What Was Once Wild by Kasia Merrill
2022 Honourable Mention
When the last dog died, they held the memorial service on national television. An off-white poodle with dainty shaved legs and paws that exploded in thick tufts of fur that bounced as they carried her stretcher down the velvet carpet. Plastic bones and tennis balls were arranged on the altar, framing the thin-haired priest as he mumbled through a pun-filled speech, his words interrupted when someone in the audience squeezed a squeaky toy.
We’d known it was coming. The last few weeks of Coco’s life had been televised, news casters flocking around her as she nibbled at her food, stretched on the floorboards, shit in a diaper. They rolled rubber balls to her and zoomed in on her face for the reaction. Her long eyelashes dipped like syrup.
Over Coco’s coffin, her former owners, two long-faced women dressed identically in black turtlenecks, held hands and sang an Irish ballad. I was patting my eyes with a tissue when the phone rang.
“Are you watching?” my ex-husband, Eli, asked.
“It’s awful.”
“Terrible,” he said.
“Everyone knew she was going to die, but…”
“It feels too soon.”
“Right.
Eli exhaled longingly. “Listen,” he said. “Let’s not tell Abby.”
Our daughter hadn’t crossed my mind during the service. She’d never seen a real dog in her life. By the time she was born, dogs were a rarity, an exotic pet people paid obscene amounts of money to possess. She would not know the language of this tragedy.
“We can’t lie to her,” I said.
“She talks about seeing a dog one day. This would crush her.”
“She’s stronger than you think.”
Eli sighed. “Don’t make this about us,” Eli said.
On the television screen, a recorded Coco was prancing in a circle, tail pointed upward. Eli and I adopted a puppy once, before Abby was born. It was a small sickly runt. It died after just a week, its bald body warm in my palms for an unexpectedly long time. My hands were still covered in the dirt we buried it in when I cut my hair with a butcher knife, and peed on the plastic pregnancy stick.
“She should know,” I said. “She should know what we lost.”
“She didn’t lose it,” Eli responded. “It was us.”
*
After the memorial service, suicide rates reached an all-time high. People had clung to the hope that with one dog left, we could recover the species. It wasn’t just about the dogs. It was about all the animals we’d lost over the years – the last polar bear that drowned when I was pregnant. The last elephant poached for its tusks. For many, losing man’s best friend was the final straw.
It was my job to talk these people down. I worked as a teletherapist for a suicide hotline. Not that I could take much credit for what I did. All I had to do was read the script presented to me, each prompt a response to the depressed individual on the line. When they first developed the system, they didn’t use humans – just linked the patients to a robot programmed to console and relieve. It was unsuccessful. People could tell that the voice was artificial, which left them feeling alienated. So, they rehired us, asked us to read from the screen.
After Coco’s memorial, a man in Portland called. He was holding a gun to his head, distraught over the dead dogs. “It was our job to protect them,” he sobbed. “We could have avoided all of this if we had just cared more.” The safety lock unclicked. Words shot through the screen before me. Usually, the script said something like You have a purpose. You are loved. This time, it said: Do you know that a dog was recently spotted in the abandoned San Francisco Zoo?
“You’re lying,” the man said.
I’m sending you a photograph; the screen prompted me to say. A second later, I heard a chime, swipe, gasp.
“There’s really a dog out there?”
It’s possible.
Later, in the chilled whir of the air conditioning, I combed through the internet. Googled Can the AI teletherapists lie? Googled Dog SF Zoo. A Reddit conversation appeared, peppered with claims of a great government conspiracy. The government is eradicating living animals for their own benefit was the most believable. Dogs never actually existed was the least. It was probably just a lie, I thought, but I’d never seen the machines lie before. Did they have that ability? Didn’t it take free will to make a lie?
*
When I knocked on my ex-husband’s door, I was surprised to hear a bark in response. Without waiting for an answer, I stepped inside. In the foyer sat a black Labrador retriever. It panted happily as it stared at me, its eyes a deep lifeless black. I wrapped my hand across my mouth, feeling nauseous.
Eli and Abby came downstairs hand-in-hand. Abby launched herself at the dog and, to my horror, rubbed her face against its thick head. “Mama, look!” she shouted. “Daddy got me a dog!”
“Where’s my hug?” I asked.
Abby stared at me blankly. When she was a baby, I worried that we didn’t connect enough. Was I feeling what I was supposed to? At the grocery store, I would see strange women coo at her, watch her smile in return. Would she notice if they took her home? Was I a replaceable mother?
“That’s not a dog,” I said.
“It’s a dog,” Eli said.
“All the dogs are dead,” I hissed.
“What?” Abby asked, glancing between us.
“It’s a real dog, honey,” Eli reassured our daughter. He hooked his hand into my arm and pulled me into the living room. “What are you doing?” he whispered.
“What is that?” I pointed into the foyer.
“Aik. An AIK9. Brand new technology. Most people don’t even know about it yet. I got it for her as a gift.”
“She thinks it’s a real dog?”
“So, what if she does? It makes her happy.”
“But, it’s not real. It’s…” Abby dashed into the room, Aik at her heels. She giggled in delight as it licked her fingers. She couldn’t tell that it was imitating play, imitating joy. She shouted “Jump!” and Aik jumped, knocking her back into the cabinet behind her.
Eli and I rushed over, coddling her in a sea of anxiety that we weren’t good parents.
“Mommy, can Aik come with us?” Abby asked.
“I don’t think Daddy would want us to take his…Aik.”
Eli wiped his glasses with his t-shirt. “I don’t mind,” he said. “It might be good for you and Aik to get to know each other.”
*
In the car, Abby told me all about Aik. Aik understood 100 languages. Aik didn’t need food or water. Aik was trained to protect us.
“Programmed, not trained,” I corrected her.
“He doesn’t poop in the house,” Abby said.
“That’s because he isn’t a real dog,” I told her. “Aik is pretend.”
“Maybe you’re not a real Mommy,” Abby said. “Maybe you’re pretend.”
My throat felt hot and dry. I turned to look at her. “That wasn’t a nice thing to say.”
Abby took off her seatbelt and knelt on the floor, placing her head on Aik’s unbreathing body, stroking his fur. It was his stillness that bothered me, his docility, the lack of will. My fingers tightened against the steering wheel; my foot pressed the gas pedal. Twenty minutes later, we were standing outside of the abandoned zoo, our masks strapped to our faces.
“What are we doing here?” Abby asked.
Maybe the robot was lying. Maybe there was no wild dog running loose in the zoo. I at least had to try to show Abby so she’d understand the difference between what was alive and what was just good at pretending.
Aik stayed in the car, watching unexcitedly through the window as we squeezed through two bent metal bars in the zoo’s surrounding gate. Inside, the zoo was empty. The hiss of our breaths through the tubed masks filled the air. I could feel Abby’s heartbeat through my fingers.
Abby peeled a faded purple heart sticker off her mask. When she was younger, she used to cry when we strapped the mask over her face, no matter how many times we explained that the air quality was poor, that she could get sick. We even showed her photographs of the blackened lungs of people who went maskless. She wasn’t persuaded. Sometimes I wondered if her whole generation was desensitized to death.
“Mama, I hear something.”
The stickers made the mask hers. Finally, one day, she put it on without a fight. It was a relief to lead her outside, tantrum-free. It also bothered me that her will was breakable. Who else would be able to break it in her lifetime? What other strong opinions and needs would she relinquish?
“Mama –”
I glanced up from the cage just in time to see a flash of black – a sharp pain in the back of my head, then nothing. The last I heard was Abby’s scream.
*
I woke up to the smell of burnt hair, Abby’s hands pulling at my shirt. “Our masks, our masks,” she was saying through a wet sob. “Mama, our masks.”
It took me a moment to register the incorrect scene – the polluted air, the dry Earth beneath us, our naked noses. I sat up slowly, blinking away the static in my vision. The back of my head pulsed in response, nausea gathering like a wave through my insides.
“Pull your shirt up.” I dipped my chin and nose into my collar. “Like this.”
Abby followed my instructions, her small nose and quivering lip disappearing inside her pink t-shirt. I turned to look for our masks, taking in the bars that surrounded us. We were inside a cage, once used for a smaller animal. Outside the bars stood three teenagers, no more than sixteen years old, maskless and smug.
In the front stood a girl with long blue hair twisted into a top-bun, eyes blackened with paint. In her left hand hung Abby’s mask.
The girl tossed Abby’s mask to an anxious, acne-flecked boy behind her. Another young girl, thin and tall with a shaved head, rattled a stick against the bars of the cage. Abby squeezed my leg, shut her eyes.
“Your generation created this air. Why don’t you try breathing it?”
I’d had conversations like this before – understandably bitter teenagers calling the teletherapy hotline at the behest of their parents. The kids always asked the same thing: How was it fair to be born into this world against their will and be raised as the generation to solve it? Why had we let things get this bad?
The three of them turned to leave. Abby stared at me, waiting for me to rescue us. Before I had her, I had a weak will to live, too, just like these teens, just like my patients. Her growth inside me grew a need to survive. Someone had to protect her.
Squeezing Abby’s hand, I approached the edge of the cage. It was getting dark, and I could feel the stir of a dust storm. Scientists said ten minutes unprotected in a dust storm could leave your lungs cancer-riddled within a year.
“Hey,” I called, my voice muffled in my t-shirt. The teenagers kept walking. I freed my mouth. “Hey!” I yelled. “Have you seen the dog?” Curiosity pulled three faces to look at me. I placed my hand on top of Abby’s head. “I heard there’s a dog living in this zoo.”
“Nobody’s seen a dog ‘round here,” the blue-bunned girl said, but from her tone, I sensed apprehension.
“I can help you find it. That’s the reason we came here.”
“Yeah, right,” the girl with the stick said, swinging it in the air. “She’s lying.”
“Mama,” Abby cried, burying her face in my leg. Eli would kill me if he knew I’d brought our miracle here, to an abandoned zoo, to look for a rumor of a dog.
“Check my phone!” I shouted. “I took a picture.”
The blue-bunned girl glanced at her friends, then pulled my phone from her pocket. She approached the cage to scan my face so the phone would unlock.
“Look at the date,” I said. “I took that picture today.”
Up close, the girl reminded me of Eli, a lack of hope resting like a cataract in her gaze. At the sight of the photo, it retracted like water sucked through a straw. She licked her lip, shifted her weight, then waved for the others to come over.
The boy gasped at the photograph, the girl with the shaved head smiled.
“Have you ever seen a dog before?” I asked. They glanced at me, their expressions betraying the youth beyond their angry facades. “I’ll help you find it.”
*
“My parents had a dog when I was born,” the boy told me. He cleared his throat, spit a blood-tinted spot into the dirt. How long until he died? “I can’t remember it.”
Abby’s palm sweat inside mine. Beside her, the girl with the shaved head swung her stick. When we’d first set out to find the dog, I’d tried to carry Abby, but she was too heavy. When she whimpered beside me, the boy handed her the mask.
“It took me a while to get used to the air,” he said.
“Here, doggy,” I shouted, shakily. I wet my lips and whistled. My mask was nowhere in sight – possibly in one of their backpacks or thrown into the trash.
I wasn’t planning to find the dog, but I figured I could distract the teens long enough for Abby and me to run. The only advantage I had was that these teenagers had only seen dogs in videos on the internet. They’d never pet one or played with one. They didn’t know how to call one or how to tell if one was near. To them, dogs were as exotic as tigers once were.
When I heard a rustle near the locked bathrooms, I gasped. “That’s it,” I said, feigning certainty.
The two girls began running toward the sound.
“Here, boy!” the boy shouted, copying my tone. He whistled.
When I saw it coming from the underbrush, snout first, I felt just like I did the first time I saw Abby’s heartbeat appear as a blip on the screen – amazed, breathless. But, as it crawled out, paw by paw, my hand tightened around Abby’s. It wasn’t a dog at all, but a starved wolf. I glanced down at my daughter, and by her riveted gaze, I knew she saw it – that spark that Aik could never have.
“That’s not a dog,” the boy said, his voice quivering. The blue-haired girl narrowed her eyes, squatted. “Here, boy,” she said.
When the wolf launched, I jerked on Abby’s arm and bolted across the plaza, past the abandoned gift shop. Behind us, a scream was followed by a vicious growl, then the echoing slap of sneakers against the pavement. When I turned, I saw the boy running behind us. The wolf was on-top of the girl, its snout tearing into her mess of hair, while the tall girl stood over the creature, hitting it with her stick. While I felt pulled to run back and save them, I felt an equal swell of emotion to save the wolf, maybe the last wild creature we’d ever see. The boy shot into an abandoned building. I picked Abby up, my legs aching with the strain as I pushed forward.
We were almost to the car when I heard the wolf bounding behind us, its toenails hitting the pavement as it sprinted. I’d just gotten the car door open when its great paws slapped my back, slamming me forward as I shoved Abby inside to safety. The sharp teeth dug into my shoulder, and just as I relinquished myself to being consumed by the wild, Aik was through the door, answering to its protective programming. The wolf howled as Aik gripped its neck, pulled until it made an audible snap. The wolf fell to the concrete, body limp and lifeless.
Just before it closed its eyes, the wolf looked at me. Its eyes were damp and unafraid, much the way I imagined my own were on the days I numbly muttered responses from the prompter, following a program designed to save a life. Behind me, Abby gratefully hugged Aik while I pressed my fingers into the wolf’s matted fur, memorizing the soft grit against its skin.