No offense to Lisa, but when I think about my life, I think about Commander Zideo. My first understanding of human emotion and pain was from wrestling with him, puncturing his finger with my needle-sharp puppy teeth, the horror of seeing him recoil, swear, and walk into another room. So wracked was I with guilt that I found the nearest shoe—an nearly the size of my entire body and reeking with “gnaw me” signals—and chewed a hole through the toe.

This did not repair his mood, but Lisa laughed so hard that he had no choice other than to do the same. With a little perspective, he smiled, and my heart soared.

From then on, I thought of him as mine; the primary human in my life, my point person. We became a team in my eyes, each with his own responsibilities and skillset. Obviously, he did the talking, while I handled security detail. If someone was at the door, he would speak to them through the cracked door while I barked as vociferously as I knew how. When we passed other dogs and their humans during walks, he would wave at them and I would sniff or growl at the fur-brother. One must stay vigilant against strange dogs luring other dogs’ humans away from them, after all.

I have said that a short memory is only part of why we dogs go completely bugfuck-bananas when our humans return home. In truth, it has more to do with the fragility of our station than the function of our minds. When so much of your energy and thought goes into the wellbeing of one creature, it becomes very easy to give into anxieties when you cannot see them. Thus, even the briefest and most inconsequential visit to the store for you erodes our confidence in your return. After a few minutes we think “Was it something I said?” and after an hour we think “I should probably start getting used to this new reality in which I never see my human again,” and begin strategizing methods of escape, such as gnawing our way through the front door.

Each absence of my designated human’s registers on a scale from Concerning to Traumatic, and thus I can recall each and every departure and return just as well as you can recall the beginning and end of a story you have read. It’s true. Commander Zideo has left the house to go to R-Mart 846 times. I have confirmed this because he brought me there twice, allowing me to match up the smells on his body with their origin. It is a place of many colors and smells and even sounds, although I am not allowed to go inside. Even from the sidewalk or the inside of Zideo’s Honda Micro-Commuter EV, it can be an exciting place. Sometimes even before he gets in the front doors, the bearded man who spends his time waiting for people outside the front doors educates him on how “public schools are actually terrorist training camps” and “PC culture is a tool of the lizard people infiltrating the highest levels of American government.” Am I jealous that I can’t follow Zideo into the R-Mart and experience such high-minded philosophy myself? Certainly. But it’s all a bit beyond my dog mind, if we’re being honest. Besides, I get the benefit of R-Mart visits anyway, because Zideo can’t help but throw me a Funion, and I will sometimes shred the wrappers from the sausage biscuits he leaves in his office in search of leftover cheese particles. So, win-win.

As I stood on the frigid cliffside, with neither sound nor scent of my human, all his past absences flashed before my mind. I have heard that something similar happens to humans when they are afforded a premonition of their impending demise. I fended them off, because I knew I needed to get out of here, and Helmgarth too. Focus, Cormac.

I was not afraid to die—no dog is, when it comes down to it. (Have you seen us when we encounter a possum or a car we don’t recognize?) I was not even all that afraid for Helmgarth to die, as he hung by a leather strap from the side of the cliff before me. His death should be prevented if possible, I knew, but it would have ranked higher on my priority list if he had been my human. As it stood, I needed horizontal space to get to the tuxedo-wearing seneschal in order to help him, and as we both clung to a rock face, there was none.

Above me, the pitiless night sky was no more than a ragged fissure between two cliffs. Around me the dreadful wind keened against jutting stone. Below me, a featureless dark beckoned, abetted by its accomplice, gravity.

Did this make sense? No. I had seen the Shard from the other landmass floating in the starry night, the Screenwilds, and knew it was limited, finite. A patchwork hunk of a thousand gameworld remnants. If there was a gulf this deep, I should have been able to see all the way to the opposite side. So how could it be that it plunged infinitely below me?

They say that if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. Unfortunately, this dun canvas served as grounds for a parade of memories to march across. I lost control of my own mind staring into that void, and could no more resist the gravity of that remembrance than I could fly.

I saw the car ride to university, not the cramped Micro-Commuter EV but Lisa’s larger four-door vehicle with just barely enough space to for me to pace the back seat. Lisa and Zideo excited, but the weather had been sullen with the presentiment of what was to come. There were other young quasi-adults moving luggage into the large building and hugging their relations before parting, and I knew then that I would be separated from the greatest dude who had ever lived. I raised hell, whining and yipping and was eventually forced to wait in the car. The rain drowned out my whimpers, and when Lisa returned, wet and preoccupied and hopeful, she was alone. The drive back was awful, but Lisa gave me an entire burger patty for my troubles that night, which did soothe my trouble mind for a while.

This absence was hurtful but temporary, and Lisa herself returned with him some months later.

He resided at home for some time after, and all was right with the world. Mine, anyway, although Commander Zideo lost himself in his work. I am assuming that’s what he was doing—work—when he typed on his medium-sized and glowing desk rectangle, spoke and and made faces into his pocket glowing rectangle, and Did Streams. He would be very animated during Streams, and I would sometimes look up to see what was happening. Usually just shapes on the medium glowing rectangle, although I sometimes thought I could see people there: people with weapons, people with outlandish clothing, people seen from various distances. How he contained little people within the glowing rectangle was very much out of my wheelhouse (as the dandier version of Helmgarth might say), but I had a theory that this was some kind of communication. Previously, I had seen his sister Krystal contained in a pocket rectangle, and she greeted me by name and said I was a good boy. Her smile was radiant, and all the more so as it resembled Zideo’s. I do not think he shrank her down and put her inside his pocket rectangle, but rather I think this was some kind of arcane power of communication over long distances. I expect it is the same technology as the cloning window in the bathroom, a surface which shows a very lifelike recreation of whoever it can see. I know now that there is not a second Cormac living in the walls of the master bathroom, but I still have no satisfying explanation.

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The Streams became his job. He even got money from them, which I know because I was there when he thrust his hands into the air, staring at the medium rectangle on his desk, and turned to me and said, “I got paid!”

The second absence I recalled, there on the cliff, was a night that he went to dinner with Franklin and Luna. While he had not mentioned their names, I matched their scents to the children I knew from before. The male and female humans came over to hang out and do homework before the disastrous day that we had left him at university.

Luna was black-haired and Zideo forgot me when she was in the room, though I did not hold this against her. She wore black fingernails and black necklaces, and smelled of the tang of hair product. Franklin, on the other hand, reeked of some potent chemical malodor that he had applied liberally to his body, created obviously by humans to evoke artificial pine trees and seaside resorts and also basketball. I sneezed uncontrollably when too close to him, or even moderately far away from him for too long of a time. He, too, paid Luna a disproportionate amount of attention when the three were together studying. The two visited many times, Luna throwing the irresistible orange ball and laughing when I brought it back but refused to return it to her. Franklin rolled his eyes and told Zideo he needed to train the dog better, then immediately began discoursing on a business plan for a dog training startup.

The night he went to see them, he was tense. He kept beginning tasks and forgetting them, putting toothpaste on his toothbrush and then tapping away with his thumbs on his pocket rectangle. He went from room to room accomplishing little. Finally he told Lisa he would cancel, and before he could do so through his rectangle, she snatched it out of his hand, holding him by the shoulder and saying “Just. Go. They’re your friends.”

He did, and he was out for a long time. Given his mental state when he left, I harbored serious concerns that this would be another multi-month absence. I paced the house nervously, as dogs are wont to do, seeking clues and reassurance. I found it in the medium rectangle that was still on his desk, its fan humming softly. If there was one thing I knew, it was that wherever his medium glowing rectangle lived, he did too.

He returned that night, quite unhappy. I wrote this off to the convolutions of human social interactions, and made myself available for head scratches, which are often as much for the giver’s benefit as the recipient’s. He did not take me up on them, and Lisa kept stopping by and speaking loudly through his door: “Everybody’s life is different, sweetie. Everybody moves at their own pace.” He put on headphones and lost himself in the medium rectangle on his desk that night, but did not—as far as I could tell—Do A Stream. I knew he would bounce back, and even if he was not happy, at least he was here.

Lisa, hoping to adjust his mental state, printed out some “job postings” and left them taped on the refrigerator.

The third absence terrified me utterly, because he packed up his glowing rectangle entirely and took it with him, but not me. Leaning back in through the doorway with an unwieldy garbage bag of machine components slung over his shoulder, he shouted across the house to Lisa. He said he was going to a place called Down Town for something called Tournament because Team Plasma was scouting new members, and would be back that night. I was unconvinced, but proven wrong. The quiet, whining whir of his Micro-Commuter EV woke me, and soon his key was scraping in the lock at the front door. I played it cool. He was ecstatic and set up his medium glowing rectangle hurriedly, halting every few minutes to tap something into his pocket rectangle, and saying things like, “I cannot believe it” and “Ya boy got in.” He smelled like excitement and potato chips and a thousand different people’s sweat that night. His sleep schedule became disastrous for the following couple of weeks, and dark crescents formed beneath his eyes.

And then, he moved out without a goodbye, barely even packing anything but his medium rectangle and some toiletries and clothes. I did not know who Team Plasma was, or why he desired to live with him or her. I have heard that humans will leave their dens to be with their mates, instead of the much less complex approach dogs take. I thought that whoever Team Plasma was, he or she must be quite beautiful.

I will not dwell on this absence, because as you know it was temporary, but long. Months by human reckoning, years by that of a dog. My heart was broken, and I began to adjust to the “new normal” of a life without the number one greatest human of all time and space, giver of the best head scratches and ear rubs, finder of the tickle spot on my lower spine.

When he returned, which I have told already, I was elated—and that made one of us.

I am not sure how I made it across the gap. I must have channeled my inner goat. I have vague memories, like a slideshow, of my claws scrabbling tentatively against rock, leather in my teeth, and Helmgarth’s heaving and strained voice as I lifted him to a handhold, and he lifted me to the snowy ridge.

Helmgarth panted like a dog and collapsed when we reached the top. I could not recreate the scene if I tried—our scaling of the cliffside defied all probability. I gazed over the edge as the pebbles I dislodged were carried away by the ghastly wind. The seneschal squeezed his eyes tight and stuck his hands elbow-deep into the snow, saying, “Aarrghgh! I’ll be feeling this one for days, old bean.” After a time, he pulled them back out and shook them in the air, even after clearing off the ice. “We should find a good spot to make a fire,” he said, and reached habitually for the buckles of his backpack before remembering it was gone.

A nearby snowdrift exploded, showering us both with cold debris. Tattooed arms scrambled beneath it, and pink and aqua hair shook. Commander Zideo stood. He blinked, not with his eyes, but with his existence, then became real and tangible enough for me to pin him to the ground with big dog smooches.

“Hold—pffpblpt— hold on, bud.” He embraced me, but pushed me aside.

“Well,” said Helmgarth. “Albja slap me sideways. It’s really you, old bean!”

“I saw her,” said Zideo. “I saw Addrion.”

Helmgarth blinked. “Where?”

He pointed across the howling gulf to the opposite ridge.