Phoenix
1.
The vet requests a stool sample. We got the dog two weeks ago and the children named her after a shared enthusiasm for Greek mythology. So, the furred creature I’m currently tailing, eagerly awaiting her squat so I may make off with her fecal matter, is now called Phoenix. She had another name when she lived the first part of her life in a rescue shelter, which has saved over eight thousand animals since 1998, the woman told me as we left with the dog, who then had the other name. And so this legendary deathless bird with the capacity to regenerate now lives in our small Brooklyn apartment and probably has a parasite called Giardia, the vet says.
Since getting the dog, I must surround myself with people who won’t be bored by my canis lupus familiaris tales, my dog stories, which leaves me with…absolutely nobody. So now I sit here on the bench, side by side with her, telling the stories to the dog herself, who does her part by licking my hand. She sleeps on my head, and I haven’t woken up to any sensation save that of her long, wet tongue feeling out the perimeter of my face, figuring out where she ends and I begin.
She also particularly likes to lick my books. Groucho Marx said, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” and so here I am trying to imagine what it would be like to read inside Phoenix. Who’s to say it is dusky in there? Perhaps internally she emits light. I have a feeling it’s not out of the question. But the more I investigate, the more it becomes clear that what I really want to do is curl up with a mystery inside her, bring together my two greatest loves: novels and this pain in the ass dog that makes puddles on my floors and tears up all the books, ironically.
However, she also tears up all that came before. She’s mythological like that, and comes with all the emphasis on histories, how things are shaped and now there’s just before and after Phoenix when it comes to time. According to one book, the phoenix has been known to “symbolize renewal in general as well as the sun, time, the Roman Empire, metempsychosis, consecration, resurrection, and life in the heavenly Paradise.” Because she is sacred, the vet says I must collect the stool sample.
2.
I sit across from an older couple on the subway, mutually asleep, maybe dreaming. His hands and legs are crossed while hers are not. I imagine these to be not people of the present but my partner and me in the future, living through some type of time-space situation. Like how yesterday I watched my son play the drum part to Radiohead’s “Creep,” a song I listened to on repeat in high school. His playing put me into a temporal fugue where the times of high school and the present were flashing closer until they merged. There I was, electrified, at once my current self and my teenage self, dreaming of a future child and perceiving his music, which already existed because time had folded in upon itself in that same madly intricate way the stories I love always do.
As my son approached the end of the song, I saw the larger thing my whole life had been, as people do on their deathbeds. I suddenly understood everything before being shotgunned back to my current time period of being here and human and always having someone to clean and something blocking my spiritual view. But how to get that way of seeing back? Is Phoenix part of it? When I pet her, I’m telescoped into forever.
Yesterday at breakfast, my friend the hyperverbal playwright said she loved dogs precisely because they can’t talk, and I understood, but I still wait for Phoenix to speak to me. Still, there is something so comforting about communicating with Phoenix through motions, understanding things about her by her gaze, the shape of her body at any given moment, sometimes even the smells she emits, the sounds she makes that are still not words no matter how long I wait. Marriage comes to feel much like this, a communication often outside the realm of the verbal, a rogue eye motion sends him all the news of my day, how I sleep next to him each night, our elbows touching and therefore sending back and forth between them the items of our minds. We have had nights where we dream almost the same dream. And yet I can still feel so lonely.
I didn’t feel alone earlier this morning when the dog and I sat on a park bench to people-watch together–a shared interest of ours. In romantic comedies, the man and woman often bond and indicate their casual humor by watching people pass and pretending to speak for them, a shared act of ventriloquism.
But Phoenix and I aren’t in a rom-com and she doesn’t speak in human terms, no matter how much I beg her to in the quiet of the dawn hours when it’s just her, me, and the poop bag. I hallucinate that we communicate but I think this is more a function of urban loneliness, the sense of being always sardine-canned with others but still feeling a solitude; or mom-loneliness, the feeling of being surrounded by people you take care of for infinity without their ever inquiring about your inner life. This is probably why I imagine in Phoenix unique powers of understanding that possibly far exceed her dogness as we sit on our park bench together.
This morning, I decided to try out the romantic comedy strategy on her, so that when the harried couple walks by, I turn to Phoenix and speak first for the man, “I’m very busy and important and therefore I carry this unidentifiable parcel and walk ahead of you.” And then I speak for the woman who walks a step behind: “If only you held me the way you hold your unidentifiable parcel.” And do I imagine it, or does Phoenix crack a smile, teeth sharp, unusually long tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. We are having quite the romantic moment until the couple passes and the dog squats on the park bench and finally poops.
3.
You don’t really know your neighborhood until you get a dog. The sticks and details of pavement and brick, other neighbors, smells and sirens, where exactly everything is and how it’s configured. The dog brings new knowledge, such as the fact that Virginia Woolf wrote a whole book from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel.
I’m riding the subway now, almost asleep, head on train window, graffiti passing, as I slip into some sort of portal. When I raise my head again, it has become a dog head. It’s Phoenix’s head riding atop my body, such that I’m part poet-woman and part Australian Cattle Dog mix.
As I exit the train, I’m stopped by the beauty police. They take me into a holding cell in a tunnel beneath an unused restroom. They accuse me of no longer being a sexually viable young woman but that happened before Phoenix. (My college students recently told me that anyone over thirty is aged.) The police decide that I am not domesticated based on my neural crest and my central nervous system. They determine me to be not dangerous, however, and they release me after I pull a breakfast casserole out of my mom bag and feed them all. But they question their logic when I annihilate the remainder of the casserole and dive through glass to escape.
I will not bewail my lost lady-face but rather complete my transformation into something feral, a dog-woman of the Brooklyn tundras, find me frolicking in Prospect Park before I’m never seen again. In particular, it was noted that I was no longer there to rock anyone to sleep or clean up midnight throw-up. Would I still be loved? I didn’t stick around to find out. Instead, I took, finally, to the hills.
When they found my corpse years later, scientists and other officials determined that I was not a woman, not a dog, not a wolf but rather some other haunting amalgam. They decreed that the evidence—isotopic, genetic, morphological, and contextual—spoke to something else entirely. They were too disturbed by the uncertainty I caused in them, so they just left me there, under a dusting of hematite powder.
For safe keeping, they went back one last time to cover me with boulders. To ensure, you see, that I would never rise again to upset the natural order, a Phoenix. But the moment they turned their backs, I did in fact levitate. I placed my skeleton hands on either side of one policeman’s face in particular to tell him my ancient secret, “you humans fear all the wrong things.”