Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman

Author:Eleanor Lerman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781579624101
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2014-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

~X~

Over the next couple of weeks, I noticed that my dog—and he was definitely my dog now, as bonded to me as I had become to him—seemed to remain in a heightened state of anxiety, or at least alertness. He was eating less and often, in the night, jumped off the bed to pace back and forth between the bedroom and the front door of my apartment. And every night, when I came home from work, I would see him in the window, ears twitching above his wedge-shaped skull, seemingly poised to leap through the glass and come looking for me if I didn’t get home exactly when I was supposed to.

I began to worry about him a bit, so decided it was time to take him for a checkup. When I’d gotten him, I’d been so overwhelmed by everything that had happened—the break-in on the previous night and then the visit from my neighbor and her cousin, the somewhat grim professor of French literature, Dr. Carpenter—that it had never even occurred to me to ask questions like whether or not the dog needed vaccinations or anything like that. So I made an appointment at a nearby veterinary clinic, and brought him in on a quiet Tuesday afternoon when I was off from work. The vet, a Dr. Tyner, who turned out to be a serious young guy with lots of snapshots of his four-legged patients in the waiting room, earnestly shook my hand after an assistant ushered me into an exam room. Then the doctor took a good, long look at my dog and asked his name.

When I told him, he asked me to spell it and then carefully corrected a mistake in how his assistant had entered it on the chart she had started for Digitaria.

“That’s an unusual name,” he said.

I didn’t want to try to explain the whole story—visitors from the interstellar neighborhood of Sirius and the dark star that was its invisible companion star seemed like a bit much for a first visit to a vet’s office—so I just said that it was a Dogon name, and explained that the Dogon were an African tribe.

“That makes sense,” Dr. Tyner said. “He has the look of a pariah dog. He’s narrow, and has that curled tail.”

I probably looked like I was not happy to have my dog called a pariah, and that made Dr. Tyner smile. “It’s not an insult,” he said. “It just means that they’re hardy animals. They live with nomads and tribespeople who follow their herds. When life’s hard for the people, it is for the dogs, too.”

As he spoke to me, Dr. Tyner was examining Digitaria, who he had hoisted up onto an examining table. All the while, the dog kept his eyes focused on me. And I got the message: he was only enduring this going-over for me, because I wanted him to.

“Well,” Dr. Tyner said, “we’ll give him the regular inoculations, but otherwise, he seems fine. In fact, he seems like a particularly hardy fellow.

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