The expression of the emotions in man and animals

It was raining today, much like it was raining yesterday and the day before. And, as I've done yesterday and the day before and most likely would do today, I'd make a sandwich and sit by my window to watch the rain fall.

The weather reports say that it was going to rain until the end of the week, not much more. Forecasters are always a quick study about this sort of thing. Pulling a consistent 90% isn't that bad, now that I think about it; weather forecasters could possibly be the sibyls of this generation.

You can bet that I'm proud of that analogy, mostly because I'm not really the sort of person to think in analogies. Nope, you can say that I'm a straightforward sort of person. In fact, you can count on it, much like you can count on the fact that my clocks and my watches are timed precisely to the moment of Now. That's a marker of how reliable I am.

My boss told me that I could take a few days off, mostly because he felt bad, I suppose. Truthfully, I don't think anything is wrong with me, but from his vantage point, I guess everything was going wrong for me.

I had a dog once. I'm not the type of person who names animals, or even keeps pets, but nevertheless, I had a dog. His name was Mr. Dog. There was nothing more to it. It was quite possible that if it had been a cat, its name would have been Mr. Cat, but like I said, there was nothing more to it.

What he did was the same as any other dog would do. He ate, and he slept, and he'd want to be taken for walks. The only thing terribly out of ordinary was that he hated eggs. But, hey, how would you know such a thing? It's not like anyone else would feed their dogs eggs. Now that I think about it, maybe it wasn't terribly out of ordinary. Maybe most dogs disliked eggs, and my dog just followed through.

He was a present from a girlfriend I once had. Terribly typical of her to do, I guess, to give me a dog. A dog is about the most reliable animal you can get, except for maybe a donkey. They do nothing out of ordinary; are perfectly reliable; and in fact, never waver in their feelings. 100% sure, you can say. Whether or not I liked the dog or not wasn't really the question, since it was a pet, and I was obliged to take care of it, regardless of how I felt.

When my girlfriend left me, I wasn't terribly disappointed to see her go. Towards the end of our relationship, I could have said that she had been growing increasingly irrational about the three of us. Yes, I say three, because Mr. Dog was surely as part of the reason she left as I was. I'm not sure how it could be, because she said nothing about him in her last few words to me, but he was really part of it. She hated Mr. Dog, that much I was sure.

Irrational, you could say she was. It was as clear as day, as clear as the clocks that adorned my wall.

But Mr. Dog eventually left me, too.

It feels weird, being on the other side of the world. Jet lag really does me in, all the time. I fly to Korea, and I lose a day. I fly back to New York, and the world tells me that I've lost only an hour in a thirteen hour flight. I don't think I aged an hour; I've aged an entire day. Sometimes these speculative thoughts lead me to think about flying furthur east, toward the sun, and maybe I'll grow older and older while time passes like nothing to everyone standing firmly on the earth.

So when the phone call came to my room, late at night, I couldn't be sure if it was just a prank call or a call on the other side of the world. Time gets really sort of complicated when I move around, which is why I dislike traveling. It's a terrible thought to think that I can't be precisely on time no matter where I go.

Somewhere in the background, I could hear the fragments of a song, coming from another hotel room: "...and the earth spins round while the people fall down..."

The phone was still ringing. I can't help my nature, who I am. I have to pick up the phone nonetheless to find out who it is.

...and the world stands still not a sound (not a sound)...

I was greeted with a series of hoarse coughs. Racking ones, the kind you get when you've been sick for a while and can't do anything about it except let it all out - the sickness, the phlegm, the pain.

"Hello?" I asked tentatively.

The coughing stopped. "My, you sound well," the voice said on the other end of the phone.

I frowned. I counted it a personal achievement of mine to recognize the voice of anybody I knew. It was a knack. But I didn't recognize this man's voice, and as a consequence, was deeply puzzled. It was, after all, 3 AM in the morning. Who isn't puzzled at this kind of time, ordinary or extraordinary circumstance? "Can I ask you who you are?"

"Of course, of course. How stupid of me," the man said, his voice was like gravel and wet cement. He stopped and started with his words like a sputtering engine, and it was difficult to follow, especially when his words were sometimes almost indistinguishable from his coughing. "I shall tell you. Due time, after all. This is no ordinary phone call. No sir, it is not."

"It's not?"

"Of course not. Three in the morning? From someone you don't recognize? Can you tell me, in what way, is this phone call ordinary for you?"

"Well, I was hoping..." I started, but he interrupted me again.

"Of course not. Of course not. But, how like you! To always expect the ordinary!" The coughing continued again. "I'm sick, by the way. I don't really have much time. So I decided to call you. As, you know, a going away present."

This was just too weird. Someone I didn't know, on his death bed, telling me something. "I really don't know who you are," I said, "but I don't think you've gotten the right number." It might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard some faint, clanking noise in the background of his call, like chains being dragged against each other.

"Right number? Right number! How could I know that you're on the other side of this world, at 3 AM? I assure you, mister, I have the right number. I can tell you about your ex-girlfriend, down to the last mole on her body, and you tell me I don't have the right number?"

My ex-girlfriend?

"Merely an excuse," he said, as if reading my mind. "Something to catch your attention. I must say, it was a surprise, finding you. It's been so long, I've forgotten. It's plainly clear that nothing's changed." The stranger cleared his voice, and again, I heard that rasping sound in the background, something something harsh scraping against wood. "Come now, how's business for you?"

"The same," I managed to reply. Why was I still on the phone with him? I didn't know.

"The same, the same!" he exclaimed. "It figures. Nothing ever changes around you. Do you want to know why your girlfriend threw you away like yesterday's trash?"

"Who knows?" I said. "I can't ever say she ever told me." And now I was discussing my love life with a perfect stranger. Weirder and weirder.

"Of course she didn't say," the stranger said. "Who can say it clearly? It makes no sense, if you think about it. But that's not the real question. No, sir, it is not. It is how you did it. Tell me that, as a last favor, to your old pet. How did you do it?"

"Wait a minute. Old pet?"

"Surely you know me? Mr. Dog. Surely you couldn't have forgotten...?"

I was speechless. Last I remembered, dogs didn't talk.

I must have spoken such thoughts out loud, because he answered. "You're obviously delusional," Mr. Dog said. "Maybe we do talk when you're not looking. How can you prove something wrong out of inconclusional evidence?"

"By believing the facts," I said, ekeing out a reply as best I could.

"Facts? Facts! Bah, facts are just words. I could say, pigs could fly, but proof? How you would know proof if it never happened in front of your eyes? How impossible could it be that pigs fly only on very special days?"

"Very impossible," I said.

"True, true," he said, and I could almost hear him nodding on the other end of the phone in agreement. "It's difficult to think of such a thing. Pigs flying! Bah, I can barely believe it myself. But, you know, pigs are pigs, and dogs are dogs, and let me tell you, pet to man, this: you were a pretty poor excuse for an owner. What your poor ex-girlfriend couldn't say, God bless her, is this: ordinary, that's what you are. So ordinary that it's extraordinary."

"Ordinary?" I said, startled. "What's wrong with that?"

Mr. Dog was beginning to gasp now, but he did not give me even the slightest moment to interrupt.

"Listen to me. You know that I'm dying, you can hear it. Whether or not you care is none of my business. I've come to make this call to ask you to wake up! Forget trying to achieve the status quo! How could a person like you survive in this extraordinary world? Let me tell you this: the world does not like the ordinary. No, it hates the ordinary. And in such an extraordinary world such as this one, you will be crushed between the gears. I assure you of this, as surely as the Last Day...!"

Mr. Dog's voice had grown more and more frantic with every word; and in the background of his call, I could hear the clanking sound (which I had initially attributed to my imagination) grow louder. From my hotel on the other side of the world, it was as if I was there: there was a series of scraping movements, and then the phone the stranger (Mr. Dog?) was holding fell to the ground and clattered, firecrackers of sound in my ears.

Dimly, I heard a groan, and then heavy silence. The clanking sounds, which had stopped when the phone dropped, started up again, fading steadily into silence.

I was left alone in my room. In the silence, I could hear the song again from the room next door: "...with the gods all gone and the souls making sound (in the worst way)..."

The next day, I put everything up as an exceptional dream and flew home to go back to work. I'm not the kind of person to let my boss down.