Dogs do not understand the laws of physics, which is why they have never invented anything like the seat belt on their own.
I drink half a bottle of wine as I cook the steaks.
Albert Camus and I listen to our favorite CD—Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Cello Suites.
It massages our souls.
The smell of meat warming, cow blood boiling and evaporating in the frying pan, a virtuoso playing a genius’s compositions—all of it fills the house, and Albert Camus salivates worse than Pavlov’s dog until there is a puddle of drool on the black-and-white tile floor of the kitchen.
It takes me a long time to cut Albert Camus’s steak into tiny pieces on which it is impossible to choke, because little Albert inhales his meat, and I think about how I could really use a food processor, make a mental note to buy one the next time I visit civilization. The whole time I’m cutting, he paws sheepishly at my feet, and his saliva glands get an excruciating workout.
I try not to think about Mrs. Harper’s erotic nose, and am mostly successful.
My four-legged friend eats a good portion of the meat before his bowl even hits the ground. He’s licked the bottom clean and is working on his butcher’s bone before I swallow my second piece of steak, which is warm, bloody, and pairs divinely with the pinot noir.
As the spicy juices fill my mouth and give my taste buds an orgasmic high, I think about the vegan butcher.
“He’s like Sisyphus,” I say to Albert Camus, “rolling the metaphorical boulder up the hill, knowing it will roll down again no matter what he does. Over and over. He sees no future for himself. ‘Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd.’ Remember when you wrote that, Albert Camus? The vegan butcher sees no Mrs. Harper in his future. He sees nothing. What do we see in our future now that we’ve lost our Mrs. Harper, Albert Camus?”
He pauses his gnawing for a second to ponder the question, and then resumes scraping the bone vigorously with his little teeth.
I finish the first bottle of wine and open another, which I quaff deeply as Albert Camus gnaws and gnaws and Yo-Yo Ma works his magic bow and snow flurries outside and Brian what’s-his-face the ignorant butcher who doesn’t even know who the hell Albert Camus was—that guy probably makes passionate love to Mrs. Harper, who moans through her wondrous nose under the weight of her bare-assed, affable butcher.
The CD ends, and I finish the second bottle of pinot noir to the now slightly less fervent sound of Albert’s teeth chipping away at cow bone. I envy him; he looks much more content on marrow than I am on wine.
I see Mrs. Harper’s nose in my mind’s eye.
She knows who Albert Camus is—she must.
In all of my many fantasies she was well-read and sophisticated.
Mrs. Harper paired divinely with me.
I try to mentally undress her, but the gap-toothed butcher keeps popping up in my thoughts like a traffic cop of masturbatory fantasies, and he’s yelling, “Whoa, friend! Time out here. This woman is going to be my wife. She’s engaged now. But there are other doe in the woods, if you know what I mean. So point your arrow elsewhere.” Brian the butcher winks and nods, and then he returns to making love to Mrs. Harper, whose gray wave of hair rises and falls over her titillating nose.
I briefly contemplate opening a third bottle of wine as my eyes get heavier—What is this lit cigarette doing in my hand?—and then my head is somehow down on the table.
And then . . .
And then . . .
And then . . .
And then . . .
I’m in bed with a desert-dry tongue that seems to have been smoked and cured into beef jerky without my knowing about it. A mind-numbing pulse is sounding an angry war-drum-like beat against my temples—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—when through the darkness I hear a scratching at the window. This seems impossible, because we are high in the air on the second-floor loft, and the window in question is maybe a good thirty-five feet above the wooden deck below. I wonder if a bird might be pecking at the window. What sort of bird would do that at the end of winter, in the dead of night?
When I turn on the bedside light, I see Albert Camus jumping up and clawing at the window.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” I say.
I look at the bedside clock’s glowing red numbers: 4:44 a.m.
Is that good luck or bad? All the same number. I can’t remember what my students used to say about that—whether I should make a wish or hold my breath or do something else. They were always so superstitious.
“Go to sleep, Albert. Get in your bed. I need to sleep off this wine headache.”
But he keeps leaping up and scratching at the window.
When I stand, my cane is wobbly. He begins to bark and growl as he continues to jump and scratch. He’s never behaved this way before. Was there something in his bone? Maybe that vegan teenager sprayed it with some sort of drug.
You can’t trust anyone anymore, I think. And that kid had motive.
But what sort of drug would make Albert Camus act like this, so intently focused on the window?
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” I ask as I make my way toward the light switch, feeling a bit dizzy and still very drunk.
My right foot sinks into a warm pile of Albert Camus’s shit, which squirts through my toes.
My left foot lands in a warm puddle of his piss.
He has never before had an accident in the house.
Never.
I honestly can’t remember if I took him outside before I went to bed, and I mentally berate myself for being a bad pet owner, an inhumane lovesick drunken oaf.
Before cleaning my feet, I need to apologize. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “The indignity. I’m the beast. This will not happen again.”
I kneel down next to him and try to pick him up and give him a few kisses, but he growls menacingly enough to scare me into letting him go.
“What’s wrong, boy? What are you trying to tell me?”
He keeps jumping up and scratching at the window.
Over and over.
Am I dreaming?
“There’s nothing out there. Nothing. Time for bed, buddy. Stop that. Come on now. Stop it!”
He keeps jumping and scratching, like he’s trying to run up the wall and onto the glass.
“Okay. Let’s see what’s outside.”
I open the window and feel the cold night air rush in.
When I bend down to pick up Albert Camus, so that I might show him there is nothing outside, he uses my thigh as a springboard and is through my hands and out the window before I know what happened.
“No!”
In the time it takes for him to fall, I remember that just yesterday I had the handyman shovel the snow from the deck, fearing that the weight was becoming too great for the wood; I immediately understand that a thirty-five-foot fall is enough to kill a dog the size of Albert Camus; and I also remember what I said to him earlier in the truck about the first question and the possibility of a suicide pact between us. And then I remember every single kiss he ever gave me, the feel of his Afro in my hand, the way he wagged his tail whenever I said his name, and my great love for him swells my heart to a dangerous size.
Do dogs ever commit suicide?
The thud of his skull hitting the wood below sounds like heavy knuckles striking a door.
I listen for a yelp, mentally beg for the sound of his toenails clicking on the deck below, but there is nothing but a deathly silence.
I race down the stairs just as fast as my limp and cane and drunkenness allow, tracking my dog’s excrement through the entire house, flick on the outside flood lights, and throw open the sliding glass door.
Albert Camus’s head is bent at a horrifically un
natural angle, and his little legs are limp, which is when some part of me knows he was killed instantly, that the impact snapped his neck. But I scoop up his little body anyway, cradling his head, trying not to damage the spine, retching at the lifelessness of the bones and fur in my hands. “Please don’t die. Please don’t. Don’t. I love you, buddy. Please. I’m sorry I talked so much about the first question. I haven’t been an easy roommate, I know, but I’ll change. I promise.”
There’s blood trickling out of his mouth, and his one eye has rolled into the back of his head, but I grab my keys, lay him gently on the passenger-side seat of my truck, and—even though my veterinarian is an hour’s drive away and most likely won’t be in her office for another four hours or so—still barefoot, I shift into drive and hit the gas.
“Wake up, Albert Camus. You’re going to be okay, little buddy,” I say, looking over at him, patting his still-warm head, paying no attention to the fact that I am driving a truck.
Toward the end of my steep dirt driveway, my right front tire slips into the rut I’ve been meaning to have the plow guy fill in, the steering wheel jerks right, and I smash into an old oak tree.
The airbag inflates, punching me in the nose.
I blink.
My vision blurs.
I throw up two bottles of red wine and a pound of bloody meat onto the deflating airbag and my lap.
I cry.
I punch the dashboard.
I hyperventilate.
I try to spit out the awful taste in my mouth.
A rush of blood fills my head and then drains away too quickly, like an ocean wave crashing on the shore, grabbing everything on the beach and retreating back to whence it came.
A strange feeling comes over me, and I hope it is death.
I’m done.
I surrender to the first question.
Finally, I black out.
CHAPTER 8
The winter sun wakes me rudely.
Albert Camus is dead on the passenger-side floor; he’s stiff as a stuffed fox.
I grab my cane and get out of the truck.
The hood is crumpled. The front bumper has become a part of the thick and noble oak tree—almost like an accessory maybe, a tree belt.
Part of me knows that this is it for me.
I live at the end of a dirt road. I picked this property because no one is ever around. No neighbors. No passing traffic—the connecting road is three miles from my driveway, and I have not walked more than a half mile or so in one stretch since the series of surgeries that put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I do not own a telephone—land or cell. No computer or Internet. This is my Walden, the closest I’ll ever get to being Henry David Thoreau.
I have no friends. No one would ever visit. I have to drive to my handyman’s home whenever I need him. The plow man is contracted to come whenever more than three inches of snow falls, but we only had a dusting last night, and according to the paper I read on Sunday, no storms are forecast for the coming week, so I know I can pretty much die alone out here without anyone trying to save me.
The smell of gas is pungent, and I see that the truck is indeed leaking—most likely a fuel hose has come loose. I think about lighting the whole thing on fire, sending Albert Camus to his next incarnation in a blaze of glory, like he’s a Viking dog king and our truck is his boat, which it sort of was. But instead I start to strip off my puke-covered clothes and throw them onto the snow piles melting on the sides of my dirt driveway as I cane my way back to the house.
Without bothering to take off my underwear, I enter the shower and let the hot spikes rain down on me until the water heater’s tank is exhausted, at which point I towel off, dress, and examine the window in my bedroom, which is still open.
“What did you hear or see, Albert?” I ask the cold air.
I stick my head outside and look around.
Nothing.
No animal prints in the snow.
Nothing at the edge of the woods.
Nothing.
I shut the window.
I think about whether my dog may have actually committed suicide, and decide it is possible—especially since I named him Albert Camus, and went on and on about the first question for years.
It was like I had been training him to find meaning or perish, then I continually told him that there was no meaning. And the suicide pact I offered him—how was he to know I wasn’t invoking it with my heavy drinking last night? I mean, he was only a dog. His brain was smaller than a peach.
What dog could live up to such a weighty name when it came to solving his master’s existential crisis?
Maybe I put too much pressure on him.
Perhaps his heart was like an emotional tick, absorbing all of my anxiety and regrets and inaction and sadness, swelling until it outgrew his little toy poodle chest, until he just could no longer take the anticipation of the inevitable pop.
I remember once reading an essay by or an interview with David Foster Wallace, in which he says that suicide is akin to jumping from the top floor of a burning skyscraper—it’s not that you are unafraid of jumping, but the fall is the lesser of two terrors.
Was jumping out the window preferable to living with me?
Had I emotionally abused Albert Camus without knowing it?
He had never before shown any interest in the bedroom window—none whatsoever—so why last night?
These questions are beginning to hurt my head. I go to the kitchen and open up another bottle of red wine—a rioja—and spark a Parliament Light cigarette for breakfast.
I pour a glass and down it in one gulp without even tasting.
I pour another glass, and try to figure out what to do.
I light a second cigarette just as soon as I’ve finished the first.
“You killed your dog,” I say to myself. “What type of a man drives his dog to suicide?”
As I chain-smoke and drink away the morning, I can’t help but think about Edmond Atherton, the kid who smashed my bones with a baseball bat and ended my teaching career.
For six months he sat against the right wall of my classroom, just under a black-and-white photo of Toni Morrison, and he never made a sound as the rest of the class discussed Herman Hesse, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camus, Ivan Turgenev, Paulo Coelho, and so many others.
And then one day Edmond Atherton raised his hand and asked if he could speak with me after class. It was a strange request to make in the middle of the lesson, and out of the blue, but I agreed, and redirected the class back to the discussion at hand.
I remember Edmond stayed seated when the bell rang, waited patiently for everyone else to leave the room as he sat almost lifelessly. His calm gave me goose bumps; it was so eerie and . . . forceful. Something had shifted inside him, I’m certain of that now, but it was just a suspicion on that day.
Once we were alone, I said, “What’s on your mind, Edmond?”
He put his hands together with a clap and held them in front of his face like he was about to pray. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I think I found a major flaw in your teaching philosophy. I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of the entire class, which is why I asked to speak privately. But there’s a serious problem regarding your message.”
“Okay.” I forced a laugh. But something inside me knew that this was not going to go very well—that the reason for this talk was more than just regular teenage attention-seeking bullshit. Part of me knew that I was in trouble. Even still, I said, “Let me have it.”
“Are you sure?” he said, tapping his nose with the ends of his forefingers in this almost giddy way. “Because I think you might not be able to teach the way you do once I point this out.”
“Believe me, Edmond, I’m a grizzled veteran with decades of teaching experience und
er my belt. I can handle it.”
“Okay, then.” He slapped his hands down on the desk hard, which made me flinch, and then he smiled and looked at me for too long, creating a silence that hovered like mustard gas between us. “I admire what you’re trying to do for us, I really do. I mean, it’s nice to be told that we’re all special, capable of the ‘extraordinary.’ Like in that Dead Poets Society movie clip you showed us. It’s nice to think we can all seize the day. That we can all make our mark on the world. But it’s not true, is it? I mean, just consider the definition of the word extraordinary, right? It’s an exclusionary word, after all. There have to be many ordinary people for the word extraordinary to mean something!”
He was smiling in this madman way.
“What do you really want to talk about, Edmond? What’s eating you up?”
“Your class. I’m getting a little tired of the happy bullshit.”
“Happy bullshit?”
“Yeah. I stomached it for as long as I could, but I just can’t anymore. And I don’t think what you’re teaching is right. I mean, all of the teachers in this school are full of shit, but what you teach is dangerous.”
“Dangerous? How so?”
“I watched the rest of Dead Poets Society. The main character kills himself. Is that what you’re trying to do? Get us to kill ourselves too?”
I could see the madness in his eyes, and knew right then that any attempt at defending myself would be unsuccessful, because we were no longer having a rational conversation. But this wasn’t the first irrational conversation I had had with a teenager. So I swallowed my pride and said, “I’m not sure I understand—”
“You tell us that we should all be different, but if we were all different, we’d be the same. Can’t you see that? Not everyone can be different, or we’d lose the sense of the word—just like everyone can’t be extraordinary. You can’t tell average people to be extraordinary and get away with it forever. It’s a mindfuck. And it’s a lie. A pyramid scheme. At some point, someone is going to make you pay.”