by Mark Doty
So, Hammer used his teeth to take hold of a rope attached to the back of the cart, and began to walk, gingerly, backwards, in a very straight line, tugging the cart up toward the entrance of the auditorium. It was the last thing a dog would “naturally” do, walk backwards for forty feet in a very straight line, tugging a weight. What startled me was perhaps not so much that Hammer has been trained to do this unlikely thing, but that he so clearly believed in its absolute importance, the necessity of getting it right. It seemed, this quiet act, a triumph of will and nerve.
Those who don’t believe in animal character or intelligence will probably have turned from these pages long ago, and with them safely out of earshot, I can relax into a confident assertion that a dog’s eyes may brim with intelligence, preference, temperament, eagerness, forms of memory, assertions of desire. Anyway, if language is metaphor, a system of signs tacked none too firmly to the real, then our words only point imprecisely toward our own feelings anyway, and may as well point just as inexactly toward those of dogs.
A golden retriever is perfectly capable of walking through a city, knowing there will be few such walks to come, and I am certain that his vision might thus be heightened, made more fiercely poignant. And I am likewise sure—through whatever alchemy of bonding takes place between those who live together over years—that his human companion might also be filled with something like dog-vision, his own eyesight taking in something of that shine which death must lend to his animal’s sense of the world.
Dr. Cain looks worriedly at Beau’s diminished aspect, and then he sees the wobble. “That’s not kidney disease,” he says. There’s something else, something neurological. A brain tumor?
In the past, Dr. Cain has always offered options, even when they were unlikely or extreme. For the kidney problems, he had explained to me, there was a procedure at the Animal Medical Center uptown, a transplant. The cost would be something like thirty thousand dollars a kidney, and even I, who am shamelessly devoted to my dogs, think that’s decadent—how could you justify that expense to prolong an animal’s life, with all the suffering in the world? Wouldn’t it just be more suffering, that surgery—and where do those extra organs come from, anyway?
For this new difficulty, though, Dr. Cain presents no choices. He says, “This could move very quickly.”
Oh bright shade, friendly ghost, couldn’t you come and snatch the black glove of my narrative now?
We’re walking home, turning onto Lafayette, when the wobble in Beau’s legs gets decidedly worse, he staggers a bit toward a building, and, right beside one of those shuttered metal openings in the street, flung open now for a delivery of rice or beans or who knows what, he falls down. He tries again, and he can’t stand up, so he simply stays down on all fours, and looks at me.
I’m kneeling beside him, and I’m trying to hold myself together, and I’m starting to weep. There are passersby who’ve noticed us; there’s a kind woman who says, “Is there something I can do to help?” People in New York, in the majority, love dogs, as if they’re grateful for animal presence in the angled and concrete realm in which they dwell. I’m thanking the people who stop, no, he’s just having a hard time, I’m saying, but I know his failing is written large on my face, and the woman walks on, with a little exhalation and a look that acknowledges our mutual helplessness. What comes crowding up in me is the wild grief of the ferry, but there’s nothing to do but put it away, at eleven in the morning, on a city sidewalk across the street from the Public Theater, and lift Mr. Beau in my arms, carrying him the way, in the Bible pictures of my childhood, shepherds would carry an errant lamb. We head for the apartment, with many stops to rest my arms along the way.
That hour of lead on the Staten Island Ferry—how is it that I looked down at him and knew with absolute clarity that he would die very soon? And how does one arrive at zero and go right on, more or less as if nothing has happened? In truth, I might have done it if it hadn’t occurred to me that I would cause him to suffer: that he was a strong swimmer, that he’d try for a long time to stay afloat, and then his going under would be slow and awful. Or worse, that he wouldn’t want to leave me, that he’d keep circling, trying to find me. I couldn’t do that to him.
Nor could I do that to Paul, though I’d gone so far down in the tunnel vision of my misery that it was hard to see other people. I was startled, when I showed Paul a story about someone who’d leapt in front of an oncoming train in Hoboken, and his first reaction was, “Oh, that’s so cruel to other people, to put them through that!” I truly hadn’t even thought of that. The narcissism of depression is a hole with very steep sides.
And, down in the pit, I came up fully, completely, against the absence of hope. What is it that pulls one back? Somehow my faith in human attachments, my belief in the cementing bonds that hold us all together, just wasn’t there. It was only the trusting silent fellow at my feet, who kept looking down into the racing wake through the small hole at the base of the ferry railing—it was that trust, that day, that kept me in the world.
Do I dramatize? When I say I want to drown, it’s that I am looking for some exit where there is none, some escape from how the world has constellated itself around me. I wouldn’t kill myself, but the wish to, the saying of the wish—that’s the performance that reveals the truth and points a light toward the seemingly bottomless space opening:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
On Tuesday, unthinkably, something’s wrong with Arden. He’s barely touched his breakfast, and now he won’t move; he’s chosen one spot on the bedroom floor and isn’t stirring. We call him for a walk, even go and get the leash and hold it up to him, and he looks at it, with a bleary gaze, and doesn’t move. In a while, he moves to another spot on the floor, and drinks some water, but that’s it. He’s never acted like this in his life.
Is it some kind of sympathetic illness for Beau? Or did something happen at Sandy Hook? Was that wild running in the snowy dunes the thing that pushed both dogs over some edge, brought them to some precipice over which they were already poised to fall?
Wednesday morning, Beau takes his last walk, a lurching stagger with Paul around the courtyard of the Silver Towers, the building next door, where they’re a little more dog-friendly, and a rusty Picasso looms in the snowy lawn—a monumental sculpture that seems half woman and half Afghan hound. Arden won’t move at all; now we know he’s seriously ill. Could it be possible that we are about to lose both our dogs at once?
There’s no question of getting Arden to the vet; he’s immobile and inert, and Beau, who now can’t stand at all, needs attention, too. So, Dr. Cain agrees to come to the house on Friday morning. He arrives with a nurse in tow, the model of brisk efficiency, but, as ever, his MBA demeanor’s just the way in which he delivers his compassionate help. There’s something strange about our apartment—already a borrowed place, not home but a space that belongs to the university, outfitted rather anonymously for visitors—now become a vet’s office.
Beau, who is lying on his spot on the floor where he’s taken up residence, sitting like a sculptured greyhound in repose, thumps his tail on the floor when he spies Dr. Cain and the nurse, though of course he can’t stand up to greet them. Dr. Cain tries to get Beau on his feet to examine him, but it’s impossible; he falls over as quickly as he’s propped up. Poor Arden doesn’t move at all, head flat on the floor, eyes glazed, when the doctor lifts his lids with a finger. Arden has a high fever. We’ve almost forgotten that Lyme disease test, and, in truth, he’s seemed fine; probably what’s happened is that the dormant disease has flared to full-tilt illness.
Dr. Cain talks about how seriously ill both dogs are, and that it would not be inappropriate to euthanize them now.
But there’s a chance for Arden—a shot to bring the fever down now, and then antibiotics; it’s hard to tell how he’ll respond. And Mr. Beau is, after all, watching us all with a look of mild curiosity and pleasure, happy to be in
company, and evidently not in pain.
But will he be, later? There won’t be any help for us over the weekend. If he’s failing and in agony, then what? Dr. Cain will give us a handful of tranquilizers strong enough that six of them crushed up in water will end his life. That’s all I need, that emergency measure. Arden gets his medicine, and a measure, if a rather faint one, of hope, and we have recourse, if what’s happening to Beau is too much to bear, if we’ve made the wrong decision in letting him live.
We move into a warm circle of lamplight: Beau on the couch, in the spot he used to sneak into when we weren’t home but where he now is welcomed. Arden on the rug. Paul and I on the couch, reading, sitting, keeping company, doing nothing. Circle of intimacy. For now, there’s no world outside of this room—just a siren or an occasional taxi horn on the periphery, but, in fact, you can barely hear that up here, with the windows closed. I sleep, at night, on the end of the long curve of the sofa—grateful at last for the absurd thing, which seems to have been designed so that a dozen people could watch TV at once. Or, more likely, so there’d be seats for everybody when a class visited the guest professor’s digs. I bring Mr. Beau sips of water, raising his head so he can drink. When one of us walks over to him to say hello, and stroke his back and belly, he thumps his tail on the black leatherette. It’s so weirdly familiar, uncannily like Wally’s illness, the way he’s going: the trouble with balance first, and then the legs giving way, and then paralysis, but that unexpected ease and good spirit the whole time, as if it isn’t so bad, to go this way, something gentle about it, for the body simply to be shut down gradually from the ground up. Not so gradually, in Beau’s case, the paralysis flying up into his torso. We turn him, from time to time, to prevent his lungs from filling with fluid. We stroke him and look into his eyes and talk to him. I’m good at this, putting everything else on hold, to be in this moment with the dying; I’m practiced; there is some deep intimacy about it that feels enclosing, essential.
On Saturday night, Arden staggers up, stumbles in the direction of the balcony, where we’ve spread out some paper, and pees for a very long time. It’s his first movement in three days; it’s a wonder. Of course, we always thought our older dog would go first, especially after Tandy Tupper told us about his raggedy heartbeat and his tiny liver—but Arden’s a survivor, determined to stay, bless him.
On Sunday morning, I’m sitting on the floor next to Beau’s end of the vast couch, drinking coffee. Paul’s on the other end, reading a novel by Joy Williams; every time he laughs, Beau thumps his tail. In a while, when Beau’s breathing changes, we both kneel beside him. We are talking to Mr. Beau, praising his muzzle and paws and his lovely life, we’re holding his face, I’m leaning my head against his belly and praying that he goes easily, trying to send whatever mental force I can muster that might lighten his spirit’s way…. Each breath enters his chest a little less deeply. And then, when his breathing’s become shallow, he suddenly lifts his head up and back, looking right at me, his eyes widening, with a look not afraid but wondering, startled. A look that would be read, were it a text in a language we knew, as What’s happening to me? And the life sighs right out of him like a wind, a single breath out and gone.
I go out for a walk, after a time. At the door, I find myself reaching, out of habit, for the leash, and though there’s no one to wear it, I put it in my pocket anyway. In a while, I’m standing at the corner in SoHo where, a week ago, Beau caught the scent of soup from a lunch-stand window. His reaction was visceral, physical, eyes going wide with curiosity and delight. Not unlike, I realize, that last look on his face—that what-on-earth look.
Now it’s as if I’m down close to the ground, attentive to garbage, splashes of urine on the street, trash in the gutter; I’ve lowered my head to a dog’s-eye view of the city. It’s bitter cold. I’m stuffing my gloved hands in my pocket, hanging on to the leash.
I buy a branch of flowering plum, tall apparition in an urban January. Back at the apartment, it goes in a vase beside the end of the couch where he gave up the ghost, with candles, a photograph of him years ago, running in the Beech Forest, ears akimbo in the wind.
Giving up the ghost—that is the best phrase we have for dying. The ghost in ourselves, the animating geist—in that last moment of breathing out, I swear it does go up.
Transmutation of energy, movement outside of time, release of the singular into the life of the whole? I don’t know what I think dying is. But when I have seen it, which I have four times now (three of those deaths are part of this story), I have felt each time the dying man or animal was, in some essential but unexplainable way, all right—that is, there was some kindness built into the structure of things, which, in some fashion, took care of the dead. That’s the best I can do, that rather awkward sentence, to say what I’ve seen when I looked directly into that wind.
And you would think such a bit of knowledge would be a tonic to grief, and I suppose it is, though only very briefly. That moment of heightened perception only seems to come from being very close to the dying, from breathing, as it were, with them in the late hour. That’s when the witness might feel the wind blowing from the other side, as it carries anyone away. But such awareness is not to be sustained, is not to be carried back into daily life, where absence and grief reside. I know it’s a blessing that he didn’t suffer the long dwindling of kidney disease, that he’s been swiftly and (as far as we can tell) painlessly swept away. But who cares, just now, about blessings?
Wherever the rest of him is, Beau’s body is right here, in the godawful world of the living, wrapped in an Indian bedspread on the balcony, thirteen stories above the city. In this cold, he’s fine there; we can wait a few days and see if Arden—who is beginning to stir again, drinking copious amounts of water—isn’t better, maybe well enough to come along to Provincetown, where we’ll bury Beau in the garden, in the spot where he used to sit with an eye toward every passerby.
Entr’acte
Questions About Time
Here is an ancient problem. Before the creation of the world, God was alone, but He (I use the pronoun merely for convenience, since there is no adequate one) was also omnipresent. In order to assuage His loneliness by creating a world that was not Himself, there had to be some space in which He did not exist. He did this, the Kabbalists say, by “withdrawing from some region of Himself.”
What is the part of the world that does not have God in it? This place where we find ourselves?
Sometimes I think the place where God is not is time; that is the particular character of the mortal adventure, to be bound in time, and thus to arrive, inevitably, at the desolation of limit. It’s why Blake railed at Divinity: If you have form’d a circle to go into, Go into it yourself, and see how you would do.
But then. Perhaps it’s in time’s hurrying, where everything turns on the wheel toward the crux of disappearance, maybe it’s there we could know something of what my friend Lucie calls “an ever,” if that quality is to be found or known at all.
Not trying to look outside of time (if such is even possible to us), but farther into it, pushing our faces up toward vanishing, to that vaporous line between being here and not. Power that animates and erases: hello and yes, good-bye and no.
To look right into the blank behind the eyes of the skull.
To let yourself get used to that wind that blows there.
Chapter Twelve
It is a marvelous thing, to watch an old dog’s obdurate will.
We have very nearly lost Arden, who is eleven years old, but he is the embodiment of resistance and resilience, and now we begin to believe he will see his twelfth birthday. He’s walking, tentatively, near the front of our building. He’s pleased to ride in the car again, on our trip to Provincetown—though this time Arden sits in the backseat, and naps on a blanket we’ve spread for him there, because Mr. Beau’s curled body lies in the back of the wagon, on our long, sad drive home.
In a little while, we discover how well Manhattan
works for the old fellow Arden’s become. He can walk out to the sidewalk, plant himself down for a rest, and receive the interest and greetings of passersby; he exerts a particular charm for the elderly, who must find in his infirmity and persistence a familiar mirror. But people of all ages stop to greet Arden. “It’s the dogs,” Paul says, “who humanize New York.” They are occasions of human contact, neighborly conversation, surprising expressions of feeling. We’re joined to a community in which we’re more likely to be known as Arden’s people than by our own names—and, in fact, when we’re not with him, we’re sometimes not recognized by the very people we speak with when we all have dogs in tow.
Every morning and evening, Arden conducts a social life with the steady stream of dogs that march or amble along the sidewalk. There are a pair of shar-peis he loathes, inexplicably, and, once, a passing Vietnamese potbellied pig fills him with terror—he hides behind us and shakes—but otherwise his social congress is harmonious. He carefully gets up, wags a little, sniffs, greets. He receives his human admirers lying on the cement as if he were holding court, expending very little effort.
Though gradually, slowly, he begins to exercise a bit more strength. When we go to the beach at the Jersey Shore, later in the spring, he startles us both by walking down to the edge of the water and, in his old way, flinging himself down on the sand, initiating the movement by dropping one shoulder and then letting the rest of his body follow—and rolling on his back, scratching every inch of spine on the gritty sand and little bits of shell—just the way he has always loved to do.
I’d be grateful if I could mend that way. But I seem to be in two places at once: relieved and glad that Arden’s in the world, interested in our new life in the city, and at the same time negotiating with a profound internal sense of emptiness, a blank, a nil spot.
