The Dog, The Stick

Brandon Ingalls

My heart wouldn’t stop pounding. It pulsed in my throat. I reminded myself: an overworked heart is still a working heart. My only objection was to its velocity. It felt like an eight-piston engine skittering off its ruts, like some maniac was locked behind the ventricles, pulling levers at random.

Reid seemed to be handling his high better, though not by much. He was in the middle of the story about the dog. I could tell he was working himself into a fit, getting frustrated by his own mangling of the plot. He couldn’t tell a story to save his life and the coke wasn’t helping. He ducked his head to the plate, held the straw to his nostril like a downed reverse periscope. A loud snort, and the thin white line was gone, magicked away into the hollow of his face.

“Give it a rest,” Sasha was saying.  She was curled on her side of the couch. Her back was to us.  Sasha didn’t do blow, was above the lethality of it. She liked E, though, and occasionally ketamine – same as me.  As medical students we were both attracted to things that may hurt us a little, so long as they weren’t necessarily proven to do so.

“It’s too moist,” Reid said.  He put the crusty dollar bill down on the table.  Thin white powder was smeared about the plate. I looked at Sasha. Her bare feet were poking out beneath the blanket, the bottoms a little blackened by her shoes. I looked at her ankles and felt a dense, leaded ball tilt in my stomach.

Sasha’s shoulder rolled. “Could you guys at least turn down the music?” I grabbed the remote and flipped the volume to zero.

Reid threw a little glance at Sasha, then shrugged. “It keeps clumping, anyway.”

The coke belonged to Reid, a childhood friend who’d flown in from New York the day before. His eyes were squinting at something on the ceiling. Reid’s always had a face like a possum – pinched and wary, better suited to nighttime endeavors – but now he was wearing this new eight-hundred-dollar watch – I knew the price because he’d told me – and genuine Italian-leather shoes that reflected your own face back at you. They amplified his rat-factor. Like he’d gone to JC Penny and asked the clerk where they kept the expensive stuff.

A few hours into the night, Sasha nearly blew out my ear drum yelling about him.  At first, I couldn’t hear her over the music. Her mouth was wide open and hovering dangerously close to my ear. The contour of words getting lost in pure decibel.

“What?” I’d shouted back. We were standing by a speaker. The bass doing its best to punch out my core.

“I said Reid creeps me out!”

I shook my head. “He’s not all that bad.”

“Well, he’s not all that good.”

When I’d first seen them talking by the fuzzy couches – one of the sleezy little corners of Social 25 where people disappear to, usually to make out and grope each other through the pants – I’d been hit with the dull thud of jealousy. I’d seen him lean into her, his body hanging languidly against the guardrail, half-drunk, blocking her path.  But then I saw his hand reach down by her thigh, how he extended a finger, grazing the edge of her dress. Let his hand drift its way up.  He’d bent his face near her neck.

For a moment I thought she might let it happen, but then the whole of her frame had gone rigid, like she’d grabbed a light pole and now her body was a conduit. Then she’d shoved into his chest and slipped past him.

“What did he say to you?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes, swatted the question back to the air. A strobe came on, blinding me. Sasha’s face became a still photo replicated, gliding in slow motion.

“Some fucking dog story. Will you just talk to him?” she said. “Tell him that’s not cool. The grabbing.”

I admit, I felt a bit defensive. I’d seen Sasha in worse situations before.

“He’s harmless,” I barked back.

She turned away from me then. Her face went flat.

“Promise me you’ll say something,” she said, quieter this time.

That was when my heart started acting up. The unpredictable flipping.

I held up my hands. “Sure,” I said. “Sure. I’ll say something.”

***

It was May, our last month of medical school, and I didn’t know if I would be seeing Sasha much after this. At that point, the pimping and bowing and scraping were over, all the trappings of being a student finally concluded. Those days, most of us were just sitting around in pajamas, waiting for our residency match lists to be published.

“Best time to visit,” Reid had said over the phone. “Sounds like spring break for nerds.”

Others, like Sasha and I, were going out like crazy.  For four years we’d lived squashed together in the hospital library. We’d spent our entire mid-twenties surrounded by nothing but doctors and a whole ocean of other students, buried under a hundred replicas of us.  Now we were drinking ourselves into oblivion almost every weekend. We drank, we snorted powder off key rings in public bathrooms. A new type of recklessness.

“It’s fine,” we’d tell ourselves, laughing, vertiginous, leaning against stall doors for support. ‘This is temporary.”

We met new types of people – DJ’s, graphic artists, a zillion consultants who were all young-ish and boring and good looking in a cooky cutter way – anybody who had nothing to do with medicine.  We pounded beer in corner sinkholes with meat packers, men who drifted in off the street like a Chicago stage play, ghosts of some defunct union’s past. On classier nights, in swankier clubs, Sasha would wear dresses I’d never seen her in. She’d strike up conversations with middle-aged lawyers who didn’t bother removing their wedding rings, joining large clusters of them at their bottle-serviced booths – they only ever wanted Sasha, of course, but she clung to me like an appendage.

“Just pretend like we belong here, okay?” Her face would be beaming, her wrists lit up by the sparkles being jettisoned from their champaign bottles. I’d sit in silence while she flirted.  I’d check my phone, gaze at the dancefloor. Occasionally I’d slip drinks from the bucket until I got side-eyed by the guys who’d bought the bucket.  Eventually, her and her man would leave. She’d give me the eyebrows like, “This ok?” I’d nod and grin.

Afterwards, I’d stumble across the street to a wawa and stuff my face with a gyro.  I’d talk to my own reflection in the window, puff out my meat-packed cheeks, twist my face into something cartoonish.

Sasha once joked that the crowds always seemed too young or too old for us.  Younger doctors were an in-between sub- species of human, she’d said. Especially the single ones. We’d wasted our youth cloistered away in textbooks; we were desperate to get it back, had no idea how to navigate forward.

Here is where Sasha and I differed. The truth is that I felt more hollowed out than her. I wasn’t desperate for anything, really, wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be a doctor.  I wasn’t like her, with medicine in my lineage. The closest thing my family ever had to a doctor was Uncle Roy, who’d been a medic in Vietnam. He was lucky enough to make it home with his life, then burned the next thirty years mainly drifting around Texas before the emphysema took him. My dad always said that Roy was born a little wayward anyway, like a compass tossed in a field of magnets.

“Not you, though,” he’d said when we’d opened my acceptance letter to Northwestern. “By the grace of God, not you.”

***

When we’d first met, Sasha told me two things. First, that her father was some prominent orthopedic surgeon in New York, but that I ‘shouldn’t be intimidated’. Second, that her grandfather had done the exact same thing, with even more renown.

“Can you guess what my great-grandfather did?” she asked.

“Steel factory foreman?” I said.

She told me no, then scrunched up her eyes like there was some philosophical question there. But her grandfather. Oh, her grandfather, what a man to meet in his time. She said that he’d operated on plenty of high-profile clients. One of those, apparently, was Willie Mays.

“You’re lying,” I’d said.

We’d been at a Cubs game, one of those meet-and-greets Northwestern threw for us like clockwork during Welcome Week. She’d gripped my pinky with her pinky and said, in her most serious, no-nonsense voice, “Scout’s honor.” Her eyes were dark brown and soaked up the afternoon light.  To say that Sasha was beautiful would be an understatement: half Lebanese, half Pakistani, straight shouldered and self-assured in the way that only family money can make you.

I nodded, though I didn’t necessarily believe her.  Our class was small, though. Within a month, everybody knew everybody else’s business, and apparently Sasha’s busines was that she came from a long line of prominent doctors. A purebred with an almost biblical pedigree.

Sasha had a habit for retelling the same stories.  Mainly the story of her father. I came to know the guy intimately in my mind. His successes, his failures. How he’d published a few papers early in his career, before he’d grown bored and left academia in the early nineties.

After she was born, he settled himself into the business of making money. He operated mainly on those who could afford him out-of-pocket: professional athletes, famous comedians, even old wall street sharks who tore themselves up playing racket ball at private clubs. She’d told us how each weekday morning, at seven AM, he’d kiss her shoulder while she was still in bed, then he’d walk the four blocks to his hospital on Lexington. He’d spend the afternoon washing out his clients’ world-famous joints, hammering their artificial hips into place.

“Sounds like you nailed the childhood lottery,” I said.

“I was his only hope, unfortunately.” She raised her glass. “To the son he never had.”

“I don’t know if I could do that,” I told her.

“Do what?”

“Operate on celebrities. What if something went wrong?”

“It’s not like they wouldn’t train you.” She laughed. “Maybe surgery just isn’t for you.”

I smiled. “Right. But there are degrees to people. Just seems like celebrities have a bit more clout. They could come back and sue you.”

“Anybody could come back and sue you.”

“Yeah. But celebrities could sue you and win.” When I said this, Sasha sat back in her chair.

“Should it really matter?” she asked.

“Should what matter?”

“If they’re famous or not. A person’s a person, right?”

“Right.” I said this to stave off any misunderstanding– her eyes had gone flat, like she was re-evaluating my humanity.  The wind picked up and blew at my sleeves.  On the field, somebody had just struck out. All I heard was the ball thumping into a mitt, a couple of boos snaking through the crowd.

Sometimes, the problem with wanting somebody is that your own body turns against you. It can happen right away. Even while you’re talking, your heart picks a thread from the air, a pulse riding the breeze, and syncs to its rhythm.  You’d basically say anything to stay on that wave.

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t mean…”

She smiled again. “I’m fucking with you.” I felt my cheeks burn, and the more I stared at her staring back at me, the redder I got. This is the other problem with desire: it’s kinetic. It births itself and becomes a living, screaming thing. It sharpens its own edge.

***

I was starting to come down. I peeked through the blinds. The streetlamps were still on, but already the sky was a heavy slate of charcoal gray. I could see the wet puddles in the street reflecting the curb-parked cars. The colors of the neighboring apartments began to announce themselves again with the faded morning light.

Sasha was talking in her sleep. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t.” Her back was still turned, her voice now heavy and sonorous. Thickened. Through the window came the slippery flash of a jogger’s shadow.

Reid sniffed, the story about the dog having eluded him. He laid back and sighed, tapping his fingers against the wall.  The plate was still within reach. His knees kept bouncing and his pupils were blown wide open, like he was trying to see the whole universe at once.

His gaze shifted to Sasha and lingered.

“You want to get out of here?”  I asked him.

“Where?” he said. His eyes weren’t blinking.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere. She needs to sleep.”

He wouldn’t stop fidgeting. The two of us. The picture of insanity. I’d been holding my finger over my carotid for about twenty minutes, trying to extend my exhale to activate the parasympathetics.

“Let’s get some breakfast,” I said, though I was certain that, if I ate, I would vomit. “Hey, man, look at me.”

He finally turned, wiped his mouth. “Some place open?”

“There’s a twenty-four-hour diner,” I said. “Unless you want to go upstairs and sleep, too? When’s your flight?”

He grinned broadly and blew a high whistle between his lips. “I think that ship has sailed, my friend.”

“Okay, then. Let’s go.”

***

We crept up my stairs, taking it slow. Occasionally, I would turn around and point out steps for Reid to avoid, the ones that tended to groan. This was the problem in a southwest neighborhood. The bones of all the buildings were arthritic, prone to creak.

We made our way out onto Ashland and walked the four blocks north to the Hollywood Grill. Up ahead you could see its giant awning, the cheesy bulb lights blinking in the twilight dawn, steeled and leaning like a down-and-out celebrity slouching against the curb. We passed pastel colored taquerias in clusters, their flamboyance somewhat dulled by the gray. A squat man stood in front of one of the doors with his daughter. He was jingling his keyring, trying to jostle the door open. The little girl blinked sleepily at us as we walked by.  There were no other people on the sidewalks and only a few cars zipping south.

“Crazy,” Reid said. “It’s dead out here.”

“Must be hard,” I said, “coming from the city that never sleeps.”

“Oh, New York sleeps. It’s me that doesn’t sleep.” He laughed. His breath was aired out and hollow, but given what I knew about Reid, I doubted he was joking.

At the restaurant, we slid wraithlike through the door, floated towards the back. We found an empty booth at the far corner. Opaque windows framed us on three sides. At the bar sat a man who looked like an off-duty television cop – pudgy, balding, a short-sleeved shirt straining its buttons around his belly.  He glanced over at us, flicked some crumbs from his plate, went back to his iPhone.

“I have to be honest with you,” Reid said. “this is the real reason I’ve never visited.” He held his hands aloft, like the answer was obvious.

“Shitty restaurants?” I said.

“No.” He put his hands down. “The energy in this city, man. It’s so muted and heavy. Like everybody’s trying to move fast, right? But it’s like they’re all slogging through jelly.”

“I love jelly,” I said. A waitress came, set down some menus, retreated wordlessly to the bar.

Reid leaned in. “I mean, how does anything get done here?”

“Normal life looks slow when you’re coked up all the time.” Reid batted his eyelashes, laced his fingers under his chin like, Who? Me? 

I understood what he was saying. New York was all unbridled energy. I’d been there a few times; twice to see Reid, once when I was interviewing for medical school at NYU.  The truth is that I’d never really connected with the city. The day before my interview I’d walked for miles, a little driftless. I’d sat on a rock in Central Park, took the Q train down into Brooklyn and had pizza on a breezy, shaded curb surrounded by car horns and fire escapes and sunlight. On the subway, a break dancer had held himself aloft on one of the standing poles, his body a right-angled flag at half mast. His striated torso quivering inches from my face.

“That Sasha girl,” Reid said, leaning back now, slumping in the booth, “why’d she come to Chicago, anyway? Why’d she leave New York?”

I shrugged. “Northwestern’s the best school she got into. Like me.”

“Hm,” Reid said. “You guys ever…?” He popped his eyebrows, made a hole with his left hand and slid the pointer of his other in and out.

“You’re a child,” I said. “And no.”

“But you want to. You guys only danced together last night.”

We were getting off track. Sasha had been deliberate with her request, and I remembered him gripping her body. My surprise at her fear. She’d wanted me to defend her, somehow. But now, my mouth wouldn’t work. My words weren’t connecting with my thoughts. My heart rate had slowed to somewhere near normal but was still jittery. I was sweating out the night.

And I wasn’t just thinking about Reid. His face was replaceable with any number of men that Sasha had handled. In the end, who the fuck was Reid, really? What had he done that she hadn’t let a hundred guys do before?

“She just dances with me to avoid the creeps.” I gave him what I hoped was a level stare.

Reid rested his head against the window. He tapped on the casing lightly, like his mind was chewing some big, collagenous thing.

My thoughts wandered. Had Sasha and I really danced? Yes. Usually, it was just the friends-at-a-wedding thing, hands held in the air. Lots of laughs, too many spins. Usually, it was early in the night, before she went home with whoever. But last night had felt different.

Suddenly I had a knot in my throat. Not from sadness. What I was feeling, really, was something more rigid. Painful. Incapable of being swallowed.

“You guys want anything?”  The waitress was back. I wasn’t looking at the menu and neither was Reid. The moment felt ridiculous. Like two coked out gunslingers wobbling at each other from across the saloon.

Finally, Reid sighed. “Coffee,” he said.

“Decaf,” I said.  The waitress snorted. She snapped up the menus and brisk-walked away.

I kept staring at Reid. “So, what were you and Sasha talking about at Social?”

“You know.” He smiled a toothy grin. “I was trying to tell her that story. About you saving that dog when we were kids.”

“You got to stop that, man.”

“Women love it,” he said.

“You never tell it right.”

“Who cares? It makes you look like a hero. I was just trying to get you laid for once.”

“You’re always lying, though.”

We were both quiet, then. I looked at his pinched face. His thin mouth.

In Reid’s version of the dog story, he makes me out to be a first-grade superhero. We are seven, maybe eight. We are walking along the woods behind his house, the ones that border up against a creek. We hear yelling. The sound of a dog howling, and not the normal type of howling, neither. A true dog scream. There is pain in it.

Quick, I say. We race off towards the sound and eventually come upon two boys, a few years older than us, poking at a black lab through a chain link fence. The stick they hold is sharp. The dog has a short leash and can’t get away. It snaps, it bites. Sometimes it tries to jump away, but when it does, the leash catches its throat and pulls it back against the fence.  Spittle smokes on the chain-link.  The boys laugh and laugh and laugh.

Suddenly, I become something I’ve never been. I become strong. Call me Vengeance. I grab a tree branch, rip it from the trunk. I charge at the older boys, battering away. I pound them ‘til their faces are swollen, red like the soft pulp of a watermelon. I pummel and pummel, until my arm wears me out, until I can’t hold it up.

This, of course, is not the real story.

Reid leaned across the table then, threw a couple bills down. His smile was a gaping chasm. The sun was shimmering high above the buildings. “Well,” he laughed, “I guess that’s the end of our night, isn’t it?”

***

Reid took off soon after we got back to my apartment. We didn’t bother saying much more to each other. The uber came, he clapped me on the shoulder and that was it. Nice time. See you later.

I found Sasha still in the basement. By that time the sunlight was a bright sheen slanting across the carpet. She was sitting on the couch with her face ducked to the phone. I was exhausted and my limbs felt like clubs.

“Do you need a ride?” I asked.

She shook her head without looking up. I remained by the stairs. The fan slung itself around slowly, pushing stale air. I looked around at the empty beer bottles and the plate on the couch with the thin white lines across it.  A strand of Sasha’s hair kept blowing across her forehead.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home. I could really use the air.”

“You still drunk?”

“It’s been like seven hours. I can drive.”  Her eyes flicked up from the phone, drilled into mine.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

***

We pulled out onto the street, got off the skinny, torturous one-way roads that eventually fed onto Lincoln Avenue.

The world had finally woken up. I saw some couples out for brunch, a few moms in Lululemon, pushing strollers with one hand, holding phones or smoothies or shades in the other.  Sasha lived in Logan Square which was a few miles from me. Mostly a straight shot, but, with traffic, not exactly quick. I could tell Sasha was pissed, or maybe just exhausted. For most of the ride she laid with her body slumped sideways in the seat, her head bouncing on the glass. Once I tried to turn on the radio, but she flicked it off as quick as she could.  I felt a little hollow. We only had a few weeks left of school, with not much to do, and Sasha had told me before how she was planning on flying home early to New York. This would maybe be one of our last nights together, and she could barely say a word.  And for what? My friend who was, by this point, flying east? Probably thousands of feet up?

We pulled over in front of her building.  Above us leered the Blue Line. You could smell the iron. There were people pushing past each other, climbing the exposed stairs, flipping through the turnstiles. I pulled the clutch into park.

On the corner, a small squad of pigeons picked at dropped food. We were outside of a bakery, so the pigeons had that going for them. Above us a train car rattled, screeching north towards O’hare.

“You’re angry,” I said. Her whole body breathed a long, languid exhale. She popped her sunglasses up onto her forehead. Her eyes were tired little slivers of white.

“Did you talk to Reid?” she said quietly.

“Of course,” I said. Just like that. The lie came easy.  She sat up in the seat, looked straight ahead, nodded one time.

“You remember that story about Willie Mays?” she said.

I nodded.

“Yeah.” She held her glasses in her hand, turning them over. “My grandfather didn’t really do that.”

Maybe the drugs had blotted my emotional reserve, but the news didn’t shock me. “So?”

“My dad’s not a doctor either. I live in New Jersey, not New York. He’s a math teacher.”

“I repeat. So?”

Wrong thing to say. But I felt justified. I almost laughed. And so what? The gravity with which Sasha carried herself…how long had she been weighed down like this? I’d been drunk on that orbit for too long.  The gravity of the morning seemed formed of melodrama.

And then I was laughing, but with each inhale my chest felt tighter. With each beat my vision squeezed a little around the edges. I became nauseas and closed my eyes.

She gazed at me. “You don’t think it matters?” Her voice sounded very far away, a deep and cavernous echo.

“Not really,” I wheezed. “Whatever story you want.”

“I guess men really do have that luxury, don’t they?” she said. She unbuckled her seatbelt, put her hand on the door, then put it back in her lap. “I’m a little embarrassed, I guess.  I lied to you. It seems like you should care.”

“But I don’t,” I said.  I felt a little pulled apart. My heart. My heart was going too fast. I wanted to argue with her and reassure her all at the same time. I wanted to explode.  I wanted to keep whatever was whole, whole.

“I know you,” I said. “Don’t I know you?”

“Of course,” she said. “But honesty matters, right? Truth matters?”  I was looking at her, reaching for her hands. She was difficult to see. I remembered the strobe. The elliptical movement of her face.

“Hey,” she said, fading out. “Hey. Are you ok?”

***

I struggle with which version of the story to tell here. They are all equally true.

***

Version one. Sasha grips my face, pulls me out into the street. I am fighting her, tooth and limb, fighting a body that is no longer hers.

In her place: snow. A biting frost. A dog barking behind a fence. The boy on my back is hissing in my ear. “Faggot, I bet you like this.” My pants are down. My scream is ripping my throat apart. My groin burns in the freeze. Something cold is shoved between my legs.

***

Version two. The older boys do not come at us. Not immediately, anyway.  I’m crying a bit because the sight of the beaten dog has also wounded me, somehow. The shorter boy is laughing, but I’m watching the taller one. He’s got these freckles and a soft, copper fuzz on his lip. He’s watching me too, but there is no laughter there. There is a type of grimace on his face, and in the blurred-out world that my tears are drowning me in I think I see something else. Emotions I do not yet have words for: curiosity, confusion, frustration…a type of pain that would only embarrass a boy at that age.

***

I hear Sasha. The acrid smell of hot pavement on my cheek. A woman’s shoes, close to my face. A pair of furious hands ripping my shirt open, a palm on my sternum.

Who is he? Who should I call?

Nobody, I say without saying.  Let an animal alone.

***

Version three.

I’m alone in the clearing, holding the sharpened stick. The other boys have left.

All I hear is birdsong. Light drains through the overhanging branches. The dog is still there, bug-eyed and staring. His tail hangs between his legs. He makes no sound.

My arm switches back. Pauses a moment. I watch his steaming breath, feel the floor of my heart drop out from under my legs, and I can’t stop looking between the stick and the dog, the dog and the stick.

~0~

Brandon Ingalls received his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He currently lives in Chicago Illinois, where he practices as a physician specializing in Emergency Medicine.

Judge Clare says about The Dog, The Stick  “sharply voiced and nicely layered, this is one to ponder over and revisit.”