Black Lab

                                                                                                                                             

                                                         

1. 

There’s this guy I meet over Good Friday weekend. He goes by the name Avi. We’re all hanging out at your place, smoking and drinking, and Avi and I end up in the balcony talking. He’s quite well off, like a head honcho-type at a big corporate firm. Most of these kinds of people are quite superficial, not great conversationalists. Not Avi, though. 

So anyway, I’m stoned and he makes me laugh a lot. At one point, someone plays the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong version of ‘Dream A Little Dream of Me’. Have you heard it? It goes: ‘But in your dreams, whatever they be/ Dream a little dream of me.’ Avi’s eyes light up right at the beginning when she goes ‘Prap doobie do doooo…’ And that’s the exact moment I feel this really strong connection between him and me.

It’s late at night when I leave the party. I’m exhausted by then, and get home and go straight to bed.

Some time later I stir in my sleep and find myself in a long corridor lit by a single bulb. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end. Just two points: one where I stand and another where there’s a shiny-coated black Labrador. And I’m watching him from my point of the corridor. I don’t know what time it is, or what building I’m in, or even if it’s night or day. All I know for sure is that this is my starting point, and that’s the jet-black Lab’s. A friendly looking thing with big golden eyes.

So I start walking towards the other point in the only direction available to me. Almost simultaneously, the dog starts walking towards me, too, matching my pace. Carefully watching me approach him he senses the emotions within me, internalises them and mirrors them back. I’ve never seen a dog behave that way; maybe this corridor has something to do with it. So I’m walking and he’s walking – slow, careful, measured strides – one foot in front of the other. The soft pattering of the dog’s paws sound off the cold marble floor. He’s calm and his tongue’s sticking out, but there’s also a serious air about him. Like he’s there for a reason.

And while I may not know it, he does.

We meet at a point somewhere midway. I look at him for a while, not knowing what to do, and he looks at me. His breathing becomes heavy, his stomach rising and falling in a steady cadence. Slowly I bend down and sit on my knees. Looking straight into his eyes I stoop my head forward in his direction. And the black lab copies me. He sits down on his hind legs and, facing down, juts his little head out in my direction. In the precipitate silence of the corridor, suspended amidst a sheet of brown-noise static, I touch my forehead to his. And slowly he retracts his tongue into his mouth. His breathing softens, and together our eyelids shut. 

The vibes start, and I don’t know how long we’ll both remain in that position. What I do know is that I’m receiving. 

Then I open my eyes. I don’t know how much time has passed. I see Avi standing behind the dog looking over us. I can’t remember if there’s a smile on his face or what, but he’s there. I stand up on my feet, silent, and meet his gaze. But before I say anything I get a strong premonition he’s missing someone deeply. Someone younger than him, female, someone he confides in and maybe the only person he fully trusts.

Then, just like that, I wake up and find I’m not in the corridor anymore. The first thing I do is I write all this down, as I do usually. Then I call up Avi and ask to meet him, and he says to come over so we can talk. But I can’t wait.

And so before hanging up I tell him: ‘I’m kind of getting a sense you’re missing someone, like a younger female you’re attached to, maybe a relative of some sort?’

He’s quiet for a couple seconds and then, in a sombre tone, says yes, his younger sister Ariel. I go, ‘Okay, why today?’ And he says, ‘She had a dog, a black Lab, three years old, who died last night rather mysteriously. The Lab fell ill around Good Friday, but then seemed to get better around Easter. Yesterday he ate a full meal for the first time in two weeks, and before that went running with Ariel. At night he slept next to her, but never woke up this morning.’

Then he’s quiet for a half minute. I hear the soft hum of his breathing, a slow, steady cadence.

‘That dog meant everything to Ariel. Now she’s all alone.’

2.

Vibes. As long as we’d known Su she’d been performing them.

That day, sitting in the college canteen, we were going over a list of events to host for the upcoming college festival. On a table across from us sat five students from another program chitchatting and drinking coffee. Just as we were wrapping up, a second-year student joined the group across from us. Su couldn’t take her gaze off this guy. A melange of thoughts, until now formless, was beginning to take shape in her head. The corners of her face twitched lightly as she observed him.

Then, without a word she walked over to their table. She sat on an empty chair across from this guy, rubbed her palms together and asked for his hands. For a brief moment the guy seemed disorientated. Then he extended his arms out in her direction. Su placed her palms gently under his, and lightly clasped his hands.

‘We’re going to talk now. And I want you to know the things we talk about, their existence is not for us to debate. These are concatenations – memory and fact instruments designed, in some cases, to birth realisations. Either way, we’ll never know until the vibes happen.’

Surprisingly, the guy didn’t resist. He seemed already to be in a trance, his face rapt.

Su closed her eyes and stayed silent for what seemed like a half day. The occupants of both tables watched on in a daze.

Then she began.

‘You are a strong soul, you’ve stood up for the people you care about.’
The guy simply offered a smile in the way of agreement.

‘You’re adopted, and loved. But you’ve also seen a place where it seemed no love could exist. You’ve known that place like the skin on your body. Over time you came to adjust well to both places, because you’re strong. But no matter how immune you try to make yourself, bad experiences take their toll. And so a huge part of your life is an attempt to reconcile this polarity.’

This was an abstraction, it seemed, the guy couldn’t wrap his head around. Nonetheless, Su didn’t attempt to break it down for him.

‘Recently you’ve been suicidal. You’ve had thoughts about killing yourself. But you haven’t gone through with it because you’re unable to figure out why you’ve been having these thoughts. Repeatedly you feel an inexplicable urge to end things but you hold back, not because you’re scared. But because you know you aren’t, and that confounds you.’
Su paused for a while, taking deep breaths. At last she spoke.
‘The feeling you want to feel exists, and you know because you’ve felt it before. But suddenly it stopped existing. And it’s thrown you off.’

The guy was listening intently.

‘So now suicide feels like the most natural course of action, and at times the urge is really strong. But maybe nothing you do can ever make you feel what you crave, and that’s the general order of things.’

We stared at Su like a group of tourists looking at wildfire spreading through the expanse of a faraway hill.

‘You have questions,’ Su went on, ‘and so many of them.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘And I want to make you feel better, or differently, trust me. But I don’t know how.’ 

‘The answers you’re looking for don’t exist. Not here.’

Su didn’t speak for the next minute or so. Then raising his hands to her face she opened her eyes and gently placed his fingers on her eyebrows, as if signalling the end of the conversation. The guy opened his eyes, not speaking a word. With a deadpan look on his face he stared at Su. Su looked him in the eye and smiled wearily. Then giving a perfunctory nod to everyone around the table she took her bag and headed for the exit. At the door she turned around.

‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘K-Karl.’

‘Karl… Karl’, Su muttered under her breath. Nodding slowly, a knowing smile on her face, she continued on her way out.

3.

‘…and I’m speechless. You know, the more articulate you believe you are, the more clammed up you become during conversation. Everything you know – analogies, aphorisms – cascades down your intellect in sheets of white noise. Nothing makes sense. It’s enervating. Like trying to focus hard on watching 10 am city traffic.’

‘That bit about the dog is… tragic. And strange,’ I say.

‘Yeah. So strange. His eyes, though. That dog’s seen things,’ Su says.

‘Like, abuse?’

‘Maybe.’

It’s one hour to midnight. Su and I are the only patrons at the late-night tea stall down the road from college. We’re sitting at a corner table, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. Su’s staring past my shoulder blankly into space. From a window frame above us pours in a soft beam of moonlight. A vapid bulb hangs low from the roof, shining its light on the centre of the sitting area. It swirls ominously from side to side every time a cold gush of winter air blows in through the entrance.

‘Aren’t you tired of the whole thing?’ I ask.

Su takes slow, brooding, calculated drags on her menthol click cigarette. With every puff her eyes take on a pensive look. She curves her lips inwards and blows out a puff of smoke in a thin line. She stares intently at the smoke on its way out of her mouth. Like she’s wondering what parts of her the smoke’s taking away with it.

‘You don’t have to put yourself through this,’ I reassure her. ‘Refuse to believe it happens. Whoever you meet next, whether it’s this dog guy or someone else, you can let go at the exact moment you realise it’s them.’
Su is still looking away, not listening. She nods nonetheless. 

Sometimes I feel like Su’s not wired to listen unless she’s receiving.

‘Have you ever seen an egg-shaped glass paperweight? One with a glazed, flat base that has a mini aquarium inside? It has tiny corals coloured in the most imaginative ways, and it’s three-fourths filled with water and contains microscopic, floating grains. When you give it a shake you displace its entire internal ecosystem. The heavier things – pointy rocks in shades of orange, green, blue – don’t move about that much. But the smaller flecks, they get charged up with energy and traverse the full expanse of the paperweight. And slowly, on their own time, they come to rest again. Each little speckle finds a new place within the framework of that object. But here’s what I wonder. No matter in how many specific ways you shake that paperweight, can you make all the stuff in it come to rest at the same spot more than once?’

I take a sip of my tea. Su takes a big drag on her cigarette, flicks it down on the floor and crushes it under her foot. I light up another one.

‘It’s scary that you’re always thinking there’s still time, right? Like, okay, I feel impulsive right now. I’ll do something – or I won’t – and leave it up to time to take care of it. More often than not you won’t even end up thinking about it. But what if that, very precisely, is the last moment you know time the way you know it? I mean, we’re all just specks of universe material scattered about here and there, right? There’s a certain randomness to it all, to us, even to things we think we know. And all it takes is a strong gust of wind to shake it all up. When it settles we’re somewhere else in space with no knowledge of even the most basic things. You know what displacement without a measure of direction or velocity or time does? it changes matter. Then you’re possibly living a whole new kind of life, again going through the unlearn-learn grind. Getting adjusted to a different cadence. Rhythm. What if during a torrid spell of displacement, in a split second, you feel something? Nice, maybe not nice, but a definite feeling you’d like to feel more of. Then  – poof – it goes away. Now in your new place you don’t know the true nature of feeling anymore. Riding an emotional transient, you force yourself to summon that feeling based on memory. But how’s memory to be trusted? And so all you’re left with is… natsukashii, a lingering sense of nostalgia. You try harder, but feelings never respond well to that. You’re now in a different framework, which is home to a new set of emotions. And the more you keep getting pushed around the more frameworks you discover. Illusory constants. How you connect to each of them is different, unique to the force that brought you there. Forces that determine the feelings you’re going to feel. And soon enough another force will come by and scatter the specks and send them on newer journeys. Propel them into stranger places. And that’s how we – everything – will keep on moving about, one illusory constant forever in the wait to replace another.’ 

I stare at Su’s crushed cigarette on the floor. A dull plume of grey smoke rises up from it and trails off a couple of feet above the ground.

‘What makes you dream so often about death?’ I say.

‘I guess it’s one of those things that really shakes us all up. In this constant, at least. Isn’t it?’

‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘It’s one of the things, yeah.’

‘But it’s the flecks that intrigue me,’ Su says. ‘They’re all… interrelated, connected. They’re amongst each other and yet so insular, so distant. Each one is an island. But they all have a stolid sense of individuality, which makes them part of something bigger. A kind of archipelago.

‘An archipelago whose countless parts are endlessly drawing each other into their own closed worlds. Worlds so self-consumed they miss a universe.’

Su looked through the window frame straight up at the moon. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

4.

‘Stars fading but I linger on dear/
Still craving your kiss.
I’m longing to linger till dawn dear/
Just saying this.’

I know that song, I heard myself think. Then I awoke and sat straight up in bed. It was one of the deepest sleeps I’d ever had. I looked out the window; it was the middle of day. I grabbed my notebook, sitting on the edge of the chiffonier, and a pen next to it. Paint a comprehensive picture, I told myself. ‘Otherwise, he won’t understand.’

From the beginning, then…

‘I had a really strange dream.' 

'There’s this guy I meet over the Good Friday weekend. He goes by the name Avi. We’re all hanging out at your place, smoking and drinking, and Avi and I…’