It rained the day Mrs. Edna Mallory from twenty-six found the mummified dog beneath the back stairs and showed it to the Super. With his large calloused hands, the Super examined the dog while Mrs. Mallory listened to the rain dance off the uneven rows of automobiles parked behind the building. It made a musical sound as it pelted metal and streamed into the unpaved lot. The Super decided that the dog had been dead a long time though he said it would take some scientists to determine exactly how long. Mrs. Mallory chose to believe that the dog had been there since she moved from Chicago to New York in nineteen sixty-one, forty years ago.
Mrs. Mallory lived on a military pension she received in exchange for her husband, Cleveland, who had died in nineteen sixty during an official demonstration of the proper procedure for disarming a hand grenade. Mrs. Mallory had never seen her husband in death. The military had assumed possession of his body and arranged its formal burial. At the funeral she had sat quietly, staring at the sealed coffin, wondering about things too large for her mind to encompass at one time. A middle aged man with a chest full of colorful ribbons had handed her a neatly folded American flag. She often recalled the man's grey temples and the lines of discomfort which had marked his strong face. While six young men her age had repeatedly fired their rifles into the air, Mrs. Mallory had rested her hands on top of the folded flag in her lap. It was the only tangible record she had kept of her husband's death, an event whose memory always took the shape of gunsmoke floating above an open grave. In the car on the way home from his funeral, her heart had given birth to a sense of regret because she had been denied possession of her husband's death. That feeling had remained with her for over forty years like an unfinished letter, yellowed and incomplete.
Mrs. Mallory found it remarkable that the mummified dog had remained unnoticed beneath the back stairs for forty years. She calculated that she herself must have passed over it more than twenty-nine thousand times and she only used those stairs twice a day: once when she left to shop at the corner market and once when she returned. Anyone who had casually glanced in that direction would surely have seen the ragged thing stiff against a wooden support beam. Believing all things happened for reasons, she imagined some secret magic had kept that corner of the world private.
Mr. Aziz, a software salesman from sixteen, passed Mrs. Mallory and the Super on his way to work. Mr. Aziz nourished his peaceful disposition by helping others so when they showed him the dog he immediately volunteered to bury its remains out back by the dumpster where rainwater had drained into the earth making it soft and pliable; but, by that time Mrs. Mallory had become attached to the "poor creature" and refused to part with it. She carried the dog upstairs to her apartment, surprised by the way it seemed to float in her arms. She immersed the dog in the kitchen sink and, using a bar of lye soap and a green dishtowel, tried to clean forty years of dust and dirt from its matted coat. She scrubbed until her arthritic fingers ached and her hands throbbed as if a tiny heart beat beneath the skin of each. She brushed and rinsed, washed and rubbed the fur, draining and refilling the sinks with each pass over the dog's body until both sinks in twenty-six were permanently stained. After hours of concentrated effort, the front of her simple flowered dress was soaked, perspiration glued streams of grey hair to her wrinkled forehead and the small of her back complained, but the mummified dog's coat was still black.
News of the unusual discovery beneath the back stairs spread through the apartment building until talk of the mummified dog colored every conversation. Other tenants gradually manufactured reasons to visit the elderly woman in twenty-six. Cynthia, the young waitress from twenty-nine was the first one to actually see the wet mummified dog in Mrs. Mallory's sink. She was a tall thin woman who wore loose clothing to cover the way her bones showed beneath her skin. She had wiry blond hair which she cut short and a hooked nose which was too large for her face. The air in the kitchen was thick with the stench of soaked animal fur. Cynthia raised her hand in front of her face and stared at the damp mass of fur resting in a pool of dark water. Mrs. Mallory stood behind her like a shadow. "This is no ordinary dog," Mrs. Mallory said proudly. "Forty years under the stairs and still nearly all there."
Cynthia inspected the mummified dog closely. "It's a sad thing isn't it, Mrs. Mallory?" she said. She watched the dark dish-water drip from its knotted hair until soon her hand fell away from her nose and she too fell under its spell. Cynthia moved closer to the sink, pushing strings of blond hair behind her ears. She stared into the empty sockets where eyes had once been housed and imagined she saw something in those black holes, something beyond the boundaries of her experience-- a dream whose contents had been bleached white by the morning sun yet whose spirit lingered like an impression left on the skin.
"It is a shame about the eyes," Mrs. Mallory said.
"I have some marbles. Perhaps they would do," Cynthia said.
Mrs. Mallory smiled and ten years of solitude disappeared into the lines of her face.
Cynthia hurried across the hall to her apartment. Out of breath and flushed she removed a sandwich bag full of marbles from her bedside table and poured them onto the bedspread. She ran her bony hands over the marbles as she had done many times before, delighting in the delicate sound they made as they bumped against each other. The marbles had belonged to her brother. One day he had been swimming in a neighbor's pool, dove into the shallow end and shattered his neck on the cement bottom. Unable to move anything below his chin, he had drowned. He had been seven. Her parents had barred her from the funeral claiming she was too young to understand. While everyone was at the funeral, she had taken the marbles out of her brother's room and hidden them beneath her mattress. She had watched over them ever since, occasionally taking them out to listen to the music they made when they rubbed together. She replaced the plastic bag once a year on the anniversary of his death. It was her brother she thought of as she separated the marbles into groups by size and color until finally settling on two large blue cat's eyes about the size and color she believed the mummified dog's eyes must have been. Clutching the marbles in her moist palm, she rushed back to Mrs. Mallory's apartment where the two women, with a soup spoon, carefully installed the marbles into the dog's empty sockets. The change in the dog's face was dramatic. Now he had a way to give something back to his hosts, even if his gift was only an ephemeral reflection in blue marble eyes. Cynthia and Mrs. Mallory stayed up late into the night eating chocolate chip cookies, drinking hot tea from china cups and discussing the remarkable mummified dog.
The next day Cynthia brought Norman and Nelma Stein from eleven up to twenty-six to show them what wonderful eyes her brother's marbles made. Norman had a simple face. He wore gold rimmed wire spectacles and still had a full head of curly hair even though he was in his fifties. When he sat next to his wife one could not help but notice the resemblance that twenty-five years of marriage had helped to craft. Norman took an interest in the dog's coat. His father had been a barber. In the early seventies when barber shops began to fade into antiquity and unisex salons robbed him of his livelihood, Norman's father, one evening, drove the family station wagon into their garage, left the engine running and shut the door on his misfortune. All that remained of Norman's father was a set of stainless steel clippers and three plastic brushes which Norman kept in a shoebox in the closet. Norman had forgotten about the tattered shoebox until he saw the mummified dog's matted hair.
"I was thinking," Norman said after eating the last chocolate chip cookie and washing it down with the last of the tea, "I might be able to trim up its hair for you, cut off the clumps that won't brush out."
Mrs. Mallory gladly accepted Norman Stein's offer. Fifteen minutes later Norman returned with the shoe-box beneath his arm. The Super had come with him carrying a jug of rug shampoo. "I thought this might help you clean its coat," he said. "It's pretty strong. I once used it to remove a coffee stain from a Persian rug my mother, rest her soul, used to own."
Efforts to make the dog's coat presentable, began again, this time with ten hands massaging rug shampoo deep into the hair, scrubbing and rinsing. Several times Cynthia put down her brush and wiped suds from the blue marbles with a dish-towel. Working together they accomplished in two hours what Mrs. Mallory had not been able to do in two days. After the last rinse, when the fur began to dry, they discovered that the mummified dog's coat was the color of ocean pearls speckled with gray like a negative image of the night sky. They finished drying its coat with bath-towels and Mrs. Mallory tried to carry it into the living room. But the dog no longer floated in her arms. It had gained so much weight during the cleaning that Cynthia had to help Mrs. Mallory lift the dog into the other room and set it on the coffee table. Surprisingly, the mummified dog no longer needed a wooden beam for support. It sat on the table as solidly as a paperweight, stable enough to balance on its four rigid legs.
As the others watched, Norman clipped and brushed the dog, trimming away troubled knots of hair. Mrs. Mallory passed around a tin of saltines and cups of cranberry juice which represented the last of her supply. She had always kept a store of cookies and tea in the cupboard for guests without cause to use them until now when she found herself embarrassingly short stocked. But, none of her guests minded. They were too busy watching Norman shape the dog's white coat with his stainless steel clippers and plastic brushes.
Norman labored slowly and methodically. It was well after midnight when he stepped back to survey his work. Mrs. Mallory and her guests were stunned by the metamorphosis. The mummified dog with the blue marble eyes and plush white coat filled the room with memories of power and grandeur. Everyone agreed that, even in death, it was a regal animal.
Over the next few days, other tenants crowded into Mrs. Mallory's tiny apartment to drink tea, eat cookies and stare at the mummified dog on the coffee table. On one occasion, Victor Martinez from seventeen reached for another pecan sandie, accidently bumped the dog and discovered to everyone's amazement that the dog now weighed close to seventy-five pounds. Even the Super was unable to think of a reasonable explanation. Victor's wife, Elizabeth, four months pregnant, stroked the dog's back and said, "this is a marvelous creature you have found, Mrs. Mallory." From then on everyone in the building who had seen the dog noticed that they rose easier in the morning and walked with lighter steps.
Mrs. Mallory began to find that her visitors were leaving small things behind. First, she found a short length of blue ribbon beneath the coffee table. She believed that Elizabeth Martinez had been wearing a blue ribbon on her wrist the night before, but when Mrs. Mallory tried to return it, Elizabeth denied ownership. "It belonged to my son," she told Mrs. Mallory. "The son I never had because I was young and others said I didn't understand what it meant to raise a child. Now it belongs to the dog." Mrs. Mallory fixed Elizabeth a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a cup of orange pekoe tea and then tied the blue ribbon in a bow around the mummified dog's right paw.
When Mr. Aziz left a bracelet of tiny silver bells behind, Mrs. Mallory did not try to return it; she clasped it around the dog's neck like a collar. When Mr. Aziz saw the collar of silver bells, he glowed and ate twice his share of raspberry oatmeal cookies. That night for the first time since she had died, Mr. Aziz took the photo of his wife from the dresser and placed it in a drawer.
The gifts began appearing too frequently for Mrs. Mallory to trace. She found a swatch of red plaid which she stuffed behind Elizabeth Martinez' blue ribbon. She found three rings: one of twenty-four carat gold, one of turquoise and one shaped from plastic like the kind dispensed by gum machines. She strung all three rings on Mr. Aziz' bracelet of silver bells. Beneath the couch someone left an empty and worn leather tool belt which Mrs. Mallory fastened around the dog's waist. Inside the tool belt she placed a coin commemorating the Green Bay Packers' victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in the nineteen sixty-seven Super Bowl in Los Angeles, California; an unopened letter postmarked August 17th, 1951; a torn cloth watchband; a pair of reading glasses; one lace glove; an unused postcard from Santiago de Cuba; and an empty pewter pill box.
A week after Mrs. Mallory had found the dog, the gifts stopped appearing in twenty-six, but the tenants continued to drop in on Mrs. Mallory, nibble on cookies and marvel at the mummified dog.
The night of the new moon, everyone visiting twenty-six began to speculate about what had preserved the dog so well for so long. The Super, always the rational one, claimed that the dog's present state was the result of natural laws regarding humidity and airflow. He suspected that the area under the back stairs had been engineered like an Egyptian pyramid and recommended they place razor blades and fruit beneath the stairs to see if they remained sharp and fresh. Victor Martinez, who had taken off from work early to come and see the dog, felt that the Super's explanation was reasonable, though he doubted the dog had actually been beneath the stairs for forty years. While Victor explained how improbable it was that the dog had gone unnoticed for that long, Elizabeth Martinez quietly clutched a small gold cross in her hand until the shape of the cross was pressed into her palm. Cynthia claimed with certainty that the position of the planets was at least partially responsible, recalling something she had read once about strange occurrences that take place when planets fall into retrograde. "That's what I think has happened," she said. "Mercury or Venus changed direction and opened the door to curious events."
"Mr. Aziz offered no explanation and, when asked, said only, "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih."
"It has been waiting," Mrs. Mallory said finally, putting an end to the debate.
"Waiting?" said Norman Stein.
Mrs. Mallory sipped her tea. "Isn't it obvious?" she asked. For the others, nothing was obvious except that they were certainly not dealing with an ordinary mummified dog. "It has been waiting...for forty years..." Mrs. Mallory glanced at Victor Martinez whose head immediately dropped two inches. "Waiting for witnesses to notice it and take possession of its death."
"And we are those witnesses?" Cynthia asked.
"We are those witnesses," Elizabeth said, because she understood what Mrs. Mallory was saying. She knew what it meant to be denied possession of someone's death. "The dog matters to us."
"The dog matters," Mrs. Mallory repeated.
After a long lull during which no one spoke and only the liquid sound of china cups filling with tea broke the silence, the discussion turned toward the future. It was time to move away from the past. Everyone huddled in the tiny room arrived at that revelation together, simultaneously realizing that through either fate or chance they had assumed possession of the mummified dog's death and were now obligated to mediate its passage.
Early the next day a group led by Mr. Aziz and Norman Stein began clearing an area in the back of the building while the Super and Cynthia led another group through every apartment, collecting broken and dilapidated furniture which had outlasted its usefulness. Three legged chairs, wobbly card tables, glassless picture frames and unstable bookshelves were hauled out back and stacked neatly beside the space that Mr. Aziz and Norman Stein's group made by sweeping aside the litter that had fallen short of the dumpster, and by skimming spades across the earth until it was smooth and even.
By noon a sizable collection of odds and ends had been amassed and piled out back next to the clearing. Mr. Aziz, because of organizational skills he developed thorough years of work with computers, accepted responsibility for designing the pyre. The Super, whom everyone agreed could fix anything with a hammer and a bit of luck, took charge of the pyre's construction. They shaped a foundation from the bones of a threadbare couch the Steins had contributed and, working out from that focal point, carefully stacked the debris according to Mr. Aziz' design and the Super's direction. Every tenant participated in the pyre's construction. Some tenants, like Elizabeth Martinez, only offered small contributions such as the nailing of two boards together; others, like Norman Stein, left his fingerprints on each item that went into the structure.
As the platform rose from the dirt out back, Mrs. Mallory and Elizabeth Martinez cooked meals for the tenants and supplied the workers with pitchers of lemonade and iced tea. The building filled with the aroma of sausage and garlic, turkey and roast lamb. Even when they feasted, the work did not slow down. Tenants hammered, sawed and stacked as they ate, stealing bites of turkey leg and sausage rolls between tasks. Throughout the day they found themselves laughing from their diaphragms, reminiscing about relatives and friends who had disappeared into the forgetful fog of time and reenacting games they had played as children. Their minds flooded with crisp images, orphaned memories returning home to welcome arms.
The sun melted into an orange glow in the western sky as Mr. Aziz stuffed the last bail of newspapers beneath the platform. While the light lasted, the tenants admired the structure. The pyre was six feet high, twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The meticulous care that had gone into its construction showed in the even edges and balanced design. From a distance the sharpest eye could not detect that it had been molded from discarded junk.
One by one the tenants moved back inside to wash off the sweat and dirt which had worked its way beneath their fingernails and into their skin. They ran hot water over their sore muscles, their limbs aching with satisfaction. They all believed something meaningful had been accomplished, something they could never hope to explain to someone who had not experienced it. Among themselves, there was a quiet understanding so solid it had nothing to gain from words.
Around nine o'clock, Norman Stein, Victor Martinez, Mr. Aziz and the Super carried the mummified dog, wrapped in Mrs. Mallory's flag, down from twenty-six, past the stairs where it had slept for forty years, and out into the back where everyone had gathered in the darkness. "It must weigh two hundred pounds," Norman said smiling.
With effort, the four men gently placed the mummified dog, complete with all its possessions, atop the pyre. Only after Mrs. Mallory struck a match to the newspapers and kindling at the bottom of the structure were the tenant's faces discernable, each sharply etched with its own secrets. No one spoke as the paper caught fire and flames danced up the sides of the pyre, climbing table legs and picture frames until they ignited Mrs. Mallory's flag, and with the flag, Elizabeth Martinez's blue ribbon, and Cynthia's blue marbles, and Mr Aziz's bracelet of silver bells. No one moved, even when fire threatened to skip to the roof of the building. No one moved even after nothing was left of the mummified dog but a pile of embers imbedded in the ash of memories glowing in the black moonless night.