In fact, it took a long time. The process of fashioning a prosthetic beak took days and days. Soth was a meticulous craftsman. He created the acrylic beak to resemble a real swan beak as closely as possible, using tiny hinges to allow it to open and shut.
Now, the core questions—how would we attach it and would it actually work?
Ivory is the first and only swan to have a prosthetic beak, but that is really the least of it. She is the first, and perhaps the only swan to have benefited from plastic surgery and, by doing so, to demonstrate that the “luxury” medical procedures human use can in fact have critical relevance to animals who truly need the procedures. More than that, she is the first and only swan to have illuminated so starkly, so clearly, the truth about her species—the vulnerability, the sociability, the capacity to connect with humans—and by doing so to bust through the myths that have kept swans caged in misconceptions. They are elegant animals, yes, but they are also sweet, love to play, understand language (Ivory knew the words tub and water). Still more important, Ivory helped me to find and articulate a certain ethical stance: all questions of logic, of risks and benefits, cannot stand up to this simple mandate that drives my life today, as a psychologist treating humans in a clinic not so different from that twenty-four-hour crisis veterinary hospital where I worked so long ago. The humans I treat have no money to pay; they are all Ivories, badly bungled, empty of purse. Care should not cost; air should not cost; they are both basic animal rights and thus the economic burden should be placed on all of us, collectively.
I am happy to be able to say that Ivory had her new beak within the three-week deadline set by Dr. Proctor, and because the beak worked, because it opened and shut and allowed Ivory to take food on her own, she grew fat to the point of independence. However, independence would never mean life as a regular swan for Ivory; she would never return to the lake from which she came. On the day of Ivory’s discharge I called the mother of the girl who brought her in and said, “Come now. Come see the swan.”
So they came. I wanted them to. Dr. Brumberg and I treated animals but all pain was our concern. If that day of the snapping turtle had made a memory for this girl—a memory of horror—then we wanted to help make its alternate. A memory of joy? No. A mangled swan with an acrylic beak is not a joyful sight. But it is a hopeful sight, a sight that suggests there are always possible solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
So the girl came down and was amazed to see the baby bird who was now, twenty days later, no longer a baby but a full-fledged teen with an enormous appetite and a sense of her own beauty. Ivory, it turns out, was a large bird, as white as snow, the pink of the prosthetic beak all the pinker when set against the blizzard of her body. The girl touched the beak, watched the tiny golden hinges work. “Wow,” she said.
At the end of that day, after the visit, we moved Ivory to a wildlife habitat in Maine where she could spend her long life in safety and in peace, in the midst of humans and also other birds. The director’s name was Ginny. Dr. Brumberg and I drove Ivory there and left her in the hands of Ginny and walked away, something sad in me, something I could not say. We walked away. We had had her for less than thirty days, but in that time so much had happened, so much growth, for one, and then so much fear, for another, those nighttime sounds, the creature I never found, and then the one that I did. From Ivory I had learned what I believe to be right about medical care—it should come at no cost to the consumer, and because of Ivory I frequently recall the necessity of faith in any healing endeavor. Poor Dr. Feldman, the eminent plastic surgeon. He could not see it. He lacked either the imagination or the sheer chutzpah that allows caring to happen. And why not, Dr. Feldman? I’d like to ask. Why not a nose job for a swan, a beak for a boy, if that is what is needed? You must, sometimes, be a little out of your mind.
Not long after Ivory had gone to her rehab center, Ginny called us to tell us that she was using her beak to eat, to kiss, and, yes, to sing. The girl had begun to sing, soft but real songs nonetheless, a gentle mournful music that you can hear only if you listen very quietly. Dr. Brumberg and I went back to visit Ivory several months later; we went to hear her songs, and we did, and the soft music was like a river running over rocks or a fast falling rain. It went on and on, her beak just slightly ajar and her lids at half mast, she swam and sang, and though we knew nothing of what she meant—the struggles against the turtle, or just smelt and scat, no matter— the melodies clearly had meaning, because the other birds listened, all cocking their tiny heads.
Anyway, this was all years and years ago, when I was younger, and perhaps more easily charmed. Maybe now, twenty years older, and that much harder, I have more of the Proctor and less of the Brumberg in me; I hope not. I hope I’d still support the quixotic risk taker over the bureaucratic conservative, but one does not know where one’s values lies until one is pushed up against a living ledge. For me, Ivory was that ledge. I have not seen her in years and years. But I do keep tabs on her, and last I heard she was still alive, an old lady now herself, but very elegant and still as playful as ever. According to Ginny she still likes to be scratched like a cat, and she uses her not-new-anymore beak to snack on smelt and bluefish, and she enjoys all her meals. She enjoys paddling in the small habitat pond. She enjoys mothering the foundling birds brought to the habitat; she has never had babies of her own, but she has come to know what it means to care. When the injured birds are brought in, Ivory, an old timer, takes them quite literally under her enormous white wing, sings softly, and then pecks them gently with her gold hinged beak, a kind of kissing.
My status as human being practically ensures that I’ll never know what Ivory’s singing really means. As intimate as I was with her body, I’ll never cross that last bridge that would give me access to her mind. Are the songs warbles for a mate? For food? For the pure pleasure of the sound and the mechanics of its making? It seems endlessly odd to me that we can be so close to animals, physically, emotionally, and yet never will we see through their ancient eyes; never once will their day be ours.
As for me, Ivory was a brief hiatus in what was otherwise a difficult year of drudgery, working as a vet tech, cleaning the cages of cats and dogs. Like I said, at the ends of my days I’d try to write, but, unlike Ivory, no melodies came to me; no stories to sing. And sometimes in the night I’d wake to hear that terrible scream from the woods again, it would go on and on, raising the hairs at the nape of my neck, and if I blocked my ears, it was still there, and so I saw the forest was within me, along with its simian sound.
I would hum then, I would hum Ivory’s songs, and whenever I did she appeared in the air, as if straight out of a giant book; beautiful, huge and white, her beak gone golden: I’d say Sing to me, muse, and she’d sing to me and she’d sing to me and she’d sing to me until the screams in the forest receded and dawn was limning the sky. “Don’t leave,” I’d say, but the swan always did, once her singing was over, and I was sound asleep.
The Sixty Thousand–Dollar Dog
1: Pressure
My dog, Lila, is forty pounds packed with muscle and grit. Her hide is as rough as the rind of a cantaloupe, covered with course hair that is nevertheless somehow soft to the touch. She is a dumb dog in the sense that all dogs are dumb, driven by genes and status, she will willingly fight any mammal that threatens her alpha position, and she delights in bones, big greasy bones she can crunch in her curved canines, and then swallow, splinters and all.
My husband disparages Lila, and, to his credit, there is much there to disparage. She lacks the capacity for critical thought. She has deposited in our yard an estimated four hundred pounds of feces during her ten-year tenure with us. Her urine has bleached our green grass so the lawn is now a bright yellow-lime, the same shade as the world seen through a pair of poorly tinted sunglasses, at once glaring and false. Lila farts and howls. Lila sheds and drools. Lila costs us more per year to maintain than does the oil to heat our home. There is her food; her vaccinations; her grooming; the
four times yearly palpating of her anal glands; her heartworm medications; her chew toys; her city leash; her second, country retractable leash; her dog bed; the emergency veterinary visits when she gets ill; the sheer time it takes to walk her (my husband estimates my rate at fifty dollars per hour). Picture him, my husband, at night, the children tucked in bed, punching the keys on his calculator. Picture Lila, unsuspecting (and this is why she charms us, is it not?), draped across his feet, dreaming of deer and rivers as he figures the cost of her existence meshed with ours. It is cold outside. The air cracks like a pane of glass and sends its shards straight up our noses. He presses = and announces the price he claims is right. Sixty thousand. The cost of Lila’s life. I look out the window. The lawn she’s bleached is covered with a fine film of snow and the sky above is as dark as a blackboard, scrawled with stars and beyond them—what? Six trillion suns. Ancient radiation that still sizzles in our air. Scientists now claim there is more than one universe, but precisely how many more? No one knows. Some things cannot be calculated. I won’t tell my husband this. I love my husband. I love Lila too.
Why I love Lila is not clear. The facts, after all, are the facts. There are, by some estimates, 2 million tons of dog feces deposited annually on American sidewalks and in American parks and lawns. The volume of the collective canine liquid output in this country has been estimated at 4 billion gallons. Dogs are the carriers of more than sixty-five diseases they can pass to their human counterparts. Some of the more well-known ones are rabies, tuberculosis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Six hundred and fifty four people died last year in the United States from dog bites, and over thirty thousand were injured enough to require a visit to the emergency room. Seems a no brainer, right? Knowing these facts, you would have to be as dumb as a dog to have a dog in your home.
Now, another small fact. I don’t have one dog. I have two. And if I had a bigger home, I would have three. Maybe even four. Or more. My idea of heaven on earth is to have as many dogs as I do socks, or spoons. All the facts in the world cannot change the final fact in this matter, which is that dogs and I—we get along.
I don’t know why this is. Nor do I know why I so adore dogs while my husband fairly despises them. I have a hunch, though not up to investigation. Still, here it is. Dogs evolved from wolves. The modern-day human evolved from the Cro-Magnon man. A long time ago, so long that even all the dog scat stretched into a single smelly string could not go that far, a few wolf pups crept into a few Cro-Magnon caves and kept some scared families company in a night dense with danger. These wolf pups howled warning when a wildebeest was near. Their multilayered coats emitted continuous waves of warmth. Faster than us on their feet, they became indispensable hunting aides, twisting up in the air and bringing down the deer, teeth sunk into the blood-speckled neck of an animal we feasted on, sharing scraps, breaking bread with these canids whose evolution is all tied up with ours. Eventually, these progenitor pups, perpetually in our presence, grew domesticated, and thus the dawning of the dog. This, understand, is the short, short, short version of what was probably in reality a synergistic push and pull, a unique kind of coevolution that kept on keeping on over spans of thousands and thousands of years.
Sometimes, if I lie very still in the flat part of our field and if, as I do so, I stare up at the spattered sky, I think I can feel those years tumbling me over and down, over and down and back. My guess? I must have descended from those early wolf-welcoming Cro-Magnons, those hairy hunters with the genetic predisposition that allowed them to open doors they didn’t know they had. I must have descended from a line of people who liked the stink of the wild, smelling it on their palms pressed up to their faces; who knew long before Crick unraveled the chromosome that there was not much difference between our genome and theirs. And these people, perhaps they were lonely and needed the feel of fur in order to salve the skin-stinging openness of the Pliocene plains. Most of all I believe we believed, even back then—a wordless, wild belief—that humans only become beings in relation to the animals with whom we share this planet; the differences defines us and the similarities remind us of some essential primitive cry we keep a clamp on.
The bottom line? Maybe Homo can only be Sapien (wise) when he respects the radical others who populate our blue ball, when he considers their sentient suffering and their planes of knowledge. Literary critic Donna Haraway puts it well when she writes in her book The Companion Species Manifesto, “Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter here. Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshy material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go.” This is all a lot of hog wash, or poodle poop, according to my husband. Jacques Derrida wrote about feeling shame when he saw the face of an animal in part because that face reflected back to him his moral failings as a man amongst men who had trampled the planet past the point of recognition, almost. My husband is a gentle man who cares about this planet. He says sorry to a tree before he cuts it down. He dutifully recycles, patiently sorting our scumbled trash, putting tin in the blue bin, plastics in the pink. He grows exotic mushrooms in our backyard’s shadiest spot, fragrant plants with gilled undersides and suede-soft caps of gray. But when it comes to dogs, my husband feels next to nothing. He has, I think, a kind of canid autism, almost utterly unable to engage in the social play between people and their pooches. His actions and attitude lead me to wonder if his long line is entirely different from mine. While I must be descended from those hairy hunters with genetic predispositions that encouraged them to welcome wolf, my husband, well, he must come from a tribe the genetic constitution of which lead them to either overtly reject the canine or simply fail to hear his knock at their door. Some theorists believe that the reason why the Neanderthals became extinct is because they never took to the pups sniffing the perimeters of their property and thus lost out on all the riches that the human/canine relationship had to offer. As the Cro-Magnon flourished, the Neanderthals—living in an iced-over Europe, in a land of perpetual twilit snow—dwindled down; cold, hunger, scarcity the name of their game. What this may mean: all those “not dog” people, the ones who push away the paws and straighten their skirts after being sniffed, well, they may have one foot in the chromosomally compromised Neanderthal pool, while, on the other hand, those of us who sneak food to Fido, roam with Rover, or insist that the Pekinese is put on the bed each night, well, we may be displaying not idiocy or short-sighted sentimentality, as our critics would call it, but a sign of our superior genetic lineage. It’s possible. But I don’t want to tell my husband this. I’d hate to hurt his feelings.
Despite our different attitudes towards dogs in particular, pets in general (we also have a cat, two hamsters, and I’m planning on hens and horses when we move full time to the country) have not been a subject of sore dispute in our home until recently. In the past, my husband and I have had brief spats about Lila and her brother, Musashi, but nothing that led to a deep and abiding impasse. Now, however, circumstances are starting to change. When I got the dogs they were puppies, and so were we. Twelve years later, I have begun to read the obituaries in the paper. I worry about osteoporosis, and I experience occasional sciatica. My eyesight is going, the distance still crisp but all that comes close to me fuzzy. Furred. Words warp and melt, slipping sideways on the page. The other day, while admiring my hydrangea in the garden, I could not recall its name. Hydrangea. Hydrangea. Hydrangea. Now I walk around repeating the names of plants to myself, as if words will keep my world intact. Hydrangea. Aster. Sedum. Astilbe.
My husband, a deeply private person, has his own assortment of worries, aches, and pains. Two years or so ago his arms started to hurt, a flaming deep in the muscles. The pain had made him smaller, solitary, sitting in his study, his wrists gleaming with Bengay. Before he left his job, unable to use a keyboard, he worked sixty, seventy hours a week an
d got his exercise while commuting in his car, steering with his left hand and lifting a five-pound weight with his right. Then he’d switch sides. He claimed that kept him in cardiovascular shape. I view this claim as the distortions of a desperate man. Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven. Unemployed, now; cornered and chronic. He has a beautiful bald spot on his head, a perfect cream-colored circle haloed by red hair. He knows enough not to try a comb-over. Our children see his bald spot as a toy. Our son races his cars around and around its circumference. Our daughter draws on it: Two eyes. A heart. Enough, he says. Enough. As for our dogs, our aging reflects theirs, or theirs ours. Musashi, the elder of our canines, appears blessed with youthful genes, his only sign a whitening of the whiskers. But Lila, like me, is going gray all over, her urine mysteriously tinged with pus and blood, her hips eroding, clumps of fur falling from her hide, her skin beneath raw red and scaly.
Until recently, I viewed Lila’s decline like my own, an unhappy inconvenience auguring a foreboding future that was still a ways off. Then, a few months ago (it was spring then, a beautiful blue and yellow May day) I came downstairs to find my feisty dog crouched by the front door, her eyes squinted shut, her breath coming fast and hot. I called to her. She struggled towards me, then sunk sideways. When she refused the ice cream I offered her (Oreo cookie, her favorite), I knew it was something serious. I rushed her to the twenty-four-hour veterinary hospital located ten miles from our house. Why, I thought, as I waited at a series of interminable red lights, my dog now panting in pain, why are there no ambulances for animals? While an ambulance for animals may strike some as absurd, it is likely no more ridiculous than a pet ER would have seemed to the general public one hundred years ago.
The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals Page 20
