Man in the Empty Boat Page 13

  When I take charge of things, they never unfold according to my wishes. If I had planned D-day, the Allies would have gotten lost in the Atlantic and stormed the beaches of New Jersey. On the drive up, Bowie and I stopped for the night at a dog-friendly hotel. I took her for a potty walk before we went inside, and I thought she’d emptied her tank, but the first thing she did when she got in the room was to squat and soak the carpet. When we arrived at my friend’s house the next day, I kept her on a leash, even indoors, but it didn’t matter. On our way to the kitchen, she froze as if she’d been shot, lowered her bum, and pissed right in front of me, half on the rug and half on my shoe, oblivious to the “nein!” and “nay!” commands and professionally approved corrective yanks on her training collar.

  Greg’s house is in the Wood River Valley, one of the most beautiful spots on Earth. Ernest Hemingway loved this area; his house is just up the road from where I was staying. Yes, he killed himself in it, but that’s not Idaho’s fault. Herds of elk wander around the neighborhood all the time. During my visits there, I have seen moose, red foxes, otters, and even a bear. The valley is far from any large cities, so there is almost no light pollution—the night sky is glorious. The Milky Way is stunning. On our first night there, I took Bowie out for a walk and tried to get her to look up. I wanted her to admire the portion of the Milky Way that runs through the constellation Sagittarius, the heart of our galaxy. Physicists say a giant black hole must be lurking there, gobbling up stars and space and even time and reducing all of it to a point of infinite density. Some days I wish we could all fall into it.

  My dad used to take me out at nights with his telescope—the one he’d bitten off more than he could chew to buy—to stargaze. The hobby stuck; I’ve got my own telescope now, but when the sky is as clear and dark as it is in Idaho, you don’t need a telescope to feel that you’re spying on eternity.

  The night sky makes me feel calm. All that empty space, the unimaginable distances between stars, makes what happens here on Earth seem relatively insignificant. Some people find that depressing, but I think it’s cheering. It means our sorrows are small and they die with us, like raindrops dissolving into the ocean. Hemingway’s suffering is ended now, but his better moments live on in his books.

  My attempts to get Bowie to appreciate the Milky Way proved futile. If she couldn’t eat it, or it hadn’t come out of another animal’s rear end, she wasn’t interested. Back inside, she curled up on the floor next to the chair where I was sitting and fell asleep. She wanted me to like her, I could tell, and as long as she was asleep, I did like her. A little. We were going to make this work, one way or another.

  The next morning, when I got up, I didn’t have to make breakfast for the kids, and I didn’t have to dress them or drive them to school or to playdates or doctor’s appointments. I didn’t have to entertain them or get them to brush their teeth or do their homework. I had only my own dishes to wash, no lunches to pack, no mail to answer, no bills to pay, no gutters to clean, no drains to clear, no ants to spray, no traps to set, no forced-air duct filters to change, no garbage bins to remember to drag out to the street before seven on Thursday, no toys to pick up, no groceries to buy, and no phone to answer. All I had to do was walk the dog, and then the day would be my own.

  The moment I lifted her leash from the counter, she jumped to her feet. We do have this in common: We’re morning people. I linked her up, and out the door we went, into the wild blue yonder, and it really is wild and it really is blue and it really feels like yonder up there. We walked about a mile south along the Big Wood River, and the only other people I saw were the fly fishermen in their waders, up to their hips in water that a day or two earlier must have been snow in the Sawtooth Mountains. There’s a lovely path beside this river that used to be a railroad track. When the rail line got canceled, the residents of the valley decided to rip out the ties and the rails, smooth it out, pave it, and turn it into a walking trail. It’s a twenty-mile-long gift. All it needs is a statue of Brad Pitt holding a fly-casting rod.

  Bowie sniffed the ground. Was she going to do it? Was she going to poop outdoors and earn my undying gratitude? No—she’d found another dog’s poop and seemed to be licking it. I groaned and gave her leash a tug. I looked up and saw a cyclist coming toward us, and I saw that he was moving fast. His head was lowered and his legs were pumping; he was not out there to admire the scenery—he was a serious athlete wearing a serious outfit. I had just enough time to reel in the dog’s extendable leash and move off to one side. (The trail is only as wide as the train track once was, and I wanted to give this guy plenty of room.) I spooled in the leash cord and gave it a tug so that Bowie would move out of the center of the path, but that is the exact moment when she decided she had to defecate. And when this dog decides she is going to defecate, there is nothing you can do to stop her. Meanwhile, the cyclist was getting closer, and I could see that some of the push had gone out of his stroke. He saw how little room he had to get by the dog, and I’m sure he was wondering if this was the kind of dog that gets startled when a bicycle goes past her at twenty-five miles an hour at a distance of about six inches. I made a quick decision: I had to pull the dog out of the way. I dragged her, in that awful, scrunched-up shitting posture, her nails scratching across the pavement, as she left a trail of diarrhea across the trail. Nice.

  The bicycle flew past us. Bowie looked at me guiltily. She was finished and was probably wondering if I was going to scold her. I didn’t. I took out my little blue poop bag and scooped up as much of the mess as I could, but it was a futile task. The pristine walking trail was pristine no longer. We’d left our mark on the Wood River Valley.

  But half a mile later, all was forgiven. We passed several other people walking their dogs, and I concluded that I was the only dog owner in that valley who used a leash. The off-leash dogs invariably rushed up to establish dominance, followed by much posturing and lurching and snapping, until their owners sauntered up without even bothering to lower their cell phones from their ears and said, “Oh, Max/Bailey/Cody/Duke/Cooper! Be nice!”

  Bowie and I made it back to the house, where I gave her a treat, and then it was time to settle onto the couch with the view of the mountains and do what I’d been wanting to do for months: curl up under a blanket and get well. Bowie seemed to have the same idea, and that’s exactly what she did, right next to the couch. And that’s what we did together for four days, and it was good.

  Twenty-one

  ON THE FIFTH DAY, BOWIE stretched, sat up next to me, and rubbed her nose against my leg. She was blinding to look at—there was sunlight all over her fur. How did that sunlight get there? I know I’m having a good day when I don’t even know if it’s morning or afternoon. Bowie wanted to go out. She’d figured out the potty stuff by then. Good dog.

  I put on her leash and took her out to the backyard, but then I decided, to hell with the leash, this dog needs a chance to run around for a while—she’s not going to bother anybody.

  A breeze rustled through the valley. The leaves on the aspen trees shuddered. Clouds drifted overhead and their round shadows raced across the hills. Bowie ran through the tall grass on the undeveloped lot next door, bounding over thistles and chasing things that I couldn’t see. I’d never seen her run like this, and it was enjoyable to watch. She looked like a real animal now, not just a piece of living bric-a-brac. When she runs, she’s fast and agile and even graceful. What a pity it is, I found myself thinking, that she’ll have to spend most of her life indoors. She would be so happy as a working dog on a farm or a ranch or in the Arctic pulling a sled. Instead, like most AASFaDs, she’ll have her daily walk and spend the rest of the day pacing and barking at doorbells. Poor thing.

  She halted and started pawing at the ground. When she raised her head to look at me, I barely recognized her. Her head was no longer white, it was now the color of mud. Same with her paws. Great, I thought—with my luck, she’d probably dug into a water main and busted it. Or a sewer pipe. I ca
lled her over and wiped her off with a towel, and then I went to check on the damage. No pipes, just dirt.

  I panfried a turkey and cheese sandwich in olive oil, washed some raspberries and grapes, poured myself a small glass of wine, and carried my movable feast outdoors. A bunch of dark clouds appeared over the hills, and within minutes they were overhead. The weather changes quickly in that valley. Halfway through my lunch, raindrops started falling, and I had to scurry indoors with my tray of goodies. Bowie and I were treated to the sight of an all-out Idaho downpour.

  Rain used to depress me when I lived in Connecticut. It seemed to fall for months at a time there, but since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve come to feel differently about it. A storm, as far as I’m concerned, is a work of art. It has narrative structure. The one Bowie and I watched that day was a short story. It was over in around fifteen minutes, and that was just right. No Russian novels for me, thank you. The sunlight peeked through a break in the clouds, and I just had to laugh—there was a rainbow out there. Consider the fate of the rainbow, exploited for so long as a symbol of hope and innocence that you can’t look at one anymore without feeling as if you’re drowning in maple syrup! I tried to remind myself that rainbows don’t have to signify anything. They are atmospheric phenomena that happen to be beautiful. I tried to look at this one with fresh eyes, but my mind wouldn’t cooperate; it was like trying to look at a cross made out of wood without seeing a crucifix.

  It was time for another glass of wine. I raised it in a toast to inactivity. Whenever I drink alone, I usually remember to toast someone or something. I can’t remember where the habit started, but I’m in no hurry to break it. I made a resolution to do nothing at all for the rest of my vacation, just to see what it felt like. There was no rush, there was no deadline, there was no specific goal to be accomplished. That was the gift Jessica gave to me, and it would have been a shame to squander it.

  Then I heard the sound of toenails scratching across wood. This was a new sound, unfamiliar to me—was Bowie trying to dig a hole in the floor? I turned around and saw that Bowie was trying to sit up. Her paws were sliding around on the floor as if she were on a sheet of ice rather than a wood floor. She looked drunk. Had she gotten into the liquor cabinet? She wobbled for a moment, and then she did something so strange that I didn’t have any mental context for it at all, no category to put it into so that I could understand what was going on: She launched her torso upwards and balanced on her hind legs and rump like a circus performer, with her front paws extended in front of her. She teetered like that for a moment, went stiff as a board, and then dropped like a felled tree, landing flat on her back with her legs sticking up in the air. It looked so much like a parody of death that I wondered for a moment if it could be just that, an elaborate version of “play dead.” Had her former owners, the ones who’d dumped her off by the side of a road somewhere, taught her this trick while they were waiting for their crystal meth to cook? Only when she flopped over to one side and drool started pouring out of her mouth did I realize that something was terribly wrong.

  My mind stalled. I knew what I was supposed to be doing: rushing to the dog’s side, cradling her in my arms, getting her to a veterinarian right away. I knew that this was what I had to do, but for a few agonizing moments, I could not do anything. I was paralyzed by disbelief; I found it difficult to accept that this was really happening. The whole scenario, beginning with my not wanting a dog to being strong-armed into getting one to having the dog arrive at the worst possible time and then my resenting it all out of proportion and now this preposterous medical emergency—after not one but several of my friends had remarked, in jest, that I’d better take good care of Bowie on my trip to Idaho because if anything bad happened to her it would look mighty suspicious—this was the plot of a Ben Stiller movie, not real life.

  But then I remembered that this was my daughters’ dog, not Ben Stiller’s, and that cured my paralysis. I rushed Bowie to an animal clinic only two miles away, where a veterinarian looked Bowie over and said that it appeared she’d had either a seizure or a stroke or an aneurysm. Hard to say. “She might recover fully and never have another event, she might recover but with some impairment of function, the seizures could become intractable, or she might die in the next few minutes. I could tell you stories, but without all the information, it would just be guessing. For now, I’m going to run some tests and get her hydrated, and then we’ll keep an eye on her and see what happens next.” He took Bowie’s leash off and handed it to me gently, and then his assistant picked Bowie up to carry her away.

  Bowie looked at me—yes, me, the only person in the room who looked and smelled familiar to her—and tried to struggle free, but she was too weak. I returned to the house to wait for news.

  Silence has a texture, and when I got back to Greg’s house, I was reminded of how widely that texture can vary. An hour earlier, the silence in his house enveloped me like a down comforter. Now it was a vacuum that left me exposed. I paced through the house, trying to find a comfortable spot, but I carried my nakedness with me. I tried listening to music, but I was too agitated to concentrate. All I heard was noise.

  I was agitated because I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so upset. I kept seeing the look on Bowie’s face when the vet’s assistant carried her off, but instead of arousing my pity, it seemed to be unleashing something darker in me. Whatever it was, it wasn’t directed at the dog; I wasn’t angry at her for getting sick. I was afraid.

  My sister-in-law once had a cat that was hit by a car. The cat survived but suffered nerve damage that rendered it unable to urinate without human assistance. For months, Jennifer dutifully brought the cat to her local vet’s office twice a day to have its bladder manually squeezed. Eventually, Jennifer learned how to squeeze the cat herself, and she did this twice a day for years. Was this what was bothering me? Was I worried that I would be expected to squeeze Bowie’s bladder for the next ten years or drive her to the hospital three times a week for dialysis or approve of an experimental surgical procedure that would require taking out a second mortgage on our home?

  It was too damned confusing; I needed to stop thinking about it. I went to the shelf where Greg keeps his DVDs and browsed his collection. Sense and Sensibility? Too complicated. Saving Private Ryan? Too gory. Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Too frantic. I sorted through dozens of titles, but none of them appealed to me. I felt like a man on a cruise ship who was trying to distract himself from seasickness by checking out the buffet table.

  But then I saw something there that surprised me, something completely unexpected: Koyaanisqatsi. The surprise came from the fact that since the film’s release in 1979, I had never, ever seen a VHS or DVD copy of it in anyone’s home. It’s an arthouse film, for heaven’s sake. Yet, only a couple of weeks after seeing it for the first time myself, here it was on Greg’s shelf, and the moment I saw it, I realized that it was exactly the film I wanted to see. It occurred to me that if I watched it again, I might have that same cathartic experience—and I certainly could have used a cathartic experience just then.

  I felt like an addict about to light an opium pipe; my hands shook as I slipped the disk into the player. I sat down on the couch and pressed the button on the remote, but I paused before the film started. I was shivering with cold; the chills were so intense that my whole body was trembling. I went upstairs, pulled the comforter off my bed, and brought it down to the couch. I curled up under a layer of goose down and pressed play again, and as soon as I heard the first note of the score, my eyes welled up. This time I wasn’t in a crowd. I didn’t have to feel embarrassed, I didn’t have to hide my face in my hands, and I didn’t have to drive home.

  Twenty-two

  BY THE TIME THE FILM ended, the lawn sprinklers had come on, and water droplets were hitting the window, sounding like rain, but the sky was cloudless.

  I guess we all process information in our own way and at our own rate. When my nieces received the news that their mother had died
, they could only hold that information in their minds for a few moments at a time. They were like stones skipping over the surface of a lake. They seemed to realize, instinctively, that if they thought about it for too long, they would sink.

  Maybe we all do that. When I returned from Connecticut, I hardly thought about Rachel at all. It’s not that I chose to avoid thinking about her, it’s that my mind simply wouldn’t go there. Some part of me sensed that the experience of losing her had been toxic. I buried the experience and then stood guard to make sure I couldn’t dig it up. The problem is, you bury that stuff but the containers always seem to leak. Next thing you know, the lawn over your favorite park turns brown, and the lake catches fire.

  Now I did want to think about my sister. I searched for her but she was hard to find. The most vivid memories I had of her were images from the hospital, when she was a corpse rather than a person, and from childhood, when she was painfully shy and withdrawn. That seemed unfair. I didn’t want those to be my primary sources; I didn’t want to remember my only sister that way. It’s true, Rachel had struggled with anxiety and depression for most of her life, but that didn’t stop her from achieving success in love and work. She had married, started a family, raised her girls, and run her own business. People adored her. I wanted to remember Rachel as a wife and mother and artist more than I wanted to remember her as a sister haunted by worries.