The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  I did not sleep well that night. These were times when often sleep eluded me, with the result that my dreams dried up. Sometimes I would stay awake the whole night through, listening to the church bells clang by the hour, listening to my clock tick by the minute, my mind empty of sleep’s greatest gift—those strange hybrid dreams where sounds come in color and colors seem to sing.

  I tried to write about the swan, but my wording was weighted, awkward, and sentences slipped past me before I could secure them in my snapping flapping maw. In the mirror in the hall of my house I looked beastly to myself, greedy for something I could not name. I tossed and turned in bed. Although not yet summer, the mosquitoes seemed rampant, nibbling on my neck. When I finally fell into a fitful slumber it was early in the morning, and I swear I’d been under no more than seconds when an anguished cry cut through my dreaming and jolted me up right. What was it? Nothing. Silence and bugs. I was about to lie back down when the sound came again, this time more piercing than the last, the cry of an animal in anguish somewhere in the woods that fringed the yard, and this time the sound didn’t stop. It was stranger than anything I’d heard before. It was a cry, unearthly, in agony; it was a shriek of pain and protest, and it just went on and on, piercing the night. I tried but failed to imagine what could cause such distress, such unrelenting pain. I had the sense then that I sometimes did when I slipped beneath the surface and saw the horror of the ordinary, the cruelness in the quotidian. Eventually, maybe after an hour, or two, the cries ceased.

  As soon as it was light enough I got out of bed, slipped my feet into my slippers, and plodded out across the dawn-moist yard to find the source of such sound. I thought there would be a carcass there, somewhere near my rented house, something quartered with its innards spilling out. But I found nothing. I searched the sky for vultures, but the sky was just a gentle blue, a barely blue, no sign yet of the sun. There was great pain but no particular place of emanation; I saw that then. One could not pin pain down. It would come and come from every direction, from any direction, and you could try to treat it, try to send some soothing, and you might get lucky and succeed. But pain was the one animal that could never be captured, trained or domesticated. It was a wild beast for sure, and it lived by laws we could not ever learn.

  For these reasons—the sleeplessness, the beastly sound, the bugs nibbling at my neck—for these reasons I figured that I would find the baby swan dead in her enclosure at work. It would not have surprised me if she had failed to survive the night, what with half her head gone and a tube in her neck. I got to work early that day, turned the key in the door, entered the hospital’s hallways. Dr. Brumberg, indeed no other vets, had arrived yet. Dogs dreamt in their cages. A cat sat on its carpeted perch, her maple-colored eyes huge and glowing. I could hear my footsteps as I walked the long hall and then opened the door to the baby bird’s room. Inside: silence. The smell of scat and straw. “Ivory?” I called out. I clucked. No response. Slowly, I made my way over to where she was, looked over the edge of the box and saw her there, dead or sleeping, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Ivory, Ivory,” I called and then I put my hand on her tiny, toy-sized body and felt the waxy warmth of the white feathers. Elation moved through me, slowly, like heat, it spread from my hands up my arms into my neck and up through my eyes until it seemed light was coming out of my eyes. This is what it means to beam. You find the baby bird alive. You feel the waxy warmth of feathers. You watch as the cygnet wakes up, one swollen lid slowly opening to reveal the dark ink drop of the pupil floating.

  “Lauren, Lauren,” someone called.

  Dr. Brumberg’s supervisor, and mine by extension as well. Dr. Proctor. He owned the practice. His picture hung in the hall. “Lauren,” he called, beckoning me from where he stood in the shadow of his open door.

  I met him in his office. “The swan has survived the night,” I said.

  He was a good man, Dr. Proctor, but here’s the problem: not good enough.

  “We can’t keep the bird here,” he said.

  He told me to turn her out.

  “But I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m just a tech.”

  “Precisely why you can,” Dr. Proctor said. “And will,” he added.

  “She’s not my patient,” I tried again. “She’s Dr. Brumberg’s—”

  “Turn her out,” Dr. Proctor repeated.

  “But she’ll die,” I said, and then I had tears in my eyes and was squeezing my toes. Don’t cry. Die. Don’t cry. Die.

  “And if she lives, Lauren,” Dr. Proctor said, “what do you think will happen to your swan if she lives?”

  “The swan wants to live,” I said. “It’s clear. She has the will to live.”

  “No,” Dr. Proctor said. “She has the instinct to live. But here’s the problem with instinct. It is devoid of intelligence. You save that swan and you are consigning her to a life of misery, a life where she will be unable to survive on her own, unable to catch food, unable to mate. Do you call that ethical? Whose pain are you really trying to treat?”

  The world is full of intelligent Homo sapiens who even as they propel a heinous argument make excellent points. How is that we humans are capable of thinking excellently about actions so dishonorable? Is this where we cross the line from rational to rationalizing creatures? True, if you looked at the situation from the perspective of pure logic, Proctor’s points were worth tucking under one’s big beret. Might it be better to have no life than a life so mangled it dispirits and despairs? One can endlessly balance the odds, tweak the scale, move this weight here and that there, but in the very end, the scale itself is the problem. I believe there are whole systems of celestial logics we have yet to unravel, and that there are ethical mandates that come from a place beyond what we can easily figure. Sometimes I think I know what it means to be human. You have to care. Side with life. It’s terribly, terribly simple.

  Vets don’t treat wildlife for three reasons: money and law and some sort of ethics based on some sort of limited logic that says it is sometimes better to “let nature take its course.” How silly. Is medical intervention outside of nature? Is anything, ever, outside of nature? You show me something that does not arise from nature while I wait. And wait.

  In the meantime, there are things to tend to and care for. First and foremost, Ivory needed to eat. She had been almost twenty-four hours now without food or water. I tried feeding her crushed grass, fish sticks, but the beak didn’t work and food would not find its way to her mouth. Dr. Brumberg arrived soon after. He inserted a tube straight into the small swan stomach and got her nutrients to her that way.

  And it worked. Ivory grew bigger and plumper, filling out measurably, day after day. Her pain subsided, and Ivory began to waddle around her cage, dragging her wings behind her. Feathers floated up in the sunlit air. I sometimes scratched her long, looped neck, and like a dog or a cat she leaned into the feeling, taking pleasure, her eyes half closing as she drifted into swan-sleep. Other times, Dr. Brumberg would have me fill a tub with cool water and place her in it, and she would paddle her feet fast, circling around and around, her eyes bright and dancing. She never made a sound—she was a mute swan, because a bird needs a beak to sing. But I could tell, when Ivory heard the sound of water rumbling in the tub, I could tell she was singing in her mind, singing with her eyes. She would telescope her head up over the enclosure and look for the source of the water. She would hop into my hands with eagerness, knowing it was time for a bath. I would cradle her, carry her into the bathroom, set her gently down on her aquatic playground. Sometimes she twirled in place, like a ballerina spinning on tiptoe, she would twirl and twirl, making a whirlpool of the water, her eyes closed, as though she were remembering some other place.

  In one of my favorite Greek myths that was read to me as a child, Zeus, infuriated with Leda, who spurned his advances, turned into a magnificent white swan with a huge wingspan and, flapping down from his regal perch in a pear tree, wooed Leda in disguise. In this version, Leda
falls in love with the swan and marries him, living with him happily ever after, not ever knowing that her spouse is the man she rejected.

  It wasn’t until years later, in college, that I read another rendition of this myth. In this version, Zeus is enraged that Leda has rejected him as a lover. In retaliation, he turns into a swan, swims down the river on whose banks Leda is sunning, and clucks so sweetly to her that she awakens and wades into the water, drawn by the beauty of this beast. And once she is in the water, the placid river turns wild, the currents swift and strong, trapping her while Zeus sheds his swanness and rapes her as a male.

  We, as humans, have so many, many stories in which animals play parts, but it is only when you actually come to care for animals that you see how these stories, powerful though they may be, bear basically zero relationship to the actual animal kingdom. In our animal stories the only animal we learn about is man, but when you come close to animals you see the true strangeness of the beasts who share our planet. Swans are extraordinary but not at all in the way our literature suggests. They are extraordinary because of their unique biology, which has created for them a way to manufacture, in a gland, a special oil they then, when preening, spread across their feathers, this substance more waterproof than anything a human could ever devise.

  They are extraordinary because their brains are about the size of a kiwi, grey paste stuffed in their slender heads, and yet within that small scoop of grey matter they are able to memorize migratory routes thousands of miles long, and they never need a map. They are capable of mating for life, something we, as humans, have tried but largely failed to accomplish.

  Dr. Proctor gave Dr. Brumberg and me a deadline. We could keep the swan at our facility for three more weeks, but at the end of that time, when the clock chimed, the bird was to go back to the lake, ready or not.

  Dr. Brumberg and I had to think now, think hard and fast. Perhaps I or he could find a facility that would take the swan. Surely if we set Ivory back upon the lake from which she came we would be consigning her to death, either a fast merciful death in the jaws of some snapping prey or a slow miserable death due to starvation and fear. At work the next day I called a few habitats, asking them if they would be interested in housing a swan with no beak on a permanent basis, but this is like asking a barn to accept the care and maintenance of a lame mare—what’s in it for them? We thought about zoos, but zoos in this country are largely built for the pleasure of the people who pass through them—what fun to see the tiger snoozing in the sun or to see the spider-tailed monkeys swinging from their branches. Who wants to pay twelve bucks to see a badly mangled soundless swan, an ugly duckling with no chance at transformation? Where were our wands when we needed them?

  Transformation. I had seen that word somewhere not long ago. Where? On a billboard? Transformation. Oh yes, that’s right. I had seen it on the cover of a magazine in our waiting room, a fashion magazine, the sort of thing that holds no interest for me.

  Now, however, I had an interest. I went to the office waiting room and found the publication—Vogue, the slick cover showing a breezy model in a diamond dress with her hand on her hip and her eyes in provocative slits. The headline: “Transformation: Plastic Surgery in Ten Minutes or Less.”

  I flipped to the article. It was about facelifts, chemical peels, and supposedly other low cost fix-its for aging. According to the article, one in four women in the United States now have some sort of cosmetic procedure, as do one in eight men. The number of people having cosmetic procedures has risen by 68 percent in the past decade. It’s de rigueur.

  Veterinary care has become expensive in part because it uses much of the same technology as human medicine. CAT scans, MRI machines, complicated blood tests, delicate eye surgeries, replacement hips, even replacement hearts; slowly all of these options have become available for animal patients as well as human patients, although few pet owners have pockets deep enough to actually pay. Even dentistry has entered veterinary care, and it wouldn’t surprise me if in a few years one can get veneers for Fido. There is one area of care, however, that has not really caught on in animal land—plastic surgery.

  What about a case where an animal loses a limb, or is badly torn apart; is there not a role for plastic surgery in veterinary care in these cases? Dr. Brumberg and I discussed this. He was not afraid of seeming stupid. On speaker phone, so I could listen in, he called a plastic surgeon at Yale Medical Center.

  “This is Dr. Brumberg,” he said. “I have a patient I need to refer to you.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. Feldman. He waited for Brumberg to tell him more. He did not know, had no way of knowing, that Dr. Brumberg was a vet and the patient in question was nonhuman.

  “There has been a traumatic injury to the … the face area,” Dr. Brumberg said, “and portions will need to be rebuilt.”

  This was a surgeon known for his work on faces.

  “Age?” asked the doctor.

  “Oh,” Dr. Brumberg said, “very young. Very, very young.” He paused, glanced over at me; I shrugged. “Just about,” Dr. Brumberg said (he later explained to me that swans live fifteen years roughly and he based his calculations on that), “just about four years.”

  “Four years,” the surgeon said. “What happened?”

  “She was swimming,” Dr. Brumberg said. I could see he was smiling slightly. “Bitten by a turtle.”

  “Do four-year-olds swim?” asked the doctor.

  “Look,” Dr. Brumberg said then, and sighed. I swear I could see the air go out of his sail. “I’m a vet over at New Haven Animal Hospital. The patient in question is a swan. I have a baby swan whose beak was bitten off, and I need a plastic surgeon to make her a new beak so she can survive.”

  “A swan,” Dr. Feldman repeated. Even over speakerphone I could feel his shock. “A swan …,” he repeated.

  “Yes,” Dr. Brumberg said. “Very sweet animal with no chance of making it unless she gets a b—”

  “You are,” Feldman interrupted, “you are a vet and you are asking me, a plastic surgeon, to do a procedure on a swan. You are,” he cleared his throat, “you are essentially asking me to do a nose job on a bird.”

  “Well,” Dr. Brumberg said. “Well, yes. That’s exactly what I’m asking. And as free care, of course,” he said. “Because the swan does not have Medicaid.”

  “I see,” said the surgeon. I could almost hear him smile, and somehow, at some point, a little bit more levity entered the conversation. “And may I ask?” the surgeon said, “may I ask whether or not the patient in question has a preference for what sort of prosthetic beak we might build? In nose jobs,” he said, “patients have very clear preferences. Upturned, downturned, narrow, tilted, et cetera. Oftentimes,” he said, “patients have a certain celebrity in mind, upon whom they wish their nose to be modeled. Is there, in this case—”

  “We have no celebrity in mind,” Dr. Brumberg said, and he seemed on the verge of being elated and then—

  “Donald Duck, I suppose,” said the surgeon.

  Dr. Brumberg’s face fell.

  “No, not Donald Duck,” Dr. Brumberg said in a soft voice. “The patient, after all, is not a duck.”

  “Right,” said Dr. Feldman. “Precisely.” And suddenly then the surgeon’s tone changed, veered swiftly and sharply into iciness. “Dr. Brumberg,” he said. “The patient is not a duck. Nor is the patient a person. Are you out of your goddamn mind thinking I’m going to do a plastic surgery procedure on a … on a …” He seemed at a loss for words.

  “A swan,” Dr. Brumberg said gently. “It’s a swan. We call her Ivory.”

  But he didn’t ever hear her name. He had hung up.

  Dr. Brumberg called, then, a dentist. Yes, by the way, he was out of his goddamn mind, which is sometimes exactly what you need to step out of, if you are to find a solution.

  Dr. Brumberg called a friend of his, a Dr. Eric Soth, who was a dentist. Dr. Soth, also, was out of his goddamn mind. Dr. Brumberg told me how they had been good friend
s at Berkeley. Brumberg had come to college with a snake, and Soth had come to college with a kilt and a pair of bagpipes. At night, in their dorm room, so the story goes, Soth would get dressed in his kilt and play the bagpipes while the snake danced on Brumberg’s desk.

  Dr. Brumberg explained the situation to Eric Soth. The very next day Soth drove from his office to ours, saw the baby bird, and said to both of us, “Guys, this is possible.”

  Eric Soth showed us how he planned to do it. Retainers and other orthodontic materials are made out of a pinkish, inner-lip-colored resin that the doctor pours in a bowl as powder and then liquefies with water, making a kind of clayish substance that he then molds to the patient’s teeth. You may have had this done to you before, the cold metal clamp filled with the waxy pink stuff, jammed up against the roof of your mouth while you wait for it to harden just enough to hold an impression of your bite. This impression is then left to dry under a heat lamp and the dentist uses it to fashion whatever mouth gear you need.

  Eric Soth’s idea was to do something similar for our swan. Because she had lost her beak, there was no impression of the original beak that he could make. But there was a ragged beak stump left, and, very gently, the dentist made a mold of it—the beak’s base—and then, using measurements derived from pictures, fashioned a full beak out of the same stuff your retainer is made of.