I didn’t know what to do, but some part of my brain had kicked into override mode and I found myself running again, this time heading for the car. I found it without even consciously thinking about where I had parked it, got in and started the engine. My first organized thought since I had seen the dog take off down the beach was to drive around, looking for him. What else could I do?

So I drove up and down the streets in an ever-widening grid, stopping to ask people if they had seen a small, thin dog with a tightly curled tail roaming around anywhere. Everyone said no, so I kept driving. I drove for half an hour, and after that, half an hour more. The afternoon was getting later, the weather turning unseasonably cold. And then it began to rain.

Sheets, buckets, pails of water, rain was pouring from the sky. Streams of water formed along the curbsides; rain pooled in potholes and spread across the asphalt roadbed like a watery veneer. For a few minutes, the rain started to come down so heavily that I couldn’t see well enough to drive, so I pulled over and let the engine idle.

Then, finally, I did start to cry. To the core of my being, I felt incredibly sad, terribly lonely and completely bereft. I remembered reading once—in the magazine TV Guide, of all places—that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to make television shows and movies about pets who are lost or in some kind of trouble because small children tend to identify with small animals in dangerous situations. At that moment, sitting in Jack’s car, imprisoned by the rain, that was exactly how I felt—like I was a helpless child and Digitaria was an extension of me, wandering lost and frightened in the rain. I seemed to be reexperiencing every feeling I’d ever had about abandonment, about being estranged from my family long ago, about being on my own for most of my life and too often living near the edge of the economy, supporting myself but just barely, about needing to take care of myself because there was no one else to help me. All of that got mixed up with my terrible sense of responsibility for having lost the dog and the imminent prospect of having to abandon my search and leave him alone in a world where he would face hunger and cruelty and loneliness. I cried until I had the dry heaves. I cried until I just didn’t have any tears left. I cried until I felt I had cried for everything bad that had ever happened to me in my whole life.

And then, suddenly, as I was leaning back against the car seat with my eyes closed, feeling exhausted as I listened to the rain continuing to pound on the windshield, an image came into my mind. That’s the only way I can explain it. Maybe there was a reason I had thought about the TV Guide, because it was like a screen had been turned on somewhere in some viewing theater in the back of my brain and a scene was being projected in a little bright, white square of light. The scene was made up of pixels of memory and intuition, little bits of experience and dreams and stories. It had a fire escape in it and a small dog orbiting Earth in a satellite and my uncle in his worn-out old suit, showing me how to turn the dial on a radio. Before the scene faded away, I had an idea of where Digitaria might be.

The rain was finally beginning to let up just a little as I eased the car back into the street. I left the condos and surf shops behind, heading down the peninsula on the badly torn-up road that ran between the elevated train tracks and the boardwalk—if you could call it a boardwalk, here, where many of the wooden slats were warped or missing and the beach beyond had been overrun by salt grass and tall stands of sea oats. Now, I was driving up and down the same ruined sidewalks, passing the same empty lots that I had passed by last winter. This was a no-man’s land of litter and rubble and it was going to take a long time for urban renewal to march its way down to this lonely area and reclaim it with bulldozers and backhoes. It had the look of a place that intended, almost deliberately, to continue its decline. The buried foundations of old bungalows, the piles of rotting, painted planks that used to be stairs and porches seemed more like archaeological relics than urban debris waiting to be replaced with upscale versions of what used to be.

Peering through the rain, I kept watch for the dog as I passed the remnant of each cross street, but I didn’t expect to find him yet. I just kept driving until I reached the corner where, up the block, I could see the squat brick box that was the shell of the Sunlite Apartments, framed on either side by the blackened trees that I remembered from the last time I’d been here. The rest of the landscape around me was flat, overgrown with tangled weeds.

I stopped on the edge of the road across from the Sunlite Apartments and turned off the ignition. I sat for a moment, listening to the near silence that now contained only the sharp ticking of the rain on the car’s hood and the occasional rattle of sand and pebbles as a gust of wind blew by. Then I opened the door and stepped out into the wet world.

And there he was. My dog, Digitaria. My entire self—blood, spirit, bone—felt flooded with relief.

The dog was sitting on his haunches, on what remained of the sidewalk outside the entrance to the Sunlite Apartments. Previously, I hadn’t paid much attention to the entrance of the building, but now I did notice that the front door of the building was gone. That made it possible to see inside, but because it was growing dark, from where I stood on the street, I couldn’t pick out any specific structures that might remain. Perhaps some part of the internal staircase was still standing, perhaps some of the apartments were intact, though surely long since claimed by mold and rot. It was impossible for me to know if the dog had tried to get inside, but whatever explorations he might have made were over now and he was simply sitting in the rain, looking at the building and occasionally tilting his head from side to side.

As I walked up beside him, he acknowledged me by moving closer and then leaning against my leg, the way he did at home. I picked up his leash, and wrapped it firmly around my hand. He turned his head and stared at me with those dark, glittering eyes.

I tugged on the leash but he didn’t seem to want to move. He turned back to face the building and then, suddenly, let out a loud yip—a high-pitched, disturbing sound that was something like the noise he’d made when I had come home late, but more urgent. The sound seemed to linger in the night air until the wind swept it away.

After a few more moments of staring intently at the gaping hole where the front door of the building had once been, the dog finally let me lead him back across the street to the car. He jumped in and moved over to the passenger seat. Once I slid into the driver’s side, the dog managed to maneuver his body so that he was lying flat across the seat with his head in my lap. Soon, we were driving back across the bridge and Digitaria was fast asleep. A few times as I was driving, he continued to make that yipping sound, and though it was much softer now, coming from somewhere deep in his sleep, it still made me wonder just what it was that he might be dreaming about.

~XI~

“A pedophile?” I said to Jack. “That’s what they think you are? And they actually think they have some kind of evidence for this?”

“You don’t need evidence nowadays,” Jack said. “You just make accusations. And then you repeat them on some listener’s blog and before you know it—wham. Tried and convicted. Oh, yes—and did I tell you I might also be a drug dealer, a rapist and possibly the Antichrist? The Pope himself might issue an encyclical denouncing me because I promulgate degenerate theories about the sex life of the saints.”