As I listened to all this, I was able to fit a little piece of my own into the story. I had spent too many nights waiting at bus stops, watching the progress of the seasons mapped out in the slow movement of the constellations across the great, dark grid of the sky, not to have been curious enough to look up their names. And because of that, I knew what other name Sirius went by. Orion, the hunter, with the Three Sisters stars in his belt, was accompanied all night by two star-marked hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. Canis Major—the Great Dog—contains Sirius, which is also called the Dog Star.

Then I said the words aloud. “Sirius is the Dog Star.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Now you’re getting it. But there’s more. The Dogon say that when the visitors came from the universe they described as next to ours, the one with an entry point near Sirius, they brought dogs with them. Or anyway, some kind of companion being that seemed like a dog. When they left, they took all these—well, for the sake of argument, let’s call them animals—with them, except for one, which had become attached to a Dogon boy. The boy wouldn’t part with his pet and the animal wouldn’t leave the boy, so it was allowed to stay. The dogs that the Dogon have now are supposedly descended from that animal and the camp dogs that lived with the Dogon people, but they aren’t like any other dogs in one other respect: they have very few offspring. A Dogon dog may only have one or two offspring in its entire lifetime. So they’re relatively rare. And the Dogon never give them away to anyone. I didn’t even know there were any in the United States.”

We both now looked over at the flat little dog lying at my feet. He seemed suddenly to be aware that he was the object of our conversation because he opened his eyes and rose to his feet. He stretched and then jumped up to sit beside me on the couch. He looked at me, blinked, and leaned against my side. With the weight of him against me, I was surprised by how substantial he seemed to be; he looked like he was made of thin sticks and that odd wedge-shaped head, but he didn’t feel that way. He felt heavy, and he felt strong.

I put my arm around him and he leaned even harder. “Hello, Digitaria,” I said.

Jack laughed. “That’s a good name,” he said. “Your secret companion.”

“Not so secret,” I said. “But very quiet, don’t you think? He’s barely made a sound since he’s been here.”

“More thoughtful than vocal,” Jack said. “A good quality in people—and in a dog.”

“I guess I’d better go out and get him some food,” I said. “Want to come?”

“No, I’d better get back to Brooklyn,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of material to go over for the show tonight.”

I asked how he was going to get home and he told me that he’d driven here last night—which explained how he’d gotten to my place so quickly—and had parked his car a few blocks away. As he was getting his things together and putting on his coat, he paused to give me an appraising look. Then he said, “You seem a lot better than when I got here last night.”

“I do feel better,” I said, agreeing that my mood seemed to be settling. The sense of craziness I had been feeling since I’d walked into my ransacked apartment last night was definitely dissipating. I still had a lot of putting-things-back-where-they-belonged to do, but the task seemed less impossible now. Another few hours’ work and everything would be back the way it was—almost.

But then something occurred to me. Jack was already out the door, so I hurried after him and caught him on the stairs.

“You left something out of the story,” I said to him.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You didn’t tell me what they looked like. The visitors.”

I waited to hear what I thought was inevitable: the words shadow, faceless, flat, but Jack had no such description to offer. He said, “As far as I know, the Dogon never passed on a description. But they do seem to have some sort of collective memory of what they sounded like. Mostly, they hissed.”

I paused before responding. Jack remained on the stairs, waiting.

“That’s was Gilmartin’s description too, wasn’t it?” I said finally.

Jack shrugged. “I’m just telling you what’s been told to me.”

He raised his hand, signaling a brief wave good-bye, and then continued on his way.

I went back to my apartment and got the dog. He trotted along beside me amiably enough, so I took him for a walk to the nearest bodega and bought a few cans of dog food. I hadn’t asked what he ate—though as I thought about that on the way back home, I realized that I probably would have gotten the same nonanswer as I did about the dog’s name.

In my apartment, I put some water in a bowl and scooped some of the canned food into a dish. The dog walked over to the dish and immediately started eating, so I left him in the kitchen while I went to the bathroom to begin getting ready for work. A little while later, when I stepped out of the shower, the dog was sitting on the bath mat, waiting for me.

I patted him on the head, dried myself off, and went into the bedroom to get dressed. He followed me and sat patiently while I pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt. Then he followed me out to the living room, where I gathered up my jacket.

I had started to feel anxious again and very tired. I really shouldn’t have gone to work, but if they were going to get another bartender out to the airport, I would have had to call in hours ago, and I hadn’t thought of it, so I felt responsible for showing up. Why? I asked myself. It wasn’t like anybody who signed my checks—people at the corporate headquarters in Cleveland—would ever feel responsible about me. But I decided that it was going to help me to stick to my usual routine, and so I unlocked my massive new deadbolt and started out the door.

But before I left, I stopped to give the dog another pat on the head. “Digitaria,” I said, “guard the house.”

His eyes seemed to glitter even more brightly. He really was a small dog, thin and narrow. But as I looked down at him, with his wedge-shaped head tilted slightly to the side as if he were listening, processing my directive, I had a definite feeling that if anyone so much as tried to get back into my apartment tonight, he would eat them alive.

~IX~

When I finally got home from work around two A.M. on that first night I had the dog, I was surprised to find him sitting just about where I had left him, facing the front door. I told myself that of course he hadn’t simply been waiting there all night; probably he had heard me at the door and the sound of my key in the lock had brought him back to what he seemed to regard as his post. Later, when I went to bed, the dog jumped in as well, settling himself at my feet. Since my two small rooms were set up like a railroad flat, you could see through the bedroom doorway straight through to the front door of the apartment and the dog had positioned himself so that he was pointed right at that door. He kept his attention focused there as sharply as if he were looking at it through a nightscope. I found this very comforting. I hadn’t expected to be able to sleep very well, and I didn’t, but each time I woke up, the fact that the dog was there was reassuring enough to allow me to drift off again.

So I got used to him, but more than that, I quickly grew fond of him. I’d never had a dog before but even so, I was pretty sure that as dogs go, this one was unusual. For example, he rarely made a sound. And though I had bought him some dog toys—rawhide bones and a ball—he didn’t seem much interested in playing. He liked walks, the longer the better, and he liked to be let off his leash to run around at the edge of the marshland near my bus stop where he could chase seagulls, but that seemed to be enough activity for him. All he seemed to want other than his daily exercise was to sit next to me, or to lean against my feet—in other words, to be where I was. And every night when I came home from work, I found him sitting at the front door, waiting for me. And he continued to sleep at the edge of the bed—or at least, I assumed he slept sometimes. Those times when, for whatever reason, I woke up in the middle of the night, Digitaria always seemed to be awake, too. And he was hypervigilant. Any noise in the hallway, even Sassouma and her family or other neighbors passing by, sent him running to the front door. He didn’t bark but simply stood at alert, staring at the door until whatever sounds had disturbed him finally subsided. And then he’d march back to bed and curl up in exactly the same position he’d been in before, but with his eyes open, glittering in the darkness.