# The Bowl The Joint Postmortem Commission met at a Travelodge off the A4 because no one in possession of consecrated ground would let the others stand on theirs. The dog sat on the carpet of Conference Suite B, between a folding table and a kettle, and looked from face to face with the polite, slightly worried expression of a Labrador who has been asked to wait while someone fetches his lead. His name, on the documentation, was Biscuit. He had died of a tumour the size of a grapefruit in a vet's surgery in Reading, and had returned, three weeks ago, to the same back garden, in the same body, with a small bald patch where the IV had gone in. The body's reappearance was not in dispute. There were papers. There were a great many papers. The relevant fact, agreed by Rome and the Royal Society and a wet-eyed clerical attaché from Tehran, was that the soul, whatever you wanted to call it, had been somewhere and had now come back, and could be measured on its way in and out at a confidence interval that made denial professionally embarrassing. The afterlife, in other words, had been confirmed. The public had taken it about as well as could be expected, which is to say churches had filled for a week and emptied again, and the betting markets had paid out on suicide rates that turned out lower than predicted, because it transpired that very few people had actually doubted, only suspected, and the difference is the whole of religion. What had not been confirmed was anything else. The dog had not, on his return, dictated the structure of the heavens, named the true prophet, or settled the filioque. He had eaten a sausage, urinated in the kitchen, and gone to sleep under the radiator. The Commission had been convened to determine whether he had brought back any information at all, and if so, whose. There was, in the corner of Conference Suite B, on a trolley, a thing the Americans had sent. It was the size of a thick paperback, and it hummed, and it was meant to render canine somethings into broken English by a process the engineers would not let the Commission describe in writing. It had run for forty minutes on the first morning. It had returned the words FEED and NOT and STILL, in that order, and then a long blank. The technician had explained that the vocabulary was small, that the verb set was smaller, that the syntax was the subject of three rounds of NDAs. The Commission had thanked him. The trolley had been pushed against the wall. No one had asked it anything since. Dr. Yusra Hadid had been invited to sit on the Commission as a neutral observer, which meant that over a long career she had managed to insult every tradition represented at the table in roughly equal measure. She was fifty-one. She wanted to go home. She was thinking about her cat. "He looked at the Mishnah again," said Rabbi Stein. "Twice now. That's twice." "He looked at the kettle," said the man from the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, whose name was Father Ercolani and who had been crying intermittently for forty minutes. "He has looked at the kettle six times. Are we to canonise the kettle." "With respect," said Stein. "With respect," said Ercolani. The dog yawned. The Hindu delegate, a quiet woman from a Vaishnava institution in Chennai who had introduced herself as Dr. Iyer and then said almost nothing for two days, leaned forward and offered him a piece of banana on the flat of her palm. He sniffed it without interest and looked away. "Note," said the secretary, "that the subject declines prasad." "He declined the host yesterday," said Ercolani. "He declined the wafer and he declined the wine. He declined a piece of matzoh. He declined a date. He declined." "He's a dog," said Yusra. "He doesn't like fruit." The room turned to look at her. She had not, until this moment, contributed anything to the proceedings except a written statement, in week one, regretting her own presence. "He's a dog," she said again, more quietly. "Could we, perhaps, consider that as a working hypothesis." --- The Sunni delegate was called Brother Khalid and he had spent most of the first day staring at the small stack of sacred texts the Commission had assembled in the centre of the table. The texts were there in case the dog wished to indicate one. He had not. On the second morning Yusra came in early to refill her coffee and found Khalid alone in the room with the Mishnah open in front of him, upside-down, his finger moving slowly across the lines of Hebrew as if he could read them by touch. He looked up. He did not flinch. He said, "I have wanted to look at this book since I was nine years old. My father said it was forbidden. I am sixty-four." "It isn't forbidden," she said. "I know," he said. "He was wrong about many things. I loved him." He closed the book and set it back on the stack, the right way up, with great care. "You will not write this down." "No." "Thank you." He paused at the door. He looked back at the trolley with the humming American thing on it, and at the dog asleep under the radiator, and he said, in the tone of a man trying out a sentence for the first time, "We have built an instrument that measures the part of a person which was turned toward someone else. Then we are surprised when it returns a dog." He went out before she could answer. She made her coffee. The dog, who had been asleep under the radiator, opened one eye, looked at her, and closed it again. --- By the third day Biscuit had stopped eating altogether and Father Ercolani had taken to filling his pockets with the complimentary biscuits from the lobby, which were small, hard, and individually wrapped in plastic stamped with the Travelodge logo. Yusra had watched him do it twice. She thought at first he was stealing them out of nervousness. By the second time she understood he was saving them, the way one saves things during a war, and that he was not aware he was doing it, and that some part of him had decided, without consulting the rest, that the rationing had begun. The dog's belly had gone tight. There was a smell coming off him that was not the smell of a sick dog, not exactly. It was the smell of something fermenting under cloth. When he stood up he stood with his hind legs slightly apart, as if the ground between them was sore. He had developed, on the underside of his abdomen, a swelling the size of a clementine which the Vatican's veterinary consultant had palpated twice and pronounced "consistent with the original neoplasm" before going outside to be sick in the car park. The original neoplasm was supposed to be in a yellow bin in Reading. The original neoplasm had been removed and incinerated. The vet's notes were in the file. Someone had brought the file. "It is the body," said Ercolani. "He is reconstituting the body. The disease is part of the body." "He is dying again," said Stein. "He cannot die again. He has died." "He is dying again," said Stein. The American thing on the trolley, which had been left running for the record, hummed and produced, with the slowness of a bad printer, a single line. FEED. NOT ME. The technician, who had been reading a paperback, sat up. He wrote it down. He looked at the dog. The dog was not looking at the technician. The dog was looking at the cupboard under the kitchenette sink. The dog got up. He walked, with the careful gait of an old man with a hernia, to the kitchenette at the back of the suite, where the Commission's tea things were laid out on a tray. He stood in front of the cupboard under the sink for a moment. Then he took the cupboard's handle in his teeth and pulled it open, and dragged out, with some difficulty, a beige plastic bowl. The bowl was empty. It had been empty, presumably, since the last conference of regional sales managers. He carried the bowl back to the centre of the room and set it down on the carpet between Yusra's feet and Father Ercolani's, and looked up at them, and waited. "He wants water," said Iyer. Yusra was already on her knees. She had moved before she had thought, the way one moves when a child holds something out, and she had her hand on the dog's flank before she registered that her hand was on the dog's flank, and what she felt under the fur was the steady patience of an animal carrying something it could not put down. Hunger and thirst did not enter into it. She had watched him for three days. He had been watching her back. Some part of her, lying awake the night before with the sodium lights of the car park making a yellow square on the ceiling, had already done the work; her hand had only just got the message. A Labrador, asked what to do about a person it loves who will not eat, will bring that person things. It will bring sticks and shoes and dead birds and the contents of the bin and lay them at the person's feet and watch the person's face, hopefully, for the moment of taking. It will do this for as long as it takes. If the person does not take, the Labrador, eventually, faced with the accumulated offering and the unbearable fact of the person's hunger, will eat the offering itself, on the person's behalf, because something has to be done with it and the dog's body is the only body to hand. The dog's eyes were brown and tired and fixed on her face. "How long," she said to him, quietly, "has He not been eating." The dog put his head on her knee. It was an answer. It was not an answer that would survive committee. "Dr. Hadid," said Stein, behind her. "Yusra. What are you doing." She had not, she realised, been crying, but her face was wet anyway, in the way one's face is wet on a cold morning without one's permission. She picked up the bowl. She walked it to the kitchenette. She filled it, not with water, and not with food, because there was nothing in the kitchenette that would have done, but with the small hard biscuits from the bowl on the counter, the ones from the lobby, which Father Ercolani had not yet got round to pocketing that morning because the dog had moved first. She tipped them into the bowl. They made the small irrelevant sound of plastic on plastic. She set the bowl down on the carpet. She said, to no one in particular, and to whatever was listening, and possibly to the bowl itself, "Eat something. Please." The dog let out a long breath. His belly, visibly, went down. Not all the way. Some way. He lay down on the carpet next to the bowl, with the slow controlled collapse of an animal that has been carrying a thing for a long time and has just been told it can put the thing down. He did not eat. He closed his eyes. Behind her, Stein said, "Is that," and stopped. Iyer said, "Oh." Ercolani said nothing. Ercolani had his hand in his pocket, on the biscuits there, and he was looking at the dog, and his mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out of it, which is, in its way, a form of prayer. The American machine hummed on the trolley and printed nothing. It had not been built for this. Nothing had. --- She went out into the corridor. The corridor smelled of carpet shampoo and, faintly, of bacon from the breakfast buffet two floors down. She stood with her back against the wall. She still had the bowl in her hands, which was stupid; she had brought the bowl out with her without noticing, and now she didn't know where to put it down. Through the door, muffled, she could hear them starting. Stein's voice, careful. Ercolani's, recovering. Khalid's, surprisingly, the loudest of the three. The phrase she caught, quite clearly, was "no precedent for a layperson," and then the door closed properly and the rest was carpet. No precedent for a layperson. She thought about that. She thought about the showbread on the table in the Holy of Holies, which was replaced every week, and which the priests ate, in the end, because somebody had to, because God, on the available evidence, had never quite got round to it. She thought about her cat, who would be hungry by now, who had been fed by a neighbour for eight days and would be furious about the substitution. She thought about her father, who had been a chemist in Mosul and who had stopped praying, late in life, on the grounds that the management was clearly absent and the staff were stealing. She had told her father, the last time she saw him, that she still believed in something, vaguely, in her way. She had said it because he was dying and she had wanted to give him something. She said, aloud, in the corridor, with the bowl in her hands, "I lied to you, Baba." It came out flatter than she meant. She had not rehearsed it. She heard it land in the carpet and stay there. She had to put a hand against the wall. Inside the room, the dog was, presumably, still breathing. Or not. She did not, just then, go back in to check. She stood in the corridor of a Travelodge near Heathrow, holding an empty plastic bowl that smelled of nothing at all, and listened to the planes going over, one after another, full of people on their way somewhere, and tried to remember whether she had left the kitchen window open for the cat.