Gary
There is a dog in the bathroom.
I want to be clear that I did not agree to this. I woke on the cot in the back office of the Midnight Mission with my mouth tasting of someone else's cigarettes — Jake's, that'll be Jake's, I've asked him — and a headache the size of Queens, and a small brown dog sitting in the doorway looking at me with an expression of enormous patience, as though it had been waiting quite a while and was too polite to say.
"Hello," I said, because you have to say something.
The dog's tail went once, side to side, like a metronome deciding whether to bother.
The notebook was on the desk. It's a school exercise book, the kind with the multiplication tables printed on the back, and it is how we live. Marc writes in block capitals and presses so hard the next three pages take the ghost of it. Jake writes in a slanting scrawl, half of it in Spanish, and never dates anything, which drives Marc round the bend. I write neatly and I date everything and I underline. Between the three of us the book is a sort of relay baton we hand off across the hours none of us remember. Took your afternoon, sorry. Rent's paid. The woman on 4 is not a threat, stand down. Milk. That's the whole marriage of us, that book.
Last night's entry was Jake's.
found him tied to the railing outside. some kid did it and ran. named him Gary. do NOT lose Gary.
Underneath, in Marc's furious capitals, pressed so hard the pen had torn the paper:
WE ARE NOT KEEPING THE DOG.
And under that, in Jake's hand again, unbothered:
we'll see
I sat down on the cot. Gary came and put his chin on my knee. He smelled of rain and, faintly, of the street, and his ribs were a little too easy to count under my hand, and I thought: oh no. Oh no, I've done it now, I've touched him, and once you've felt a thing's ribs you're finished, everyone knows that.
"We are not keeping the dog," I told him, to practice saying it.
Gary sighed through his nose and settled his whole weight onto my foot.
Here is the thing about a new moon. On a new moon Marc is just a man — no strength, no suit worth wearing, no god riding shotgun bright enough to matter — and so the calendar has, in its wisdom, handed this one to me. A whole day. No mission. No one to hit. Just the Mission with its lights off and its front door unlocked the way we leave it, and a Tuesday with nothing in it, and now a dog.
I found half a tin of something in the little kitchen and Gary ate it in the manner of a man who has read about food but never expected to see it in person. I found a bit of rope for a lead. I took him out onto the block where the morning was doing its grey New York impression and I let him sniff every single railing, which he did with the seriousness of a health inspector.
I talked to him. I'm aware. But it's easier than the mirror.
"The trouble," I explained, "is that we can't. It's not that we don't want to. Well. He doesn't want to. But it's not even that. It's that we're not — reliable. Do you see. There are days I go to sleep on a Tuesday and wake on a Friday and there's a bruise on my hand I didn't earn and a note that says everything's fine. You need someone who's there, Gary. Every day. Same face. And we haven't got one of those. We've got a rota."
Gary found a chip packet and ate the corner of it before I could stop him.
At the vet's — I'd decided, walking, that this was the grown-up thing, you scan the chip, you find the owner, you hand the dog back and you go home and you don't feel the shape of the foot he slept on — the young woman ran the little wand over the back of Gary's neck twice, frowning, and said, "Nothing. Sorry. He's not chipped."
"Oh," I said.
"No collar, no chip, no owner on file." She scratched Gary under the chin and he leaned into it, shameless. "He's yours if you want him, honestly. Otherwise it's the shelter."
The word did something to the room. I felt Marc come up behind my eyes the way you feel someone come into a doorway — not seeing them, just the change in the air — and for a moment the vet's little examination room went thin and doubled and I had to put my hand flat on the table.
Shelter's fine, Marc said, from inside. Not out loud. He almost never comes out loud. Shelter's what it's for.
"You don't mean that," I said. Out loud. The vet looked at me.
"Sorry — no — I'll — can I have a minute?"
She stepped out, kind about it. They're always kind here at the — well.
We had the row in the mirror over the sink, which is how we have all our rows. It's not shouting. You can't shout in a mirror, it just looks mad. It's lower than shouting.
I lose days, Marc said. His face on me, using my mouth, is a strange thing to watch, the jaw sitting different. You want to know what happens to a dog when the god takes the wheel? When I go down and the bird's up there flying this body around for a week and nobody's home? Who feeds it, Steven? Who feeds it on the full moon.
And that was the real thing, under the WE ARE NOT KEEPING THE DOG. Not that he didn't want it. That he'd counted the cost of it before I'd finished feeling its ribs, the way he counts everything, the way he can't not. That's Marc. He looks at the worst first so the rest of us don't have to.
Somewhere far back and to the left, in the place the voice lives, there was a dry rustle like wind through old feathers. I did not, said Khonshu, to no one, to the ceiling, in the tone of a landlord discovering a pet clause has been violated, agree to a dog.
Gary, sitting on the vet's lino, looked up sharply at the empty corner of the room and gave one short bark.
Nobody said anything about that. We never do. The dog barks at nothing, or the dog barks at a god; you can't chip that either, and I've long stopped trying. It stays where it is, in the corner, unanswered, the way it always stays. I've a whole life to get on with in front of it.
I looked at us in the mirror. I looked at the tired man there with three men behind his face.
"We feed it," I said, "the way we feed this."
Marc went still.
"We've kept one body alive," I said, "between the three of us, for years, and none of us can be trusted to remember a Tuesday. And it's worked, Marc. Badly. But it's worked. We've got a system for exactly this. It's a rubbish system and it's held together with an exercise book and it has never once let the body starve." I picked the notebook up off the back of the toilet where it lives. "So we put him in the book. Same as the milk. Same as the rent."
I felt him weighing it. I felt the not this, not this of him running down the options, hunting the fault — and not finding one he could say out loud.
One of us misses a feed, he said finally, the next one covers it.
"The next one covers it."
That's the whole rule.
"That's the whole rule. We already live by it."
He didn't say yes. Marc has never once said yes to anything in his life. He just stepped back out of the doorway of my eyes and left the mirror to me, which is how he says yes.
So here is the notebook, open on the kitchen table of the Midnight Mission, and here is the new page, and at the top of it in my neat underlined hand it says GARY, and below it there is a feeding schedule in three sets of writing. Mine, dated, morning. Jake's slanting scrawl for the small hours, because Jake's up anyway, driving strangers around and hearing their confessions; of course Jake takes the night feed. And at the bottom, in furious block capitals pressed hard enough to ghost the next three pages, so there's no possible way to pretend it was anyone else:
7AM. NON-NEGOTIABLE. — M.
Gary is asleep under the table with his chin on my foot, exactly where the cost of him started, and the front door is unlocked the way we leave it, and it is a new moon, and for once there is nothing in the whole city that needs hitting, and all three of us have signed the same page.
Head-canon of [[moonknight-khonshu-consciousness-integration]] — a new-moon Tuesday, no mission, one stray dog · the comedy of cohabitation.