My neighbor’s dogs were a constant trouble to him. I would see him driving his small car with all three of them inside—one in front and two in back—their noses out the windows, their hair streaming into the man’s face as he hunched over the wheel. He could walk them only very early or very late when no one else was out—it seemed all he could do just to hang on while they dragged him down the street.

Unlike other men I’ve seen with a mean dog, my neighbor did not seem proud of them or proud of himself for raising them. Our houses almost touched. We kept our windows open all year. When he spoke to them it seemed he was speaking to me—his voice traveling clearly and firmly into my rooms, in a tone one might use with an employee or teenager.

I am not a dog, he said. You are a dog.

Some nights a man would come to see me. I would open one of my doors but not the other and look at him through the screen before I unlocked it. The light above his head stuttered with moths and cast odd shadows. It was hard to tell where his bones ended. He never looked the same. I sometimes wondered whether I wasn’t visited by a different, albeit similar man each night—and if that was the case, whether or not I minded.

There was a place where people gathered. That was where I met the man. I walked in one night after walking up and down the streets that led from where I lived. I’d walked to my car to get something from it. Then, after getting the thing, instead of returning to my house, I’d walked past it wishing I knew someone, some man, whose house I could walk to, upon whose door I could knock—a man I knew but not well, one I’d not seen in a while who would be surprised to find me on his step. But I did not know anyone, not even the man with the dogs next door, whose name I never learned, and whose face, when I try to think of it now, will not come to me.

As I walked away from my house, a cat—one without tail or ears—began to follow me. It was a cat I knew but had long since given up for dead. We passed uncurtained houses that released their odors like nocturnal flowers. We passed a tree hung with hollow bottles that moaned and made sounds of breaking when they touched. We passed a statue at the entrance to a church—a large wolf with pendulous teats, from which two naked baby boys suckled.

When we reached the place, the cat sat down at the entrance to wait. Inside, the lights were dim and there were pieces of wood nailed together for sitting on. People sat and stood in slumped and straight positions, and many clustered in the middle of the room. I pushed through them, though to what end I couldn’t have said. Then a hand pressed my back and a voice near my ear said, This is the way. I liked the voice and I liked the hand, so we walked out the back together.