The dog, on the other hand. Always trying to lick me. Always growing, eating more, its puppyish yips turning into adult, full-throated barks. Everything it did mocked what I had made here, and any attempt the dog made to cozy up to me I rejected with disgust. “I don’t like needy people!” I yelled at it once after she nearly tripped me in the kitchen, trying to catch a falling morsel from whatever I was making, and it whimpered as if I had hit it. Then it did that cutesy TV dog thing where it crouched down and put its paws over its eyes, making me hate her even more.

I’d read where dogs can sometimes resemble their master’s face, and I began to think I could see Ray’s face, his shaggy, solemn face, in this dog’s snout. And one day as I got off the bus the dog ran up to me with a partially smoked cigarette in its mouth, no lie. It wasn’t lit, nothing as fantastic as that, but I sprinted up the steps, anyway, before the dog could follow too closely, and shut the door before it could enter. It whimpered and whined on the balcony all night. Hungry, I guessed. “You’re an animal!” I had yelled through the door. “Go kill something!”

The next morning when I opened the door slowly, it was nowhere to be seen. But outside, on the doormat, was the half-smashed cigarette butt, soggy with doggy spit.

What could I do? I couldn’t shoot the dog—I didn’t have a gun, and felt that might be taking things too far. More and more, though, the bird and the dog made their collective presence known. Whenever I left the apartment for a few minutes, breathed fresh air, and then came back inside, I could smell the animals, a scent I detested. No matter how much I cleaned—and it felt like I cleaned a lot more than any 1977 young person living in Santa Monica ever did, let me tell you—I could not eradicate the smell. Something was underneath it, too, probably the bird shit, the musty stench of animal bodies and their relentless emissions of sweat and piss and shit and fear and pleasure and sex. Some of my smell was probably in there, too, though I always had trouble distinguishing my own offensive odors.

The bird I could keep, I figured, for my Roper years, if it lived that long. It wasn’t a parakeet but it was yellow and better than nothing. Whenever it wouldn’t stop its barrage of tweets, and the weather was decent, I put the cage outside on the balcony.

But the dog, the dog. It was not a puppy anymore. By the time I got to my Roper years, the dog would be useless.

What had Ray been thinking? As the second year passed and then the third, I decided that Ray, like everyone else I left behind, had probably despised me. Nothing else could explain the animals. What a fool I had been, to ever think he was a friend. Hadn’t I learned anything, first with Krystal, and then with. . . . everyone else I’d ever known? I was always learning things and forgetting how to apply the lesson.