I’d usually define my normal day as something like this: After work, I take my dog to the park and—maybe—get some reading in, hang out with friends, sleep, then back to work the next day and the cycle begins again. Toss in some Internet surfing if my connection hasn’t crapped out. After the 13th of July—around six pm— normal gave way to abnormal.

 

But, wait. I should start at the beginning, shouldn’t I? My name’s Kyle. I’m currently an office cog at a publishing house in New York. I’d consider myself a decent looking guy; everything’s where it should be and I can dress myself so I don’t look homeless. I don’t have a lot of friends, because I moved here a couple months ago after I graduated. I own a dog—an Augi, which is an Australian Shepherd/corgi mix. He’s tri-colored: His back is brown, stomach white, and his head has splashes of orange fur mixed in with the brown. I live in a modest apartment which is covered in books. (A friend came over once, looked around, shook her head in amazement, and said, “Everything is books.”) I’ve got a TV and a couch, but the only time I use both of them at the same time is when there’s a baseball game on.

 

After work on the 13th, I took the subway to my apartment, tried not to trip over my dog—named Doug after the one in Up—fetched his leash and Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries, and headed down to the park. The sun wouldn’t set until nine. We made it to the park around six-thirty. I walked him around for a while. The last normal thing in my life happened a bit after that, as I sat on a park bench. Doug jumped up next to me and looked around, panting. Neither of us liked the heat.

 

A hipster girl who reminded me of Zooey Deschanel sat across the walking path on a bench, reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Whether this meant she had a great sense of humor, or had no knowledge of literature, I didn’t know. After a minute or two of deliberation, I determined it was the former, thought about how to approach her, and then my life changed. “Hey,” said a strange voice. It sounded like the accent of someone who’d immigrated to the States a while ago and found his way into a Mel Brooks movie.

 

I looked around and saw no one except joggers.

 

“No, you schmuck, here,” said the voice again.

 

I looked to my right and, there, looking at me and panting, was Doug. “He listens,” my dog said. “Good.”

 

“What?” I asked.

 

“Doesn’t mean he’s not a putz, though,” said Doug.

 

You know those movies where a CGI dog talks and the moving mouth looks unnatural? Turns out it’s dead-on.

 

“What’s your name?” asked Doug.

 

“Kyle.” I shook my head. “Wait. Doug, what’s going on?”

 

“I’m not—Doug? What’s a Doug?” My dog looked at himself, specifically his paws, and yowled. “What the Hell is this? I find my way into a fucking dog? Vey iz mir, there is no justice.”

 

Doug was screaming at this point, and a few people looked over at me, then away. The best way to go about your business is to avoid other people’s.

 

“Oy, first I get kicked out at the gates, and now I’m a fucking dog with a pischer for a master. Great.”

 

“Um,” I reiterated.

 

“Fuck,” Doug said again. “Okay.” He looked at me. Something was different. Doug’s eyes were always grey. They were now brown. “Listen, Kyle pischer. My name is Chaim.”

 

“Your name is Doug.”

 

“If I had hands, I would slap you.” Doug’s tail wagged furiously. “My name is Chaim. I died in March, stood in a line to get into the Afterlife for a long time and then I get up to the gates, and some schmuck with a dead-end job tells me I can’t get in. Why? Because I didn’t fulfill my purpose. I ask him, ‘What’s my purpose?’ You know what he says? ‘I can’t tell you.’ He can’t tell me. My purpose is a secret. I lived eighty years, had kids, fought in the Army, visited Israel, and he tells me I can’t get in because I didn’t fulfill a purpose.” I’d never seen a dog spit before, but Chaim managed it. It was bizarre.

 

I looked around. The cute girl across the walking trail packed up and left with a concerned glance in my direction.

 

“So they send me—disembodied, mind you, because I wasn’t having a hard enough time—back here. First person I see is you, so I think, ‘Bam, I’ll get this guy, he’s young, and I’ll find my purpose and get back to the afterlife.’ But what happens? I pop into your mutt.”

“Augi, not a mutt.”

 

“What?”

 

“Doug’s—er, you’re—an Augi.”

 

“So? Who cares? Listen, you’re going to help me.”

 

“Um.”

 

“You a Jew?”

 

“Yeah. Kind of.”

 

“Bring me to your rabbi.”

 

So I did.

 

Turns out the synagogue was closed. I never thought about synagogues having opening hours—I only went on the occasional Friday night and High Holidays. Doug - well, Chaim, let loose a vicious string of obscenities the likes of which I’d never heard before. A couple of Hassids walking through the area looked over and decided to go along their way. “What,” asked Chaim, “you couldn’t stop them?”

 

“Who?” I asked. “The Hassids? I can’t speak Yiddish.”

 

“I can.”

 

“How was I supposed to know that? You’re just shouting obscenities. Everyone knows Yiddish obscenities.”

 

Chaim said, “Okay, fine, we’re going back to your place and tomorrow, you’ll bring me to your rabbi.”

 

It’s amazing how quickly we get used to strangeness in our lives. After walking the few blocks from the park to my synagogue, I’d seen Doug-Chaim and his Yiddish accent and cursing as a completely normal part of my life. The whole way back to my place, he ranted about how God was a prick for not telling him what his purpose in life was, and I simply nodded. I could sympathize. Personally, I felt that God was a bit of a cruel bastard for allowing a crotchety old Jew to inhabit my otherwise lovely-tempered dog right before I was going to make a move on a girl in the park.

 

***

 

It turned out that Chaim used to be a cabbie who’d moved to New York from Russia when he was a kid. He didn’t have much to say about anything aside from baseball and jazz, and viewed my music collection as proof that I was an idiot. All told, he was an incredibly charming guy.

 

I showed him Doug’s bed. It was a stuffed blue circular thing. Doug chewed the edges when he got bored and, if you didn’t know, anything with an Australian Shepherd bloodline gets bored quickly—so the edges were pretty damn near destroyed. “What, this?” Chaim asked.

 

“Your bed.”

 

“Hell no, I’m not sleeping in this.”

 

“It’s a dog bed. You happen to have popped into a dog from whatever poltergeist for—”

 

“Dybbuk.”

 

“What?”

 

Doug’s tail stood straight back. “Dybbuk. I’m a dybbuk. None of this poltergeist shit. Do you see a midget exorcist? I don’t.”

 

“Fine, dybbuk. Point is, you’re a dog, so you’re sleeping in a dog bed. Sorry, Chaim, but I’m the one who has control in this relationship. The worst thing you can do is shit in my shoes.”

 

Chaim, cowed, turned around in the bed and, with one final glare, went to sleep.

 

***

 

The next day, a Saturday, we went down to Beth Israel, my synagogue, to have a chat with my rabbi. Now, yes, I know, it’s a Saturday, and thus you might argue that the rabbi should have been leading a Torah service instead of hearing about my dybbuk problem, but considering I called him in a state of near-hyperventilation (I was always a good actor), I guess he wanted to help a congregant. After all, personal crises don’t take a day off just because it’s Shabbat.

 

We sat in his office—a big room with a pair of comfy black leather couches and a ton of thick, leather-bound (black and brown, all with gold lettering) books in sizes ranging from ones that reminded me of kids’ books to ones that seemed like they could double for the OED. The rabbi sat across from us, on one of the couches. He was a stout guy with gray hair and glasses, and wore a white shirt, blue tie, and black slacks. He looked from Chaim to me. Obviously, talking dogs were not in his repertoire.

 

“So,” Chaim said, “that’s where I stand. I’m a dybbuk.” He licked his crotch. I’m not sure if this was on purpose or if it was a nervous tick.

 

Rabbi Schwartz looked at me and said, “I didn’t see you earlier today, did I?”

 

“Nope,” I said.

 

“You weren’t at the Starbucks over on Broadway, were you?”

 

“No. I walked Chaim-Doug earlier today, tried to use him to pick up this redhead by the pond in the park, but she ran off when he called her a shikseh.”

 

“So,” said the rabbi, “there is no way you could have spiked my coffee.”

 

“Don’t think so.”

 

The rabbi took what I saw as a thinking position. It’s what one adopts when faced with a severe, insurmountable problem. “I,” he said after a brief bout of rumination, “would like you to leave. Right now.”

 

Chaim and I looked at him from our couch. “What?” we said in unison.

 

“There is no logical explanation for your dog’s predicament other than you are an incredibly skilled dog trainer and ventriloquist. However, as I’ve never known a dog smart enough to pull off a con of this magnitude, I’m forced to conclude that I’m hallucinating and in need of a heavy, oil-fried meal. I can’t do that when you’re in my office, so get out. Vamoose.”

 

Thus rebuked, Doug-Chaim and I left. (I probably don’t need to tell you that Chaim was infuriated to the point of slipping into a hideous, obscenity-laden combination of Russian and Yiddish.) The way back to my apartment, Chaim didn’t speak, no matter how many times I tried to rouse him from his taciturn state by calling him an ass-sniffing mutt.

 

***

 

“Hey. Hey. Wake up. Wake up, you pischer.”

 

I woke up with a jolt, a bead of drool snapping and plopping from my mouth to the pillow. I blinked a few times, my eyes adjusted to the light streaming in to my tiny bedroom window. Chaim sat panting at the side of my bed, tail wagging.

 

“Whuh?” I asked.

 

“I have an idea. Get dressed, showered, coffee, whatever it is pischers do in the morning to wake up. We’re going to meet Rabbi Kanevsky.”

 

“Who?”

 

“He’s a local Lubavitcher. Shower, and I’ll explain later.”

 

He left the room, and I went to shower. I accepted my fate this morning, and I had nothing better to do anyway.

 

Rabbi Kanevsky was a tall, reedy man with a huge, black-and-gray beard. I don’t know how he and Chaim knew each other in Chaim’s previous, non-dybbuk life, but after the man peeked out at us through his house’s cracked-open front door and Chaim let loose with a lot of rapid-fire Yiddish, Rabbi Kanevsky welcomed us into his house as if we were relatives. He led us into his living room, which had a couple of recliners, a wall of bookshelves, a fireplace, and a noticeable lack of a television.

 

Rabbi Kanevsky sat down in one of the recliners, waved at the other one, and said something in Yiddish. I tilted my head to the side.

 

“He said ‘Have a seat,’” said Chaim.

 

“Oh,” I said. I sat. Chaim plopped down on the floor.

 

I looked around. Opposite me was a doorway leading to a dining room. A couple of young girls peeked at me through the doorway. I grinned at them and they bolted.

 

The rabbi and Chaim started talking, and the only things I caught were, no surprise, dirty words. It seemed that Chaim thought there were a lot of people out there who were mamzers and shysters, and the rabbi seemed to sympathize with him. I spent the time during their discussion looking around, twiddling my thumbs, counting the number of artworks hanging on the rabbi’s living room wall (twenty) and how many had to deal with Jews dancing or reading Torah (eighteen). His bookshelves were filled with books bound in leather and featuring Hebrew characters on the side—a far cry from my rabbi’s collection of Reform-approved prayer books and copies of Michael Chabon and Philip Roth novels.

 

After trying to read the books’ titles, I gave up and watched the clock above the rabbi’s fireplace. It was black, iron, and had Roman numerals. After about thirty minutes, the rabbi clapped his hands together once, rubbed them together, and paced in front of the recliner.

 

“He have a solution?” I asked.

 

“What? No. We just got down to business.”

 

“What? We’ve been here an hour and you’re just now getting to the point where he realizes you’re a dog?”

 

“So nu, I have to catch up with old friends. What, do you have to do something important? Go to church, maybe? Like a goy?”

 

I exhaled and threw up my hands in defeat.

 

Rabbi Kanevsky continued speaking Yiddish and gesticulating in the air. I watched him in amusement, simply because I’d never seen anyone who was so animated while delivering a monologue. Chaim would occasionally offer a comment or two, the rabbi would respond, and they’d continue. It eventually got to the point where Chaim was tailing the rabbi as he paced across the room, and I just watched. It hit me, briefly, that I was in the same position Doug used to be in whenever I held a conversation over the phone and paced my living room.

 

After a couple of minutes, the rabbi walked over to a book shelf and picked out a CD case. He walked over to me and held it out. I took it, and he patted me on the shoulder with a smile. “All right,” said Chaim. “We’re going back to your place.”

 

“What’s this?”

 

“It’s a CD of the Rebbe, zikrono levrachah. That’s what’s going to get me out of your dog and, er, elsewhere.”

 

Chaim’s eyes grew shifty, but I chose to ignore the implication. The rabbi led us out of his house and on to the street. As we walked, Chaim let me in on the plan. It seemed that the Rebbe—the head of the Lubavitch community for a long time—was seen as a Messiah sort of figure. Rabbi Kanevsky had an idea that playing a recording of the Rebbe speaking would exorcise Chaim out of my dog, and send him on his way.

 

I went along with it, because I’d seen some documentaries on exorcisms and thought that it’d take a couple of hours, at most.

 

***

 

When we got home, I turned on my stereo and plopped in the CD. An old, but nice, grandfatherly voice recited what clicked in my head as Torah, and Chaim plopped in front of the stereo. “So you’re fine, then?” I asked.

 

“What?” Chaim asked, turning around. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He turned back to the stereo and stared at the speakers. “Put it on repeat, pischer.”

 

I did, then went down the street for coffee.

 

By the time I got back from work Monday evening, he’d dragged the bed in front of the stereo. “Have you eaten, Chaim?” I asked. The bowl full of corned beef (as per his request) I’d set out in the morning remained untouched.

 

He responded in Yiddish, then turned to face me instead of the speakers. “It means, ‘Torah is food for the soul.’”

 

I didn’t respond, but shrugged my shoulders and made myself dinner. That night, when I tried to turn on the TV to watch the Yankees game, Chaim barked and shouted at me until I put the TV on mute. I sighed, wondering why the Rebbe wasn’t doing anything for the dybbuk, and watched the game while he talked over my stereo.

 

That night, I dreamed in Hebrew, and the next morning, waking up to hear the CD end and begin again, I snapped. I woke up, forced the CD out of the tray. The newfound silence woke Chaim up with a whine. I looked at him and said, “It’s over,” and threw the CD out the window.

 

“What the fuck?” shouted Chaim.

 

“You’ve been listening to it for three fucking days, Chaim. The recording’s not doing anything.”

 

“You don’t know that,” he growled, “there could be a change.”

 

“You’re right, I might not know that, but what I do know is that you haven’t eaten for three whole days, and if you keep that up, you’ll starve and kill my dog.” I leaned down and lowered my voice. “And I love my dog.”

 

Chaim growled and Doug’s upper lip twitched. “Fine. We’ll find another way.” He walked over to the dog bowl and ate.

 

***

 

For the next couple of months, Chaim and I were at a standstill. I was stuck in my office job, and Chaim was stuck in my dog’s body. A few important memories from that time, which I’m currently calling The Interim:

 

1) A few days throwing away the CD, I went out to a bar downtown. I brought back this girl who was way out of my league. She was Scottish with auburn hair and an aphrodisiac of an accent. I brought her back to my place, we made it through the door, and we started trying to simultaneously take off each other’s shirts. (This, for the record, doesn’t work. It’s like when soccer players try to tackle each other at the same time. Tangle of limbs.) We were greeted by Chaim saying, “So, pischer, you’re back. About time, I was about to shit on your bed.” She fled and I never saw her again.

 

2) Tired of our normal walking route, I decided to take Chaim to a small dog park I knew in the west side of town. Within an hour, Chaim essentially had a dog-proof force field around him. It came from literally leaping on any nearby dog’s back and screaming at them in a human’s voice. Turns out dogs are as easily freaked out as people.

 

3) We walked around the park one day in early fall. Chaim was getting fat, so I switched him to a lean diet, and he was grouchy. There was a guy selling hot dogs near the pond, and he dropped one from his cart. Chaim bolted for it, but, after the dog park incident, I had the good sense to throw a choker around his neck. As he bolted, I pulled up, and he yipped. He laid on the ground, panting and slightly whimpering and said, “You do that again, I will convince the police that you’ve been fucking me in the ass, pischer.”

 

4) We sat on a park bench—I had to heave Chaim on to any raised surface; Doug could easily handle them, but Chaim never quite got the hang of a dog’s muscles. A young dad and his son played catch. Personally, the last time my Dad and I played catch must have been twenty years ago, when I was about five or six and before he and my mom divorced, so I thought nothing of it. Chaim, though, couldn’t take his eyes off of them. I’d never seen a dog cry before. I asked him what was up, but he only responded with a low growl and a very quiet statement which was probably, “Be quiet.” The rest of the time in the park, Chaim didn’t speak.

 

5) Watching a Yankees-Red Sox game, Chaim was so enraged at an error in the infield, which resulted in a game-winning play by the Sox, that he took a dump on my carpet. I haven’t watched an American League game other than the World Series since then.

 

 

Those moments aside, it’s been a fairly normal human-dog relationship. Chaim’s grouchy, sure, but he’s old and I can’t blame him for being upset about his predicament. After the initial phase of our relationship, we decided to get proactive about finding his purpose. Most nights, we spend time going over his life, trying to figure out where he could have missed it—how he could have doomed himself to a happy afterlife. So far, we keep running into the same conclusion: God is a prick who, in no way, makes life easy for his favorite creation.

 

Chaim’s reminiscing shoots off in the direction of his wife and kids. According to him, his wife—Leah—is waiting for him, and I hope that’s the case. His kids—and this I’ve checked on—are successful. His son currently lives in London, heading up a branch of a law firm based in Manhattan. His daughter is a therapist in Seattle who has a radio show and a series of self-help books. I’ve brought up the possibility that maybe his purpose is something to do with his kids, but Chaim took this as an insult and came after me, jaws snapping until I leapt onto my bed and apologized profusely.

 

It’s gotten me thinking about what I’m doing in my own life. I’m certainly not having much in the way of an impact on world affairs. The most effect I’ve had has been arranging the first letters in a paragraph of a best-selling novel to spell out my name. Hardly enough to make it into the history books, I know, but it’s what I’ve got to hold on to right now, until the girl comes along who’s not freaked out by a Yiddish-screaming Augi. I’ve brought that up sometimes—my own increasing sense that I’m wasting time by not doing what I love—but that might be one of the really good things about having a crotchety old Jew as a pet dog: they don’t let you dwell on self-pity for long.

 

 

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