This Essay Grows

by Andrew Felsher

We weren’t alone. Many writers and filmmakers have sought to own a dog while committed to making great work. The problem was with our lease. It clearly stated that pets were only permitted “upon owner approval.”

So, we emailed the landlord and asked for approval.

She responded quickly: “Unfortunately you cannot have a dog.”

Countless requests of ours ended like this, with the hammering of desire into some variation of “Unfortunately.” What’s more, the landlord (one of three siblings who inherited this gut renovated brownstone) never included Y in her responses, even if I deliberately cc’d Y.

The landlord lived on the third floor. Whenever we passed by her in the hallway, she didn’t utter a word or look at us, dismissing us even more brutally than in her emails.

Sometimes, it felt like we were living in the same building as—and paying rent on the first of every month to—a bot in need of an update. 

When Y nicknamed the landlords “robots,” we laughed.

Our laughter wasn’t strong enough to overpower our discontent toward their expansive, robotic impact. We had no choice but to push back. After all, breeders and rescue/adoption centers typically needed documentation from tenants to confirm that their building permitted dogs. We understood. This avoided the increased risk of abandonment.

After researching, we found a reliable loophole and responded to the robot, claiming the dog would be for “emotional support.”

Of course, the robot requested that we furnish the appropriate paperwork, proving our claim that this dog would be an official, legal emotional support pet. And, if we purchased an emotional support dog, then the insurance policy would only permit a small dog, under 25 pounds.

Furnishing such a letter would have been simple. After all, Y had a degree in Social Work from Columbia University, so she had easy access to friends who could sign off on our need for emotional support. This wasn’t so far-fetched anyway. A large inventory of anxiety had been accumulating in me for all sorts of reasons—from the socio-political environment to the normalization of death during Covid, and to the impending 6 months of separation we would soon experience because Y needed to travel to China (which was closed to foreigners like me at the time) to film her first feature documentary. In fact, emotional support would have been appreciated.

It was natural for me to wonder, “Can a small dog emotionally support me?” I didn’t think so. At the very least, I needed a medium-sized dog.

I must have said to Y, “Under twenty-five pounds is too small for us.”

We felt hopeless and impotent, until one day we heard a bark coming from the third floor followed by the sound of paws against the wooden steps in the hallway. It piqued our interest because the sounds resembled those of a substantial creature that might be an enormous pet defying the terms of the robot’s insurance policy.

Skeptical, Y investigated by peering through the curtains of the living room window, where she confirmed the existence of not only a dog, but a big dog, a big dog that belonged to the robots. This big dog was so well-trained that the robot would wait by the entrance of the brownstone on the top of the steps while the dog walked down to the curb, urinated, and then sauntered back.

“The robots have a robot dog,” Y reported from the edge of the living room.

There were two obvious possibilities. The robots either changed their insurance policy without feeling the need to inform us or they had lied from the start and wanted to be the only people in the building with easy access to emotional support.

At the time, I was devouring lots of satirical Chinese literature by Wang Xiaobo and films like Farewell My Concubine and To Live, which gave me a heightened sensitivity to revolution and the pathways between ownership, landlords, tenants, workers, and exploitation. What’s more, I would sometimes reveal my weakness by interjecting something nice about the new appliances and the countertops in our apartment, to which Y would say, “We don’t own it. Don’t be too proud.”

We promised each other to defy and disregard the power structure that was kind to the robots. We would buy a dog when the time was right, without their permission. Weeks later, we wandered into a Mexican Craft store upstate and encountered three 3-month old Shiba Inu’s in a playpen all available for purchase. We held them in our arms and asked if we would need to furnish documentation to show we could have a dog in our building. The owner of the store, who was also the breeder, said something like, “Just pay me on Venmo. I have all the vaccination and medical docs. They’re healthy.”

We came back a few weeks later and bought Enrique (named by the breeder after Enrique Iglesias because of his handsome looks).

We had no shame in bringing the dog back. The robots never said anything to us.

*

We fed and trained Enrique, bought him a little bed, took him out to urinate, poop, and scavenge chicken bones left on the street. He went through a destructive phase and would rip apart my books, eat our wallets and leather shoes, and even bark at me if I ignored him and wrote for too long. In other words, he resembled, in many ways, a dog that needed emotional support, obliterating the intended dynamic between us. Regardless, the routine of dog walking allowed us to encounter so many locals from the neighborhood, many of whom warned us that Enrique was not a dog but a fox. Kids playing in the street would scream: “That’s a fox.” The women selling flowers at the corner of our block would always hold Enrique in their lap, confess their love for him, and welcome his licks all over their faces.

Nearly a year later, when Y was away in China getting shots of relatives and her ancestor’s village, Xi Jiao Gou, tucked deeply in the mountains of Shanxi province, it became difficult to manage a relationship with someone on the opposite side of the planet, a dog, a full-time job, a new literary platform, and writing. That’s when I realized that I needed help with at least one of those dimensions of my existence, if not all of them, so I hired a dog walker to help two mornings a week. I think she had a soft spot for Enrique. She would drop her son off at school, get on a bus for 15 minutes before Enrique would jump on her, lick her, and then zoom around. She often took videos of their excitable introductions and sent them to me. Once Enrique calmed himself, he would always drag the dog walker to his psychic anchor, the women selling flowers at the corner of the block.

One night, I was walking Enrique and one of his psychic anchors, who knew Y was away for a few months, glared at me before threatening, “Who’s that woman walking Enrique?”

One inevitable aspect of dog ownership in the city is that you become more familiar with the local community, but you also become more familiar with other dogs and other dog owners. The dogs sniff each other. The dogs play. The dogs show their teeth. Owners say, “What’s the name?” or “How old?” or “Is he friendly?”

I often ran into R, who had a big dog. One day, while our dogs were sniffing each other, we compared the nature of our dog ownership. His building required emotional support documentation too, but he went online on some website that provided the document for cheap. I told him about the origins of our ownership of Enrique, how Y nicknamed the landlords “robots,” and that we discovered the landlord had a big dog, to which he said, “For real?” We then compared our approach and mentality toward dog insurance, both convinced it wasn’t worth it and that it was a big scam with lots of exclusions and out-of-pocket expenses.

The human world was referenced in our discussions too, not just the universe of dog maintenance. R mentioned that he expected to wrap up his degree in Corporate Communications. That it had been delayed, and he needed to get his shit together. He asked what I do, so I told him that I enjoyed writing and had recently published this piece, “On Strangeness,” which considered how fiction writers can effectively engage with bizarre and incredulous events and conditions.

R asked how much money I make as a writer.

“None,” I said. “I have a day job.”

R revealed that he was concerned about the job market and how to navigate it post-graduation, that he often encountered responses just like our “robots” where someone would spew ambiguity into his email inbox, dismissing his desire for a job that covers rent.

There was a legitimate reason for this concern. One day a friend of his asked if he could pick up a package outside in the neighborhood. Like many people, I think he figured a friend was a friend and a package was a package, nothing to be too worried about. But outside, police ambushed and arrested R.

“I had no idea,” R revealed, “that there was a gun in the package.”

Then he explained that everyone knows Riker’s is an awful, cruel, and inhuman place. But Riker’s during Covid was worse. A lockdown within a horrible container.

I asked him how long he was there, to which he said a few weeks, but fortunately his fingerprints were not on the gun, so the state had nothing on him. In other words, R became another black man wrongfully ambushed, handcuffed and then sent to Riker’s.

We exchanged numbers. He asked for a link to my essay, “On Strangeness.” Soon, he responded, revealing it was honestly the best essay he had ever read.

Over the next few months, the earth rotated on its axis. Y’s night became my day. R chose not to seek compensation for the violation of his rights, mostly because if he went to court, then his family would find out that he was locked up.

Robots collected rent. My dog ate. He even started to eat the wall.

This eating made a hole.

The hole grew and grew. 

Listen, this grows.

June 2023