The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  “Here,” I say. I unclip the muzzle and pull it away from Dean’s snout. Suddenly, he looks more like the dog we both know. I pet his head, and he sniffs at my hand. He tries to shuffle forward, but his lower half doesn’t follow his front legs’ lead, and his nails scrape futilely against the table.

  “Would you like to step outside?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Jill says. She moves toward the door.

  “Wait,” I say. “Jill, I’m really, really sorry about this. All of it.”

  She stands at the door, her hand on the knob.

  “Whatever you want to do,” I say, “I’m your man. We’re in this thing together.”

  Maybe it’s the classical music coming through the thin walls of the next room, or that our dog is dying on a table in front of us. Perhaps it’s something else entirely. But before Jill walks out the door, she smiles. She gives me a look that says, At least we have each other. That seems to say, We can still make this work. A look that says, Don’t worry. Love won’t let go.

  . . .

  Now, it’s just me and Dean. It’s hard to look at him, so I look around the room. It’s small, not like the offices where you take your pet for a checkup. No posters of breeds on the walls or tins of doggy treats on the countertop. This room is reserved for death. There are two chairs, a big padded one for the vet and a white, plastic chair, an old piece of patio furniture. I pick the plastic chair, which seems to open its arms to accept me as I sit, then grips my hips so tightly I wonder if I’ll ever escape.

  I force myself to look at Dean. Dean looks back. He’s got his head balanced on his front paws. If you took away the IV tube, he’d look like one of those dogs you see on calendars with titles like Beautiful Beagles or Purebred Hounds.

  “We had a deal,” I say. Dean doesn’t say anything, just watches me with his big, sad dog eyes. “We had a deal, you fucker.”

  Dean winces, and I know that he must be in terrible pain, that it’s time to get this over with. As if on cue, the veterinarian walks in. He carries a small tray with a stiff, blue cloth draped over the top, like I won’t guess what’s underneath.

  “If you’re finished,” he says, “I’d like to go ahead with the procedure.” Procedure. He says it the way you’d say spatula. There’s no inflection, no hint of what’s in the syringe and what it will do to the dog.

  “I’ll need you to step out,” he says. His face is kind, but his voice is firm.

  “No,” I say. “I think I’ll stay.”

  “We generally don’t recommend that.”

  “I want to watch you kill my dog,” I say.

  “Sir,” he says, but there is nothing else to say.

  “If you want me to sign a waiver or something, I will.”

  The man frowns. He pulls the blue cloth from the tray, revealing two shots.

  “I’m afraid I’ll need to put the muzzle back on,” he says. “He tried to bite one of my technicians.”

  “Sorry about that,” I say.

  The vet steps forward with the muzzle, and something churns inside me. It seems undignified, like Dean deserves better. I may not like this dog, but all living things deserve to die decently. I believe that.

  I jump up, the chair clinging to me for a second before clattering to the floor. “Wait,” I say. “Don’t put that on him. I’ll take care of it.”

  The vet looks at me skeptically, then puts the muzzle away. I step up to the table and crouch so that me and Dean are eye and eye.

  “Well,” I say, “this is it, buddy.” I make a fist around his snout and nod at the vet. The first needle goes in and Dean whines, struggles under my grip.

  Quickly, the vet retrieves the second syringe. When the needle hits Dean’s hide, though, he thrashes, pulls his mouth from my hand, and bites down hard on my thumb. The vet injects the last of the toxin, pulls the needle out, and, still, Dean doesn’t let go. I try to pry my hand from his jaws, but he holds on tight.

  He dies like that, my bloody thumb caught between his teeth. And, for the first time since we met, he looks happy.

  Nudists

  Outside, Mark’s brother lit a second cigarette. Above him, tacked to a stone column, a sign directed smokers to other stretches of sidewalk. Joshua seemed not to notice the sign or, beyond the wide glass doors and across the crowded baggage claim, his brother.

  Mark was in no hurry to have his brother’s attention. The flight had been long, the movie unwatchable, his seatmate more than a little on the smelly side. And now he had Joshua to endure, Joshua, who, even as a boy, refused to let anyone shorten his name. Call him Josh, and he’d punch you in the arm, hard.

  He watched Joshua smoke the cigarette to the filter, watched him drop, then grind, the butt into the sidewalk with the bright toe of a brown leather boot. When the doors opened and the boots shuffled through, Mark turned away. He tried to arrange his expression into something approaching happy surprise, and, when he turned back, Joshua was on him.

  The hug lasted too long, past uncomfortable, then past that, until, gently, he pushed Joshua away, and they stood, studying each other.

  Last he’d seen him, Joshua had looked weary, old for his age. Now, he was the kind of thirty that got carded at bars. He was lean, muscled, like someone who played sports, though Mark couldn’t imagine it—Joshua kicking a field goal or working a basketball down the court. His skin was bronzed, hair black, curls tangled thick as sheep’s wool. His hair had the appearance that comes from one’s working very hard to make hair look messy. It glistened under the airport lights as though lacquered. Mark had expected a gut, an invasion of gray hairs, those plagues of age he’d endured himself. Had he hoped them for his brother? But Joshua looked better than ever, healthy, fit—young—and Mark told him so.

  “You look good too,” Joshua said.

  “I got fat,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend I didn’t.”

  Joshua shrugged. He ran a hand over his hair, which didn’t move.

  An employee of the federal park service, Joshua had pinballed from park to park before landing a permanent position at the San Francisco Maritime Museum. For two years, he’d held Mark to the promise to visit, a promise Mark had felt no real obligation to keep. He was always the one emptying his wallet for flights to Jackson Hole or Salt Lake or Tucson, wherever Joshua landed seasonal work. Joshua had never returned the favor, had never come to Vermont, never, in ten years, seen their home or Lorrie’s garden in full bloom. And now it was too late. The house was no longer his. The flowers, which he’d let wilt, then die, had been pulled up. Where there’d been flowerbeds, the new owners had laid sod. It shone in the sun, neon, indisputable as Astroturf.

  The baggage carousel snaked past them, silver, a river of ladders, rungs spinning. The other passengers from his flight had left, bags in hand, all but a woman in a yellow dress. Three times, a white duffel circled. A red ribbon fluttered from its handle. On the fourth pass, the woman cried, “Oh!” She got a hand on the bag and fought to pull it from the conveyor. Joshua stepped forward and, with an Allow me, lifted the bag and lowered it onto a cart stacked high with matching luggage.

  “Thank you!” she said.

  “My pleasure,” Joshua said. He raised a hand, touched the brim of a hat that wasn’t there. He turned to Mark, crossed his arms.

  “Marisa’s thrilled you came,” he said.

  Marisa was Joshua’s girlfriend. She was smart, smarter than Joshua. Kinder, too, so that Mark often wondered what she saw in his brother.

  But the bond was undeniable, and their relationship, whatever else it may have been, was not an unhappy one. It wasn’t that Joshua and Marisa never fought. It was that they fought without raising their voices. Each laughed at the other’s jokes. Each smiled when the other talked. Mark had stood in the doorway, once, and watched them wash dishes. They’d moved side by side at the sink with a shared tempo, Marisa humming something,
hands working fast with a rag. They were good for each other, in dishwashing and in life, and, following a visit, Lorrie had never failed to point this out to Mark, illustratively, letting the fact stand for that which she couldn’t—wouldn’t—say.

  “I think you’ll like the place we picked out for Thursday,” Joshua said.

  Mark nodded. He wished suddenly and like hell that he hadn’t come.

  The carousel circled, bagless. A new group of passengers flooded the lobby.

  “This right here is why I carry on,” Joshua said.

  He wanted to tell Joshua that he had carried on, that he’d been stopped at boarding by a flight attendant who insisted his bag was oversized. He’d argued, then pleaded. The bag would fit, had fit many times before. But it was no use. The suitcase had been ticketed and whisked away.

  A siren squawked and the carousel shuddered to a stop.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Easy,” Joshua said. “It’s just luggage.”

  But it wasn’t just luggage. This, this very moment, was the culmination of everything that had conspired, that year, to wreck him. Everything resurfacing, the way it did daily, this day in the guise of lost luggage. He thought he might cry. Thinking it, he was ashamed, and then he was sure he would cry.

  “Hey, they’ll find it,” Joshua said. “Till then, mi ropa es su ropa, you know?”

  Mark nodded. Back in Burlington, he taught Spanish to dead-eyed adolescents, a fact he’d quit advertising on airplanes or anywhere people asked, What do you do? He hated being the dartboard for people’s bad Spanish, their mismatched participles and mangled pronunciations. He loved language, loved it too much to hear it roll ugly off others’ tongues, which was to say that, as a middle school teacher halfway to retirement, he had long ago committed himself to the wrong profession.

  “I have a toothbrush you can use,” Joshua said. “I always keep an extra on hand.”

  Who the fuck kept spare toothbrushes? It was too much. Mark wanted to turn and walk back onto the plane.

  “Boy Scout motto,” Joshua said, and, when Mark couldn’t fill in the blank, he held up a hand in the trademark three-finger salute and said, “Be prepared.”

  . . .

  But what could have prepared Mark for that year? What prepares one for a life left under a bridge in blue water?

  Three cars spinning was how one witness described what he’d seen. Lorrie’s car was the one to go through the guardrail, to eat the sky and fall. The river was frozen, and the car cracked it open.

  When Mark reached the river, he pushed past paramedics and reporters and saw what everyone saw: two circles projected onto the underside of the ice. They glowed like ghosts, like river moons. He vomited, staggered forward, was caught before he fell through.

  As he watched, a shadow crossed one beam, then the other. The shadow grew in the light. He prayed that it was Lorrie even as he knew that it couldn’t be Lorrie. The shadow was like a great fish rising, then an angel, and then the shadow was a man. The man appeared through a hole in the ice. He elbowed his way onto the ice and moved toward shore. He was pulled onto the bank by police officers in black coats with thick collars. The swimmer’s feet were fins, his face a bubble of glass. A blue skin covered him, head to toe, and a tank hung from his back. A regulator’s bulb fell from his mouth, and, shivering, the man pulled the mask from his face. He said nothing, only shook his head.

  The next day, on the phone, Joshua had said over and over how sorry he was. He asked how he could help. When Mark suggested he board the first flight to Burlington, Joshua had said that sort of thing could be difficult, that he’d have to discuss it with Marisa, that it was a tough time, which meant that he didn’t want to spend the money.

  Two words, and Mark might have changed his brother’s mind. I’ll pay. Or, if his brother were a better man, simply: Please, come. Though, if his brother were a better man, Mark wouldn’t have needed the words, and so he would not say them. He would not beg.

  Silence stood between them like the quiet that follows the click of a pin pulled from a grenade. Then Joshua said he had to go. He’d talk to Marisa. He’d see what he could do.

  But he had not come. And so they had not spoken, not until the year unraveled into autumn and a surprise showed up in the mail. It was Marisa’s name at the bottom of the card in blue ink. The invitation to Thanksgiving dinner was hers. Mark had accepted. He’d been ready, then, to face his brother. Now, he was no longer sure that he was.

  . . .

  Joshua drove fast, an arm out the window. He pointed and smoked. He had a park ranger’s trademark memory and could, when called upon to do so, expound at length on his surroundings. Each San Francisco block brought another restaurant, storefront, or statue and, with each, an anecdote, a history, the confirmation or rejection of local lore.

  Mark sat low in his seat, half-listening. He felt his pockets for his wallet, his keys, his phone. His suitcase held everything else. The bag would be delivered by morning. He had the airline’s assurances.

  Bad music shook the speakers of Joshua’s car, something about mammals . . . something, something . . . the Discovery Channel.

  “Here’s the Haight,” Joshua said. “Haight-Ashbury. Hippie shit. Late sixties, heart of the free love movement. Now it’s a place you don’t walk at night.”

  They stopped at a light. A man in a floppy stovepipe hat, red and white like the Cat in the Hat’s, shuffled down the sidewalk. Ahead of him, a Mohawked woman jogged, tracksuit billowing.

  “Freak show,” Joshua said. “A lot of that here. Not just here, but here.” He nodded, as if to indict the city, all of it, or maybe the whole West Coast. The song changed, and Joshua’s arm returned to the cab and drummed the dash. Every few taps, his other hand left the wheel to stick an invisible cymbal.

  The Mohawked woman was getting farther and farther away. She was tall and thin and moved with a bouncy, assured gait. Mark would have liked to run a hand over her head, to feel the smooth scalp turn to hair, then back to skin. He thought of highways, of the grassy medians that divide them. He thought—he couldn’t help himself—of Lorrie.

  They drove on until he was sure they’d left the city, and then the car approached a bend. Joshua took the turn hard, and Mark flinched. When they straightened out, he relaxed his grip on the door handle. It had been like this since the accident. His new apartment he’d picked by its proximity to school. Except during rainstorms, he walked to work.

  They followed the road down a hill and joined a line of cars on the shoulder. The sight had been picked to astonish: the Golden Gate Bridge, many-spindled, majestic, and fat behind fog. They left the car, climbed a bluff, and looked down on the bridge, which seemed to Mark more red than gold. Trying to take in the bridge, the enormity of it in the fog, was like picturing a puzzle with gaps at the center and the sides. Below, ships navigated the channel. A sailboat cut through the mist and emerged from beneath the bridge.

  “I stop here sometimes on my way to work,” Joshua said. “Just to see it. An absolute feat of engineering. Took four thousand workers and four years to complete. 1.2 million rivets, each one solid steel.” He sighed, shook his head. “Men died to make this bridge.”

  Far back as Mark could remember, Joshua had been like this. He was the kind of guy who took his truth where he could find it, and because, given his line of work, factoids were the morsels that made up his communion, he was prone to flights of trivial import, his life a kind of Jeopardy! He might note, with urgency, that the blind were known for their acute sense of hearing or that elephants sometimes ran trunks over the tusks of the dead. Invariably, he would follow these nuggets up with It just goes to show you, or It really makes you think, though he could never be depended upon to say just what something went to show or was meant to make one think. His metaphors went forever unfinished, as though to turn them toward relevance might diminish their vague power. T
he right listener might smile, amused or awed, but Mark was not the right listener. The treatises generally left him resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

  As a child, Joshua had been drawn to nature documentaries. He’d harried the family at mealtimes with the sleeping habits of lions, the diets of zebras, the migration patterns of various African birds. Traits were occasionally attributed to family members.

  “You,” he told Mark over a dinner of hot dogs, “are a rhino.” He didn’t say why. Instead, he took a big bite of hot dog, mustard dropping onto his shirtfront. He set the hot dog down, and—Mark couldn’t say why he remembered this so vividly—he pulled the shirt to his mouth and, nimbly as a cat, tongued the fabric clean.

  Each evening brought new animals to the table, and what Joshua didn’t know, Mark suspected he made up. He suspected this still.

  On the bluff, Mark watched him. They shared the same hawk’s nose, the same narrow forehead and cleft chin. Hard features. Presidential, Lorrie had said.

  They shared the same blood. This was unmistakable, right up to the moment Joshua opened his mouth, at which point Mark always wondered how they could be brothers.

  “This bridge,” Joshua said. “It really makes you think.”

  “It does,” Mark said, thinking how a moment can mean two things to two people.

  He thought this and did not speak it. Neither did he remind the man at his side that a bridge in winter was what had killed his wife.

  . . .

  They drove on, following the coastline, until they came to a kind of compound. Identical concrete units rose between trees from green hills, the buildings dark-roofed and many-antennaed. They had reached the Presidio.

  “Former military base,” Joshua said. “And now—”

  “Housing for hippies?”

  “You got it.”

  The units were small, three-storied, drab but for plants in window boxes and flags hung from ledges.

  “Batteries line the beach,” Joshua said. “The government was all set for the Japanese.”