There are dogs who misbehave, and then there is Samantha, Jake's border collie, who shits on a different step in the south stairwell every day. She started with the topmost step on the fifth floor and is working her way down neatly, methodically. Every so often someone will come by to clean it up, which must be a process, but little stains remain like so many ghostly footsteps. In twenty days she will shit on my step, and I don't know what I'll do.
Why doesn't Jake at least clean up after her? He won't say. He speaks of Samantha like she is a precocious but troubled teenager, beyond a desperate parent's reach.
“Maybe she's stressed,” he says. “The world must seem so large, to a dog, so large and out of reach. Your owner loves but never understands you. There are doors, but none of them open.”
“You should save a few of these excuses for tomorrow,” I say.
“I can sympathize, I guess." He empties his espresso and sets it down, tap-tapping. “Maybe she's looking for ways to exert control.”
“Control would be cleaning up shit.”
He points a finger: “Easy for a woman with opposable thumbs to say.”
I've never had a dog; am, in fact, mildly allergic, which is the excuse I trot out for the heavily-dogged among my friends. This is also why I never go to Jake's, or so I say. But I think even I could manage to corral Samantha.
Days pass and her reign continues. I walk up and down the fourteen steps still between us, the march she will be making. I try to convince Jake:
“She needs tough love. Help her grow.”
“Me?” He laughs. “What do I know about growth? I process spreadsheets for a living. This morning I met an intern who, just to get the internship, trained a system to do my job.”
“It's easy to pick that stuff up,” I say, but Jake sighs:
“Not for me.”
I've never understood this about him: the melancholy stirring of sediment. He has a lot of inertia, basically, which is like having two bum legs.
My own life begins to pick up—finally, customers sign letters of intent; my co-founder on the other coast, years younger, pops champagne and drops acid with his Stanford roommates… life, finally, maybe, coming into focus. And I think less about the steps, mercifully, until I walk through the stairwell and notice she's reached the flight closest to me.
“Do you ever worry you’re not headed anywhere?” Jake says. I don't, of course, but this would be inartful to say. I want to talk about the shitting.
“I bet Samantha feels that way,” he says. “We go on walks, but it doesn't matter what we pass—where do we end up?”
“At home,” I said. “Most people like that.” Jake's face is Vancouver grey.
“Sometimes I worry,” he says, “that she isn't able to articulate the pain in her life. Which might be worse than the pain itself.”
“Dogs will talk someday,” I say. “Brain-computer interfaces—give it fifteen years.”
But this doesn't assuage him, maybe because Samantha is already seven, or because so many dogs have already gone without it.
“Not for nothing,” I say, “but she seems happy to me.”
The last investor on my list of crossed-out names is a piece of shit, entirely unfamiliar with the field and wielding a reflexive skepticism like some sort of fourteenth-century flail.
“You need traction,” he says.
“Um. We have letters of intent.” From big brands, I want to shout, you sanctimonious dipshit!
“I know, sweetie," he says, “that's fine. But you need more.”
The co-founder, launching satellites with a club in the Mojave, sighs theatrically over the phone.
“I skipped an orgy for that Zoom meeting,” he says. “Granted, they're every Friday.”
“He called me sweetie.”
“Southerners,” he said. “Anyway, I'll ask around. There's money somewhere.”
Jake can't make it to our morning coffee, and I realize I'm severely disappointed. I root around for new leads online, sending personalized form letters, an earthworm wriggling.
If Samantha could speak, would she? Would she cry that her toys, squeaky and colorful, do too little to pull apart each day's woolen inanity? Would she sneer that she doesn't love us, or we her, that this is all just a convenient arrangement?
Would she bite, or might it feel naïve? Would she book a midnight train out of town, with the doors still human-shaped, the handles paw-unfriendly? And what could await but other cities with other dogs, mutely tethered to other humans, like so many uninspired retellings of a tale? In short, would anything change?
I am thinking about this, and also considering getting dinner with Jake—my life could use some sprucing, some unplanned foliage—as I walk into the stairwell. And here is a crouching man, bare pale ass exposed, legs quaking, Samantha wagging nervously alongside, as the morning's new monument creeps into view.