SERVICE DOGS
FRANK FLIES MOVED into a luxurious apartment at the top of the only nice-looking high rise in a sea of dumpy apartment buildings. It had an elevator, carpeted floors, great views, and indoor and outdoor swimming pools. Frank looked younger than his age (52) but the other tenants in his new building were mostly senior citizens. One day he was on his way up in the elevator and a pretty girl with black hair got on with her dog. She told him her dog’s name was Pine in an accent that went in and out of sounding British and American and Frank told her looks like a fine dog. Actually she’s a service dog, said the girl, and Frank said really? We do a lot of work with the vets, she said, and Frank said, Good for you. I’m Frank. I’m Lisa, she told him. What floor are you going to? Twelve. Top floor, she said, sounding British. What’s your name again? Frank asked. Lisa. And I’m Frank. I bet you have a great view. Thanks. See you later. Have a great night. Thanks. The woman he’d been seeing had dropped out of contact just before the election, when you couldn’t really blame anyone for doing anything. It didn’t tear his heart out, but he felt disappointed, having just decorated his new apartment with three or four beautiful runners and area rugs for his lady and being left to walk around on them himself. These crazy times full of artificial intelligence and UAP/FOs and now a government takeover by right wing technocrats in a fictional world not unlike our own. Times like these demanded different gods. Frank read about the primordial Greek goddess of the night Nyx in a post on Facebook. Nyx helped shape the earliest universe, and even Zeus feared her enough to back down when she challenged his efforts to rename the Aegean Sea or whatever it was he wanted to do. Another post suggested viewers make their voting records confidential in light of Primus Kamp commandeering the government records. Frank filled out the form, downloaded it, walked up the street to the library and printed it out. He caught a train downtown after a lot of forgetting things and losing things and making sure he had things. All this going back and forth lost might have been the result of a spell by Primus Kamp to disorient opponents but Frank dispelled it with a prayer to Goddess Nyx. Frank remembered a time years ago when he’d known a girl named Sunny with Nyx tattooed on one of her forearms and Hera on the other. There was a large pear-shaped man walking down the street fifty yards ahead with a beard and a fez wearing a sleeveless shirt and a pair of pantaloons. He said something and Frank said, “What?” “Got a 29 inch dick, cocaine thick,” said the strange looking man, perhaps repeating lyrics. When Frank got to the building downtown there was a metal detector inside the door and he had to unload all his stuff and let the security guard check his bag. “I’ll let you take out your scarf,” she told him. “I’ll just let you do it. Looks like you have an umbrella in there, too. That’s not a gun, is it?” “No. Just an umbrella. Forgot it was in there, sorry.” Then she told him which window to go to and he went over. The woman behind the window looked like [NAME WITHELD]. She looked over his form. “Everything is in order,” she told him, adding, “Just so you know, you will no longer be receiving confirmation of your vote.” Frank had always appreciated the confirmation of his vote by email. “Sounds just like how America works.” Frank was upset about President Bedford and Primus Kamp trying to take over the government and now he was taking it out on this poor woman resembling [REDACTED]. “Well, I’m processing it now,” she explained, and Frank said, “You work for the government. Will the vote still count, at least?” “Of course,” she said emphatically, but he would never know now. “Well, thanks.” He walked out of the building and started walking down the street until he came to a Mexican restaurant he knew, went in, and ordered a green chile burrito. “You mean a chile verde burrito?” asked the waiter with a mustache Frank had been seeing around Culchack Corners in different Mexican restaurants for years. “Yass . . . That’s what I should have said.” The waiter took his order to the kitchen then came back and asked him if he wanted a shot of tequila. “Sure,” said Frank, “You choose,” and the waiter brought him a shot of Hornitos blanca, possibly assuming Frank wouldn’t know that means white, but who knows. He was very nice about it. When Frank got to the bus stop a woman who looked homeless kept asking him questions about Fastline Road, like how long it was and where did it end and was it going away from Culchack Corners or toward it. “How long is it? Miles and miles. It goes through Culchack Corners.” “Why do you get so mad? Why do people get so mad when I ask about Fastline Road? Are they mad at themselves because they don’t know the answer? Why do they attack me for wanting to know?” But that wasn’t it. “Wait a minute,” said Frank, “Do you not even realize the whole country is being taken over right now by an oligarch? Have you not been paying attention? Maybe that’s just not something you’ve been paying attention to.” “How do you know what I’ve been paying attention to?” the woman asked him. “I don’t know,” said Frank. “I’m going to the next bus stop.” He started walking off down Fastline Road, not knowing how long it was. “See?” the woman called from behind him, point proven. Well, I got that done, thought Frank once he got home. Thanks, Goddess Nyx. He was still trying to get a passport, not because he had anywhere else in mind, just to stay free if he could. Immigration performed more raids in Frank’s neighborhood the next day but they didn’t come into his building, maybe because of construction being done on the parking lot, three or four small bulldozers tearing into the surface and beeping when they backed up. According to WatchDog, Immigration was just out of sight of his windows, on the other side, assembling behind PetWorks, getting ready to target the last row of apartment buildings he’d lived in. Frank stood looking down twelve floors and saw a couple of black pickup trucks park suspiciously in front of apartment buildings without anyone getting out. Maybe that’s Immigration, he thought. From what he’d heard, that’s how they did it: just pulled up and waited for people to come out of their apartments, then grabbed them. He was sitting in his office when there came a banging on his door and all the doors of his hallway at the same time. At first he thought it was Immigration but it turned out to be a couple of the building’s workmen doing an emergency “air bleed” after one of the heaters downstairs had blown. One of them tried to explain it in technical terms but the only thing Frank caught was that the kind of building he lived in was called a “one-stack,” meaning all the floors were laid out identically. “Well, maybe you can explain something to me,” he said, and the workmen showed him how to use his thermostat as a heater on cold nights. “Thanks a lot, I’ve been using a space heater.” After the workmen left, Frank realized that had been exactly the right way to handle the situation, the most diplomatic, and he’d done it without thinking first, and said a prayer of thanks to guardian goddess Nyx for the guidance. On Facebook, he publicly objected to Primus Kamp’s spastic couple of spiteful sieg heils onstage at the big hoo hah the other day because he believed in equal rights for everyone regardless of race or sex or thoughts or feelings, because gestures like these went against everything he’d been raised to believe this country stands for, because his spirit was healthy and he felt obligated, and so on. “I am not complacent about unelected anglers who hire frat boys to tamper with computers flinging their arms out like this with any degree of impunity,” Frank wrote. “This is my statement, and I’ll keep making it until someone listens.” He was not a political guy! I’m just someone watching this beautiful angel go through her changes, he thought. That’s me. Later that night he saw some posts on NextDoor showing about twenty agents in jackets with IMMIGRATION on the backs crowding around apartment doors and said a prayer. O Goddess Nyx, I trust in you to transmute this energy of fear and activated blood in me to one of clarity and surety and certainty and grace. Please make me a channel of safety and immunity, a conduit for your magic and thank you for doing whatever it takes to protect your children. Please guide me through your shadow treatment in its deepest loss of light, through darkest night please guide me safely. Frank put on his gray trench coat and went downstairs in the elevator and walked through the parking lot past some bulldozers doing construction work heading for the grocery store across the boulevard. “Your heat still working?” called one of the maintenance guys from the night before, suddenly walking across the street toward Frank out of nowhere. “Hey Emilio, yeah it’s going fine. It’s working fine.” “Well, you let us know.” “I will, thanks.” Frank kept on heading down the street, going over all the weirdness lately: workmen banging on the door, his passport dream delayed, Immigration reportedly swarming apartment buildings elementary schools and churches in his own neighborhood, and now Primus Kamp moving in to reconfigure all the files without legal permission or any credentials. It all made such an interesting story, it was the bloody living American death-of-dreams story history’s algorithm had built up to. Or maybe I’m overreacting, thought Frank. Maybe everything’s fine. The same bearded fat guy in a fez and pantaloons was about fifty yards ahead in exactly the same position he’d been the other day. “How’s your day going today?” he asked politely as Frank came abreast. “I’m feeling good today. How’s your day going?” “Excellent, as always.” “That’s great.” “You look really good in those glasses.” Frank was wearing his trademark clip-on shades. “Thanks a lot.” “Sure thing.” The light changed, Frank ran across the boulevard, gathered his groceries and considered walking over by PetWorks on the way back home to witness the Immigration agents swarming his neighborhood but decided not to. Everything was a dance between matters and meanings, how much anything mattered and what it all meant. Everything was a season. There might be a reason. And it was a mystery. This has never happened to me before, Frank thought. My life has never felt like this before. I’ve walked around in this neighborhood for years. That website was still working on his passport. Maybe they’d get back to him tomorrow. Or he’d get it done another way. That night an old friend covered with tattoos and questions of life called and said she might be breaking up with her boyfriend and knew life was a test. Tell me more, he said, and the phone call unfolded about ten more minutes. She told him everything is a test and is it the personality is it the people who knows but it’s a test, and he said several, and she said yes, but it’s a test. At one point she said I don’t deserve it and Frank said No, you don’t deserve it, you’re smart, you’re brave, and Frank’s friend made a joke in response: I think I deserve a steak and a Sprite, and Frank said, Well, I’ve always wanted to go to Bastien’s, I hear they make a good steak, let’s go there someday, they might have Sprite. As for the government takeover, Frank knew about enough active counter-efforts by the end of the next day he didn’t feel completely discouraged anymore. Bedford was still saying and doing or trying to do lots of mad things. Of course, the media would change the story again pretty soon, but then it would change back again, and keep on going back and forth forever like a compass set to the most sensational story. Frank needed something more foundational. He’d been watching the news a lot lately. He remembered the feeling of learning how not to care what the news said, realized he was having that old familiar feeling again, sinking into that unending season of not caring what the news said anymore because it was always worse and worse. That old feeling was back. Please let me serve you, Goddess Nyx. Take care of me. I’ll build you an altar, Frank thought. I’ll send out a prayer to you. He looked around at all the hangings on the walls around his desk and realized he was already sitting right there, at the Altar to Nyx. Using his own body and mind and the world wide web, Frank performed an improvised ritual supplication to Nyx, discharging bodily fluids into the void, best sacrifice there is for a hungry primordial goddess, and he proceeded through the daily reportage of the hijackers’ worsening atrocities with a somewhat lighter feeling after making this compact with Goddess Nyx. There was a fish and chips joint on Broadway Frank liked to go to because it was never very crowded. The last time he’d been, he’d run into his brother Stan there who made him uncomfortable because he seemed permanently saddened by life, as if he’d given up. It happened again, like a stutter in time. Stan Flies came over, Frank’s twin he hadn’t seen in years, who still honored his thirty-years-gone former self, no matter how he’d changed. Did they still have the same psychic bond? Frank tried to talk about the oligarchy taking over and his twin brother Stan told him he was “out of the game” and he’d realized now that “his voice didn’t count.” Well, maybe that was true, maybe no one’s voices counted anymore in politics—maybe that’s what made Frank Flies so angry, being in the first place such a non-political guy anyway, for exactly this reason. Was it their strange psychic bond? Maybe it was the thought that people believing their voices didn’t count was what had caused this in the first place. Partly, anyway. “It’s cool, man. I understand. If you’ve got something you’re so single-minded about like that, you go ahead . . .” “It’s not me, it’s the whole human race!” Frank Flies shouted at his brother Stan who didn’t deserve to be yelled at like that, and after a minute of sitting there silently, not wanting to rule such a kingdom, he apologized. “Didn’t mean to lose my cool there, sorry.” Wait a minute. Such a painful experience sitting there staring down into the red plastic basket at his cut up fish and chips after losing his cool like that, and unable to swallow, not him but the whole human race for a change. “Sorry, man,” said Frank again on his way out the door thinking, “Well, fuck. Maybe I won’t be coming back here anymore.” So many ghosts and shadows everywhere. And uncommon repetition of occurrence the last few weeks like life giving us one last desperate chance to do everything right before all the sand runs out.
Zack Kopp holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and blows a blue harmonica. You can find his frequently-updated blog at www.campelasticity.com and all his books at Amazon. His latest work of fiction, Main Character Syndrome, was published in Feb of 2024, and a collection of interviews, essays, and commentary called Rare But Serious was just published. Kopp lives currently in Denver, Colorado.
