Читать книгу Widow's Dozen - Marek Waldorf - Страница 9

FETCH

Truth was there could be no question of her responsibility for Aaron’s death. Murder, that’s something else again. Murder involves intent, and can a dumb animal actually possess the “intent to kill”? Ridiculous, right? But in fact I don’t know what to think anymore. The more outlandish the idea appears, the more effort I seem to put into believing it. Because there she is—preventing me from sleeping, observing me as I do my best to understand.

Why? Revenge. Sheer malevolence. No reason. So why do I keep her?

In one sense, there’s nothing simpler to cope with than loss. The more I feel it, the less complicated it seems, and the routines that constitute my day-to-day existence—the commute, the practice, endless chores, the downtime in front of the TV, the walks—all have become unlikely emanations of that simplicity, the obstinate abstractness death holds over me. So she eyes me, so what? So she won’t let me sleep because she has a guilty conscience. So what does she want from me? Just listen.

We first met during the winter of my sophomore year. My college roommate, a new recruit to the then-burgeoning Church of Christ, had invited me to join him and his born-again cohorts on a few weekend runs to Greek Peak near the Cortlands. It was a package deal, and a good enough one, I figured, to make allowances for the company I’d be keeping. For some reason, Aaron joined us on the second trip. He was riding shotgun, and he was doing everything in his power to make a bad impression—which he did, on me. The Church of Christers were going out of their way to show how unflappable they were. He talked a lot of puerile blasphemy. Failing to get a rise, he started in with his sexual hang-ups. It was like a one-man Truth or Dare session, and I can’t remember who repelled me more, this petty maestro of needling and put-upon resentment, or his hosts for not chucking him out of the car.

Our paths crossed again several months later, at a party. To my surprise, he remembered me—just not my name. I feigned ignorance, then amnesia. It wasn’t long before I realized that he had nobody else to converse with, and since I was in the same boat (abandoned by my date), I decided to stick it out with him for a while. I had to admit he was more of a character than I’d given him credit for.

He was also older than most of us, by about five years. He wanted to make me understand that his association with the Church of Christ had been entirely opportunistic—he’d been writing an exposé on them for Pipe Dream, Harpur’s weekly paper—and while not outright implausible, something in the story or his telling of it tilted me toward disbelief. Aaron had a habit of inventing complexities where none were needed. A ferociously dignified liar. Besides, around the time of Aaron’s purported tenure, I’d “comped” for the paper—unsuccessfully, in fact—and would have remembered him. Later, for that reason or a different one, I hinted that he was full of shit. He pretended he himself couldn’t be needled.

“Exactly what part of the country did you say you’re from?”

* * *

Not too long into law school, the same place as I’d gone undergrad, I saw I had made a terrible mistake. Out of what I thought was a lack of options, I’d chosen a career I had neither the aptitude nor the inclination for. The “law” of course can be made to cover many interests. Friends and family advised me to identify a niche. I tried corporate, criminal, taxes, torts and international before I made housing my area, not because it was the most interesting, but it seemed the easiest to coast through. It was around this time that I started running into Aaron more often. The third or fourth time, it occurred to me that these encounters might not be the product of chance.

So this was where our friendship began, queasily but in earnest. Since I lived near his job and was rarely out, he would drop by after work, in the early evening, and wind up staying late. We watched a lot of TV together, during which Aaron kept up a running sarcastic commentary—I’ve never met anybody with such a mania for attaching points to things. He left his background sketchy: mother dead (his mixed-up guilt and sorrow were “unimaginable”) and “an egregious lump” of a dad, whom he never saw anymore and swore he’d kill, obviously hyperbolizing, if he did.

He could fall into free-form, all-out rants, whatever set him off. And though sometimes it was entertaining, mainly I wished I’d had a stun-gun handy. Then when life knocked him around a little more, he learned to control himself, and, where there had once been angry outbursts, there now came these protracted, sour silences. And I would make a point of testing the artillery, so to speak, to see if it would sputter out or like to explode. Sputter, usually . . .

“Very funny,” he might grumble. “Maybe you should wear a special hat, you know, like for humor.” Like a native New Yorker, he pronounced it yumor. “That’s very yumorous,” he might say, for instance, definitively. Watching him fail to rise to the bait or fail to dignify some exceeding stupidity of mine with a response, I would feel strange surges of affection for Aaron, because that’s where I wanted our friendship to be, not quite at the end of something but near enough to the end so that speech was no better than an irritant. It wasn’t like you knew what the other person was going to say, no, you owned it. The various personal revelations I turned a deaf ear to, of course. One day—this would be in New York now—I met up with him at the Zinc Bar (it was near the office), and was shocked to find him wearing a pair of very thick glasses. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’ve only told you about a hundred times.”

But it was news to me, this condition of his. I’d always thought . . .

“What d’you mean, a ploy? A ploy—?! Do you think I’m spending my days trying to think up how to win your sympathy? That’s a hot one.”

To make amends, I bought him a drink. To show he accepted my amends, Aaron ordered the priciest single malt at the well, took one sip and let it stand . . .

What he might have been—in a different world maybe, or with different talents—was a writer. He talked about the impossibility of it often enough. Once (again, New York) while he was out running an errand or trying to score drugs, I was satisfying idle curiosity in the drawers of his desk and ran across some of his work. I don’t pretend my tastes are all that developed, but what I read truly embarrassed me. Lots of references to “torment” and “the abyss.” It was pretty clear, in any case, the nature of Aaron’s impossibility. I think this chance discovery—one not shared, of course—marked a turning point in our relationship, in an obvious way, and it clearly wasn’t for the best. Now, whenever I heard Aaron go off on the subject of betrayal, I all but resonated with sympathy and understanding. No, it was no good at all.

New York—I never expected to end up here. It helped knowing Aaron had preceded me by a year. By the time I arrived, he’d been fired from his fact-checking job (he refused to share the details) and was working at the Strand, shelving books, where he stayed until he was legally blind.

My early years in the city are a blur now. I worked for men who were born assholes, career bullies, and, after work, I partied until I was insensate. Mostly clubbing, with Aaron, whose way I mostly paid. I learned to cope without sleep. There I had help, admittedly. It was like I was breaking, but breaking forward, into a new kind of conflict with myself. Others felt it too, I felt. I was more at ease with women, and I dressed up my act with what success told me was newfound grace. But success of a peculiar sort. I’d managed to push what I really wanted further out of reach. It was defeat masquerading as attack.

Aaron and I had perfected a rhythm together, which we played out—I want to say to the end, but that wouldn’t be true. Things never fall together that neatly. Or maybe it depresses me to think about how it did end, in a way. “‘Let go.’ Don’t you mean shit-canned? Just what kind of lawyer did you think you were anyways?”

Not a good one—clearly. I had no passion to draw upon except for fear of failure and when I’d anesthetized that fear, there wasn’t much in the way of competence to save me. But I don’t beat myself up about it. Mistakes were made. And I don’t blame Aaron either, although maybe I did a little at the time. My first few years out of the firm, making ends meet through a succession of grisly legal temp services and nonprofits, were a financial nightmare, but one which woke me from a period of intense and possibly permanent self-delusion, and for that I suppose I should be grateful, or so the therapist I’d started seeing then helped me to understand. It was also around this time that I met the woman who I willingly and without second thoughts would have married.

There were facets of Aaron nobody could deal with for long and not get irritated. The more settled I became, in my new job and with C—, the farther apart we drifted. I don’t recall a scene or formal break, simply a growing perception on both our parts that the friendship was no longer tenable. He began to annoy me. Why had I allowed this guy to hold any influence over my life? I masked these feelings as best I could, but Aaron wasn’t stupid, he could see I’d changed, and no doubt he too felt disappointment. Our communications grew shorter, duller, infrequent, then more or less discontinued.

Personally I would have preferred something definitive. In his absence, I tried to work myself up into fits of pique, remembering favors owed, money borrowed and never paid back, instances of extraordinary munificence on my part and great callousness on his, and I would prepare myself the way I used to prepare for trial, thinking up things he might say, then me coming back with a retort or sometimes a speech, and I’d go rigid with indignation. I’d even do this on the street.

I hadn’t seen him in about a year when one day he stopped by the office for “a bit of free legal counsel,” although he probably was hoping I’d offer more. I gave him a lot of unnecessary advice, tossed around some legalisms, tried to make the situation look as complicated as possible, all of it to prove that I was in my element. In short, I made an ass of myself. Aaron was having a hard time putting his sentences together, and threads of saliva would gather at the corner of his mouth. He used a lot of big words—correctly I’m assuming, but who the hell cared?—as if he, too, had something to prove. “See?” he seemed to be saying. “I may be a total fuck-up and I may be on my way to jail or out on the street, but I still have a healthy vocabulary.”

Quite possibly, I asked him what drugs he was on, I mean it was that obvious. Quite possibly, I offered to give him a couple of numbers to call. Rehab, that sort of thing. Maybe he took serious offense and maybe, under similar circumstances, I would have, too. But the phrase hides a lot of things—second chances, third chances, half a lifetime of lifelines seen and not taken, and plenty of good old-fashioned fucking up.

Inexplicably, even though many more years would pass without our communicating, when C— left me, it was Aaron I thought to call first. I rang up directory assistance and after several false leads, located him in Astoria, at the top of the N line.

It was one of the first nice days of spring. The few trees planted on the sidewalk were tipped with green and the air itself seemed to be coming into leaf. The exhaust-blackened balance of the last big snowfall edged the curbs. I held Aaron’s address, which I’d jotted down the night before on the back of another distressing bank statement. Our conversation hadn’t gone too well, especially in the beginning. Aaron was phlegmatic. I got the sense that everything he said was some private sarcasm—that tone of voice.

“No,” he replied to a suggested meeting place. “I don’t get out much these days.”

I was ready to give up. Why force a reconciliation? Clearly, he wanted nothing to do with me. Stupidly, though, I got onto the subject of C—, a dismal topic, and then came details I hadn’t wanted to share, things that made me look like a fool or worse. Such as her last words to me right after she asked for the keys: “I was wondering . . . listen, would you mind very much walking the dog? I need to shower and I can’t be late for work.”

Aaron laughed so hard I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.

“Walk the dog!” he cried. “Are you the universal straight man or what?! Ha!! Walk the fucking dog! And what’s even better, I bet you did!”

I assured him that he was wrong, but he seemed to be enjoying himself so much I didn’t press the point. At any rate, something clicked, and we returned to our old footing, or close enough that Aaron invited me over.

“Keep your expectations low,” he stated, “and you won’t be disappointed.”

Ironic that a dog should have been the source of our reconciliation, for Aaron now had one of his own, a yellow lab with a very large head. Eva he called her, and their “bunker” was a basement apartment below a loud Italian family, its windows overlooking (at ankle-level), on one side, a driveway, and, on the other, a pathetically well-groomed but tiny plot of grass with a plastic, child-sized cast of the Virgin Mary. She kept her back to us.

He was now blind, of course. A placard hung from Eva’s neck reading, IGNORE ME. I AM A WORKING GUIDE DOG. Those words ricocheted around in my head. They seemed such a surly and undignified thing for a dog—any dog, but this one in particular—to say.

He offered me a cup of tea: “It’ll only take a couple of hours. Now that you’re a free man, you have the time to spare.” Taking invisible umbrage at this sally, I made no offer to help as he ran both hands through the eccentrically stocked kitchen cabinet, knocking over boxes of sweet cereal and cans of black beans and dog food until he found the Lipton’s he was looking for, lifted out two tea bags, and then started to search for a pot, a kettle, anything in which water could be brought to a boil. Rice and pasta rained from their bags onto the counter. Aaron seemed to be injuring himself deliberately—releasing yelps of probably genuine pain—in order to prove to me how poorly he’d adapted to his affliction. I made sympathetic noises, but that was it. Finally, he grew tired of the game. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you just keep standing there?”

The place was a sty, no attempt to even kick the mess into piles. Plates scabbed with uneaten food, on his floor, on the table—and quite a few, along with assorted pots and pans, in the kitchen sink, which was also, judging by the pasty white streaks, where Aaron brushed his teeth. Sooner or later, you accepted the fact that walking around meant something breaking underfoot. The only thing not lying about—I was surprised, I confess—was dog shit.

The place smelled bad. Those filthy clothes, of course. But there was something more, or stronger, than the smell of mildew, sweat, fur, stale smoke and dirty feet, and while it was rank, I couldn’t identify it, either as a peculiar amalgam of the smells just mentioned or as a separate smell, distinct but not yet attached to a source. It was the kind of smell you refrained from joking about. Too personal, I thought, but I was wrong. Rinsing out a cup in the sink, I noticed a saucepan in which the residue of a cheesy tuna casserole had been watered down and left for days, with a green gelatinous mold shaped like a sombrero on top. Backing away, I stepped on—and broke—a cheap pair of sunglasses.

You’d think I’d take the first opportunity to flee—hop a train back to Manhattan, clucking sadly to myself the whole way back. And for the first hour or so, escape was uppermost in my mind. After that hour passed, though, a surprising thing happened: not only did I feel obliged to stay, I wanted to. Is “want” the right word? Compelled, you see, by emotions which deviated from pity and by a new complexity bolstered to my old perception of Aaron. No, it was very simple. Blindness worked for him, and yes, I know how heartless that sounds, but there it was. It gave his existence definition, his failures gravitas and all his resentments worthy cause—this truly caustic resonance.

And I stayed. Afternoon stretched into night, and I switched the lights on, sat in that wrecked basement and listened to Aaron. Occasionally I said something. In most ways it was typical, ten different types of invective twisted into a spew so bleak and interminable it made your head hurt. In other ways it was like the doggerel I’d run across years earlier—laugh and its rotten spell was broken. His eyes no longer deceiving him as to the reactions he was constitutionally incapable of soliciting, he watched me watch him and listen to him, and, hard as it is to say why, I felt he had picked up a newfound dignity.

That night I dreamed I myself had gone blind.

But it was a strange, almost metaphysical blindness because, of course, dreams being a mainly visual medium, the capacity I lacked wasn’t sight. Not strictly speaking. This dream was full of people and incidents of such totally bland character that they had to be spelling out “blindness,” and among them Aaron stood out like a beacon. For some time after I woke, it seemed odd that everything in my bedroom was as I had left it. Odd, too, how it felt. I understood the message in my dream to be that seeing was nothing more than the habit of believing everything you saw.

Of course, part of my fascination included the dog—or rather the relationship that had developed between the two of them. He depended on her completely now, as he’d never had to depend before on another living creature, and he resented that. He must have. Resented the fact that she was always at the end of the leash, pulling him forward through the confused, noisy darkness. Resented her steadiness at sounds he himself would jump at. And most of all that she—a dumb creature—should possess the gift of sight. From what I saw, he treated Eva pretty badly, at times some truly ugly shit. I suppose I bear part of the blame because I didn’t openly chastise Aaron. But what could I do? I feared this would only push him further when I was gone.

Instead I took the dog’s side, silently but with vigor. Whenever I visited, I’d bring her a new squeaky toy, a chewable bone made out of brown vinyl or a can of doggy treats, supposedly good for the teeth. Particularly cruel, Aaron thought, was the time I brought over a little beanbag cat that yowled whenever you tossed it against something hard, on what turned out to be his fortieth birthday. That I hadn’t known (or remembered) made no difference. My apologies were so much wasted breath. He rose to the occasion, with a great show of hurt feelings, a performance cruelly wasted—we both knew this—on the likes of me.

Because all I could think was that he was going to disturb his neighbors. I suggested we take a walk and offered to spring for dinner, any place within reason. The fresh air worked as a calmative of sorts. It was late summer and we walked north, following the channel. Other dogs would bark from behind fences, the sight of Eva upsetting them. Aaron would jump, then start yelling, pointlessly.

I watched Eva stretch back her hind legs and quiver as she plopped three turds into the grass. Her ears flattened in a wonderful imitation of human embarrassment. She tried to backpaw dirt over the shit, only Aaron yanked her away.

“All right already—leave it!”

We were in a fairly sizable park a ten-minute walk from his miserable pad. Mostly grass and hardwood benches, where old men slumped, watching us without real interest. They weren’t even carrying bread crumbs for the pigeons. There were a great number of diseased-looking birds around. I’d thought the park charming on my first visit, but that day it had a profoundly depressing effect on me. Also, it would be the last time I saw Aaron alive.

I missed it in the Metro section of the Wednesday Times. A snippet on the ten o’clock news caught my interest, even though I didn’t know it was him I was hearing about—didn’t make the connection. A subway accident. He had been led too close to the edge by his guide dog, fallen onto the tracks, and . . . people looked on—helpless, horrified. Had he yelled any last words, anything quotable or true to character? Somehow I think he must have, although I have no idea what they were. His guide dog observes from the platform as the train bounds, screeching, into the station. Eva. That’s right. Who I then agree to take.

No, I didn’t agree to anything. I offered to, insisted on it. I was told there was a good possibility she’d be put to sleep, and it seemed at the time I had too much on my conscience to allow that to happen. Now I see that saving the dog worked only as a glum and even meaningless form of expiation. It was one of those traps I have a genius for making and then stepping into.

My apartment was small. I had gotten accustomed to being alone—nobody to worry after, feed, groom or walk. I was jealous of my privacy. Having a dog, I discovered, is not such a small commitment.

So at first the difficulties were all on my side. A period of adjustment was needed. I say “at first,” because, later, after a couple of months, the problems seemed to have a lot to do with Eva, who had changed for the worse. Did it start with the barking? In one sense, yes—and how easy things would be if there were nothing else to it. I mean I tried not to view her as responsible. I tried to let the past settle, and with it, the question of her guilt. I tried not to endow a look—did she want to go out? again?—with personality, planning, patience, but something got in the way.

As I said, a period of adjustment was required. It lasted four, maybe five months. Nothing much happened during that time—my routine was thrown off and I developed a new one, accommodating the animal that had killed my best friend. Now that he was dead I felt I had the right to think of him that way, as my best friend . . . now deceased.

I never did see the body, but I doubt it would have helped much. My thoughts of Aaron were too unreal. Trying to conjure him up, to fetch him back, I often found it was myself I was thinking of. I made a lousy reality filter, I realized. I missed the quality of his voice and couldn’t find the clubfooted consonance of his Brooklyn accent, so even when a word or words seemed right (“toit,” “detritus,” “revenant”), the delivery never was. I didn’t comfort myself with the thought that nobody else tried or even cared. I walked his murderer three times a day, four on weekends—usually west to the river. I sat around patting her head or scratching the backs of her ears, while she would tilt her neck back to take full advantage. I called her a good dog and asked her who was a sweet girl, and so on, as if I meant it.

Only once did she let her bad intentions show openly: I was petting her in the lower stomach area, trying to locate the nerve that would make her hind legs quiver, when she made a sudden lunge for my hand. She could easily have taken off a finger if I hadn’t snatched it away in time. We stared at each other then, both of us shocked by her boldness. There were strings of saliva dangling from her sideflaps, and—astonishingly, I think—I checked my own mouth for drool!

But the barking. The slightest noise, from the halls or in either of the apartments next to mine, would set her off. It was a loud bark, it went through you—or me—like a shot, and it carried. Neighbors complained, the landlord threatened. Sometimes I would have to smack her with a rolled-up magazine to get her to shut up, but that didn’t happen too often, thank god. The point is, she was out of control, and the constant barking was driving me nuts, too. It affected my sleep. Sometimes it even carried into my dreams, as the sound of a hacking cough, for example, or a pile driver, or as someone pounding on a door. Only once did it register as what it was, but this time I was making the noise. I was down on all fours. I remember being wildly agitated, whipping myself from side to side in a furious, doglike frenzy, as Eva reared back above me.

I woke with my head in a vise. The dog of course barking like a crazy person and my neighbors hammering on the walls with their fists. I swallowed a couple of ibuprofen tablets and stayed awake until it was light out. And then I took her for her walk, the same routine as every other morning, only this one was colder—ridiculously bright and ridiculously cold. My breath left crystals on my scarf when it wasn’t steaming up my glasses. Every time we hit a patch of ice, Eva would pull at the leash extra hard. Come on, I thought, we both know it’ll take more than that, and I bent my knees and stayed lower to the ground, as if preparing to slalom.