I was once sixteen or seventeen years old, driving loose and insensible around a very dark country road. Above me the stars were out in a great flock. The night air hot and wooly through the window, sweet-smelling. At the townline I came to the long bend. Making the curve, I was stopped by a heinous scene. Police cars and ambulances and fire engines, their lights rising up like steam to hang themselves reddened between the trees. A man out front is wearing a highlighter vest and making up sign language. He's walking towards you, he's coming apart and putting himself back together right before your eyes. Below him a body is asleep in the road. I turned around and remade the long bend and promptly could never know whether the scene had truly occurred or whether I had stumbled into a waking terror. I had broken open a 60-watt lightbulb through which to smoke pot, halophosphates and all. [1] But I had seen it so clear. And I know that even when you're wide-awake your mind is such a dream-maker.

***

I am twenty-six years old, I am living in a neighborhood of Roanoke, Virginia called Old Southwest. [2] One night I am alone by the corner of Maple and Walnut Avenues [3] when I see a man walking a small pink piglet. Or, it could've simply been a small pig. Either the man had a long thin leash strung onto the pig, or he did not. Of course, it is not an inconceivable thought for someone to own a pig as a housepet. But it does seem notable, even unusual, and, therefore, potentially indicative of some larger significance.

***

I realize that the scene on the country road had been made most unreal by the oceanic silence of the whole thing. Even with my windows down the sirens had not made a sound, they were just flinging their lights through the trees and off the sleeping housefaces. The pig, meanwhile, had been made most unreal by its pigness. If it had been a dog, the pig would have been made so real by its own dogness that I would not have remembered it at all.

***

In the late winter the floor of my apartment is beaten weightless by light. Cathedrals [4] of light, clocktowers of light, skylines and cupolas rising and falling across the wooden slats. The whole history of civilization covered in one morning and an afternoon.

***

I am curious to see the pig again, as you might be curious to again see a neighbor with some distinguishing physical attribute, such as extremely hairy ears or no legs. When I pass by my front windows I look outside through the light, hoping to see the pig. The building across the street is very active. [5] All day long people walk in and out. At night the moon likes to pause just at the edge of its roof. The lot turns to a coarse plain then. You remind yourself: sometimes one must go outside to look.

***

I take the first pig-walk just after dusk, anticipating that the man might walk his pig at the same time each day. A ritual is a good thing between your hands, like a marriage or a kettle made out of iron. Outside the sky is not black but gray and diffuse. Hiding behind itself when you look too hard. It has been getting warm at the very crick of the day but at night the smell is cool and smoking and scoured clean. Not one pig in the whole universe. Buds creeping up like dead fingers in the dirt.

***

One of my first associations with the porcine comes through my grandmother. [6] Each winter she would buy a pig molded from peppermint hard candy. [7] On Christmas Day she would place the peppermint pig in a delicate purple velvet sack, which we would then take turns beating on with a tiny metal hammer. This was the express purpose of the hammer, and of the sack. At an unspecified moment, we would open up the sack and empty shards of pink peppermint out onto the table. This always created a great mess. The dog would sit under the table and lick up the pieces off the tiled floor. Someone would've tied a strand of tinsel around his collar. [8] This is one of those moments that I know occurred in my life. I know that this is something that happened to me. There might even be photographs to prove it. And yet, in my brain it is less a photograph or a portrait or an etching and more an entity that I can call up from the edges of my own guts, like a ghoul or a phantasm or a spiral of dust or a dream of some lost future.

***

The most unreal thing might not have been the pig itself, but that the man—who did or did not have the pig on a leash—seemed to have no face at all.

***

I check with my mailman to see if he's recently delivered any letters to a pig. He says, "No pigs." He tells me, however, that he has seen skunks colored pure white in the neighborhood. [9] First he says, "Like a polar bear," and then he corrects himself. "Like someone's painted them," he says, as if he's hoping to sound more reasonable. I tell him that this, unfortunately, is beyond the scope of my investigation. So I begin to think more methodically about the faceless man and his pig; I wake early the next morning, imagining that, like a dog, a pig should be walked twice a day, preferably when the light is doing something interesting. It is the time of day when everything soft in the world is happening. The sky unsprung and childlike. The shameless birds, the heaping of their songs all at once. At Highland Park the branches of the forsythia are so bright and indecent that you want to cover them up with a length of cloth. I've begun to make a wider circle through the neighborhood. There must be a thousand cats in Old Southwest, each one of them fat and starry-eyed and rolling on the sidewalk with their bellies to the sky. On mornings like this there is the sense of a spirit passing through, or it has just passed through, or it is about to, and yet the timing doesn't matter for the angle of the light and the moon still clear in the west. But I don't know any of this, I can't see any of this, for the piglessness of the morning, the memory changing to either cake batter or stuck concrete in my head.

***

The problem with memory is that you can't touch it too much, you can't hold it too close. There are many things like this. I can remember, a year ago, sitting in the rain in the summer in the falling-out-of-love-with-someone in a restaurant in New York. [10] I was feeling anxious because I had just bought an expensive pair of running shoes at the REI on Houston Street. [11] Also, I was feeling anxious because I knew we were very unhappy together. We kept making plans—not from love, but from the tightness and the fear behind our eyes. We would go to a wedding in South America. We would write more letters. We would take the ferry back to Brooklyn when the rain stopped. We were grasping hard, we were pretending not to notice.

***

Just a month ago I saw the body of a javelina outside Abilene, Texas. The size of it, like a loosened traincar or a star having dropped dead to earth. Winter never even happened in Abilene, there was no spring at all to hold onto.

***

I pig-walk at high noon. Earlier I wrote that, if the pig were a dog, I "would not have remembered it at all." I lied about this, each dog in the neighborhood makes me imagine a different vast future for myself. There's a collie named Scout who runs the fence at Highland Park when I play tennis. Maybe Scout and I might've hiked a thousand miles together. Or the two boxers, brown and white, who get walked across the parking lot of Fountain Square every afternoon, their dog-smell could've been stuck to the backseat of my car for years and years and years. [12] One dog at the park is just a ball of black yarn. I would've loved him to the moon. Even with the sun picking out the details of every leaf on the callery pear, I see no pigs at all. I imagine I had briefly entered some dark portent, a sort of pre-death, an empty dream, when I saw that pig. In the sun a man is on a crane painting the church steeple. Daffodils and bluets come wild out the earth. The light speaks of entireties. Spring here is just a doorway, just a wood frame and a thin band of air, it's gone so suddenly I can't even get a good look at it. I walk around pigless, looking over fences into backyards for any sign of a sty or a pen or maybe a mudpit, I walk around and feel the trees greening so quick all around me. I once read that you can feed magic mushrooms to hunting dogs to improve their smell and, thus, find their marks. [13]

***

I feed myself magic mushrooms and go looking for the pig. But soon I forget all about the pig and look up into the flowers of a saucer magnolia tree. Somehow the flowers have convinced the whole horizon to turn just the same shade of pink. A sense of alignment and joy starts to fill me up. At the top of a hill I look north to the blue mountains and to the sky tearing itself open above me, setting loose long banks of orange scuff, pale hearts of marigold and dandelion, tunnels into a blueness so deep that it becomes evidence of some greater source. I think, How isn't there a parade going on for all this? But it's a Wednesday in late February and I haven't been taking magic mushrooms at all, I have been writing at my desk, briefly letting go of some watchful part of myself.

***

I keep using the word "it" when I talk about the pig, on the off-chance that it's an archangel or some kind of messenger from the nether regions. [14]

***

I wake up on a Sunday morning and find a collection of droppings in the hallway of my apartment building. In fact, the droppings are laid directly outside my door. They are so close, in fact, that when I swing open the door, I inadvertently smear the droppings all over the floor. I notice then that the whole hallway has been torn up. There are tufts taken out of my neighbor's welcome mat, and the clothes that had been drying on the railing are torn and spread-eagled across the stairs. Clods of dirt and grass are thrown up all over the hallway, they are speckled low on the white walls. My neighbor is standing outside of her door. Her name is Brinon or Brinnon or Brynan, although I'm unsure. I sometimes think she's said, "Britain." Anyways, I find her very cool because she is always dribbling a basketball. I ask her, "What happened?" She's bouncing her basketball and looking at the mess. She says, "A pig came in. Someone had the door propped open downstairs and a pig came in and did this. I guess there's a man with a pig in the neighborhood." In the hallway, in the unmistakable light of a Sunday morning, I'm hit with the terrifying reality of true and incontrovertible proof. This is the stuff of miracles, of curses. I feel that a wild god has come into my home, smashing out the windows and the mirrors and the wine-glasses with furor at the knowledge of my doubt. I ask Brinon or Brinnon or Brynan or Britain if she's seen the pig, and she only points down the stairs at the open door. I stand outside and look up and down the street, the long wind and the soft rain just starting up, but the pig is gone. In the grass I bend down, my shirt sticking to my back, and I move aside little bunches of clover to look for hoofprints in the mud. [15]

***

I spend the next few days sorting through the signs, trying to determine whether this had been an encouraging or a foreboding intrusion into my investigation. The pig knew, in any case, that I had been searching for it. All else would be coincidence beyond reason. The apartment break-in might be a kind of flirtation, an invitation for me to continue the pig-walks. Yet it just as easily could have been a threat, perhaps even a death-threat, an indication of the pig's power and its dark omniscience. I begin to feel dejected.

***

As the week goes on I entertain the very foolish idea that I am somehow mistaken, that Brinon or Brinnon or Brynan or Britain had not seen the pig at all. It could've been one of the neighborhood dogs. It could've even been a goat or a sheep, and this would've left me to continue my investigations, my pig-walks, in peace. Yet I know this is vanity and self-deception. I am bitter and unhappy because I have lost the purpose of my pig-walks, and—worse even—I have not even seen the pig for myself. I am like a man who has been struck by lightning, pleading dumb, proffering his palms and the soles of his feet, yelling out at the world that something more enormous than himself has passed through his body.

***

I am walking back through Highland Park one afternoon when I stop to pet Scout the collie. Her owner is old and bald and, I soon learn, spends much of his time in Fort Myers, Florida. He seems to be partly deaf and, because of this, laughs at nearly everything I say. He has the kind of tan that goes right up to his eyeballs. I scratch just behind Scout's ear. She looks for me to throw a tennis ball. For no reason I ask the man if he has ever seen a pig in the neighborhood; he grows very quiet and asks me to repeat myself. I do, and he gives a grave, slow, unyielding nod. He starts to dig around in the back pocket of his blue jeans. I wait. Birds go swooning and pitching across the open field. Scout's eyes are like forged steel. Finally, the man pulls out a folded note and asks me to read it when I have some privacy. Then he puts a leash onto Scout and they go down off the hill towards the parking lot.

***

All the note says is a phone number. [16] When I call it, the pig answers. I know it's the pig, I know it's the pig from the very start. At first it's only oinking and snorting and snuffling but then I begin to make sense of it, I begin to pick out a stray word here and there. And, after a while, with the phone pressed up to my ear, the pig starts to explain everything to me. It tells me all the secrets of what has happened. It gives me advice and facts, it dispels myths and gives reasons—tender reasons—and it leaves me with a series of instructions. I listen, I do what it says. I copy out a message, and later I will leave the message under a package of bacon in the Kroger Supermarket at the very end of Peters Creek Road. And, when the pig hangs up, I'm left in the glow of some supreme knowledge, an ancient logic, I am left with an insight, beyond all doubt, into the machinery at the heart of things.

***

And yet I find, in the days after, that I miss the pig as it once was, the pig that could appear and disappear in my mind at will. I miss the pig when it might've been anything at all, when it was still suspended between this world and that. And I miss, maybe even worse, my own faith in something so mysterious and indefinite and flighty, my belief when it was not an assured noun but a leaping and riotous verb—torn-off, broken, wondrous, smoldering.

__

[1] https://images.thdstatic.com/catalog/pdfImages/34/345af752-884a-4317-adba-231bbe15f2f8.pdf: There's a suggestion here that inhalation, ingestion, or even retinal implantation of phosphor causes no serious adverse effects, much less any kind of hallucinatory visions.

[2] https://oldsouthwest.org/history: The official website describes the neighborhood architecture as "eclectic," which is true. Also true is that we are "blessed with styles ranging from the simple I-form to the flamboyant Queen Anne, playful Victorian, stately Colonial and Georgian Revivals, Tudor Revival, and Shingle, as well as vernacular mixes." I live in a Tudor Revival built in the 1890s, but I would like to think it is also flamboyant, playful, and even stately.

[3] 37.261313, -79.942860: It was at this exact spot.

[4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Reims-Cathedral: Sometimes I visited this cathedral. But all the separate times have stuck themselves together into a single memory, so it is the same as if I only went once. And I am guilty of repeating myself over and over and over again, and anyways each time I entered the cathedral I would say the same thing: "It's so big in here it's like we're outside!"

[5] https://cherneydevelopment.com/in-the-community/fountain-square/: I have never been inside Fountain Square. The building is so close that this is like never having entered one of the rooms of my own home. If you close your eyes you can even feel the workers and the patients inside, chattering away and breathing and living out the shape of their days. You have to wonder if there's a fountain, unseen, at the center.

[6] https://obituaries.newburyportnews.com/obituary/anna-robinson-772701291: The paragraphs here are wonderfully short and concise. They can't help but give you hope that you might summarize a whole life and file it away for later inspection. My grandmother had a sharp, hooked nose, and in the photographs of her as a young woman she is beautiful in a cold and very distant way. Sometimes, out of nowhere, she would become angry and agitated and say things like, "You'll all be sorry one day." This always scared me quite a lot. You'll notice this isn't mentioned in the obituary.

[7] https://www.saratogasweets.com/peppermint-pig/: The peppermint pigs of Saratoga Springs "came to represent much more" than health, prosperity, or happiness; they are a symbol—a somewhat nonsensical encapsulation—of some idyllic Victorian fantasy, a kind of Christmas Carol sans ghosts. There's something almost premonitory, foreboding, about taking a hammer to the pancetta of that symbol. Equally foreboding is the trademarking of Peppermint Pig™, this sudden fear of litigation.

[8] https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/poison/tinsel/: Yes, I'm aware of the danger that tinsel poses to certain housepets. But this dog, you should know, was old and entirely blind. He couldn't have known the tinsel was on his collar. He'd even let woodchucks and rabbits run loose right before his eyes. Yet he had a wisdom about him, as if he could see through to another world.

[9] https://roanoke.com/news/local/casey-stinky-subject-roanoke-/article_46a85e60-8-515a-b90f-485db3dc3986.html: The journalist here proposes that Roanoke might be the home of certain "freakishly colored skunks." This is the kind of genetic anomaly that you might spend your whole life trying to understand. And still, you might end up with nothing but tiny polar bears, and the smell of them on your fingers.

[10] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/the-transportive-thai-diner: I ordered the vegetable phat see eiw, but midway through the meal I had to go inside and stand in the corner of the bathroom and use my phone to Shazam a song playing over the stereo. It was called "Where Is the Love?" by the band Flash, off the compilation Thai Beat A Go-Go Vol. 3. Often, I cannot enjoy a song until I know its name.

[11] https://kushner.com/project/puck/: The building is owned by Jared and Charles Kushner, but you can still do your best to appreciate the high windows and the iron gating and the golden statues of Puck looking in a hand mirror and fondling himself.

[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/magazine/saab-recommendation.html: The connection a Saab owner (a "Snaab") feels for their Saab is a defiant and senseless and deeply jubilant one, prefaced largely on the fact that the cars are no longer manufactured. It is a love that involves the withholding of time from itself, the reaching out and attaching of oneself to a hunk of steel that is already half-sunk into the abyss.

[13] Hunting and hallucinogens: The use psychoactive and other plants to improve the hunting ability of dogs: The scientists here speculate that hallucinogens could allow hunting dogs to more reliably locate "explosives, drugs, [and] human remains." This is what we're looking for, what we can't let go: the potential for—and the evidence of—loss, death, and decay.

[14] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nether%20regions: I use the phrase "nether regions" here as a substitute for "Hell," "the underworld," "everlasting fire," etc., not in its more euphemistic turn as a reference to "genitals and buttocks."

[15] https://roanoke.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/pig-suspected-in-southwest-apartment-havoc/article_8343ab3f-c23f-5d8a
-94ae-096c723c13e5.html#tracking-source=home-top-story: Here, the journalist refuses to fully confirm the pig as the perpetrator of the "Southwest Apartment Havoc." During our brief interview (I'm referred to only as "another tenant" in the article), I explained the facts of the situation to her. She remained skeptical, but the potential truth of the event must have been enticing enough for her to include the pig in the headline.

[16] (520) 783-6328 

__

In this essay, I'm trying hard to hold a few things in my brain at once. Here are a few Wikipedia articles that help me exercise this skill:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_future_now_in_the_past

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptids

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films