The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  In the meantime, the ceiling was being sealed with our aromatic “rot resistant” cedar, terms I knew were not absolute, because cedar does rot if you keep it wet for long enough; it’s all relative. The size of the lump in my chest was tiny compared to the one that had come back cancerous several years before, but then again large tumors are often pseudo tumors; it’s the small ones that aren’t playing around. They have to be tough if they’re to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of nanoville. It was like I could see that world, a series of swerving tunnels hanging in a mist in the air, everywhere. And then my daughter began to have nightmares, trapped in tunnels, or the great plates of the earth crunching together so beautiful mountains blew their tops and spurted golden magma. Her dreams at night echoed my vision during the day, although I never did I tell her I was stuck with seepage, living in quarkdom, worried about wasps overtaking the home we’d bought.

  And no, never did I tell her, but daughters read their mother’s minds, the pair hitched by a hook, it’s clear. My daughter dreamt she fell down a pin-prick hole, her whole self sucked into something no bigger than the nose of a needle, she fell and fell, passing through layers of earth, the red hot embers of the center rushing up to meet her, and she screamed.

  “It’s just a bad dream,” I said to her, stroking back her hair as she lay in bed. “Don’t be scared, there’s no need to be scared.”

  And then, propping herself up with her elbow in bed, so I could see her hair cascading in the darkness, she said, “You’re scared. So why shouldn’t I be too?”

  My daughter was eight, almost nine when she said that, young enough to lie to. “I’m not scared,” I said.

  “You’re scared almost all the time,” my daughter said and then she lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling to which she’d affixed phosphorescent stars and the perfect crescent of a moon. During the day you couldn’t see them but once the light was out in the night they popped into perfect view.

  “Sometimes,” I now said, staring at her little solar system overhead, “Sometimes I admit I get a little nervous, but that’s normal.”

  “You’re scared of the wasps,” Clara said, and she was right. For five days the contractor had been out there, installing the new ceiling, and not once had I gone up to check on his progress. And prior to the wasps I’d always insisted we go to the “second home” every weekend, counting down the days until we could get there, my hands missing the ancient till and the pond’s cool water, but now I stopped insisting, and we passed our Saturdays and Sundays in the city, where I worked my small plot, pulling weeds and watering my hydrangeas, all of which were in beautiful bloom, some stippled red, others in fat clusters of sky blue. Even when the contractor called to tell us he’d finished our ceiling and the wasps were for the most part gone, their means of egress now nailed shut with rot-resistant cedar, the whole house smelling sweet, no, not even then did I want to go back.

  In my life I have had more phobias then I have fingers to count them on. I might go so far as to call myself a professional phobic, except that I’ve made no money at the job, and it brings me no esteem. Nevertheless, when I start avoiding something, I know just what it is I have to do: its equal but opposite reaction, this cure as sure and steady as the physical law it imitates. If you are afraid of fried eggs nothing will cure you except frying and eating the egg, not even knowing the etiology of the egg fear will help you so don’t spend money dreaming on an analyst’s couch. Spend your bucks on a flat frying pan and Pam. As for my wasps, who wouldn’t be frightened? But my daughter was right; my fear was infectious, even as I felt it stiffen me, constrict me and what I was in the world. We had bought this country house to live in, not avoid. We planned to move there at the end of this school year, motivated by a desire to know the earth more intimately before it disappeared in clouds of carbon and waste. Were there wasps in my childhood? For sure, but who cares? I could not recall a single one. Were the wasps some sort of misplaced fear, their swarming like cells? Of course, but this nonrevelation brought me no bravery. Thursday I had my meeting with the oncologist, but Wednesday was free, and blue and bright, the kind of crisp October day that you wish you could preserve in a bottle.

  I did what I knew I needed to do. I did it not out of bravery but superstition. If I was good enough to face what had become a full-blown fear of the house, then maybe my oncologist would palpate the little lump and say, That? It’s just fat, or some such thing. Gristle, or some such thing. So I went up to the house that Wednesday, in the morning, 10 a.m., the roads empty, me in my little car flying down the highway. It was such a pretty day. I rode with the windows down, so the speed had sound, like ripping silk, fields on either side of me, orange tractors pulsing in the strong sun.

  I pulled into the driveway, the familiar crunch of its gravel, the apple tree surrounded by fallen fruit, bruised and brown and smelling sweet. The sky was always bluer here, in the country, and today not a single cloud in sight. Overhead hung a transparent daylight moon.

  The front door, when I got to it, was open. The contractor had failed to lock it, I suppose, but there’s a difference between an unlocked door and an actual open one. There it was—the door—open, just like it might be in a storybook, a fairy tale, the little door open, the golden glow inside, the pull of the place, go in now; the necessary hesitation because what else might be in there, what with the open door and all.

  By the side of the door hung a copper bell, the clapper going green from the elements. Now I reached up and rung the bell, the sound pure and pealing in the lovely mid-morning, I rang the bell three times, one, two, three, and when no one came to get me, I stepped over the threshold, one hand on my chest, where I often found it these days, pressing the little lump, feeling for its contours and intentions.

  The contractor had left the home extremely clean. I could see that immediately. In fact the home was cleaner than we’d ever left it ourselves. The kitchen was shining, the stovetop a wet lacquered black, our old oak table covered with a sprightly red checked cloth. The stairs had been scrubbed down and the whole place smelled of sawdust and pine pitch and cedar.

  He had left the place clean, yes, but as I went from room to room the hiss returned—my imagination, perhaps, or was it the fact that I found, webbed in a few corners or simply, seemingly, dead center on some floors, the corpses of wasps, insubstantial in death, they were dried and desiccated and flaked away in the wake of my weight.

  Nothing is ever absolute, including revelations or understanding. No one had promised me a complete solution. I studied a few wasps caught in webs, snarled in the silky strands, and then I stood back up, stepped forward and heard a hard cerrunch-ch beneath the heel of my shoe.

  The crunch was so syllabic, so wet and sharp in the completely quiet house that I jumped, moved back, stared down, and that is when I saw the body of the wasp I’d stepped on. He was still alive, writhing on the floor, his lower body half smashed, oozing red blood. The blood stopped me up short. Do insects have blood, and red blood at that? I knelt down now. It could not be. I pressed my chest where the nodule was. It could not be. Down beneath me there was crimson blood and it was coming not from me but from an insect with, I’d assumed, no significant similarities to myself.

  Slowly, I stood back up. I took a mason jar from the window sill and, using a spoon I found on the dresser, I scooped the injured wasp inside. I don’t know why. I walked with him out of the house and set him on the hood of my car. Even when wounded he still hissed, his one good wing vibrating with this song he had to sing.

  I watched the wasp. My weight had damaged him, a mortal wound for sure. Blood covered the floor of the jar now, and it streaked the walls too. One of his wings was wrangled, all bent and crumpled, and his thorax was partially unhinged. I stood there and watched him as he hurled his torn self against the jar’s sides, trying to climb the glass, falling back into blood again, tearing his wing to tatters in the process.

  I have always needed to find beauty in what I love, in wha
t I claim for a connection, be it the bodies of my children, or the man I married. There was no beauty here, but there was that blood, which I could not easily overlook, blood as red as any human’s, and then I slipped my finger down deep in the jar and drew it back up, dabbed dark now, one single bead of wasp blood sliding down my first finger, caught in the cup I made of my hand, a droplet already evaporating even as it formed, and then I touched it with my tongue. Such a tiny bead, and yet it exploded in my mouth, sheer salt with a tang of sweetness that left before you could lock it in, the blood in the back of my throat now, streaks of salt so pure they stung, and my eyes teared up and then in a simple swallow it was done. Gone. In the jar the wasp, I saw, was still, lying on his side, his one good wing pumping slowly up, then down, up, then down. He’d managed to sting me without once touching me, an insect, an animal, defying the dimensions and coming across.

  I tapped three times on the side of the jar and the wasp, well, he turned towards me now, his antennae quivering and then, overtaken by rage or something more primitive still, he began to hurl himself against the glass, throwing his whole body into it, his humming ceased, the insect utterly silent as he banged his body again and again against this terrible transparency, these slick sides, and I saw in that wasp a willfulness that was terribly familiar to me. I know, I know, it’s narrow-minded to anthropomorphize, but how else might we learn to tolerate, to perhaps love, what we have in fact hated? Animal researchers are constantly warning us about anthropomorphizing when in fact it’s this that reels in revulsion, this megametaphor we make of a world both too terribly big and also dangerously small. So, yes. I will. Right now. See how he struggles? See how he slows as his wounds widen and the red keeps running out of him? It’s not a sadness that we share but some life force, some filament that flows through him and me both, joined, jointed by a fierce need to triumph even though we won’t; we can’t. I see myself in his struggles and, moments later, when the wasp dies, I no longer see myself as I am but as I one day will be.

  Bat Dreams

  1.

  When I have trouble sleeping—and even when I don’t—I like to go outside in the deepest part of the dark. Everything I fear is out here, the coyotes roaming the rim of the woods, the glades deep enough to drown in, my shadow painted on the pavement. There it is—a self so stretched I can’t see past its point of disappearance. What draws me here? When I look back, I see our house, the one we’ve finally moved to out here in the country, living now closer to cliffs and claws, our door substantial, a weighty wedge of wood, the windows sturdy squares, wrapped in vinyl that no amount of rain will rot. After years and years of searching, I finally have what I have always wanted—a home by the forest, a place called mine, where I can stack my books and sip my tea, cups nesting on the shelf I painted primrose blue. Opening the door to darkness is like diving into deep cool pool, the shock of it, the smack of it, reminding me what is real.

  2.

  Insomniacs have different ways of coping. Some stare at the wall or count cows in their mind; others toss and turn until their sheets are roped around their bodies wet with sweat. Pills come to mind, some tablets, others oblong capsules made of gelatin that dissolve in the mouth and leave some sweetness behind. I’ve tried all these tricks and found them all, at times, more or less successful. In the end they don’t matter. Sleep, as I tell my children, comes to those who wait.

  3.

  My father, at seventy-four years of age, still struggles with insomnia, his bedside drawer crammed with all manner of questionable cures. Like my sister, of similar temperament, he sleeps with a black gel mask over his eyes and a fan turned on, the white noise blocking the twitches and turns, the pings and guffaws of a planet that never rests. All of us Slaters are sensitive to sound. Our ears, it seems, are magnets, so the whine of a mosquito is multiplied times ten, and the low groan of the crocodile on a bank hundreds of miles away reaches us where we lay, staring at the ceiling, searching for something that cannot be found. No, you don’t find sleep. In the end it finds you, and only when you’ve ceased to scrabble after it.

  I have learned not to chase sleep. I have learned that, like a child or a deer, sleep will trot the other way as soon as she sees my outstretched hand. I have also learned, from all those long nights lying in bed, counting cows as they clear my moon—each one, every time—I have also learned that insomnia, at least for me, is in part a fear of precisely what I claim I long for. Yes, sleep entombs us. As soon as I turn my attention away she is there, laying her long body over mine, her cold invisible hand gagging my mouth, her weight so substantial I cease to stir, and thus I lie there, a body in the night, my muscles paralyzed as every sleeper’s are, while meanwhile, way up in the globe called my head, dancers are whirling and masked men hold sticks of fire. Houses conflagrate and people drop like leaves from silver skyscrapers, their bodies flocking in the air, which is also packed with letters, A’s and X’s and Z’s all falling with the people, some of whom sprout wings and others of whom fail to find their flight, and thus come to the concrete, crashing.

  4.

  Human beings have such a long list of fears: nachtophobia—fear of nightmares; pterodophobia—fear of ferns; acerophobia—fear of sourness; cacaphobia—fear of ugliness; venustrophobia—fear of beautiful women; chinophobia—fear of snow; cynophobia—fear of dogs; heliophobia—fear of the sun; leukophobia—fear of the color white; octophobia—fear of the figure eight; belonephobia—fear of pins and needles; chrobophobia—fear of dancing; coulraphobia—fear of clowns; dendrophobia—fear of the woods; astrophobia—fear of stars; caligrophobia—fear of writing; bibliophobia—fear of books; barophobia—fear of gravity; coultraphobia—fear of claws; autrophobia—fear of flutes; nostophobia—fear of returning home; doraphobia—fear of fur and the skins of animals.

  5.

  Wild animals have no known phobias. Human beings, on the other hand, have 753 phobias on record, fear of sleep amongst them. It seems strange to me that Homo sapiens, which translates into “wise man,” is so riddled with so many unwise fears, but stranger still is the fact that, despite all our technological prowess, we nevertheless fear so much more while we suffer so much less than wild animals whose pain is never tamed by morphine, whose hides are never saved by the scalpel. Think, for instance, of arctic caribou, huge lumbering beasts tormented by tiny botflies that crawl up the nose to deposit maggots beneath the skin, maggots that squirm and snack on living flesh. A hunter once showed me an old caribou hide he had hanging on one of his study’s walls, the skin stretched and pinned with tiny tacks so you could clearly see the wide infected welts, each one white rimmed and round, with jagged edges that looked to me like tiny teething marks. After seeing such a sight one starts to wonder if what makes an animal wild is not its temper or its teeth but rather it’s incredible unmitigated pain, a pain purer than we—who lean on our letters and our lidocaine—can conceive.

  6.

  Nictophobia—fear of forests and wooded places. These days, when I can’t sleep, because I fear sleep, I go outside, into the wooded places. I am not looking to be lulled by the breezes or the natural beauty. One overcomes fear by entering it and, because I can’t enter sleep, I do the next best thing. I enter the dew-slick night, the moist forest where millions of mosquitoes dwell, where the carcasses of animals lie deteriorating in the dirt, a half-eaten turkey, meat still clinging to its bones; I pick it up and hordes of beetles drop from its hollows, zig and zag over my bare feet before scuttering into the wall of weeds beside me. Shaken, I turn back to look at our new house and am surprised to see it has somehow shrunk, due to distance or nerves; I think of all its problems. The right-side sill is rotting, ingested by the very insects that right this minute fly in a halo around my head or hide in the heaps of dead grass and decay. The windows, which just days ago seemed so square and solid, look from here all tilted, and they do not properly close, so the weather blows in, sprays of rain in the spring or summer, isolated flakes in the winter. You look up and see those flake
s; they land on the bookshelf and melt into a tiny tide pool, lace giving way to water. Every day I consider my lists; so many things to do! So many repairs to make! It seems we close up one gap only to have another open and thus the house is a perpetual project, a lesson it insists we learn, and what lesson is this? There is no way to keep out oblivion; no antidote for annihilation. Put three thousand locks on your doorways and gum-shut your windows with tar and still finality will find its chinks and make its way through, and claim your corporeal being, when the time is right. When the time is right. When the time is right. I repeat that phrase a lot when I’m having insomnia. I lie in bed and stare at my ceiling and think—When the time is right.

  7.

  Benjamin tells me that I’ve started talking in my sleep, and this makes me still more wary of sleep’s strange grip. I don’t have secrets I need to hide. The talking bothers me because it’s like having a second self who has slipped past my awareness with her grab bag of tools and tricks she plays on a mind. “What do I say?” I ask my husband. He reports that he can’t make out a single phrase. “It’s gibberish,” he says, “and your voice is high.” I have a girl in me, I guess, a girl who has some story to tell, and she emerges in darkness, but ultimately, she, like me, is stymied by the spell of sleep. She tries and tries to talk, but all that happens is a blended mess of vowels and the clunky clunk of consonants tripping over one another.