Full Circle

I’ve got a dog at home.  He’s pale as the moon and has got the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen.  He’s everything to me.

I live in The Bronx, working as a computer programmer for one of those big name companies and I didn’t get to be in this position by mouthing off or trying to go against the grain.  I didn’t get here by arbitrarily defying authority figures.  I didn’t because I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere.  I knew it was to no end.  I got to be where I am through hard work and harsh regimens of discipline.  People who deviated from those values never went anywhere.

I left the subway station promptly and alighted the sidewalk.  I then began selectively accepting only the essential stimuli -the sidewalk, the position of people around me.  This minimalist state of mind was disrupted by a street vendor.

“Hey mista, we gotta discount today.  Three bucksa stick.”

The food’s odor pervaded my nervous system without any word or warning.  Taken aback by the strength of the intruders, I grimaced at him, - a totally reflexive reaction of course-, and for that I apologize.  I blandly rejected his offer and continued on my way back to work.  Disheartened, he returned to his sermon, hailing the almighty discount.

I had been out because my wife called and complained about the dog.  So I left the office to head home.  She complained that he was growling inside his kennel against her explicitly stated wishes, which is odd because usually we have no problem quieting him.

It was his fourteenth human birthday yesterday.  I reminisced over the memory.  My wife and I went out and, upon returning home, opened a bottle of champagne and drank.  We keep track of his human birthdays as a reminder to go out with one another every once in awhile, you know, to keep the spark between us alive.  It’s odd but it designates days where we have to schedule something.  Those nights, we usually leave him in his kennel and patronize him with a few extra treats to convince him to cooperate.  The treats seem to be less and less sufficient these days, though.  It gets weird here.  I do need the effect of the last few sentences though.  Any ideas on how to get here without the weirdness would be much appreciated.

I hated to see the agony he writhed in when we left the house the last time we went out.  His pain is my pain.

I continued walking with a steady pace to match the evenly paced sidewalk.  It was steadily paced.  I was steadily paced.  The synchronization was musical.  It was to die, to kill and to live for.

I stopped at the beck of the lit-up ‘Stop’ on the pedestrian crossing sign and went at the call of the ‘Walk’ sign.

Upon arriving at our apartment earlier that hour, I could hear the dog screeching, almost as if to yell, “Free me!”  In fact it was very much like coherent speech.  It was almost as if it was a cognisant act of the will.

I knocked and my wife answered the door.  Tears trickled from her starkly lit blue eyes and stained her pale cheeks.  Between sobs she spoke, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” and she leaned in to me.  I remember surveying the apartment only to find everything in its proper place.

I was stolen from my memory when I reached the building where I worked.  It was a bland, boring old thing adjacent to a beat up old Jiffy Lube.  In fact across the street there was a sky-scraper.  I almost used to care that the building was so boring in the midst of such culture but my caring was arbitrary.  It wouldn’t do anything to fix it.  I often would stand at the foot of the skyscraper and try to lean my head back as far as I could in an attempt to see the top.  Every once in awhile I thought that I saw the top- it’s abrupt end-, but I could never be sure.  For all I knew, the building was never-ending.  The top of the building was one of those verisimilitude facts of life that could almost certainly never be proven or disproven.

After my survey of the apartment yielded no vocal results, I moved onward so that I could see past the table obstructing my view of the dog’s kennel.  All the while my wife held fast to my arm.  

Upon my entrance of the office building, I looked at my feet in fear that a colleague might recognize my face and feel the need to start a conversation.  I nodded to those I passed with whom I felt obligated to acknowledge as I made my way to the elevator.

I punched the button to open the doors.

Once I moved to a place where the table was no longer obstructing my view, I met the source of the... howling?  The screeching?  The squealing?  I think now that it can only be described as a call.

His once deep blue eyes, capable of melting the hard of heart, possessed a new fiendishly vapid quality uncharacteristic of a domestic animal.  I winced at what was to come.  He switched between baring his flat teeth and biting at the metal bars of the cage because he didn't understand that he couldn't do both at the same time.

I limped into the elevator door at its opening and selected floor sixteen.  The doors closed and a pang of anxiety shot through my torso, but any sign that it had happened was promptly repressed.

The dog tried his best to keep his long, unkempt hair out of his eyes, for he sought to know his oppressor.

I hesitantly approached, leaving wife behind to watch.  His body contracted.  Although he was on all fours, he managed to hold a brutal eye contact with me.  He saw the fear in my eyes.  There was none in his.

That afternoon, the elevator got stuck between floors 14 and 15 while I was in it.  It was broken.

My hand found it's way to kennel door's handle.  I could see it took every bit of restraint the dog had left not to bite my hand where it was.  His eyes switched focus from my eyes onto the lock and the rage within him visibly increased in potency with every passing second.

My bare-backed, snoutless beast of a boy crawled out of the cell and stood up as best he could.  His deformities were obvious but malleable.  They might even be able to be straightened out.

That afternoon I beat the walls of the elevator.  I bathed in labored cries of solidarity.

That messy amalgamation of repressions and neuroticisms looked at me in the eyes and I saw the depths of his wounds.

He grabbed my shoulder with his right arm, my cheek with his left and forced me to the ground.  Whether I let him do it or if it was his strength that pushed me, I still do not know.
I do know that my wife watched in horror as the man ripped my face to shreds.

In the elevator, that afternoon, I leaned against the stainless steel wall and sunk into the floor at the foreboding realization that no longer would anyone submit to me.