"The Eyes and the Impossible" by Dave Eggers, Chapters 1–8

When I sleep I dream of mothers and clouds—clouds are messengers of God—and I dream of pupusas for I love pupusas and eat them with gusto.

It is long and narrow and it leads from the gray city all the way to a rough gray patch of angry ocean that meets a vast windy beach where people drown three or four times a year in the sinewy muscles of the savage sea.

So they were taken by humans and I assume they became kept dogs—pets—and I ran into the woods where I remained free and became the Eyes.

It’s just a cruel joke how much faster I am. It is embarrassing to cars and the humans that drive them and the humans that make them. I render them silly but I am not sorry.

“And of course the ducks are morons,” Samuel said. He was the most cynical, the most tired, the most funny.

The park has an Equilibrium, as all natural places do, and the Bison watch it and protect it. They are the Keepers of the Equilibrium. If the Equilibrium is upset there are problems. If the Parks People cut a new path across the width of the park, that means more people will come where the animals had been alone and undisturbed, and that might upset the balance.

I see something, I tell the Bison, they conjure a solution.

The Concerteers nearly ruin the park once a year with their noise and garbage and vomit and indiscriminate urination.

They act all casual with me, like the leash is no problem, like they would just as soon be free like me, like they could be free if they wanted, but that is a joke I laugh at with great fervor.

I laugh so much I cry and cry and cry enormous tears of limitless mirth.

They ran in place and jumped and sat and turned themselves in strange positions and did much cavorting and chanting and I grew weary and left.

Instead I look and revel in the silver and copper and then I move.

That happened that day, yes, but it was not the pivotal event I was talking about earlier.

I believe he is the grandest and strongest of all the gulls, but he is humble and has never accepted this designation—strongest, grandest.

Of all the mammals and birds I know, it’s Bertrand who is most inclined to say serious things while looking at the sea, and we allow it, we value this gravitas.

She’s been one of the Assistants, coming to meet us on our rock, for probably six hundred years, so we cannot understand this, the way she persists with this initial shyness. She is missing an eye, and the easy answer would be that this missing eye, lost in a fight with a crow, has caused her reticence.

Yolanda is a pelican, and a clumsy one, which is saying something, given all pelicans are clumsy, ungainly, unlikely in their shape and ludicrous in their flight.

“More people than usual. They were walking slowly around the oval in the middle of the plaza, and looking at rectangles full of nonsense.”
It sounded to everyone like a typically inane and inexplicable thing humans do, so we moved on.

We told stories about ducks—so many stories, all ridiculous and impossible to make funnier—and we worried together about the Bison, who were getting older and would never be free, and then we left the top of the rock and went on our respective ways.

On Sundays on a side street they set up an oval and in the oval someone sets a black box onto the pavement, and from it comes music, thumpy music with horns punching above the thumping, and then the skaters go around and around the oval and they make dance moves to the music and that is easy but they are on skates—skates!—which makes all of the dancing loose-limbed and strange and sublime.

It was the something Angus had mentioned, but it was more intriguing than he’d implied. Beguiling even. I ran like rain to the scene.

But this day I was wandering near the white-glass cathedral of flowers and then saw some new colors and shapes in the plaza, so I ventured forth but was also on high alert for the uniformed people and the helping people and all the hassles inherent in highly concentrated humanity.

I will be unhumble here and tell you that I am not a dumb dog. I pick up on things. I ascertain things. Sometimes I downright deduce things.

So in this case I inferred—another thing I do—that this was a kind of show where humans who create pictures put them up to have people walk slowly by them.

But the rectangles I found riveting. Some showed sailboats, and I had seen sailboats in the ocean, but the humans had put the sailboats inside these rectangles and that was a pretty good trick.

Some rectangles were of buildings, some were even of parks and trees, and all of them were good tricks and I felt proud of the humans for making these rectangles, given they are so incompetent at so many things, such as running at light speed as I do with such ease and flair.

No one could see me, because with my dappled coloring I tend to blend into the woods enough that no one takes notice of me unless they are looking for dogs generally or me specifically.

When your body tells you to go, it is imperative that you go.

There were deer in the park, but not too many. They were not good near the cars. In fact, they were strangely susceptible, oddly vulnerable, especially at night.

Every few months we found a deer in the road, struck dead, and it would baffle us all. Why did they get so close, when the lights and sounds and smells of the cars were so obvious?

I got him near the new museum. He was sitting there just looking at the art like some kind of connoisseur.

“That’s why we call him Twisty,” the yellow-haired man said, and giggled with an incongruous falsetto.

I know many of my kind enjoy being inside these moving metal boxes, but I did not enjoy it. Whatever appeal it might have held was diminished by my status as a captive.

“Where’d you get it?” Pamela asked, smiling with a rapturous kind of admiration.

He was obviously very proud of himself, so much so that his humility gave way.

“I always wanted a dog,” Twisty said wistfully.

I had been a dog, a free dog of limitless propulsive capacity and eyes without obstacle, and now I was a thing this man owned.

I live outdoors, yes, and partake in unwanted food, yes, and have run through mud and rain and ocean water, but I am clean.

I had noticed it right away, but it was more obvious to me when Pamela made this errant remark about me and my own odor.

“You coming or what?” Sonja asked me, so casually, so brightly, as if she were inviting me to look at a sunset on a Thursday.