While courting, my love and I used to drive to the top of a mountain whose name I have somehow forgotten. You could hike up it, at least partway, but we didn’t have time for that. At the top we lay in the sunshine on the flat rocks and looked down on the brown and yellow shapes of the fields, and the shine of the river that cut through them. Breezes blew over us. We moved, without moving closer to each other, closer to consummation.

There is a certain peaceful feeling that accompanies the attainment of great heights, even if they are reached by car, or elevator, or are not particularly great. The first two apartments we shared were graced by communal roof decks to which we clumsily transported drinks, and dinners, and once a poorly timed party, which then had to be moved, quickly, back down. On the first roof deck there were periods when the building’s air conditioning blew hard, and we had to stop talking and wait for it to be done.

On vacation we are perpetually climbing things, and we are not alone. A few weeks ago, in Mexico, we climbed to the very top of the house and could see, in one direction, a blue and gentle ocean, calmed by the white breakers about a mile out, and in the other, a white, female tourist, who liked to read in her bathing suit and shorts in the shade of a palapa. We climbed also the ancient palace of Ek’Balam, a Mayan city built three thousand years ago in the Yucatán jungle, and only recently excavated, and rebuilt. Originally, the city was paved entirely with a white stucco, and was probably, from the top of the palace, blinding. Now the ground between the buildings is covered with grass, and populated by hot, black dogs. Our guide was loyal to this place, and jealous of the special attention given to Chichen Itza, where the steps were narrower, he said, than the steps at Ek’Balam, and where the people had polluted the pure Mayan with the Aztec by introducing the practice of human sacrifice. Also, he said, the souvenir vendors at Chichen Itza were impossible.

We got there early, but as the day grew hotter, and the dogs sleepier, groups of people arrived to climb the palace steps after us. It is possible to define all this climbing as an hysterical response to the rigors of vacation, in which nothing must be done, except to create a new purpose for one’s existence out of this nothing. On the other hand, and this is what I believe, what is a better, higher use of this empty time than the attempt to attain the peaceful feeling, accompanied by breezes, that one only gets, for some reason, at the top of one thing or another?

dog Pronunciation: \dȯg, däg, (regional) dawg\ Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Old English docalakadoo Date: before 12th century. Definition: Mythical beast well-loved by everyone, useful, bringer of pipe, slippers, Freudian in concept, embodiment of the id that draws forth the superego; also can be seen as an abyss of neediness filled with shit, covered with hair. Adorable. Loves chewing on things. Four legs, tail.

What we know about the dog:
She is hairy
She wants love
She eats snow
She shits all the time, or three times a day, depending on your perspective
Nothing is ever enough for her
She will jump on you
She will follow you home
She will eat your dinner
She will lick your toes or your socks or anything salty, so watch out
If something drops on the floor and you don’t want to pick it up and it is edible, she has her uses
She can be killed by a chicken bone
She pisses on her own bed, then slinks off to avoid punishment
Some children are frightened of her
She submits
She is not a person
She doesn’t understand
She will never read a book, even a simple book
She is dumber than a chimpanzee
I don’t believe she is capable of the creative act
She is my responsibility
I can lock her in a cage
She likes her cage
She doesn’t hold grudges
She snores

What we don’t know about the dog:
What her purpose is
The meaning of her
Whether or not she is preposterous
Why she pissed on her bed the other day and what will stop her from doing this
How much we would spend on her medical care

What we sometimes imagine about the dog:
That she sits in judgment upon us

I am a dog I am a dog I am a dog I am a dog. I am an old dog, so old I died three weeks ago. They didn’t want me to die, they didn’t want me to go, so they took me to the veterinarian. The veterinarian couldn’t say, "Put him to sleep," or they couldn’t hear him, so they gave me steroids, and steroids are amazing things. They couldn’t bring me to life but I do walk around now, lifelike. Skeletal. My fur is soft.

This is from before my time—there is no reason I should know this—but when the hamster died they didn’t bring him back to life, they laid him in a box, they took the box outside, and they tried to dig a hole to bury him. The ground was frozen and they couldn't. Then they became distracted by something and they put him on a fence post and went inside. He sat in his box on a fence post until spring. I will die before spring, and they will burn me up. Salt sticks in my paws. I am gone, or almost gone.