Craig Spence © March 2022
It was a stupid name, really: Cerberus. So, we disguised it by calling our golden retriever pup Cerby ‘for short’. But why call her Cerberus in the first place? I mean, you couldn’t get much further from the mythological, three headed hound of hell than Cerby, could you? From the day we brought her home, she’s been the grateful sponge for our superabundant affection; the excuse for our daily walks around the block and through Wu’laam Park; our bestest best friend, as Malinda’s nephew Nicolaus dubbed Cerby, with that earnest enthusiasm only nephews on sleepovers can muster.
The baptism was sort of a joke. We got Cerby as a pup, cheap, because even then it was clear she didn’t conform to the championship show-dog ideal. The breeder took pity on us, too, deciding to reduce the defective, cut-rate price even further when she saw the instant delight in our eyes, which was reciprocated by Cerby’s gleefully responsive yipping, wriggling and tail wagging. “Won’t even pay for her keep,” the woman grumbled. “But I’ve always been a sucker when it comes to puppy love.”
There was no period of adjustment when it came to Cerby’s integration into our family, we were all madly happy with each other from day-one, and the radiant energy of that unqualified glee has seen us through, its vibrancy dissipated but not extinguished or even diminished, if you can imagine that.
Oh, yeah! Cerby’s baptism. I guess we needed something to counterbalance our saccharine elation – some coffee with our sugar, so to speak. I’m convinced that’s what influenced us most. Not that we thought about it, or agonized over it, or anything. The naming ceremony was a joke, really. Cerby was perfectly happy romping about our townhouse anonymously, and we were happy to let her. For a couple of days, at least. Then it just seemed right that she be christened. It was Malinda who suggested we were perhaps being a little overindulgent with our puppy.
“She is going to be a dog someday,” she admonished. As doting owners, might we have been missing something not-so-cute in her nature?
“Like, she might be evil, you mean?” I asked. We both laughed at the preposterous suggestion, Cerby looking up at us from the kitchen floor with a puzzled expression.
I can’t tell you how much it made my heart sing to hear Malinda’s laughter, how I tune memory’s antenna to the reverberations of those carefree times, because I’m afraid if I let them go, let them radiate out, beyond these walls into the utter unknown, I’ll never feel even an echo of elation again and will forget it had once been possible.
“Don’t be so stupid!” she said.
“It’s the eyes, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re like obsidian marbles, the oculars of a psychopath.”
Cerby wagged her tail expectantly. We laughed again.
We’d been watching a special on Knowledge Network, The Quest for Solomon’s Mines. The narrator was describing the grim lives of the miner-slaves, who dug copper ore out of the bowels of the earth, for smelting by other sweating slaves, so it could be transported as shining metal to Jerusalem to adorn Solomon’s great temple – which would house the Ark of the Covenant.
“Cerberus!” I said.
“What?”
“A modern reincarnation of the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology, that’s who she is.”
“We can’t call her that!” Malinda shrieked.
“Why not? No-one will ever know what it means anyway. They’ll ask. We’ll lie.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“We’ll tell them Cerberus was a dog-like creature in Greek mythology, who could cure the most grievous of wounds with a single lick of her medicinal tongue.”
“They won’t believe that!”
“Who cares?”
“Besides, she said, “it’s too hard to pronounce. Come Cerberus! Sit Cerberus! People will think we’re trying too hard to be exotic.”
“Cerby, then. Only we will know her true nature and significance of her cryptic identity.”
“But she’s so sweet!”
“That’s the thing about the devil.”
The name has long-since sloughed off any meaning other than the phantom of her running, rolling in the grass, nuzzling us on the sofa. We don’t even share the anecdote of its origins anymore, on those rare occasions when friends and family visit. Cerby is just Cerby, an aging golden whose face has gone white, her withers curled and bristly…
And?
She still walks with us – more often than not, with me alone. Off leash, she gamely plunges into the woods, darting through the underbrush from tree to tree, enacting god only knows what vaguely reincarnated feral instincts. But the intensity has drained out of her, and she tires before we’ve gone half way round our daily loop.
I know it’s silly, but I can’t help thinking she’s putting on a show for me, that she knows how much I feed off the unbridled enthusiasm of her forest romps, and doesn’t want to let me down.
We tramp and stumble about in such delusions until reality grabs us by the throat and gives us a shake. There’s a side to Cerby we don’t acknowledge, unless she forces us to shout a command for her to stop! On one of our walks, she caught a rabbit before I could intervene. I still hear it’s screams, still remember the limp rag of its corpse, which I hid in the bushes. That’s Cerby, too. A suburbanized huntress. A killer.
When Cerby was a pup, she used to sleep on our bed; then for a spell she was banished to the floor, her presence an impediment to love-making; then finally to the other side of our bedroom door, because it bothered Malinda, having another presence in the room while we were engaged in our romantic gymnastics.
I’ve never actually seen dogs humping, but have been led to believe their couplings are a slavering grunt and shove kind of affair with no preliminary pettings or post coital sighs. I suppose it’s something you could google and get lots of footage on, but I find the notion puerile and somewhat perverse.
Some things are best left unimagined.
We had Cerby spayed before her first birthday… I suppose I could rephrase that as before her first birthing-day, but won’t. I do wonder, though: Would there be any point at all to ‘love-making’ for a spayed or neutered pooch? Are they even capable of ‘the act?’ in their sterile forms.
Surely, if they were aware of the futility of it all, if their canine consciousness could have the mechanics of reproduction explained to them, they wouldn’t bother with the exertions of it all. Instead they’d trot off to pee on a bush or gnaw on a bone before they commenced the jostling, posturing, grinning and fighting acts of engagement true love entails?
Eventually Cerby snuck back onto our mattress, where she would nestle between us like a sausage in a bun, or curl up like a cinnamon roll in the crook of Malinda’s legs. Malinda accused me of shaping memory to fit a ‘pet theory’, but I honestly think Cerby consciously made herself small, so as not to be noticed when she began her retake-the-mattress campaign. The topography of our queen size bed became her field of action, its rumpled coverlet, the mounds of human anatomy, and the pillow-hillocks, the boudoir landscape she had to creep onto, undetected.
When we did notice her, Cerby would make us laugh, her brown marble eyes flicking back and forth between us, pleading not to be seen. Victory was hers. I encouraged anything that would make Malinda laugh… fragile laughter, like the tinkle of breaking glass in a distant room.
Cerby’s status as a mattress dweller confirmed, she has encroached in incremental stages more noticeably into our nocturnal space. She’s a surrogate, an emotional locus where phantom emotions can be nurtured, acknowledged, weened. In some ways, Malinda and I have come to love each other through her, and that helps us avoid the pain and blaming.
Dogs are innocent in ways we humans never can be, and in that sense, they become black holes for our guilt, our unworthiness.
How do you define that precise moment when habit becomes ritual? It’s like pressing the button on a camera: first you frame the shot, then you focus, then – without your expecting it – the shutter opens and the effulgence is etched onto digital sensors, where it will reside forever… or as forever as we can possibly enshrine anything in the neural network of human recall.
That’s where all our images and imaginings truly live. I can’t re-conjure the precise moment when I decided to make the bed with Cerberus lying on top of it. But there must have been a tipping point when the morning rite was sanctified, became official, obligatory, me straightening and flattening the tussled blankets and wrinkled sheets with her on top of them.
Cerby won’t get up, now, until we’ve done our thing.
As for Malinda, she doesn’t think it’s funny anymore; if she thinks about it at all, it’s with annoyance.
There’s a trick to making the bed with your dog lying on it. Psychically, you have to place the canine at the very centre of the activity… think of her weight, depressing the mattress, as the locus of gravity in your suburban universe. Then you have to animate that gravity with consciousness – admit it isn’t just a force, pulling everything downward, bending the universe into a dark place from which nothing, not even an essence as ephemeral as light, can escape. This warp must become part of a continuum, like the yellow centre of a daisy, that holds the petals in place and draws your picture together in time and space.
The whole of our past and entirety of our future, the infinitely large and small has to coalesce in the exact epicentre of mind before I make the bed. Once I’ve got that right, I tug, and smooth, and straighten, and – magically – everything works out… the bed gets made and the dog’s still lying there on the coverlet pretending to sleep.
Malinda and I used to share the bed making duties. Some days she’d do it, some days me, sometimes we’d each take a side and work together. I suppose if we’d continued in that vein, Cerby would never have become so central to the process.
“It’s ridiculous,” Malinda complains.”The dog shouldn’t even be on the bed in the first place.” But she lets it go at that, busies herself getting ready for work on weekdays… or for days off on weekends and holidays. There’s a ‘look’ for every occasion, and she’s meticulous about getting things just so.
I’m sure people at the bank think her a bit too elegantly coiffed and dressed and made up. They don’t understand how hard it is for her to hold things together without breaking down, without flinging papers about, smashing machines. Sometimes I pretend to be a customer, and go in to make a faux withdrawal from our account, just so I can be with her a minute or two in a place where nothing’s expected but quick smiles and polite eye contact during a curt transaction.
She appreciates that. If we didn’t have a past, it would be like flirting and falling in love again. Beautiful is the only word that works, describing her in those encounters, but it’s woefully inadequate. Even if you’re an atheist, you can’t help recognizing your goddess when you meet her on the street. To some Malinda might look too plump; there might be a frightened look in her eyes that would incite indecent, misogynistic urges; she might seem to carry herself in a way that’s officious, even angry, determined to put you off… people who see her that way don’t know Malinda… they don’t know anything about her at all.
CraigSpenceWriter.ca