The scene occurs after a liquor-store stop on Hillhurst. The living dog approaches a muscular stranger whose gentleness is immediately emphasized. He praises the dog's calmness, then says he had to put his own dog down three weeks earlier. His voice breaks; the narrator ends up holding a crying stranger.
The title's “II” implies a prior object without supplying the reader with a clean serial apparatus. That small unresolved numbering is characteristic of the corpus's habit of making the archive feel larger than the object currently in view.
The story is connected to Death & Mortality, intimacy, Los Angeles civic life, and the recurring role of dogs as social intermediaries.