The place is dark. The lightbulbs are just twenty-five watts behind dark lamp shades, and no sunlight makes it through those thick curtains. The Schwa stands there in the living room, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. There are two dogs fighting over a piece of knotted rope across the room. They don’t notice him. He does have a stealthy odor! Or the dogs are just too old to smell. He hears a TV on in another room somewhere far away in the huge apartment.

So where are the dog bowls?

He makes his way through the living room, across a formal dining room with a long table that hasn’t seen a dinner party in a millennium, and then he strikes gold. Fourteen dog bowls are lined up nice and neat against a kitchen wall. Products of Pisher Plastics.

All he has to do is take one of the bowls and get out the way he came. That’s all.

He bends down, grabs a bowl, and then he discovers something awful: All fourteen bowls are nailed to the ground.

And now he begins to think that maybe he’s like a dog whistle after all, because there’s an Afghan growling in his face . . .

Meanwhile, from outside, I saw all the dogs suddenly disappear from the windows. This was not a good sign. I heard all this barking, then a man yelling, although it was too muffled to hear what he yelled.

And Wendell Tiggor laughs. “So you lose,” he says. “Pay up.”

In the window I now saw the Schwa pressed up against the glass, hiding behind the curtains. I knew he couldn’t last like that for long.

“Think the dogs’ll eat him?” says one of the other kids.

I didn’t have time for idiots. Instead I took off across the street, toward the building, nearly becoming roadkill because I didn’t look both ways like every kid’s mother told them from the beginning of time. Narrowly surviving the busy avenue, I made it around back to the fire escape. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t just leave the Schwa stranded like that. Leave no man behind—isn’t that what they say in battle?

I scrambled to the roof, leaped into the little patio, and burst through the open door.