The images were a bit unusual, perhaps thanks to the curious expressions on the faces of some of their subjects — curious or even suspicious of the dog taking their photo. Of course, Robert took pictures of other things, too: candid photos of people looking away from the camera, no particular expression; cracks in the pavement; a dead bird; an abandoned napkin; streetlight shadows; things like that.

  Robert didn’t have his own phone to take photos with, so he was always jumping into other people’s pictures. Some of those pictures had been Bill’s. Bill had never changed the factory settings on his phone, so when he deleted a photo, it didn’t really get deleted — it just went into the trash. Bill never emptied the trash, so unwanted photos had piled up: detritus that could be restored at any time with the push of a button. One of the photos in his phone’s trash can was submitted to the police as further evidence. It came to be known as ‘Wide’.

  ‘So it seems that there were initially two versions of Canyon Proposal,’ the detective said. ‘One is a close-up taken at fifteen times magnification, and the other was taken with a wide-angle camera. Bill’s phone has a dual camera, so it can take two types of picture at once. Bill had turned the feature off, but Robert must have turned it back on. The close-up picture will save automatically, but if you want to save the wide-angle picture, you have to press another button. In short, we think that Robert turned on the dual-camera feature on Bill’s phone, took a picture, and chose to save the close up. Does this seem possible?’

  ‘Bill’s phone is a Samsung, right?’ the manager asked. ‘Mine is an iPhone, but it has a dual camera function, too. Maybe Robert learned by watching me. Or one of our guests. They come from all over the world. Robert knows the differences between phone models.’

  ‘Let’s ask Robert,’ the detective said, taking his own old iPhone out. He placed it on a tripod and asked, ‘Robert, can you take a picture of me?’

  Robert moved towards the phone and tapped it with his front paw before tilting his head and turning away.

  ‘He can’t do it,’ said one of the detective’s colleagues, watching from the back of the room, just as the man exclaimed, ‘Oh, the touch ID!’ and unlocked the mobile phone with his fingerprint. Robert approached the phone again, tilted his head, and tapped the screen lightly. It had been hard for the detectives to believe that Robert could understand them — the whole time they spoke, Robert had only yawned or scratched his ears. His demeanour changed, however, as soon as he saw the unlocked phone. Robert looked at the detective and his surroundings for a moment, then, having completed his reconnaissance, took a picture. One shot, then another.

  In the first picture, the detective was on the right side of the screen. There was the orange juice on his desk, the Hawaiian calendar on the wall to the left. It looked like a plumeria flower was blooming out of the juice. In the second picture, the detective was on the left, with a pair of handcuffs and a pile of ‘wanted’ posters to his right. His expression changed between the two pictures, even though they’d been taken mere seconds apart.

  ‘He’s playing with the composition!’ said one police officer, handing Robert his phone. ‘He thinks before composing a picture. Look, he moved the frame a little bit.’

  Robert took pictures on a total of eight mobile phones that day, using the dual camera function on phones that had it and quickly moving the frame between pictures on phones that didn’t.

  After Robert and the manager left, the detective studied the picture recovered from Bill’s phone: the ‘Wide’ version of Canyon Proposal. He couldn’t find anything in it that would help with his missing-persons case, but there was slightly more in frame in this picture than in the other Canyon Proposal. The side mirror of Bill’s car was visible in this version. In the mirror’s reflection, you could see a dog pressing his paw on a phone screen. The dog was upright, touching the screen with his front right paw. So this was Robert’s photo.

  The investigation into Lina’s whereabouts ended when two bodies were discovered in Joshua Tree National Park. Shooter’s Point, the cliff the couple had been photographed on three weeks prior, was more than six hundred kilometres from where their bodies were found. Joshua Tree had been engulfed in a mid-July heatwave much more agonising than usual when Lina and her companion met their bittersweet end. The police reported that they had made an extreme choice after losing their way amid the sweltering heat; one member of the couple had shot the other before turning the gun on themself. Rumours spread that they’d gone to Joshua Tree specifically to take their own lives, that they’d exchanged texts containing the phrase ‘lovers’ euthanasia’ and the sentence, ‘Let’s do it as elegantly as possible — our last drive together!’ Lina’s father, the head of the company Waldmann Stationery, had apparently opposed the relationship.

  The fact that Lina’s father was the chairman of Waldmann, however, wasn’t revealed until long after the investigation began. Lina’s last name wasn’t Waldmann, but that didn’t mean she had no relationship with her father. Mr Waldmann had taken Lina on camping trips when she was young; he had roasted marshmallows with her outside their tent. Once, they’d even stayed the night at Joshua Tree National Park.

  Since his daughter disappeared, Mr Waldmann had been steadfast in his attempt to find out what Lina’s last steps were; even after her body was discovered, he didn’t stop. This was how he met Robert. According to the detective, when Mr Waldmann was handed printouts of Canyon Proposal and Robert in the Canyon — the picture with Robert reflected in the car’s side mirror — he sank to the ground and cried.

  As the summer season reached its peak, the lodge — Robert’s home — was plagued by a surge of guests. Due to the aforementioned pictures, Robert had become a star; everyone wanted to see him. The manager needed to close the lodge for two months of renovations, but had to wait until winter for the crowds to die down. Before the venue entered its hibernation, Mr Waldmann returned once more, for his third visit. The lodge manager was surprised to see him; he’d read a recent article about Mr Waldmann cancelling outside engagements for the foreseeable future. The eighty-five-year-old chairman spoke slowly. He had heard about the lodge’s renovations, he said, and wondered if he could spend time with Robert during the winter closure. As soon as he said this, Robert trotted towards the car parked outside the lodge, Mr Waldmann’s cap dangling from his mouth. It was such a clear expression of intent that the manager felt disappointed.

  Robert did not come back at the end of the winter, nor by the time spring rolled around. He became a ‘permanent guest’ at Mr Waldmann’s Palm Springs villa. But Robert didn’t forget his old friend, and when the lodge manager was invited to visit Palm Springs, Robert dipped his paw in paint and left his autograph on a copy of Robert in the Canyon as a gift. At the lodge, the print with Robert’s paw was hung on the wall, and the gift shop began to sell postcards and scarves bearing the image.

  It was around this time that Bill Mori began to post screenshots of articles about copyright disputes on his social media accounts. The night that Bill had said, ‘It wasn’t me. Bill Mori did not take that photo,’ he’d chosen to distance himself from Canyon Proposal, but at some point he’d begun to draw close again. According to the art world, the photo was ‘Robert’s’, but now Bill wondered if a portion of the rights belonged to him as well.

  Bill’s first action was to send a message informing the manager of the lodge that a dog could not hold the photos’ copyrights, and that he couldn’t use the photos to make a profit. The manager said he was selling photos and souvenirs with Robert’s permission, but Bill retorted that this was like getting permission from a ‘random passerby’. Having previously shunned public attention, Bill went to the press and asked, ‘Who placed my mobile phone on the table the morning I took Canyon Proposal? You really think it was a dog?

  ‘Dogs, birds, cats, elk, wind — any of them could touch the screen of a mobile phone that’s placed in front of them. Just because I didn’t press the button, does that mean it’s not my picture? If a drop of rain hit the phone, would the resulting photo belong to the raindrop? You have to understand this photo as conceptual art. I set up my phone like a trap, ready to capture any image that happened to come in its way. I put my phone there on purpose. I was the one who named the photo Canyon Proposal, posted the picture online, and helped with the investigation. My intention was for the work to be open to all possibilities, including the possibility of a dog passing by and pressing the button.’

  From Bill’s point of view, there was no difference between the lodge selling Canyon Proposal and the lodge selling Robert in the Canyon.

  ‘Both pictures were taken on my mobile phone,’ he said in frustration. ‘It doesn’t matter who took them.’ But there wasn’t much evidence for Bill’s purported aesthetic and conceptual rationale.

  The statement that came back to bite Bill the most, though, was, ‘It wasn’t me. Bill Mori did not take that picture.’ Bill had denied ownership of the photo because he was worried about getting caught up in a legal dispute. When he changed his mind, the ensuing case lasted over a year, and Bill lost. Bill was on edge the whole time, while the manager of the lodge became more and more relaxed about potential copyright violations. Mr Waldmann and Robert had his back.

  That didn’t mean, though, that Robert held the copyrights. The results of the case were as follows:

  Bill Mori does not own the copyright to Canyon Proposal.

  Robert does not own the copyright to Canyon Proposal.

  No one owns the copyright to this photo, so anyone may profit from it. The actions of the lodge manager are not illegal.

  Experts stated that it would have been difficult for Bill Mori to obtain the copyright even if he hadn’t, as he eventually had, posted that he hadn’t taken the picture. Bill would have had to prove that he had planned the photo’s composition, which he was unable to do. He gave up fighting.

  People naturally listened to the loudest voice in the dispute: the lodge manager. The manager was now selling more photos with Robert’s pawprint than ever. Robert no longer lived at the lodge, but in a way, he was ever-present.

  More than a year later, Robert appeared alongside Mr Waldmann at an exhibition for the artist Felix Gonzalez Torres. It wasn’t the first time they had gone to an art museum together, but that day a particularly large number of people saw them. Mr Waldmann looked more relaxed than before — perhaps due to a change in his facial expression, perhaps a change in his style — and everyone knew it was Robert’s influence. Many of the museumgoers stole glances at Robert, but he didn’t seem bothered — he was too busy looking at the art, sitting in Mr Waldmann’s arms.

  The piece they lingered in front of longest was Untitled (Perfect Lovers): two clocks arranged side by side. Mr Waldmann whispered something to Robert; later, an interviewer would ask him what he had said.

  ‘What did I tell Robert? You really want to know? Oh, you’re serious. Hmm … well, I was asking Robert whether he thought I should buy the piece.’ (Everyone laughed at Mr Waldmann’s facetious grin.) ‘But then we found out that the art would be destroyed at the end of the exhibition. So I asked Robert, why don’t we make a copy of the clocks to put in our house?’

  The interview contained a few follow-up questions about Mr Waldmann’s plans to create a knock-off, but he refused to answer them. A few years later, though, he published the following essay in an art magazine.

  When Amatrice was hit with an earthquake, the village clock stopped ticking between 3.36 and 3.37. The clock in the Banda Aceh Mosque stopped at 8.25 when the city was hit by a tsunami. In Nagasaki, it was 11.02; in Chernobyl, 1.24; in Fukushima, 2.48. Analogue clocks don’t lie. When the world stops, the numbers on digital clocks evaporate instantly; the needles on an analogue clock, however, show the moment that they stopped moving.

  My personal moment of destruction was in the summer, sometime between 5.00 and 6.00 pm. A desire to run from that moment coexists with a simultaneous desire to return, to know the exact minute and second it occurred. When Felix Gonzales Torres’ piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers) was destroyed at the end of its exhibition, I felt a simultaneous sense of pain and freedom. Was it possible for me to do something similar? Robert and I decided to copy the destruction. We bought two identical round clocks. I put them on the floor, so Robert could see them. We inserted batteries and set the clocks to the current time. The clocks began to move in tandem.

  The two clocks were governed by increasingly different rhythms, and at some point the time they told diverged entirely. One clock stopped, and the other continued to tick. I was mesmerised by the difference, but Robert helped me snap out of it. Two of his photos saved me. In one photo of the clocks, their needles are out of step. The left clock was permanently stuck at three o’clock, and the right clock was about to reach nine thirty. In another, Robert is pushing the needle of one of the clocks to make it align with the other.

  In reality, after a while, you realise that one clock is stopped while the other is moving, but look: the photo creates a world in which the two clocks show the same time. You don’t need to distinguish between the clock that’s ticking and the one that isn’t. They’re like two sets of eyes, meeting each other’s gaze for a brief moment.

  There were only two things I could do after seeing this picture. One, to cry, and two, to create a world dedicated to him.

  Mr Waldmann was dying when he wrote the essay. After his death, the Robert Foundation was set up with his assets. According to the executor of his will, Mr Waldmann had decided that, upon his death, twenty million dollars would be given to Robert. Separate provisions would be made for Danny, who had served as Robert’s interpreter.

  Mr Waldmann’s writing was also published at the beginning of a four-hundred-page book about the Robert Foundation, alongside Robert’s photos. The book was too long to finish during a flight, but I brought it anyway. It was so large that every time I turned the page, it felt like a gust of wind was blowing out from the spine. The book contained the photos that had made Robert famous. They still weren’t copyrighted, but everyone knew them as Robert’s pictures. They were arranged in sets of two, the first on one side of the page and the second on the other. The second photo was always a wider version of the first.

  Photo 1. A woman sits by the window in a bagel shop, eating a bagel. At the next table, a man in khaki is eating the same type of bagel. The woman cheerfully looks out the window at the blue sky.

  Photo 2. The woman’s expression remains the same, but in this version, we can see more of the view outside the window. The man in khaki is walking out of the shop. Two cops are pointing a gun at him.

  If you turned to the next page, you’d find the title of the work, ‘Bagels and Arrest’, followed by a few words of commentary:

  It only takes a few seconds for the atmosphere to change. That’s what Robert was able to capture.

  When I flipped to yet another page, I noticed the woman sitting in the aisle seat looking at my book. Pointing, she asked, ‘Is that Tanzania?’ before quickly correcting herself.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s an island. I thought it was a bunch of wildebeests. My eyesight isn’t very good.’

  The picture in question was an aerial shot of a number of islands. I didn’t know where Tanzania was. All I knew was Robert had taken the picture. At first glance, it did look like a mass migration of wildebeests.

  ‘Is that a travel magazine?’ the woman asked.

  ‘It’s a book about ecosystems,’ I replied. That was how I felt. The book made me think of things like the deep sea, or deep space. It contained worlds that I’d never otherwise encounter, but that still somehow affected me. If I was a shallow-water fish, the Robert Foundation was a deep-sea creature. These two beings were unlikely to meet, but sometimes seawaters got mixed up.

  The pilot announced over the intercom that we were heading into a bout of turbulence. Suddenly the islands on the page really felt like wildebeests on the move. How many of them would get eaten by crocodiles? The young and sick were in the greatest danger. I looked at one of the smallest islands and, in the next moment, looking at the next picture, realised that it had disappeared. Like a lie, like it never had existed. I blinked. There were so many islands that I couldn’t even tell which one had vanished. I knew that that this was photo 1. On the next page was something entirely different.

  2.

  One year earlier, I had received a call from the Robert Foundation. It was the same day I delivered a Shake Shack burger to apartment 1903. I had met all sorts of people while working as a delivery person, but none as perplexing as this man. At the time, I’d been working for the delivery app Bballi for about a month. It was so easy to get hired there that it barely took any time at all to start making deliveries. A lot of people signed up thinking that they’d begin working the next day, maybe even the next week, but orders would come in so suddenly that they were able to start immediately.

  The Shake Shack order came in at 5.00 pm, and the delivery was complete at 5.08. The app told me that, in eight minutes, I had traversed a radius of six hundred metres. However, it didn’t take into account what was road and what wasn’t, so the actual distance I had travelled was much greater. When I reached my destination, bag in hand, a man already standing in the hallway greeted me curtly.

  ‘My hamburger must already be cold,’ he said. ‘And I bet my shake is melted, too.’

  I didn’t know how to respond. The man repeated that his burger had to be cold, and his shake had to be melted, as I stroked the bag with my gloved hand. Were my hand movements provoking him? He looked out the window and grumbled that he could hardly believe I was a delivery person.

  ‘Walking up with your hair fluttering in the wind,’ he said. ‘Were you out on a leisurely stroll? What about my hamburger?’

 

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