With My Dog Eyes: A Novel (7 page)

I do a few somersaults. Mirror and boots. I’m a castaway from myself and a gardener. I’m in the depths but I plant as though I were outside. I’m an executioner in a classroom. If they ask me I don’t respond. This is who I am. Somersault, cuddle, fish, silken tail, water, grindstone clouds in this aquarium. The eyes eye me. The faces lean their noses into my space. Mutely I roam through the room. There is a circle of glass between us. There are a bunch of people in the entryway: is that the professor? Begonia. I revisit the window in its yellows. We are questions in an extensive and inconclusive ball of twine.

I lie down on the thread, the twine nestles me, it goes concave, gets longer, makes a hammock, I sleep hearing groans and complaints. The ones who can see me are very annoyed. A man crosses the room, sits down, farts on my black chair. I ask: did you say your name, sir? There are laughs from the desks in the back. Someone gives me a jasmine. I am mutely bored. The questions grow and form cubes in the air. They collide. I stretch out on the smoothness of the mats. A cube wounds my worn-out elbow. Another bangs
against my forehead, testing my bone brown with shackles. Women invade the room. They stomp on me with their high heels. Sado-slippery I’m sweating and laughing. Grotesquely I’m dispersing. There’s blood spattering the walls of the circle. An avalanche of cubes blankets my tissues of flesh. I’m empty of anything good. Full of the absurd.

With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don’t know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don’t know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There’s a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I’m dying and I will never be heard. Now I’m a spirit. I’m free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog.

Amós Kéres, 48 years old, mathematician, was nowhere to be seen. In the arbor, the she-dog looked to the sky, sniffing. His mother found a phrase on paper: God? a Surface of Ice Anchored to Laughter. And below it: