The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Thus, I go outside. I take this girl, or rather this girl and I, we go for a walk. The night is not quiet, not quiet at all. Like my body and its busy cells, the night is alive with sounds. Stop now. Stand still. Lean against this tree. To my left, a raucous jay. His song ceases and silence ensues but not for long, because now I can hear, from inside my body, a tick ticking which is the sound of the ancient radiation that lives within me, and you too, our bodies made of astral matter, our atoms as old as the big bang itself. And is that cry across the way from a baby in sleep or a woman in distress, a woman sitting at her kitchen table, one cigarette smoldering in the tray full of ash?

  8.

  Sleep is annihilation, but it is also the chance for the self to take a break from itself. Who, after all, can be reasonably expected to live with any being, even your own, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? Thus there are many beneficial aspects of sleep. We say we wake up refreshed, but what we really mean is released. During the night we are released from the grip of self, and now, upon opening our eyes, we are ready to take on once more our hides and our habits, both of which, after an eight-hour hiatus, seem magically more manageable, freshened, and, maybe just for an instant, interesting, like someone we might want to meet. Separation makes the heart grow fonder, it’s true, and thus one of sleep’s main functions is to allow the hugely conscious human, with the overgrown frontal lobes, to meet himself anew each morning, when he is who he is, a simple animal, a primate undressed, his hair so sparse, his limbs so pale he’d like to protect this person meeting him in the mirror, and so he—we—throw on our clothes, zip up. Quickly.

  9.

  Tonight I skirt the woods and go instead for the field, where the grass is crisp from a simmering summer. Out here, bats fly low and I worry one will tangle in my hair. A long time ago, when I was young, bats got into our attic, this despite my mother’s considerable efforts to seal shut the house from wanton wind and weather. She was a regal woman, my mother, and she disliked the wayward ways of the world. Our house was kept antiseptically clean, our towels all monogrammed with our initials, as well as the collars of our blouses, as though we might somehow forget who we were without these embroidered reminders.

  And yet despite all my mother’s efforts, bats came in, probably through the chimney. I don’t recall how we discovered them, if someone found a furred corpse or if we heard their silken soars above us. My mother stormed. She sent my father up with a child’s butterfly net and obediently (my father was almost always obedient to her) he went. He climbed the three sets of steps, ascending to the attic with a small nylon net hitched to a pink handle, us four children and our clench-faced mother watching from below. We heard our father turn the handle and step into the darkest part of the house and then for a long, long time it was quiet up there. “Papa?” my younger sister mumbled after many moments had passed and he hadn’t returned. For some reason I wondered if he’d become a bat himself, joined their ranks, released from the weight of marriage and parenthood, and just as I saw this in my mind’s eye we heard from the attic’s interior the sound of a mighty struggle, crashing, curse words, something shattering, and then the door burst open and “Papa” returned, red-faced, huffing, one bat captured in that toy net he held pinched closed. He had a scrape above his eye, a slender seam of blood just beginning to show, and his whole face looked odd, stormy, his lips pressed and white. “Just one?” my mother cried. My father said nothing, strode past her, his anger entirely odd for him, and palpable. Some transformation had happened to him when he went among the bats; with their webbed wings and silent songs they’d put a spell on him, for suddenly my father stood straighter and walked with an angry energy we couldn’t understand. “Just one,” he quipped to my mother, moving past her.

  We followed our father downstairs, us kids did, leaving my mother to fret alone in the hallway. “C’mon,” he said to us, my father said to us, striding through the kitchen, opening the back door onto the evening. And what an evening it was, the sky all lavender, practically pulsing with late light, darkness creeping towards us from under the trees and shrubs. “We’ll let the little lady go,” my father said and I wondered how he knew the bat was female. We all went outside, and he held the net up, unpinched the sides, and we saw the bat soar straight towards the moon, its wings wide, its tiny furred feet splayed out as it arced heavenward. “What a sight,” my father said, and a sight it was, and we all stood there for a long time, so long we failed to recognize that the darkness was upon us and the nighttime had begun.

  10.

  This is the memory that comes to me as I pace the thatched field, back and forth, up and down, the darkness deep; I sit down and then, suddenly, sleep waves her wand because when I next look up it is somehow, oddly, nearing dawn and the sky is lavender just like it once was and above me, all around me, dipping and diving, there are bats, everywhere, small brown bats, crepuscular, some flying so low I can see their mouse-mouths and the tiny tabs of their furred ears, and I know it’s impossible but I hear it anyway, their sonar songs; yes, the bats are singing as they traverse the air, as I’ve traversed the night, and come through, once again, on the other side.

  I watch the bats. They are not doing anything special, just being bats, but that’s enough to captivate me, enough to captivate anyone, really. Mammals who fly. Imagine that. Imagine standing on the tip of a cliff and spreading your arms. Imagine nursing your young in a dark cave. Imagine seeing by sound. I stand. I watch the bats as the sky moves through its morning paces, lavender to lipstick-pink back to violet and finally settling into a pool-bottom blue, the clouds perfect today, fluffed and drifting.

  Now the door slams and my daughter and husband step outside, to find me, wet with dew, like the lawn is too. My husband has red hair, just like my father, and I have the shape and shrewdness of my mother, but the similarities end there. I do not have her rage, her huge and negative capacities. I grew up scared, in that place called the Golden Ghetto. I’m still scared now, but I think I know how to hold myself. I’ve learned how to make a plan, or to ask for directions. Most of all, I have my people, I found my people, it took years but here they are, the ones I can call mine.

  “Look,” I now say to them—my people, my husband and my daughter and now my son comes too—pointing to the soaring shapes, the webbed wings outspread. Perhaps it’s an odor, a smell rising off my skin. Because as my husband and daughter and son come closer, so too do the bats, swooping lower and lower until at last I can feel the black mass of them humming above me—too close, I think, but isn’t it always that way, the odd, the animal, too close for our comfort? I would run, but my legs seem stuck, like I’m dreaming a bat dream, a bad dream, only the sun is coming up and I am indisputably awake as a bat with an ovoid body swoops so low I can smell the guano, thick and rich, and then he’s in my hair, tangled there, while I shrink from the moist touch of nighttime. I shake my mane, flinch forward, and then go crazy, go, finally, wild, yelling, No no no, like that’s my one and only word. I utter it over and over again, my single primitive syllable, and as I speak it I raise my arm and grasp the body of the bat, surprised to find how hot he is, all throb and twist, and then I lift him with my hands and hurl him, hard, back to the heavens.

  And he goes. He catches a current and soars straight up a shaft of crystalline air, and as he rises I hear the sound of something ripped from my head, a thatch of my hair he has, carrying it clasped in what must be his mouth; it’s hard to tell. I reach up to rub, surprised by the space I can feel on my stinging scalp. I’ll have a small bald spot there until the fuzz grows in, but that won’t be for weeks. And when I look way up, I see my bat is indeed holding a hunk of my hair, so I am, for just a moment, with him, of him (or is it her, the little lady?), and this is how it comes to be that I am—a part of me is—streaming through the sky, and then I soar one step further and am winged and singing in a key no human can hear. This my daylight dream, while below me are my bones and the landscape dotted with houses and horses and s
trange pale people they’re called, the only animals with 753 fears. The bat knows this and nods. And then, because he needs his mouth to sing sonar, the bat quickly lets my locks go. I watch as all my strands circle the sky and then, at last, drift down—falling, falling, like you do in a dream, down stairs and steeples and saddles and swords, immobilized by fear as you fall—

  11.

  Except this time, grown up and long gone (I have my own home now. Come visit me here and we’ll have a cup of tea), I step forward and catch myself in my cupped hands.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Helene Atwan of Beacon Press for her unwavering support for this book. Thanks to Angela von der Lippe of W. W. Norton for believing in the project for as long as she did; to Betsy Lerner of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner for ferrying the book through its labyrinthine course; to Dorian Karchmar for being there during the absolute hardest parts; and to Kim Witherspoon for suggesting the idea in the first place. Thanks to my inimitable writer’s group—Karen Propp, Pagan Kennedy, and Audrey Schulman—a twenty-five-year-old constellation of friends and critics who heard portions of this book well past their bed times, and to my husband, who (and if you’ve read the book know this by now) put up with this project and did so with good humor. Thanks to Evans Huber, who dove in and took charge when things started coming undone. Thanks to my children, Clara and Lucas Alexander, who are inspirations and sources of solace when the going gets tough (and it did). And thanks, of course, to my canine companions, especially Lila and Musashi, with whom I shared thirteen and seventeen years respectively, who I will never stop missing, and whose gentleness, grit, mirth, and courage remain for me models of how one can live with grace and goodwill.