Garage Dogs
photo by the author
My neighbors named their dog Blitz, which I assume is short for blitzkrieg because he’s a German shepherd with shoulders like a tank. They keep him chained in the garage between their weed cutter and empty pails of paint, the door open so that summer smells like grass and gasoline and he can close his eyes and dream about big insects or sex or whatever dogs dream about. My parents told me once, when I realized my situation as an only child might be salvaged with some other type of companionship, that dogs are haram, too unclean for house life.
Congratulations. That’s what my neighbor, the dad, said to me the day I came back with a car full of disassembled Ikea furniture. I have my degree, which is sitting unframed on the coffee table, and many candidate rejection emails sitting unread in my inbox, and now I’m back to sleeping under Call of Duty posters. I get out of bed in the afternoon. I wear the same shirt for a week straight. I think about what my mom says, that Aunt Nasira is a doctor. She is on the frontlines. It’s only natural that the language we use for Covid is borrowed from wartime. Quarantine has become the sister of tin-can rations and huddling together in the basement listening to bombs pick our homes apart. Tragedy isn't allowed to be this boring.
Blitz likes to roll his tennis ball out onto the street to make you stop and pick it up, thinking he can’t get it because his chain is too short. It's torn and wet and sad, and if you give it back to him, he lets it roll back onto the street, and then you feel tricked, you dumbass. “Don’t get too close to him,” the neighbors tell me. “He likes being left alone.”
I bought a bike off Craigslist the week I got back. The seller and I met in a rec center parking lot. We looked at our feet, adjusted our masks. I rode the bike in a big circle, said “Yeah, this is fine,” and he asked “Is $200 okay?” and I said “Yeah, that’s fine.” I told myself it was time for new hobbies, something that lets me use my hands. I fixed the brakes. I rode nine miles. People understand these things. Talking about writing is like trying to convince someone of religion.
Sometimes I’m awake in the mornings because I don’t sleep, and this is when I take my bike down to the river. Blitz is always flat against the driveway like a used cushion. I nod to him, because I don’t want to be rude.
The neighbors like to have lunch with us on Sundays, socially distanced. My mom wears her Michael Kors sunglasses and we stretch an ironing board across our balconies. They bring us chickpea stew, rice with raisins and spiced lamb, and they talk about home and how good things used to be. I eat my food quietly because toddlers in Afghanistan speak Farsi better than I do, and I also have nothing to say. Blitz circles the yard below us, his head cocked. My neighbor, the dad, tells me not to feed him, that he doesn’t like being fed. He looks at my nose ring and tells me that healthcare in Canada doesn’t work.
I forgot how to sleep. I lie in bed on my phone, usually until dawn comes. The light is like the first page of a book you’ll never read.
Are you familiar with the defining characteristics of fascism? They include: increased nationalism, the protection of corporate power, aversion to human rights, obsession with national security, unifying against common enemies, anti-intellectualism, and suppression of truth.
I hear my parents in the living room asking each other if they’ve seen me eat today. The bike is on the porch, and I roll it out onto the path behind my house. The sun is setting. I look forward to the sunsets now; they look like spilled paint. The path is empty when it gets dark and I can pedal fast over wet leaves that smell like semen. At the gas station I buy lunch meat: bologna, turkey cold cuts, and a pack of cigarettes. Then I head home. It’s darker on the way home and I have to pedal slower. I don’t know how to take my time.
Blitz waits for me on the driveway. We go into his garage and I take the lunch meat from my backpack and fold it in my hands for him. I think about vomiting in toilet stalls, waking up in other people’s beds, and other things our ancestors did. When he’s done eating, we sit in the dark garage and he licks my palm until he falls asleep.