Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  Beau was nervous and didn’t want to lie down, so we tried it standing up. First I’m too tentative with the needle, and don’t poke hard enough. Then I poke too deeply, pinching up a mound of skin so that the tip of the needle comes out the other side. He flinches slightly but doesn’t seem to mind too much. I think I’ll never get this right, but I try again. The needle’s in, but the life-giving waters aren’t flowing; the technician says to move the needle a little, as it must be pressing up against muscle, and I do—then, blessedly, the liquid starts to flow. Or rather, to drip slowly; it takes five minutes or so for a bag to drain. We wait. Beau’s patient, in his accommodating way, though I can tell by the set of his hips and the way he’s holding his head up that he’d like to leave.

  “How long,” I ask, making conversation, “do we have to do this?”

  She says, “For the rest of his life.”

  I haven’t really considered this. This is going to be part of each day from now on? Can I actually do this at home without somebody who knows what they’re doing watching?

  Then she says, “Well, we’ve gotten half a liter in him, that’s good for the first time, we can stop now.” I pull the needle out from the lump that’s formed on his back, where the water’s not absorbed yet. A little spurt starts leaking out, tinged rosy with his blood. She hurries to tell me that’s normal, not to worry. Suddenly I become aware of how much he’s shedding; I am kneeling with my arms around him, and my black jeans and shirt are absolutely thick with his blond hairs. I look down to the floor and see I’m kneeling in the bloody water that’s leaked from him. I’m on my knees in the ruin of him, and I feel like I can see the parameters of his life in front of me.

  I’m kneeling in a bloody room at the bottom of the world and I can see right where we’re going, but I push that feeling down, and thank the technician. I buy two big plastic sacks heavy with bags of fluid and needles, and we start to make our walk home. I have one sack in each hand, as well as the leash, and Beau’s leading the way, happy to be out of there. But I feel like I’m still in that room, on that floor; I can hardly see what’s ahead of us. Though Beau can. He leads us across Fourth and Lafayette, across Broadway; when we’re nearly home, someone looks at him with that kind of compassion again—it must be his thinness, the protuberant hip bones, the white muzzle—and something about seeing him reflected in a stranger’s eyes entirely devastates me. The resolve I’d had to hold myself together in the doctor’s office melts; I’m liquid, my eyes filling with tears so I can barely see the sidewalk.

  It’s just then that Beau stops and turns his head to look at me, and with a kind of delicate deliberation brings his mouth near my hand, parting his lips just slightly—and snatches the wool glove from my hand. It’s his favorite joke, and he goes striding forward with the limp, black thing in his jaws, his tail high and plumed in the air, all happiness. He knows what to do.

  Aurora Borealis Theater. The shop window’s the only source of light; East Ninth Street’s empty and dim. This is the hour when no one’s looking, when anything can happen. And so, a show begins: lamps swell behind the midnight curtain; a faint, tinkling music, barely audible through the glass, grows a little firmer and more insistent; then the curtain opens, pulled upward at either side, slowly ascending into the wings. Where are we?

  The chamber of a scholar, an aging man who comes here daily, into his sanctum sanctorum of books, a privacy in which he’s surrounded himself with evidence of passion: dictionaries, shells, bird bones, feathers, nests, jars of shards, bits of the places he’s been, physical testimony. He’s reading at his desk, his puppet hands turning the pages of a large, old book, and then slowly his gaze seems to change, slowly his head begins to lower toward the desktop, like an object moving through water or oil, toward the book. His hands come together in front of him on the open pages, his forehead comes to rest upon his hands. Stillness, silence.

  Then we watch—it isn’t so much terrible as wonderful, how the top of his head springs open, as if the skull had two doors that could fly open like loading docks in a city sidewalk. Inside there it’s dark, and then that darkness gradually fills the stage, until the whole space before us is the inside of the scholar’s dream.

  One thing after another begins to float by, random, the odd apparitions that float unbidden through his thoughts. Shoes, keys, an old kite. Lost articles: a child’s beloved pocketknife, owned very briefly, with a horse’s head embedded under a bit of domed glass in its handle, handsome profile ringed by lucky horseshoes and green clover. My grandmother’s rose-gold wedding ring, my mother’s turquoise bracelet, a denim jacket I embroidered when I was sixteen. A pair of handmade leather moccasins, their buckles cinched by round brass rings, stolen at the Yippee Free Festival in a downtown park in Tucson, Arizona, in 1969. Where are these things going, hurrying by in the silent whirlwind? Down the tunnel of disappearance—no, not down, but up: here things are sucked up and out of the world, one after the other. Here come some of the objects from his study: that bird’s nest collected one winter, in a thicket on the Cape, with a single empty blue egg inside. A love letter received and never acted upon. Sheet of marbled paper from Venice. A box of books and papers lost on one of our moves, containing my passport. It’s a sort of cozy whirlwind, strangely, nothing in any great hurry, everything moving past, allowing itself to be seen on the wing.

  The scholar—of course, I am that man, with his books and stacks of old manuscripts and archives and clutter—is seeking a position in relation to the tornado. A practiced accounting of each flying element? A discipline of detachment? A study of the human work of cataloging and accommodating each absence? Each body moves upward and outward, in the oldest story. Nothing stays. But something’s in my hand, I’m holding on, what is it?

  I’m back on the street, looking through the window, staring at the cardboard theater’s closed curtain. The weight in my hand’s a leash, of course; I look down at my feet, and there is my golden companion, sitting up alertly, gazing at the space where the play has been with complete attention.

  Entr’acte

  On Being a Fool

  The wind that blows lost things away, in my dream of a puppet play, blows through this poem of Emily Dickinson’s.

  The Wind did’nt come from the Orchard—today—

  Further than that—

  Nor stop to play with the Hay

  Nor threaten a Hat—

  He’s a transitive fellow—very—

  Rely on that

  If He leave a Burr at the door

  We know he has climbed a Fir—

  But the Fir is Where—Declare—

  Were you ever there?

  If he brings Odors of Clovers—

  And that is His business—not Ours—

  Then He has been with the Mowers—

  Whetting away the Hours

  To sweet pauses of Hay—

  His way—of a June Day—

  If He fling Sand, and Pebble—

  Little Boy’s Hats—and stubble—

  With an occasional steeple—

  And a hoarse “Get out of the Way, I say,”

  Who’d be the fool to stay?

  Would you—Say—

  Would you be the fool to stay?

  The poem begins in a playful, almost childlike mood—this is a wind that doesn’t stop to “play with the hay” or to “threaten a hat.” But Dickinson swiftly takes her poem deeper—as is often the case, she works with a light surface in order to startle us with the extraordinary ferocity and gravity at which the poem arrives.

  This wind isn’t an ordinary one; it doesn’t come just from the nearby orchard, but from some more distant, less knowable locale. It’s the wind of contingency, and it might bring evidence of distant possibilities, though what it carries to us can’t be fully known (that Fir is Where?) or controlled. What the wind brings us is his business, not ours; it isn’t within the scope of human power whether he flings at us fragrance or sand, pebbles or steeples or skyscrapers. The
wind blows where it pleases, acts as it chooses; anything can, and will, be blown away, and therefore it’s a fool’s errand to hold on. Who would be that sort of fool, who won’t let go of attachment because all we’re attached to will be stripped from us?

  The implication of the last three lines—with their repeated lingering over the question—is not only that the speaker in this poem is herself that sort of fool, but that she knows her reader is, too. There’s nowhere to stand, outside of that wind. But how can one live, being battered and blown again and again? How does one keep agreeing to fall in love over the long haul of erasure?

  Chapter Three

  This morning, in front of the post office on Eighteenth Street, a reddish golden retriever sat with her leash looped around the iron scallops of a tree well. She was completely focused on the absence of the person who’d gone in to mail a letter; I suppose it isn’t even right to call this an “absence,” since for her the owner is so palpable a mental fact that she can really admit nothing else: the beeping mail truck backing up, the jackhammering and tar-rolling in front of the new condos across the street, not even the immaculate small terrier clipping by, his legs practically blurring with their unlikely speed. Not a glance. I’ve knelt down a few feet away to study her concentration. Her forehead is wrinkled a little, a bit of worry or concern—then she turns to me, makes eye contact, a sudden disarming, winning smile, which may just as well mean Who are you? as Hello!—and then she immediately turns her head back to the task of watching the bronze door of the post office as if her life depended on it.

  Which it does, actually.

  I mean this physically, in the sense of shelter and food, and of the dog’s position in an incomprehensible environment—just what would an unsupervised retriever do on Eighteenth Street in Manhattan?—but I mean more than that, too. The dog exists in relation; her identity has been built around a particular person or persons, a set of social circumstances. They are, to put it grandly, her ontological ground, the location of who she is, from which all possibilities of action and all choices arise.

  This accounts for the terrible depression of dogs in shelters, and their evident eagerness to make contact, those who still have the will to do so. I once wrote a poem about the animal shelter in Brewster, Massachusetts, which is where I found Beau. I tried to describe these abandoned ones, and to do so with the kind of double meaning that poetry allows through the breaking of the line, which invites us to hold multiple meanings in mind. I wrote:

  No one’s dog is nothing but eagerness…

  I mean that both ways. No one’s dog is nothing, in the sense that there is no relationship in which these dogs can ground themselves, to build a set of relations which are, one might argue, dogness. And I also mean the statement to be read all the way through: No one’s dog is nothing but eagerness. Readiness to begin again, to connect, to start over. It’s amazing how even beaten dogs, creatures subjected to the most mindless cruelty, will often seem to say to us, Yes, I register you, hello, what are our possibilities? Unless this characteristic freshness and responsiveness are wounded out of them, and they collapse into despair.

  Why do we love a species so dependent upon us? It isn’t unusual for human beings to actually shrink from expressions of dependence, especially in other people: we dislike a display of need, the acknowledgment of powerlessness.

  We are not helping our dogs move toward independence, as we do with children—and as, of course, children long to do. The dog’s need for us is permanent. The great evolutionary success of their species lies in their ability to convince us of our need for them.

  They have accomplished this by making themselves extraordinarily appealing. It is no easy matter to get at the source of this appeal, which exists at levels beneath the verbal, deep within ourselves. But I can point to some aspects of our delight—seven of them, to be exact.

  One

  The eyes. The gaze that registers us, fascinated, devoted, characterized by an absolute, unqualified interest. The dog’s look registers whatever strikes it, whatever matters. In the country, this seems to be practically everything, every bit of noise or motion. The urban dog learns to select, from the great city wall of stimuli, the interesting ones. But the most interesting other for the dog—or at least so we fervently hope!—is ourselves.

  A woman on my block walks a squarish, solid retriever named Hartley every day. Hartley is strikingly handsome and magnetic; he draws the interest of passersby, but the woman likes to simply keep walking. Once or twice, I have expressed delight in Hartley, greeting him, kneeling down to acknowledge his broad chest and handsome, chunky paws, the finely white teeth and splendidly pink tongue that he flicks toward my beard. I think this expression of attraction would have been acceptable to the woman Paul and I have called, because we don’t know her, “Hartley’s mother,” had Hartley not so clearly returned my attraction. He sat in a strikingly upright pose and looked into my face; he offered his paw; he rose on all fours and leaned toward me, putting his weight right against my body, a favorite retriever gesture of affection. I will let you feel the pressure of me, the physicality of my regard for you— something like that seemed to be communicated, and Hartley’s mother was not pleased. Whether she said or merely indicated, “That’s enough, Hartley, time for our walk,” I don’t remember, but it was interesting to feel that both I and the dog had been chastised—I for intruding, presumably, upon the love of her life. And Hartley? For sharing his open gaze, which ought to be directed solely toward his mistress? Perhaps she depends on Hartley’s steady regard to fix her—in many senses of that word. To fix her position in space and time, since being known locates us, and to underline her identity as one who cares for, as one who is central, as the subject at the center of her world. “I am I,” wrote Gertrude Stein, “because my little dog knows me.” But if her little dog should one day turn his look to someone else? Hartley is, after all, her mirror, and one’s own reflection is necessarily a somewhat private affair.

  Two

  Much has been said of the dog’s nearly absolute refusal of judgment. You never have to dress up for them, they have no sense of human social status, they care nothing about race, economic level, gender, sexual orientation, or any human form of privilege. How useful Arden and Beau were to me after Wally died—not only because their daily needs kept me tethered to the ordinary world of responsibility and schedules, but because I could talk and cry to them for half the day and they didn’t mind in the least, never found me morbid or fixated, and never once indicated that I should get over it.

  When we talk about this unconditional acceptance, we are really describing a fixity of devotion, a deep reliability. The source of this is, in part, the dog’s lack of agency; they cannot really do otherwise than to love us, can they? But that’s a negative way to express the fact that by entering into relationship with them, we become that ontological ground I described earlier. The contract that we enter into is one that dogs take with ultimate seriousness. We may choose—we often, sadly, do—to abandon them, to relinquish our side of the bargain, but dogs do not regard this as a choice; they intend, one might say, to honor this pact with all their hearts, or perhaps the less anthrocentric way to phrase that would be to say that in part a dog simply is an intention to be with you, to be conjoined. Thus they are the pattern of fidelity—Fido!—the very template of enduring loyalty, of love without the prospect of abandonment.

  This characteristic—and its difference from the vagaries of all human love—lies behind the most sentimental representations of relationships between people and animals. I love these stories: the heroic dog in Provincetown who went daily and lay beside his master’s grave until his own death came, and now is represented by a beautiful granite sculpture that still waits and watches. He is best visited on a snowy evening, when the white field around him and the dusting on his tail and paws seem to bring the eager, calm face into focus. The nineteenth-century Saint Bernard in a little town in the northwest corner of Iowa, who saved a toddle
r from the railroad tracks, picking the child up by her nightgown and carrying her out of the way of the oncoming train, and who is remembered, to this day, by his own life-size bronze image beside the old, disused tracks. In both these stories, the fixity of the dog’s look was so noted that it seemed to call for preservation, for a replica, so that the eyes of stone or metal may continue in some permanent version of their chosen work.

  If I persist in my assertion that sentimentality is a mask for anger, it isn’t hard to point toward the particular source behind this brand of sentimentality: that another human being will never bring to us the same unqualified, unconditional regard that a dog does. Our full immersion in language brings with it qualification and condition; once we enter the world of signs, we can never again be so single-minded.

  The fact that I know that stories of faithful dogs are kitsch does not in the least diminish their power. When Wally was ill, for instance, stuck in a rented hospital bed in our living room, losing his mental faculties to a progressive viral brain infection, he liked to watch kids’ movies, so I’d rent videos for him, which he could play again and again. As soon as one was finished, he had absolutely no memory of having seen it, and was perfectly happy to watch it again. I bought some headphones for him, so his movies wouldn’t drive me crazy. When he watched the Disney remake of The Incredible Journey, a tale in which two intrepid dogs and a cat make their way back to their human family through one tight squeeze after another until the inevitable reunion, I made sure he wore them. I didn’t want my mind to be infiltrated by those images and their soundtrack, because I knew they’d break my heart. Never mind that my circumstances were already genuinely heartbreaking; I was managing that, somehow, but what I couldn’t bear was the representation of the heartbreaking.