“Only from a couple of faculty meetings they made you go to back in the day. How to deal with a bereaved student. Look, I’m not even writing an article on the second death of dead languages. I’m writing an article about the Pawong tribe. Unless you know anything about them, I don’t see a reason for us to have lunch.”

“Well, I read Croze’s books,” Allan said. “I’m worried about her, too, actually. She stays late at work sometimes. She’s not picking up her phone.”

It surprised me that Allan and Croze were friends. It always surprised me to find out that ugly old women had male friends.

“Her office is nowhere near the library,” I said, trying to reassure him. “Plus, this morning, her tongue was covered in white spots. Maybe she’s at home, nursing some kind of virus or something. Maybe she doesn’t even know what’s going on.”

“That’s just how her tongue is,” Allan said.

“Is it a fungus?”

“I don’t know, really. I think it’s just discolored.”

I was silent.

“I’ll ask her about it, if you want. If she ever picks up the phone. Would that leave you more inclined to have dinner with me?”

I don’t know which part of our conversation had got him thinking he could upgrade to dinner, but I appreciated his boldness.

“Only if whatever it is she has isn’t contagious,” I said.

I managed to have the phone call last exactly until I reached Delphine’s practice.

“i’m here, about to knock,” I texted Delphine. “don’t be afraid. it’s just me.”

She came to the door before I knocked.

“Do you still keep beers in your vaccine fridge?” I asked.

We made our way to the consult room and Delphine answered my question by opening the black drawer at the bottom of a small refrigerator full of vials.

“Help yourself,” she said.

There was a dog on her consult table, a big freckled thing with front paws the size of smaller dogs, on which its head rested. The other two were missing. The other two paws.

“Her owner left when she got the news,” Delphine explained. “Something about getting home to her kids. I was about to put her dog down, and then she just left.”

“Are you supposed to wait until she comes back to do the injection?”

“She said I should just go ahead and take care of it. She wrote me a check and everything.”

The dog shivered when I touched its head. “You’re going to die,” I told the dog, but I said it nicely. “It’s O.K. to be afraid.”

“That’s just mean,” Delphine said. “Give her a break.”

“She’s standing up for you,” I told the dog. “You’re in good hands.”

Delphine had been watching the news on her desktop computer. She’d muted it when we came in, but her eyes were still drawn to images I couldn’t see from where I stood. She’d had three beers already.

“How long does she have, if you don’t put her down?” I asked.

“One, maybe two months of increasingly horrible pain.”

The dog started licking my forearm. Her tongue was freckled like her body.

“Can you turn the screen around?” I asked Delphine. I wanted to watch the news, too.

“The wires are too tight, actually. Come sit by me.”

Delphine turned the sound on and dragged another chair over. I didn’t want to leave the dog alone, so I carried her to the chair and nestled her hind-leg stumps into my lap.

The news showed people who had gathered on the security perimeter of the university. Some held flowers, as was customary, I guess, since I’d seen on TV other groups of people in the aftermath of other catastrophes hold flowers. I’d never questioned the practice before, but, having just walked through empty streets for more than forty minutes, I wondered where they’d found their bouquets. As far as I could tell, all the shops were closed. Delphine and I had had a real hard time finding flowers for our parents’ funeral, because so few florists had been able to meet the demands that the attack on the Saint-Michel station had engendered.

There was a picture of them, our parents, on Delphine’s desk. The dog yawned.

“Is she in pain right now?” I asked Delphine.

“She doesn’t seem to be.”

The dog had no idea what was going on. TV had bought her two more hours of life.

“Maybe we can wait a little to put her down then, no?”

“You mean until the next time she has a seizure? Like, in two days?” Delphine looked at the dog, then at the news, then at me. “Sure,” she said. “If you take her home until then.”

My phone chimed. An e-mail from Professor Croze. “Here you go!” it read. She’d attached four black-and-white pictures. A Pawong house, a Pawong dinner, two Pawong men fishing, a Pawong family. They didn’t look afraid. Or cowed. Or meek. Or, for that matter, friendly. They actually looked kind of scary.

I texted Allan to let him know that Professor Croze was safe, and that he should e-mail her. The news now showed images of windowsills all over town on which people had lit candles. I had candles at home, I thought. There’s a certain type of man who thinks that scented candles are a romantic gift. Glauber was one of them.

Around 6 A.M., after a tired news anchor announced that two suspects had been arrested, I walked Delphine to her nanny’s, then home. Her husband and kids asked me to stay for breakfast, and they wanted to know everything about the dog I was dragging in a dog-wheelchair, but I told them that I needed some sleep, that I would come over for dinner instead.

Glauber was waiting for me in the hallway of my building, by the mailboxes. He apologized for showing up unannounced, but he’d had no other way to make sure that I was all right. “You changed your number,” he said, and then sneezed. He was allergic to dogs, but it seemed a bit fast-acting for an allergy.

“I’m still at the same e-mail address,” I said.

“Who checks their e-mail during a terrorist attack?”

“Did you see Ilse last night?” I asked. “She told me about your father. I’m really sorry.”

“Why would I have seen Ilse?”

“She was looking for you.”

I invited him upstairs. We fucked, but it was meaningless. Nothing more came of it. I didn’t even tell Delphine about it. After he left, I fed the dog leftover mashed potatoes and lit some candles.

Four days later, the dog had a seizure. Delphine came over to give her the injection. I held her while she died. I felt her getting heavier almost instantly, and her body seemed to shrink in my arms, compacting the way that my winter clothes did when I vacuum-sealed them for storage each spring. She would take up less and less room from now on. I held her until I was completely sure that she wouldn’t wake in a panic, and then for a few more seconds after that.

We buried her in Delphine’s yard that night, and Delphine kept the wheelchair at her office, to give to the next dog who needed it. ♦