When he was finished with the white chair he came out, slowly, and paused in the doorway, as though listening for something. The man was one of the bigger men I had seen in all my life, with beefy arms that hung by his big belly. He was as big as the doorway itself. After pausing he began talking again and took a seat on the sofa, still talking to himself. He would talk and talk for a long time, then pause, as though someone were replying back to him, but nobody was. He was just holding a piece of metal by his ear. Then the man stopped talking and put the piece of metal into his pocket. I looked at him and wagged my tail.

“Ainjole,” he called to me. That was what the man said when he looked at me, when he wanted me to come, when he gave me food: Ain-jole. Two syllables. Easy for my ears to distinguish from the onslaught of nonsense that poured out of his mouth. What it meant, I did not know. All I knew was that it was my word, the word meaning something about me.

I came to him with my tail wagging and put my chin up on the couch. I closed my eyes as the man took my head in his large hands and lifted up my ears and scratched. It never got old, no matter how many times he did it. I never grew tired of it, I never wanted it to stop. The man liked it, too. He mouth changed when he did it, and if I wagged my tail his mouth got wider and wider. I closed my eyes as my head rolled in his hands and did things my own paws could never do.

He stopped, went to the fridge, and procured a can of beer from it. He opened it, took a sip, and sat back down. He turned on the light box. The light box also made noise, but mostly it made light. Inside the box you could see things: other, small people were in there, often times only their heads. They wore different clothes, they looked better to me. Sometimes there were dogs, too. And other things that weren’t dogs or people. At night there were almost always women, and mostly they were naked. But that was only after the woman left. After she left, the man did nothing but sit on the sofa and look at the light box—never looking into it, but rather just vaguely settling his eyes on it. The man looked at it and laid down on the sofa, readjusting. 

The man eyed me. “Ain-jole,” said the man, “Come’ear.” That meant for me to come closer to the man, so I did. The man seemed happy and so was I.

The next day the man did not leave again. Instead he slept in late. I waited by where he slept, awake, ready to eat. I was hungry and it was the man who gave me food. Without the man I would not eat. This was the dominating fact of my entire existence. Without the man I would die.

Finally he was awake and fed me—little brown bits dropped in a metal bowl, tinkling and settling into a small mound. They were hard bits and tasted like meat but were not meat. I ate all of them as fast as possible, and meanwhile the man ate, too. He ate something from a bowl, too, but ate it with milk. When the man and I ate together I felt good. We were eating at the same time, and maybe we were eating the same thing. 

When the man was finished eating he began to talk into the little piece of metal, the same way he had before—jaub, hause, rent, leyoffs. Today a new word came out of his mouth, over and over again: fuct. He got up and paced around the room, saying over and over again, Weerfuct, Eyemfuct. His voice got louder and louder, until the man’s voice got so loud, he stopped talking all of the sudden, looked at the metal piece in his hand, and slung it against the wall, where it promptly shattered into many smaller metal pieces. I was scared when the man was like this, so I went under the place where he slept and waited. I heard noises from the other room: his voice and glass breaking and wood snapping, just like when the woman left. 

After a while I heard the man enter the same room as me, change clothes, and then left the house. I was alone again.

I preferred not to be alone. I was usually alone all day when the man was gone, but now he stayed home for some reason. It had something to do with his jaub and how fuct he was. 

While he was gone I had to piss and I tried to hold it, but in the end I lifted my leg and let it out, soaking the carpet. I settled in the corner of the room, beside the light box, and tried to sleep.

The man returned late at night, smelling of alcohol and piss.

The next few days are indistinguishable from each other. The man wakes up late, feeds me, sits on the couch, and begins to drink. He drinks all day and looks into the light box. His little piece of metal that he used to talk to is gone, so he has nothing to talk to anymore but me and the light box. “Ainjole,” he calls to me, and I get up on the couch beside him. He scratches me, but he is no longer happy. I am happy, though. The man is here with me. Food appears in my bowl every morning and every night. As long as the man is there, there is food.

One day in the string of indiscernible, blended days, a strange man knocked on the door. I barked and barked, telling the person on the other side of the door, goddammit get the hell out of here can’t you see this is our place but this strange man didn’t leave. The stranger waited for the man to roll off the couch and open the door, which he blocked the opening with his massive leg so I can’t run out. 

The stranger said something, and I heard those words hause and rent again. The stranger was a small man in comparison. He had the face and nose of a bird and looked up at the man with furrowed eyebrows. The man replied to him, saying jaub and leyoff many times. The stranger replied, and the man replied back. They talked for some time, then the stranger left.

“Eyemfuct,” the man said after the stranger was gone. Then he looked at me and said, “Weerfuct.”

The man got up and opened the fridge to get another beer. By now there were cans littered the place, the carpet soaked with alcohol.

The next day the man woke up and began to pack things into a bag. All of his clothes, all of the things he could fit in the bag. I got the sense that the man was leaving, he is preparing to leave. I can sense things like this. I began to bark at him and tell him you’re leaving aren’t you but no matter how loud I yelled the man didn’t even look in my direction. I could see water coming from his eyes as he stuffed the bag full of his clothes. 

Not long after that the man took my bowl and food and brought it outside. He never brought my food outside, but I didn’t care where I would eat it. He opened the door. I stopped barking and leapt outside. I hadn’t been outside for a long, long time. He put down the bag with all his clothes, then picked up the bag of my food and poured a tall mound of the bits into my bowl—at least three times as much as usual. Then the man closed the door. 

I began to eat the food, chomping down like I’ve never eaten before. I ate and ate and ate, so quickly that the food nearly backed up in my throat. I kept eating and chewing and eating. 

I heard something loud behind me, and I saw that the man was in a car, and the car was started. Smoke poured out the exhaust. I saw the man in the car. He didn’t look at me, but I looked at him. He drove away.

Suddenly there was only silence. It was a cold day, in late winter. The grass outside was white with frost. The door to the house was closed, the man was gone, and there was half a bowl of food left in front of me. Was the man going to come back? I thought. Maybe he would come back at night like before. 

I ate the rest of the food. When it was gone, I licked the bottom of the empty bowl.