“You’re perfect,” Dorr says to Mike and leans forward in his chair, the smoke rising between them. “You should be photographing yourself.” Dorr frames Mike in a rectangle between his hands. “Shrewd Elliot. Clever, clever editor. You are your own story. That’s what he’s after.”

Mike is about to say he’s not a photographer when he hears the dog whimper again and looks to see it squatting as if about to defecate in the corner. In the next instant Mike knows she is giving birth.

A newborn pup slides from the mother and drops onto the dusty linoleum with a wet sound. She chews the umbilical cord, leaving a green and red shred hanging from the pup, but she doesn’t chew the pup out of the sac. It must be her first litter. The pup begins to suffocate. The mother faces the corner again, hind legs spread, shaking and lowing, pushing out the next pup. Mike looks up to see Dorr watching the first pup dying on the linoleum. He moves his eyes to Mike. This is too much, Mike thinks, Dorr is fucking with me. Mike is stiff with nerves as the smell of birth rises from the corner.

Dorr keeps staring at him and begins to groan and speak, sounding sick or falling asleep or both . . . I’ve seen birth, you know, my own sister, she died in childbirth. Because she got knocked up by a friend of mine from college who was too weak to take care of her. Sick, isn’t it? Watching your sister die in a fancy New Orleans hospital room because nobody wanted to be there and nobody wanted that kid, they couldn’t stop her hemorrhaging . . .

Mike is frozen. He knows he won’t tell Dorr who his father is. It must be him. Carrie drops another black pup onto the ground by the first ones. It can’t be my father, Mike thinks, he wouldn’t have taken off. Or I would have two brothers.

Dorr’s cigarette is burned to the filter. He drops it into the ashtray. . . . Of course the kid survived. I gave him up for adoption. And you know what? I’ve seen harsher births, and I know that it’s pointless to intervene. I walked into the jungle. There are still native people, injuns, simple savage farmers. Maybe working for the Burmese, maybe not. People of superstition, people of the jungle.