The King's Chessboard
A short story about one or more little dogs
Alice had been gone six months, but Abe and Lemmy still slept on the couch, the little dog usually curled up in the space behind Abe’s knees.
One morning Abe awoke, and lay still for a long time. He vaguely felt that he might be late for work or for class, before remembering he didn’t have any such responsibilities. He sighed and groped for his glasses, somewhere on the floor. His reaching hands found glass instead of glasses, and he spilled an abandoned tumbler of bourbon, not for the first time, all over the blue rug Alice had chosen for the living room. He swore, found his glasses, and staggered to the kitchen for a paper towel. None were available, so he stumbled into the bedroom, grabbed a dirty T-shirt, and set to work cleaning up the mess.
When he finished, he tossed the shirt in the direction of the bedroom and turned back to the sofa, where he found himself confronted by not one but two pairs of blank, dark eyes. He blinked. They remained.
Lemmy sat at the foot of the chaise lounge attached to the sofa, staring at him with quiet reproach. But Lemmy also sat on Abe’s pillow, where his head had rested only moments before. Both dogs watched him, unblinking. Abe stood in his living room for several minutes, then realized it was 4:00 in the morning and he was probably still drunk, if not dreaming. He crawled back under the quilt on the sofa, moving one of the Lemmys as he did, and went back to sleep.
When he awoke, his head pounding with his daily hangover, Lemmy was by his feet, noisily cleaning his paws, but Lemmy was also curled up, still asleep, on the recliner across the room. Abe stumbled away from the dogs and into the kitchen. He washed his face. He came back into the living room, and there were still two Lemmys, now both awake and staring at him.
As Abe stared at the two Lemmys, he could not find any way to tell them apart. Both appeared to be small, mutty terriers with oddly long legs and black hair that curled unpredictably. Both had dark, concerned eyes that betrayed the same amount of devotion, but very little intelligence.
The Lemmys wore identical blue harnesses. Both wore tags that read “Lemmy,” and had Abe and Alice’s phone numbers on them, and offered rewards if found. Gray fur was starting to creep around the muzzles of both Lemmys in exactly the same places. In short, they both appeared to be Lemmy, utterly familiar and unremarkable, except that there were two of them.
Abe wondered whether he should panic. He called Alice, realized he had no idea what to tell her, and hung up without leaving a message. (She had long since stopped answering the phone when he called). He sat down on the couch and stared into the blackness of the TV screen, his ears ringing and his head pounding. He stared, contemplating the vague, dim blur of his reflection in the screen. He felt as though he should panic. He tried to panic. He tried to spool up the adrenaline he felt should be racing through his veins, tried to force his mind to reckon with the impossible information he saw, quietly staring at him from either end of the sofa. Some demon has impersonated Lemmy; some transporter accident has cloned his terrier; he is going insane; he is being incepted.
But his heart refused to pound. His breathing remained steady. He felt faintly nauseous, but knew that had more to do with the bourbon than the dogs. He found himself absentmindedly petting the nearer Lemmy, who did not cast off some disguise and devour him. The other Lemmy looked on, awaiting a morning walk, apparently undisturbed by the existential crisis.
So Abe walked each Lemmy around the block, one right after the other. Each time, the Lemmy on the leash inspected the neighborhood, trotting along happily as though nothing was out of the ordinary. Each time, Abe expected to come home to an empty house, and each time, the other Lemmy was sitting in the living room, gazing at him expectantly as the other impossible dog strained at the leash to get back to the water bowl.
When both Lemmys were walked, and both were ensconced on Lemmy’s favorite blankets on the recliner and the sofa, Abe took a shower for the first time in several days, as though he could wash off whatever was happening along with the grease. But when he returned, the dogs persisted.
The Internet failed him. He googled words like “cloning,” “parthenogenesis,” “asexual reproduction,” “spontaneous generation,” and “where did this dog come from,” but found nothing that could explain the sudden appearance of another Lemmy. Nothing in the news suggested an epidemic of extra dogs around the nation. This appeared to be a localized phenomenon, entirely his own problem. His hangover had begun to subside, so he poured bourbon and watched the dogs for the rest of the day.
The Lemmys mostly ignored each other, with none of the spats or politics Abe had seen amongst other cohabitating terriers. They took turns eating out of the one dish, and continued to do so even after Abe put out a second dish. When Abe scratched one Lemmy’s ears, the other didn’t seem to notice or get jealous the way Lemmy usually did when another dog was receiving attention in his vicinity. They never ran into each other or stepped on each other, but they otherwise never acknowledged each others’ existence.
They barked at the same things, in exactly the same rhythm: when his phone rang with yet another scam robocall; when his upstairs neighbor thumped a suitcase down the stairs on her way out of her apartment for the last time. On their afternoon walk, they sniffed the same blades of grass and marked the same trees. He walked them stealthily -- running each quickly around the block, hoping not to be noticed. Usually he enjoyed the people who stopped to compliment his little dog, but now he didn’t want to answer questions about them. The Lemmys, for their part, seemed happy with the faster pace and the extra exercise.
At first, Abe wrote a few notes in a notebook, trying to collect data, notice patterns, and clarify any distinguishing marks. But after a few hours of writing down only the anodyne habits of two identical and lazy terriers, he began to feel ridiculous. He drank more bourbon. The dogs watched him drink. By his fourth bourbon, he was bored with watching the dogs sleep and clean their paws, and so turned on the TV, sinking back into the welcome haze of familiar sitcoms and alcohol, and eventually fell asleep on the couch, one Lemmy behind his knees, the other by his chest. He still had an extra dog when he awoke in the morning.
He decided to take the Lemmys to the veterinarian. He wasn’t really sure what the vet would tell him, but maybe a medical professional could explain which one was actually his dog, and which one was the impostor. As the phone rang, he realized he didn’t know what to tell the vet about why he had two identical dogs. So instead, he told the receptionist that Lemmy had been feeling strange, and could he bring Lemmy in for a quick checkup? Then he made another appointment for later that afternoon with a separate office, and brought a different Lemmy to each vet.
Each Lemmy shivered once he realized where he was going. Each Lemmy looked imploringly at him as the vet checked his reflexes and looked in his ears. Each Lemmy widened his eyes when his temperature was taken, and stared at him reproachfully for the rest of the visit.
Both vets agreed: Lemmy was in good shape for a dog his age. Lemmy was a smidge overweight, but nothing to worry about yet. Lemmy could use a tooth cleaning, and each vet scolded Abe for not brushing Lemmy’s teeth more often. (Abe did not know how to tell the vets that it was hard to brush Lemmy’s teeth by himself -- that it had always taken both him and Alice to hold the squirmy little dog still long enough to brush his teeth.) Neither vet found anything about Lemmy surprising in the least -- neither Lemmy seemed to be an alien or a demon or a golem or anything other than a small, nervous, black dog.
One of the Lemmys weighed in at 10.21 pounds, and the other at 10.22 pounds. For a few hours after Abe got home from the vet, he turned that over in his mind, trying to decide what it meant. Was the real Lemmy likely to be heavier than the new Lemmy, or lighter? How much had Lemmy weighed before? Or was it more likely that there was some tiny variation in the scales between the two vets’ offices, and the two dogs actually weighed exactly the same amount?
After their evening walk, Abe decided to ponder these questions with the assistance of a generous amount of bourbon.
When he awoke the next morning, his mouth dry and parched, sweating in the heat of the Georgia summer, he stretched, and saw Lemmy on the couch, Lemmy on the floor, Lemmy on the recliner, Lemmy wandering in from the kitchen.
--
Board game night this week was supposed to be at Abe’s apartment, and when the messages went around that morning about what to bring, he felt his first surge of panic. He messaged everyone and told them that he wasn’t feeling well, that he would have to cancel the board game night, or that they would have to have it somewhere else. His friends wished him well, apologized to him, asked him if he was okay, asked him what they could do. Abe reassured them that everything was fine, nothing to worry about, everything normal, just woke up sick. A flu or something, maybe food poisoning, just not up to hosting in this condition.
Mark, alone of his friends, called him on his lunch break. Abe answered, his hand shaking as he picked up the phone. He considered telling Mark everything. Mark would want to help. Mark would somehow already have read a book about this problem, whatever it was, and would have a plan. But when Mark asked how he was really feeling, Abe could not bring himself to say that he wasn’t sick, he just had too many dogs to host a board game night. Instead he gave Mark polite monosyllables until the conversation was over. He trusted that Mark would attribute Abe’s mood to yet more lingering resentment about Alice.
The phone conversation over, Abe ran into the bathroom and threw up ramen and bourbon. He forced himself to have more of both until the feeling passed. Each of the four Lemmys gazed at him with concern, and all of them snuggled up against him on the couch where he sat, shaking and analyzing and re-analyzing his conversation with Mark.
Days passed in stifled hesitation, whole days as one long, held breath. He left the house only to procure more bourbon and walk the dogs, one at a time around the block, three times a day each. He watched sitcoms. He played videogames. He ordered pizza. He waited.
Eventually, he awoke to eight dogs. He tried to think through the haze to mark how many days had passed. He felt he should be able to calculate the rate of acceleration, but his brain refused to process the math involved in the face of the absurdity of the problem. What was sure was this: he did not have enough dog food for eight little dogs, let alone however many more he might need to feed.
So he drove himself to the supermarket, where he felt immediately conspicuous. He hadn’t showered, probably stank of dog. Thankfully, mutty terriers do not shed (much), so he didn’t have layers of dog hair on his clothes. But they were wrinkled, and as he walked past a young mother with two small children, he noticed the ketchup stain on the belly of his shirt. Did he imagine the look of disgust on her face? Was it directed at him or at some other thing? Had the stocker blanched when he ambled past? Fuck them anyway, he told himself, trying to work up a sort of punk-rock delight in offending the normal, but that attitude didn’t really fit him, and he knew it. He arrived at the dog food aisle, but realized he’d failed to get a cart. So he turned to get one and walked back through the gauntlet of disapproving stares and slight movements away from him.
He filled the cart with three leashes and bag after bag of dog food, the biggest bags he could find that still contained smallish pieces. The cart strained beneath the weight as he maneuvered it in the direction of the checkout counter. He was wondering what he should say to the woman behind the counter when he saw Mark -- his friend Mark who knew he only had one little dog. Mark was walking towards him and waving and smiling. Mark’s girlfriend (Anit? Or just Anna?) was smiling, too, but it was the sort of smile that was looking for the exits.
“Hey,” Mark said, cheerful as always. Mark, always ready to have his picture taken, always smiling, always here to help. He narrowed his eyes as he saw Abe’s enormous heap of dog food and generally disheveled demeanor. “What’s, uh, what’s up?”
Abe mumbled something, his heart beating like he was being chased by a pride of lions.
“Sorry?” Mark said, and when Abe said nothing, he shot a quickly puzzled look at his girlfriend, who maintained her perfectly noncommittal smile, carefully neutral. Abe wondered about the look in her eye. Was it disgust? Pity?
He did not respond. Instead, he smiled at Mark and Anit (he was pretty sure it was Anit) and wandered off towards the checkout counter, as though their business was concluded. Mark started to say something, but apparently thought better of it. He did not talk to Abe in the supermarket again, but as Abe drove away, his sedan now full of processed meat and grain in plastic bags, he saw Mark watching him, holding his groceries as Abe drove by.
At the door of his apartment, Abe struggled to close the door beneath the weight of the dog food bags and in the face of many barking Lemmys surging toward him, happily yapping in his direction and jumping up against his legs. He pushed through the tide of them to reach his kitchen, where he poured more and more dog food into the various bowls and plates he filled with food all around the house. The Lemmys ate out of one bowl at a time, patiently waiting their turns before rushing in and devouring as much food as they could stand. Abe poured more bourbon, thinking only of the look on Mark’s face as he drove away.
From outside, he heard the shriek of brakes and a thump, and as he ran, he realized he had failed to close the door behind him. A jeep was stopped in front of his apartment, and Abe made eye contact with the startled teenage boy who sat in the driver’s seat. After a moment’s pause, the teenager turned and roared away, leaving behind a small black bundle on the ground -- the ruined remains of Lemmy.
Abe rushed into the street, but there was nothing to be done. It had been mercifully quick, but Lemmy was gone, Lemmy was gone, Lemmy was gone. Lemmy was a pile of broken bones and blood, and was not a little dog any more. All at once Abe was sobbing, great heaving sobs from somewhere deep in his stomach, clutching what had once been his dog to his chest. Another car stopped and honked at him, for he was kneeling in the middle of the street, but Abe pounded on the hood and screamed incoherent obscenities until it backed away and drove around him.
Alone in the street once more, he gathered what was left of Lemmy into his arms, and carried the little dog, bleeding and broken, into his apartment, past all the other Lemmys. That night, he buried Lemmy in the backyard, and the other Lemmys ignored both him and their fallen brother. Instead, they sniffed the dirt from the hole Abe had dug, marked the weeds in the backyard, and stretched out on the little back porch, panting against the heat.
He called Alice to tell her that Lemmy was gone, but she did not answer the phone this time, either, and as he watched Lemmy on the recliner, and petted Lemmy on the sofa, and heard Lemmy sniffing around the water dish, he couldn’t think of what to say, and hung up once again without leaving a message.
Mark, however, called once a day for the next week, as Abe went from seven dogs to fourteen. Every time the phone rang, the Lemmys barked, as though the phone ringing was insufficient notice. Abe ignored each of these calls and deleted the voicemails without listening to them.
Abe lost track of the days, and lost track of the dogs. He walked the dogs in shifts -- four at a time, two leashes in each hand. They tangled around his legs, such that he spent most of the walk twirling around and passing leashes from hand to hand, like a bizarre, twirling dance. He did his best to keep them all on schedule, but more and more he was finding puddles or feces in the corners of his apartment.
There were getting to be too many Lemmys for the apartment, and keeping them walked and fed had become Abe’s only occupation. Abe walked the dogs, drank, cleaned up after the dogs, drank, fed the dogs, drank, and slept. He left the house only to purchase dog food, ramen, frozen pizzas, and liquor. His credit cards whined under the extra pressure. His friends began to call him more regularly as he missed weekly board game nights and somebody’s long-planned birthday party, all without explanation, but he ignored them.
He stopped thinking of them as individual dogs. He no longer called them “Lemmys,” plural, but rather just “Lemmy,” singular, as though they were distributed pieces of a larger whole, one small dog in many bodies, surging around him like water, sharing their food without any hint of a squabble, piling on him like a breathing blanket when he went to sleep, barking all in exactly the same rhythm when the mailman dropped off Abe’s unpaid bills.
Abe dimly remembered a story he had read as a child about grains of rice on a king’s chessboard, but every time he started to formulate a plan, he couldn’t get any further than telling someone about the problem. What was he supposed to say? Who was he supposed to talk to? All he could imagine when he thought of telling Animal Control about his Lemmy infestation was the crumpled remains of the Lemmy lying in the middle of the street. He couldn’t guess what some authority would do beyond euthanizing some or all of the Lemmys, in hopes of preventing the growth of yet more, and Abe could not bear that thought -- could not stand the image of rows upon rows of dead black dogs mouldering in some morgue, or being picked apart in some sterile lab for whatever secrets might be coded into their DNA.
But still: there were too many dogs for his apartment. So he ducked upstairs one day and broke down the door to the upstairs apartment, knowing that his neighbor had moved out and trusting that his mostly absentee landlord would not notice for a time while Abe figured out what to do. Lemmy immediately made their way upstairs, lounging around the empty apartment, rolling in the dust, and hopping onto the abandoned couch his neighbor had left behind.
Some days later, Mark knocked on Abe’s door. Abe knew it was Mark, even before he peeked out the upstairs window. Who else of his friends would take it upon themselves to show up unannounced? Who else would take time from his neatly exceptional life to come help Abe, whether Abe wanted it or not? Abe watched Mark knock again. He considered pretending not to be home. But that seemed so unlikely -- where else would he be? So he came downstairs and shouted at the door. “Go away, Mark,” he said. “I’m not feeling well.”
Mark knocked again, louder.
So Abe cracked the door open and shook his head. Mark blanched at what he saw. Abe shook his head again and tried to close the door. But Mark, ever-confident, never great at boundaries, pushed through the door, easily shoving the smaller man backwards. He shut the door behind him and prepared to lecture Abe. He had even gathered his right hand into a pointed finger, and was ready to jab it incisively in Abe’s direction for gesticulative punctuation.
Instead, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he did not understand what he saw. Lemmy on the stairs, Lemmy peeking out from Abe’s apartment and the upstairs apartment, Lemmy in the short hallway between the door and the stairs. Dog urine and dog feces assailed them from every angle --filled nose and mouth such that Mark immediately started coughing. He looked at Abe with disgust and confusion and wonder in his eyes, and in that moment, Abe realized that he hated Mark.
So Abe struck Mark in the face. It was a weak hit -- Abe was not a big man, and hadn’t punched anyone since he was a child. Abe bruised his knuckles far more than he hurt Mark’s face. Mark didn’t hit back, and didn’t throw up his arms in defense. He sputtered a simple “what?” and Abe felt even more humiliated than he had before. Even his anger was pitiable. So Abe hit Mark again, and when Mark pushed him aside, almost gently, the air suddenly filled with the sound of many small, growling voices.
Lemmy surged forward from stairs and doorways and leapt at Mark, leaping from stairs to bounce off of his chest, snapping at his ankles with small, sharp teeth.
Mark was too taken aback to mount any kind of organized defense to the horde of little dogs, and yelped in pain and surprise as they nipped at his ankles. Lemmys fastened onto Mark’s shoelaces and the hem of his jeans, tearing at the fabric. Mark was going to fall. Mark was going to be covered in Lemmy, drowned in an ocean of Lemmy, torn apart by their myriad teeth. And Abe could do nothing.
But Mark fell against the wall and stumbled out the door, kicking a few Lemmys away, who yelped and let go to retreat and sulk back in the apartment. More Lemmys replaced them, rushing forward to pursue and bark at Mark as he staggered towards his car. Mark fought his way through the crush, opened the door and sequestered himself inside the car, away from the writhing black carpet of dogs. The dogs surrounded him and barked, many barks in unison, a neatly punctuated rhythm. Abe wondered at the vastness of Lemmy -- Lemmy was many more than he had thought, and Lemmy’s numbers seemed to swell even as Abe watched.
Abe could see Mark through the windshield of the car. His hand was on his chest. His eyes were wide. His shirt was torn where some of the more enterprising Lemmys had leapt up at him. Mark looked up and stared at Abe for a long moment, fear and confusion writ plain upon his face. Then Abe called for Lemmy, and the dogs ran back into the apartment, uncharacteristically obedient, and Mark started his car and sped away.
Abe shut the door and calmly walked into the bathroom, where he threw up in the sink. He sat on the couch when he was finished, absentmindedly petting two of the closest dogs.
Lemmy loved him, he realized. Lemmy cared about him, wanted him to be happy, wanted to protect him. When he had ceased to weep, he wandered into the filthy kitchen, hunting for bourbon. But he was out of bourbon.
So he put on his shoes, opened the door to his apartment, whistled for his dog, and surged out into the night, buffeted and supported by Lemmy. They could go anywhere.