All That Is Left Is All That Matters

by Mark Slouka

  His first responsibility, of course, was to reassure her, and so, clamping the cut between his thumb and ring finger, he gently called her over. She came right away, relieved and apologetic. “Come here, baby,” he said, “let’s take a look at what’s goin’ on in there.” He’d been pulling on her ears, he remembered, feeling the fuzzy whorls of cartilage on the underside with his thumb, but when he looked there was nothing there. She whined, restless, beseeching. “Shhh, hold still,” he said.

  He found it in the thick ruff of hair at the base of her skull: a thin, gunmetal sliver of steel rising perhaps an inch above the stippled skin like a rectangular fin. It made no sense. Was it glued on, somehow? Spreading back the coarse fur he flipped the thing gently back and forth with the pinky of his hurt hand and felt his throat clutch with nausea: it was buried in the skin, the thick flange of the base half-submerged beneath the surface. Taking off his glasses he could read the make—True Test—inscribed in the steel, the bottoms of the letters rising out of the plain. There was no way around it; it was what it was.

  For a moment, pity overwhelmed him and the yellow leaves and the dark brushstrokes of trunks along the far shore softened and blurred. He loved her: her big, foolish, loyal eyes, her solidity and strength. How many times had he woken to a groaning board, an up-sliding sash, and been glad to know that she was there, vigilant, terrifying to anyone who might wish him harm.

  The air moved and she looked up, her spongy, big-pored nose twitching as if invisible flies were settling on it. How can you itemize love? He remembered bringing her home from the pound in a towel-lined carton that had once held twelve cans of Campbell’s Split Pea Soup. He loved her long English face, her tongue, smooth as veal, the late-October smell of her fur. They’d watch TV together. They’d lie next to each other on the rug and he’d hear that deep, shuddering, contented sigh, and sliding down to sleep on the trough and crest of her breathing he’d know that this was love, love as profound and true as the slowing of blood when the season’s screw starts to tighten.

  And now something, or someone, had tried to hurt her. Had hurt her. Had embedded this thing—but how was this possible?—in her flesh. He wanted to grab it with his fingers, rip it from her skin. Make her who she’d been. “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered, “I’m sorry.” She whined happily, hearing his voice. He forced himself to look again. There were no sutures, no signs of trauma; her skin where it bulged like a low dune over the flared base of the blade was wax-smooth, as if grown to the steel. When he stood, a kingfisher threw itself across the pond, trailing its rapid chattering cackle. It was time to go home, where they could put this bizarre incident behind them. When he touched her back, he cut himself again.

  The next morning, under the bright light of the reading lamp, he found four more, and a deep shudder of shame ran through him. How could this have happened? Something had to be done, and soon, before it went any further. Carrying the floppy brick of the phone book over to the table with his good hand, he phoned Dr. Wilson’s office and made an appointment for that afternoon. For some reason he felt nervous, and when the receptionist inquired after the nature of the problem, he answered, vaguely, that it was just a skin condition, and that he’d been hoping somebody could take a look at it. “It’s probably nothing,” he added nonsensically. A tickle of sweat rolled down his side. “And how long would you say she’s had this condition, sir?” the receptionist asked. “Oh, not long . . . a few days,” he answered. He didn’t care for her tone.

  An hour later, too agitated to sit down, he called back to say he’d have to reschedule at some other time. It was impossible. How could he bring her to Wilson’s office with fifteen razor blades—there were more by now—embedded in her skin? They’d think he was responsible. He’d denied it—said it was nothing. No, they’d be sure to blame him—and for good reason. Worse, they might think his sweet, sad-eyed girl was dangerous; might want her put away somewhere, put down. It was unthinkable.

  Standing by the phone, unsure of what to do, he felt a tug at his pants. Sensing his anxiety, she’d brushed against his leg, and a new blade, protruding from between her poor ribs like the pectoral fin on a fish or the horizontal knife on a chariot’s wheel, had cut a neat one-inch slice through his pants just below his knee, barely missing his skin. She was sitting on the carpet at his feet, whining for forgiveness. He started to reach for her offered paw, then patted the ridge above her nose instead. “It’s OK, baby,” he said, “it’s OK. I know you didn’t mean it.” She seemed mollified. Her black mushroom nose twitched; her long pink tongue flowed over her teeth. She loved him. “We’ll have to lay low,” he whispered to her, still petting her nose with his good hand, “we’ll have to keep this between us,” and bathed in his voice she began to wriggle with excitement, her hindquarters fishtailing to the side like a tractor-trailer about to crash.

  THE TWO OF them settled into a cripple’s routine, improvised at first, soon hardened into habit. There was even some beauty to it—the two of them together, under siege. Late at night they’d walk up to the elementary school, the short, frost-baked grass caving under their feet, his breath pushing quill-less feathers into the air. On certain nights it seemed like their shadows were the last ones on Earth, like they could walk for years, unfolding the land—the valleys and hills and deserted little houses—and all would sleep before them and the night would never end. When they ran into neighbors, themselves out for a late walk, he’d pretend to be colder than he was, hugging himself in his old army jacket, and they’d hurry on. It couldn’t be helped. After a moment’s inattention had opened a deep cut in his palm that required stitches (he’d explained that he worked with glass) he’d taken to wearing his heavy, mustard-yellow work gloves. People might notice, and wonder.

  It was possible, he thought, that it would pass; that all they had to do was endure it as best they could, and all would be well. It was even possible that the situation, difficult as it was, might actually bring them closer. Certainly there were times, breaks in the pain, when he realized again—as though he needed reminding—that she was not the enemy, that it was the two of them against this thing inside her, that in fact there was something regal about her suffering, something noble in her battle with herself. She bore her trial with a dignity bordering on disdain, walking next to him with the clusters of blades rustling and clicking like a colony of mechanical insects; it moved him deeply. If she hurt, she seemed to be saying, she hurt only for him; his pain alone weighed in the balance.

  Of course he couldn’t deny that this was literally true as well: she felt no pain. He’d tested this to put his mind at ease. One evening, hearing her sigh and settle herself on her foam-filled bed (the blades, with one or two exceptions, ran largely along the ridge of her back), he called her over to the kitchen table. She came immediately. “Good girl,” he said, “that’s my good girl.” She looked up, trusting him. “We’re going to try something here,” he said. “If it hurts, you just say so, OK?” She wagged her tail.

  Pulling on his work gloves he cradled her head in one hand and with the other felt for a cluster of blades. Just above her left shoulder he found a group of four, tightly layered, leaning slightly like small steel playing cards. Propping them up to the perpendicular, he gently pressed down with his glove. Nothing. He pushed harder, drawing down the surrounding hair like trees growing from the side of a hill. When she wagged her tail, relief flooded his heart. Just as he’d hoped, the blades, like the spines on a porcupine, only cut one way. Whatever damage she might do to things outside, she herself felt little or nothing. For this he was grateful.

  As the weeks passed there were moments, admittedly, when gratitude did not come easily, when self-pity and, yes, even anger rose up inside him. It wasn’t just the unavoidable accidents that occurred despite all the precautions he’d taken—the gloves, the boots, even the rider’s chaps he’d bought, feeling like a fool, at a horseback-riding supply store—it was her inability (or unwillingness) to understand, her insistence on see
ing his attempts to protect himself as a kind of betrayal. His resentment shamed him. She loved him. Pet me, hold me, she seemed to say to him. Scratch my chest with your fingernails, bury your face in the folds of my neck. And there were times, looking into her eyes, so disappointed in him, so full of pain, when he wanted to.

  There was nothing he could do. She lived for him. How could he say to her that love had its limits? He looked at her, sleeping peacefully on her bed. Three nights earlier, he’d fallen asleep in front of the television still wearing his boots and chaps and huge leather gloves like some middle-aged wrangler home from the range. Drugged by fatigue and worry, buried under the oceanic wash of voices and laughter, he didn’t hear her when she awoke with a long, reedy yawn, rose, shook herself—her coat rattling and clashing like metal leaves in a sudden wind—and jumped on the couch to sleep by his side. He woke screaming, a four-bladed harrow digging into his ribs, staggered to his feet, and crashed over the coffee table. Still on his hands and knees like a man imitating a small horse waiting to be mounted, he felt her warm, flat tongue on his face. The pain in her eyes was like the touch of fire.

  THANKSGIVING WAS A trial. Under the circumstances, there was no question of inviting friends, and so, reluctantly, he cut his usual recipe for cornbread stuffing by three-fourths and set to work. It wasn’t easy. He moved with difficulty, what with the butterfly stitches on his hands and hip and the sutures on his ribs (he made the mistake of reaching for a can of corn in the pantry), but he managed. It was important to preserve some measure of normalcy, to allow himself a touch of happiness—after all, he’d done nothing to deserve this—but the guilt he felt putting her in the wooden crate in the living room leached all the joy from the evening. He crumbled the hard-boiled egg, awkwardly diced the celery and the green pepper, holding the butcher knife with his two good fingers, even tried to hum along with the music he’d put on, pathetically, then put everything in the refrigerator and went to bed.

  He woke to a long hiss, as if someone were trying to get his attention. Hurrying down the stairs as best he could (the hip always stiffened in the night, and the painkillers made him dizzy) he turned on the light to the living room. It was as though someone had tried to slice away the bottom of the room: a long, knee-high cut ran along the armoire and across the spines of books on the second shelves; the drapes had been sliced short; the soft white entrails of the couch and the loveseat and the leather chair bulged from their cushions. His first thought was that an intruder had been searching for something buried in the pillows or hidden behind the wallpaper sagging down like flayed flesh, and that she hadn’t barked because something had happened to her. Then he heard her claws on the kitchen floor.

  Relieved, he started toward her, limping quickly down the long hall. The claws stopped—she’d heard him, he realized—then began again, raining down on the linoleum as she rushed to meet him. Inexplicably (perhaps it was the rind of some forgotten dream) it seemed to him that in her changed state she might think he was the intruder; that at that very moment she was, in fact, coming after him. The same instant she appeared at the far end of the hallway, slipping slightly into the wall, a clattering, clicking, long-tongued thing, overcome with love for him, and he saw that it didn’t matter whether she was coming in love or fury, and genuinely terrified now, screaming at her to stop, he knocked the telephone table into her path, then brought the claw-footed base of the coatrack down on her head.

  He didn’t know he could bear that much pain. She lay on her side, her hind legs tangled in the telephone cord, her brown eyes looking at him from between the blades now growing out of her cheeks, her brows, with a kind of oceanic calm, an understanding and a forgiveness of this betrayal that shamed him to the core. Barely feeling the pain in his ribs, his hands, he crawled up and kneeled before her big, bristling head and wept. He could see the blood welling up almost directly between her ears, and though he didn’t have his gloves, he managed to part the blades with his fingers, pushing down on their flat, smooth sides, and expose the gash. He could see her breathing, the blades arranging and rearranging themselves like scales. She was looking at him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I’m sorry,” and reaching out he touched the small space on the bridge of her nose where the fur was still visible, then touched it again. Something cut him but he didn’t stop. Her tail began to beat.

  IT WASN’T HIM who first thought of doing it before the season turned the ground to stone, who limped up through the gap in the wall and into the stony pasture with a shovel and a six-foot crowbar and began what he couldn’t conceive of beginning. The pasture that afternoon, so near the dam where they’d sat together only two months earlier, was full of thin November light, like watery cream. He’d never dug a grave before.

  It wasn’t hard. The shovel’s blade slipped into the earth as easily as if the groove had been waiting for it; the big, brown rocks, which he pried from their perfect homes in the dirt and rolled, helpless, onto the leaves of the forest floor, offered little resistance. Looking up from his labors he could see the crimped tin of the lake through the trees. It wasn’t him. He was on a plane, reading an article about a man digging a grave in a pasture; the wind coming off the lake was chilling the sweat on this man—someone he’d known, once.

  He knew he didn’t deserve this distance, and it didn’t last long. The ease with which the ground opened up before him—that straight-sided rectangle deepening into its own shadow—made him sick with self-loathing. She would attack death itself for him, and yet here she was, tied to a small tree by the chain he’d had to substitute for the leather leashes she’d shredded to strips. He could see it in her face: she hated him now, and for forcing this last, deepest pain on her, she hated him more. She couldn’t understand why he’d abandoned her, why he no longer loved her. The situation—the injustice and the cruelty of it, his helplessness in the face of it—made him frantic, and to punish himself he began to work with a kind of righteous violence, relishing the fire in his ribs as his due, twisting like a discus thrower to heave a thirty-pound rock out of the grave with a joyous grunt that sounded like a sob, tearing at the red roots with his hands until, feeling the warmth in his gloves, he pulled them off with his teeth, exposing the gaping little mouths of his cuts to the wind. He deserved no less.

  There was nothing outside of them now. The grave, covered with a tarp and weighed down by rocks, remained where he left it. They returned home. He barely recognized her now, her once-familiar body a mass of blades that seemed to multiply daily, to fatten on his shame. Only her eyes remained unchanged, calm as the black little twigs under ice, watching him through the blade-gnawed bars of her crate. There was nothing to be done.

  It came on the day of the season’s first snow, a powdering that called attention to the edges of eaves and the crossbars of gates and fences and was gone by noon. They were on their way out. She had been waiting patiently while he searched his pockets for house keys, her chain clipped to her wire collar. Raising her leg to scratch at her side, she gave a startled yelp, and thinking she was being attacked, instantly bit her own rump. Unable to help her, her every cry like a fishhook in his throat, he watched her spin and crash through the house—a clattering, snarling dervish—until she’d worked herself into a corner by the couch, where he wrestled her down under her thick foam bed. He could feel her beneath him, whimpering and growling, and even as he yelled her name, frantically trying to break the spell, she worked her bloodied head free and sank her teeth in his arm.

  It was nearly dusk. He’d wrapped her in a half dozen gray movers’ blankets, and when he bent over the backseat to pick her up, he was surprised how light she’d grown. He lay her down on the leaves. As he moved the stones off the tarp, he could feel her eyes following him. The grave was as he’d left it, waist deep and perfect. “It’s not my fault,” he said aloud to himself. “It’s not my fault.”

  The pills were from Mexico, a bright canary yellow. He gave her three in a piece of hamburger meat he’d brought in a plastic ba
g. He was already weeping when she began to lick his bleeding hand, working her warm tongue between his fingers. He couldn’t do this, he thought.

  But he did. Letting her lick the grease off his hand with her cut tongue, he jumped down into the grave and lifted her in his arms. There was plenty of room. Lying down beside her he drew one of the blankets partly over himself and looked up at the rectangle of branches and sky. He’d taken eight himself; there was nothing else to do. He could feel her against him, the slowing bellows of the lungs, the shallowing crest and trough. He looked over at her. Lying on her side, gravity pulling the lower gum back from her teeth, her tongue lolling, she seemed to be smiling.

  Three brown leaves came over the rim. “Good dog,” he said. “Good dog.”

  Half-Life

  THERE’S A PLACE PAST BREATHING, discovered by deep-sea divers who swim ten stories down on a lungful of air. Past the pain. If you ignore the body’s screaming, call its bluff, you enter a plain of stillness and light: the heart’s tantrum passes, the lungs take back their shape. You swim on. Unlikely things begin to appear, serene and irrefutable. Eventually, according to those who have lived, dragged to the surface with ropes, you begin to laugh, which means you’re finally dying.

  A month ago I walked into the living room just in time to see my house go by on the evening news. I recognized it right away: the mossy awning, the garage, the small black window behind which I stood, watching my house go by on the news, and then it was gone. I hadn’t seen it in sixteen years.