I have an old dog. He limps when he walks and smells like a gas factory, but I love him anyway. Lately, it’s too much for him to go on walks—he can barely make it a quarter mile, and being that he’s a sixty-pound boxer and I’m no pup myself, I can’t exactly carry him if he breaks down halfway home—so I’ve started taking him for drives.
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. He likes to sit in the back seat and rest his chin on the open car window, and I love to watch his droopy lips flutter in the side-view mirror when I open the engine up to thirty in a twenty-five zone.
We always end in our happy place back home—me rewarding him for his efforts with a treat, and he showing his appreciation by flapping his jowls and splattering the kitchen cabinets with foam—but today, things turned out differently. Today we took a left turn onto Nightingale Lane, and things haven’t felt right since. You see, there’s no such street as Nightingale Lane. There never has been. Not around here, anyway. Yet this morning, we found it.
But first, introductions. My dog’s name is Jupiter, Pittie for short and sometimes Jupalicious when I’m feeling particularly loquacious. But never Jupe. He doesn’t like that, and he won’t respond to it, so don’t even try. But call him by just about any other variation and he’s right there in your face begging for a jerky treat, a sloppy kiss, or a belly rub. More often than not, though, he’ll pass on all three in favor of a ride in the car. He’s a good dog. Best I ever knew. Who am I to deny him?
This morning, we were in the middle of our usual circuit, weaving our way up and down the numbered streets on the east side of town where the homes are sleepy and you don’t get tailgated for driving the speed limit. Life moves fast enough; it doesn’t need our help.
We were taking our time, and maybe that’s the only reason I saw it in the first place.
It was a small flashing light. Like someone reflecting sunlight off a compact mirror. Only it seemed to be hovering in midair about twenty feet above the street.
As we approached it, I slowed the car to a crawl and observed that the light was almost directly above a street sign that read NIGHTINGALE LN.
Before I even had a chance to register the fact this was not a street that had ever existed, I felt what I can only describe as an inexplicable “pull”—an instinctive urge to crank the steering wheel to the left and turn onto the street. As we did, we passed beneath the light, and it gave out one final, blinding pulse and disappeared.
I drew the back of my hand over my eyelids and blinked to clear my vision. What I saw when I looked out through the windshield was no place I had ever seen before. It was also no place I hadn’t seen before, either.
It was just a street like any other, with homes and lawns and sidewalks and a line painted down the middle. It was also impossible. Because who had ever heard of a Nightingale Lane around here? Not me.
I cast a sideways look into the back seat and regarded Jupiter, who seemed not to have noticed anything strange at all. Of late, I’ve taken to calling him Fiver (Jupiter being the fifth planet from the sun and all, you know how nicknames take on evolutionary paths of their own), but at this particular moment, I was feeling a tad too bewildered for play-talk, so I addressed him by his legal name instead.
“Jupiter,” I said, “does any of this look familiar to you?”
He didn’t respond. Just stared tiredly out the window at the sidewalk and the driveways and the houses as they rolled slowly past as if to say, “It’s all the same to me, Pops.”
I asked him again in case he didn’t hear. Remember, he’s an old dog, so I spoke up good and loud. Still, he said nothing.
Jupiter’s silence wasn’t exactly out of character—nor would it be for anyone else to whom I might pose the same question. I imagine if I shook someone by the shoulders and informed them I’d just hung a Louie on Nightingale and that was impossible because there was no such street, they’d look at me with a “so what?” expression, maybe even fake a smile like I was about to hit ’em with a lousy punch line.
Only in this case, there was no joke to be told—simply incontrovertible truth. And if I could unzip my skull and show you that inside my head lives a perfectly alphabetized list of every single street name in my town, you might understand the gravity of my discovery. We all have strange ticks and odd abilities. Mine just so happens to be that. And on this day, my little knack was proving quite problematic. I didn’t need Jupiter’s concurrence. I was certain.
“It appears,” I said, “that we’ve fallen off the known map and are in unchartered territory. The question now is: should we be worried?”
Jupiter didn’t seem too concerned, so instead of slamming on the brakes, turning around, and trying to find my way back to the world of predictable street names and maps that made sense, I continued on down the street.
Call it a spell of bravado. A dash of daring. An action born of restlessness, or a blip of existential angst amid the otherwise even-keeled tapestry of a life. The fact was, nothing this exciting had happened to either of us in years, and probably never to Jupiter if you don’t count the time he tried to make friends with a family of raccoons in the backyard and got peed on for his troubles.
As for me, I wanted to see where this led, and when Jupiter sputtered a blast of rear-end indifference, I took it as a sign of unspoken consent.
First thing I did was look for landmarks. We’d entered Nightingale from 32nd, which meant we ought to have been running parallel to the main road just a handful of blocks away. Yet when I looked up and over the rooftops of the homes along the street, I could see no visible signs of the topography that by all rights ought to have been there.
Gone were the innumerable trees that towered in rows up and down the old neighborhood streets. In their absence, only sky.
Even the distant mountain peaks that punctuated the horizon had somehow vanished, leaving me to wonder if I’d crashed into someone’s front yard and was hallucinating it all.
I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror to make sure one half of my face wasn’t drooping. Flexed my arms and wiggled my fingers in frenetic succession. Nothing. Said, “Transylvanian tree trimmers are trained to trim the tallest Transylvanian trees,” to make sure I wasn’t slurring my speech. I wasn’t. Everything was all right with me. It was the street that was all wrong.
Ahead of us, Nightingale unfurled in an impossibly straight line. I awaited the arrival of the next cross street, anything that might help orient me to my position on the map, but none came. It was as if the street went on forever.
Next, I turned my attention to the homes along the street. There was nothing remarkable or suspicious about them. Nothing at all ominous or peculiar or out of the ordinary. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that there was something not quite right about them.
You see, many of the old streets in my town have homes dating back to the forties and fifties, and even though most have been kept up over time, there’s always an aura about those old structures that seems to sigh, “I may be old, but I’m proud.”
Looking at them, you can almost see a slouch in their stance, like dignified old men whose once-powerful bones now struggle to maintain the weight of their flesh.
It’s a circumstance that I myself am becoming increasingly familiar with, and I’m the last person to hold anything against anyone—flesh and bone or otherwise—for succumbing to the ravages of age. I’m also the last person to hold it against someone or something for failing to grow old when it’s their time. But in the case of the homes on Nightingale Lane, I was downright wary.
These houses were old. And yet there was an undeniable vivacity emanating from them that belied their age.
They looked vibrant. Youthful. And if it hadn’t been for their distinctly World War II-era architecture, I might have been convinced the neighborhood was brand new.
But people don’t build replicas of homes from bygone eras, at least not entire subdivisions of them. And these homes weren’t the product of gentrification by third-generation yuppies with tech jobs and ridiculously high incomes. I was certain no amount of paint, window replacement, or landscaping could accomplish what Nightingale Lane had going on.
“Could it?” I asked aloud.
I was talking to myself again, but to make myself feel better about it, I sent the question in Jupiter’s general direction, certain he wouldn’t chime in even if he suddenly did develop the power of speech.
Besides, he was much too busy staring out the back window at the horde of children who had emerged from their homes and were now running down the sidewalk to catch up with us.
Had I been blasting “Turkey in the Straw” from the car stereo and driving anything other than a weather-beaten sedan, I’d have thought the kids had mistaken me for the ice cream man—but instead of speeding up and making them work for it like every ice cream man in every town throughout history, I took my foot off the gas and slowed down.
There were about ten or twelve of them in all, and as they drew up alongside us, I observed that the boys all had military-style crewcuts that leveled their faces with a striking severity. The girls wore their hair in pigtails so tight they made their heads look pinched and painful.
All were dressed in clothing I hadn’t seen worn since the days of little Ronnie Howard on The Andy Griffith Show. But there was something even more inexplicable about them than their austere fashion sense might indicate.
It was their hands. Most were empty, but a few of them held objects you just don’t see anymore. A baseball here. A jump rope there. Not a single child brandished a smartphone or any other electronic device. This struck me as almost supernaturally strange. Even more curious than a street called Nightingale that wasn’t supposed to exist.
“What do you say?” I asked Jupiter. “Should we ask where we are?”
As unsure as I was about doing so, I slowed the car to a near crawl and pushed the button to lower the passenger-side power window. A collective gasp arose from the children, who sounded like an audience witnessing a magic trick.
One of the children, a girl of about eight with a ribbon in her hair and a brightly colored hula hoop trailing behind her, exclaimed, “What kind of car is that??”
Then came another voice, this one distinctly adult. It cut through the din of the children’s chicken-babble like an air raid siren. “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!” the voice boomed.
It was too late.
The hideous growl of metal against metal pierced my ears, and something exploded against my chest.
The last thought I had before I spiraled into pillowy darkness was how clear the sky overhead looked, and how strangely bright the sun was for this time of the morning.
I might have slept for days, but when I woke up and found myself lying on the sidewalk with someone’s bunched-up sweater underneath my head, they told me I’d been out only a minute.
The first thing I wanted to know was how Jupiter was, and I pawed and flailed and tried to sit up until a soft, feminine voice assured me he was okay.
“The dog’s fine,” she said. “Lie still. You fainted.”
Underneath the woman’s voice and very nearby was what sounded like two men arguing. From the periphery of my vision, I thought I saw scuffling shapes. One man was angrily describing whereupon my body he was going to insert his boot, and another seemed to be trying to talk him out of it.
Then things began to come together, and it dawned on me that I must have struck something with my car. Immediately, I thought of the children—strangely dressed and alarmingly curious though they were, they were still kids, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt any of them. Had one of them crossed out in front of me? Did I take my eyes off the road for too long and accidentally run one of them over?
Something like a cracked whimper came out of my throat when I asked the question, and again the kind and gentle voice told me everyone was alright. Then she said, “But we’re not sure about your . . . car?”
That questioning lilt in the woman’s voice brought me suddenly back to full consciousness. A shock of pain screamed across my midsection and settled in the center of my chest where the seatbelt had stopped my flight and the airbag had gone off like a bomb.
I lifted my head and looked to the street. A cloud of steam or white smoke was still rising from the crushed front end of my car. It had been caved in by one of those restored antiques people only ever drive on Sundays or to car shows. It was an Etzel, or a Cadillac, or something like that. Cars have never been my thing. Thankfully, whatever it was appeared not to have a scratch on it.
“They sure knew how to make ’em in the old days,” I heard myself remark, and this time the quaver in my voice subsided and I sounded like myself again.
I went to sit up, and someone immediately had one hand on the small of my back and another in the space between my shoulders.
“Are you sure you’re okay to sit up?” the woman asked.
I nodded and once again told her how sorry I was.
Then I called for Jupiter. I heard the rapid patter of feet against the sidewalk as he came to me, but no sooner had he pounced onto my lap than I knew something strange had taken place—something else, something even more peculiar than discovering a street that did not exist and children who looked like characters out of an anti-communist propaganda film.
Taking Jupiter by the underarms, I held him out at arms’ length.
“This is not my dog.”
The hairs on Jupiter’s face were no longer white but a shocking dark. His dull, faded coat shone like he’d been soaked in brilliantine. Even the feel of his flesh beneath the fur felt different—smooth and elastic, not rough and loose. But it wasn’t just this that caused me to believe the dog presently caught up in an uncontrolled full-body wiggle in my hands was not my Jupiter. It was the size of him.
Somehow, Jupiter had become a puppy again.
A few of the children had been ushered back to their homes by their parents, but others stayed to watch the spectacle. The little girl with the hula hoop was standing nearby amid a small crowd of onlookers that had assembled, most of them adults, some of them probably parents, no doubt all of them cursing me. Even the woman at my elbow now seemed to be losing her mellow edge.
“Of course he’s your dog,” she said curtly, beginning to lose her patience with me. It was not a tone to which I was a stranger. Patience is an attribute that rarely arrives before sixty. “He was in your back seat.”
Now the hula hoop girl’s eyes were darting between Jupiter and the wreck of my car with suspicion. She seemed to be the only person besides me to have seen the change Jupiter had undergone, and when our eyes met, she turned immediately to a man standing beside her and whispered something into his ear.
The man, who I took to be the girl’s father, was dressed in loose-fitting slacks cinched high at the waist, and he was doing something I hadn’t seen anyone under the age of sixty doing in years. He was smoking a pipe. His gaze fixed on the mangled form of my car, and he lifted a finger and gestured to it.
“How fast were you going, mister?” he asked, and when I told him that I never drive over thirty on residential streets, he scoffed. “Then how do you explain all that damage? Unless this thing is made of paper.”
Slowly, the tuning dial on my shattered attention span began to zero in. I looked at the woman still kneeling beside me and took note of her dress. It had a simple flowery pattern and was long, down to the heels. The upper portion was enclosed in a tight collar, and her arms were nearly fully sleeved.
Perhaps this wouldn’t have struck me as strange if it had been the only thing about her that didn’t fit, but in her case, the plot thickened. Her short hair was curled tightly around the crown of her head in a style that reminded me of Ginger Rogers, that old song-and-dance star from the black-and-white movie era. Except Ginger Rogers always seemed to be smiling. This lady was looking at me like I was a bug in a jar.
For seemingly the first time since my arrival on Nightingale Lane, my eyes took in the whole of my surroundings, and I wondered how I could have missed it at first sight. Parked in almost every driveway as far as the eye could see were cars the size of boats. At least that’s what we call them now, with their enormous steel frames, formidable chrome bumpers, truck-sized grills, and immense white-walled tires. Back during the era in which they were popular, they used to just be called cars. That my own car—or what was left of it—did not resemble any of the others in the neighborhood came into sudden, sharp focus.
For a long moment, no one said a word. It was as if the people of Nightingale Lane and I had simultaneously become aware of something neither side dared utter. And then a change came over them, one by one, like a chilling wave of understanding, and I felt the urgent need to put distance between myself and this strange place.
Pulling Jupiter into my chest, I stumbled to my feet and, without stopping, moved in the direction of my disfigured car. I was looking at the damaged front end and hoping it was still drivable when the man with the pipe put a hand out to stop me.
“Hold on,” he said. “Who are you?”
I told him my name and even gave him Jupiter’s, telling him it was Pittie for short but never, ever Jupe, but the man’s scowl only grew worse, and I worried that if I didn’t get back into my car and drive us the heck out of here, we might never make it home in time for our evening stories, let alone ever.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble,” I said, stammering over my consonants and staring at my feet as I moved closer to my car. “Now if you’ll excuse us . . . we have someplace else to be.”
What else could I say? By this point, I’d begun to feel a sensation at the base of my neck that was more of an itch than a sting and likely had nothing to do with the fender-bender (if I could even call it that, seeing as how the whole front end of my car had taken on the look of crumpled aluminum foil). It felt more like a primitive imperative. It was screaming at me to run. So I did.
Well, maybe I didn’t exactly run. But I moved quickly enough that it must have taken them by surprise because no one even tried to get in my way. The element of surprise is critical in these situations, you see, and I used it to bolt for the open driver’s side door of my car.
The Ginger Rogers lookalike uttered a shocked syllable—something like “m’ah?”—and the pipe man shouted after me, demanding that I stop or he’d call the police. Me? It had been a very long time since I’d surrendered my personal autonomy to anyone, and I simply ignored the request, tossed Jupiter into the front seat, and jumped in after him.
What I saw next is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Probably long after, even.
You know how sometimes you see something flash before your eyes but don’t process it until much later? These are the times when you wonder if you really saw what you saw, or if memory is playing cruel tricks. But in that brief moment between my exiting the street and flopping back into the front seat of my car, as my face sailed past the rearview mirror, I caught a glimpse of my reflection and saw the face of a young man.
Although it took only a second or two for me to slam the car door closed and turn the key in the ignition, it must have been a lifetime, because when I turned my eyes back to the mirror, I was back to my same old self again.
With a violent shudder, the engine came alive—They sure know how to make ’em these days! I nearly sobbed in relief—and I threw the car into drive.
The small crowd, which had begun to close a circle around us, pulled quickly back onto the safety of their front lawns and watched us go. Some of them were shaking their fists and others were glad to see us leave, but what I remember most as I cranked the wheel and took off in the opposite direction were the expressions on the faces of the children. They were looking not at me but Jupiter, who now gaped out the open window with his droopy white face flapping like an old flag on a used car lot.
As the car shambled and shook back the way we’d come, I saw up ahead the mysterious flashing light that had guided us in, and for the first time since the days of my wild and reckless youth, I punched the accelerator, jerked the steering wheel hard to the left, and took the corner back onto 32nd Street on screaming tires. In a burst of white light and the crackle of an invisible doorway slamming shut, the entrance to Nightingale Lane was no more.
Jupiter and I made it back home safe and sound. I imagine that our hearts lifted in shared relief as we pulled into the driveway of our home with its time-bleached face and drooping bones, but I can’t speak for Jupiter.
I like to think he doesn’t hold it against me, my ripping him away from the chance to be a pup again, and that if given the choice, he would have come home willingly. But even if he’d wanted to stay, the world of Nightingale Lane was one in which we did not belong. And if there’s anything I’ve come to know for certain in this world, it’s my place within it: right here and now, with whatever time I have left, in the company of a pooch too old to do much more than love and be loved in return.
Later, Jupiter and I shared a banana on the back porch in the shade of our old-growth trees and thought no more of Nightingale Lane.