Dennis was dreaming about a dog he had as a boy more than sixty years ago, a boxer named Brig who was large, beefy, and tan, with brindled charcoal streaks decorating his haunches. Brig might have been an intimidating-looking knot of muscle to those who did not know him, but around Dennis and his parents the animal was a slobbering goof, spinning in tight circles with incorrigible joy at the sight of any of the three of them after even the shortest time spent apart. Dennis could not remember now where the dog’s odd name had come from, or if he was ever told.
*
Boxers, if you don’t know, are highly intelligent dogs that tend to be very loyal to, and protective of, particular people, especially children. They are not necessarily considered top-notch watchdogs, however, since for whatever reason the breed cannot be made to give a damn about protecting a person’s property. You can trespass past a boxer onto a piece of real estate as long as you leave the people on it alone.
*
Dennis’s parents adopted Brig—nearly full-sized—the same week Dennis was born. “The best thing you can do for a boy is to let him grow up with a dog,” his father said. And indeed Brig took charge of the infant Dennis right away, sleeping beneath his crib, preventing anyone but Dennis’s parents from coming near him. The dog would neither bark nor bite, but simply bar unapproved encroachers from drawing close, shouldering them aside with his powerful body until they got the message.
*
In the dream, Dennis had seen himself doing what he was actually doing, dozing in the retirement condo he’d just bought. Though his eyes were open, Dennis knew he was dreaming because he remained calm and unsurprised when he observed Brig—dead for more than fifty years—silently trotting into his dim bedroom from the condo’s hallway, and then sitting in the shadows, staring at him. The dog looked exactly as he did when alive and seemed to want something.
Dennis was unafraid of this canine apparition. With the elastic logic allowed by dream states, it did not seem at all unreasonable that his old pal Brig should pay him a visit in his new home. He merely smiled ruefully at his childhood companion, then rolled over and attempted to return fully to sleep.
*
Brig’s protective streak became even more evident when Dennis was about six years old. The dog had always kept a close watch on the rambunctious boy, but now whenever Dennis entered the house or stood from a chair or rose from bed, Brig immediately came to attention and advanced to press himself, the weight of his body, against one of Dennis’s legs. It was almost as if the dog were expecting Dennis to fall over any minute, that his healthy and energetic young charge needed to be propped up for some reason. Nearly everyone who came to visit the house remarked on it. “Who’s your chaperone?” his grandfather asked.
*
Later that summer, Dennis began exhibiting some odd behavior that concerned his parents, and a visit to his pediatrician resulted in a subsequent referral to a neurologist, who diagnosed the boy with an idiopathic form of epilepsy. In that era, epileptic seizures were lumped broadly into two types: grand mal and petit mal, the difference between them explained to Dennis’s parents as “With the first, the child will fall to the floor and convulse, with rigid muscles; with the other, he will simply be confused for a while and possibly drop to his knees.”
These days, research has led to a more sophisticated understanding of the complex condition, and the terms grand mal and petit mal have mostly been replaced with clinical descriptions such as “tonic-clonic” and “absence,” but finding an effective pharmaceutical treatment precisely adjusted to an individual’s ever-evolving brain chemistry remains extremely challenging.
*
Dennis’s boyhood seizures were only ever of the absence kind, brief, painful, short-circuiting brain zips and blips that usually caused him to violently flinch and stutter and release whatever he might be holding. They felt—and were, in fact—electrical in nature, and Dennis came to think of them as “taserings.” Sometimes—more rarely—a seizure would cause him to simply freeze in position, unable to move, leisurely fluttering his eyelids and emitting a string of small whispered vocalizations. Leaning close, his parents were dismayed to realize that the vocalizations were in fact the word “help” being softly intoned until the seizure reached its merciful conclusion, which might require waiting several agonizing minutes. Afterwards, Dennis would have no memory of the event, or of ever making a sound.
*
Following Dennis’s diagnosis, when he had been put on medication and his parents scaled down their worrying a bit, the little family endeavored to resume their normal daily routine. At dinner one night, Dennis’s mother was quietly delivering one of her lectures—the one about a boy keeping his elbows off the table while eating—when Dennis’s father (who had been studying Brig half-dozing in a nearby corner) suddenly spoke.
“Dog knew the epilepsy was coming on him,” his father stated. “Damn dog knew.”
*
In the condo, Dennis could not immediately return to sleep, so he flopped about in bed, seeking that sweet spot of physical comfort in which his neck was supported but not painfully cricked, his perpetually achy shoulder—the one said to need a joint replacement—did not have overmuch body weight being rested upon it, and his feet stuck out just the right distance from beneath the quilt so they’d be rendered neither too hot nor too cold. He failed to find the elusive ideal position and turned around again. Now his ear was sweaty. He flipped the pillow to its cooler side and punched a dent for his head in the middle.
“Damn it,” he murmured. “When I was a kid I could immediately drop to sleep any which way.”
Since he was obviously becoming fully awake, he thought about rising from bed, maybe paying a preventive visit to the bathroom. Beyond a certain age, a man might feel he is scheduling his entire life around pee breaks.
Dennis sighed, hating the idea of missing out on a full night’s sleep.
When he opened his eyes again, the dreamed dog was still there.
*
Brig lived to be seventeen, several years beyond the ten- or twelve-year typical lifespan for the breed. As he aged, his muzzle developed a dignified gray, his black eyes became clouded and watery, and the excited circling ritual for which he was known was performed at a somewhat slackened pace, but basically the dog remained the same. Then, late one night, with a heavy snowstorm raging outside the house, he went to a corner of the kitchen floor and laid down alone to die, the way dogs do. Splayed on his side, he panted feverishly, but did not whine or whimper. Dennis’s parents, arrayed in bathrobes and slippers, came across the dog while locking up the house and began phoning around to locate a vet that might put a quick end to the animal’s obvious suffering.
They called Dennis down from his room. Wrested from a state of deep teenaged sleep, he was bleary-eyed and didn’t say much, hesitating just a second before tenderly approaching Brig, who delivered a couple listless wags of his tail and managed to lift his head for a moment. Dennis eased it back down. He could not think of anything to do then but abide with the dog until the end of his life, kneeling by Brig’s side to stroke his nape and shoulder, repeating, “Good boy, good boy.”
*
Dennis substantially outgrew his epilepsy in his mid-twenties, as some people are known to do. After a year with no recognized seizures, he presented a doctor’s note to his state’s DMV and was permitted to get a driver’s license. Dennis thought of this allowance as society’s way of saying, “You now have our imprimatur to go ahead and consider yourself normal.” So he did. He became a paradigmatic adult male of his time, a professional man, a husband and a father, then—far too soon—a widower. Now he was a long-time retiree with accumulating health problems, including failing vision and hearing, a typical sort of man declining naturally with age. But throughout this long life, Dennis had maintained a secret—he still had seizures, moments in which the continuous flow of his consciousness was rudely interrupted and some irretrievable minutes of his existence unfairly snatched away. He’d be engrossed in the midst of watching a television program only to suddenly be presented with the end roll of credits; he’d find himself sitting at the dining table without a memory of having entered that room; once, he came back to consciousness behind the wheel of an idling car in the driveway, with no clue about where he was meant to go. These moments occurred rarely—perhaps two or three times in a year—and he always ignored them, telling no one, not his doctor or even his wife.
*
Dennis rose on one elbow in bed and gawped at the ghostly dog waiting expectantly for him in the dark. There was no way, of course, for him to actually be seeing what he imagined he was seeing. It would have to be a trick played by the inconstant pallid light, a nonsensical shape his brain was attempting to interpret based on the vestiges of a dream. God knows his eyesight was far from perfect these days. The mirage would likely be related to the bathrobe he’d thrown without looking in the general direction of his bureau before climbing into bed. It must have caught on something and draped in a configuration that in the lightless corner of the room might be mistaken for a dog.
He hesitated to switch on the bedside table lamp to prove or disprove this desperately hopeful theory, but decided he could get a sufficient look at the…Brig-shaped object…if he were to put on his glasses, at least, which he did—after fumbling about for them on the bedside table. Out of habit, Dennis inserted his new hearing aid as well.
That did it. There was an insistent, high-pitched electrical noise surrounding him that he had been missing. A blaring yet still somehow muffled alarm of some kind, seemingly close by, perhaps even originating from inside the condo itself.
What had the real estate agent said about smoke and carbon monoxide detectors? At the time, he had been distracted by the industrial strength of her floriferous perfume, which he remembered thinking would set off the detectors if there were any.
Anyway, dumb thing to remember now. Dennis grabbed his phone from the nightstand, detached it from the charger, and stood up, his knees creaking and popping in near-unison as he did so. He wondered whether he should put on more clothes—since it was lightly snowing outside and he was wearing only the t-shirt and old sweatpants that passed for pajamas—but he lost the thought when a revolting onrush of nausea forced itself on him. Suddenly quite lightheaded, he staggered and reeled his way out the bedroom.
It took longer than seemed necessary for him to make it to the darkened condo exit, and in the manner of his approach he made a mistake, forgetting there was a modest two-step landing that had to be descended to be dead level with the front door. Thus one of his hurried footsteps abortively terminated midair, unsupported—a truly horrible, frozen-in-time feeling. When the bare, misguided foot did make clumsy, off-balance contact with the edge of the stair tread, his right ankle buckled and snapped sickeningly. This misstep caused the rushed direct path he’d taken toward the door to become skewed, and he pitched violently forward, his off-balance, ungoverned body twisting sideways. As a result, his jaw and left shoulder thwacked severely against the doorjamb. He yelped in pain and lay there, crumpled against the closed door, in an awkwardly bent heap—but only for a few seconds. Raising determinedly to one knee, Dennis continued a panicked groping with his right hand at the intransigent door lock until he was able to discover and turn the deadbolt. Dank, cold air burst in when the door sprung wide. Half-crawling, he moved through the accumulating snow to safety a few yards away from the building, trailing his obscenely bent leg and spitting blood.
Splayed on his side, he laid on the frigid stone walkway and breathed deep. The surrounding neighborhood was stilled by the snow, quiet and dark. Dennis raised his left hand to his jaw and stared for a moment with amazement at the lit-faced device he was still somehow clutching. Then he punched in 911 with a trembling finger.
His mouth had quickly filled with blood again, and when he spat some out hoping to speak more coherently, a piece of tooth went with it. But he could not worry about that now. In the long moment elapsing before he heard the emergency operator pick up his call, Dennis’s mind centered only on the intense gratitude he felt, and contained just a single thought: “Good boy, good boy.”
Image by Andreas D. from Pixabay – an old boxer dog with a greying muzzle sitting in leaves.
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