I Thought You Were Dead (12 page)

“Like stuff that happens. During the day. So people who have stressful days come home and get themselves a drink to unwind.”

“After the big dog has gone away.”

“Right.”

“Wouldn't it make more sense to drink before the big dog gets to you?”

“I suppose.”

“I mean, after the big dog is gone, where's the stress?”

“You have a good point,” Paul said. “That's the difference between you and me. For you, when the big dog goes away, your fur goes back down and you forget all about it. People keep our fur up long after the big dog goes away.”

“Why?”

“Because we're more highly evolved.”

Stella had to think a moment.

“You know, the more you tell me about evolution, the less I understand it. Evolution means improvement, right?”

“Right.”

“So thinking a big dog is there, when in fact there's no big dog there, is an improvement?”

“Not in and of itself,” Paul said. “But we have a better long-term memory than you do. That's an improvement, but it makes it harder for us to forget the big dogs we run into every day.”

“And that's why people drink?”

“Some.”

“Do your mom and dad drink?”

“Never,” Paul said.

“How about your brother?”

“Not as much as he should,” Paul said. “He's got a lot of stress. Studies show that alcohol can relieve stress.”

“And you feel better when you don't have stress?”

“Much better. I feel more like myself.”

“Who do you feel like when you don't feel like yourself?”

“You're still you, but you don't feel like it,” Paul said, knowing
that wouldn't explain anything, not even to a human being. “You feel more in touch with things.”

“Then why do you always lose your car keys?”

“Not those kinds of things.”

“Then what kinds of things?”

“Look,” Paul said. “It's like this. You feel sort of … in control and out of control at the same time. You're in charge of how out of control you get. And being out of control feels good because then you don't have the responsibility of being in control all the time, so you can kick back and be yourself. Like, when you're a baby, or a little kid, you're just you, just being yourself and not examining everything you do or worrying about what everybody else is going to think. You just basically feel good all the time. Then you get older, and you have to pay your bills, and other people expect things from you, and you never get a chance to just relax and feel good about everything.”

“Except when you're drunk?”

“Not just when you're drunk. But sometimes when you're drunk, you feel very fine.”

“How often?”

“I don't know.”

“Half the time?”

“I don't know. Why? Why do you ask?”

“I don't know,” Stella said. “Because you don't seem very happy. Especially not when you're drunk. Then you seem really sad. Is feeling sad feeling more like yourself?”

Now Paul paused.

“Does stress make you sad?” Stella persisted.

“No. Stress makes you anxious. It makes you feel up. But in a bad way.”

“Does winding down make you sad?”

“Sometimes, I guess. You feel sad when things don't work out.”

“Like with Karen?”

“Exactly.”

“Or like when you can't get a boner?”

“Yes. That makes me sad.”

“But getting a boner makes you happy.”

“It makes me very happy.”

Paul took the bar of soap and washed his hair. He wanted to change the subject. Stella was just trying to understand.

“Well, I think you have it backwards, if you don't mind my saying.”

“Meaning what?”

“I mean I think you're switching the order of things. I think first you get sad, and
then
you don't get a boner. Or first you get happy, and
then
you get a boner.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

“Observation.”

“Observation?”

“How long have we known each other?”

“In human years?” Paul answered. “Almost sixteen years.”

“And in that time, you've had how many girlfriends and wives?”

“One wife, please,” Paul said. “What's your point?”

“My point is, all those years, all the times that you were in bed with people, don't forget — there were three of us in the room, not two. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I was watching you. I don't go off duty just because somebody else is there, you know — I still have to keep an eye on you, even if you aren't paying much attention to me. And what I've seen with my own two eyes, as a noninvolved observer, is first you get sad or stressed and
then
you don't get a boner, or first you get happy, and
then
you do. And drinking makes you sad. That's my observation. For what it's worth, but hey, I'm just a dog — what do I know? I was just wondering.”

“Hmm,” Paul said. “I'll get you a beer if you really want to know.”

“No, thanks,” Stella said. “I'm already relaxed.”

“So if drinking makes me sad,” he asked her, “what makes me happy? By your observation.”

“People.”

“People?”

“Yeah.”

“Specifically how?”

“Meeting new people,” she said. “Doing nice things for them. Works every time. You should watch yourself sometime.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting.”

H
is mother said Harrold was doing better. The doctors believed the clot-busting drug they gave him in the hospital, a medication called tPA, for tissue plasminogen activator, had reached his brain in time to reestablish blood flow and limit what would have been catastrophic damage otherwise. He was still paralyzed and without speech, but he could eat and focus long enough to watch reruns of the
Rockford Files
and
Gunsmoke
and
Highway to Heaven,
which, she said, seemed to bring a tear to his eye every time, the genuine kind. They'd set his bed up downstairs, with a twenty-four-hour live-in nurse for the first week and a visiting day nurse after that, in addition to the speech and occupational therapists who visited three times a week to work his legs and arms or to electrically stimulate his throat. It was all quite amazing, Beverly said. “You should see how good they are.”

Carl made sure that the bills were paid and the checkbook was balanced and that the household was running smoothly again, for which Beverly was grateful. Carl and Bits and their families visited often or just took Beverly shopping when the day nurse was on duty. Paul's job was simply to try to engage his father in communication, to stimulate the parts of the brain that affected speech and response. It could prove difficult to measure whether it was doing any good, the therapist warned
him, but it was certain to be a slow recovery and these were the first steps.

“I'm just so amazed at what they can do these days,” Beverly said. “I remember a friend of my dad's who had a stroke, and he just sat in a wheelchair for the last twenty years of his life. This is all just so good. It's all good.”

Paul took her word for it. He kept his expectations in check and got online with his father one night after dinner. Beverly was there to help her husband and to show him how to operate the mouse.

Part of the idea was simply to let his father know that he wasn't alone and that there was somebody willing to listen. Paul pictured his father as a kind of floating consciousness, like some low-budget horror movie from the fifties where the mad scientist's brain was a bell jar full of glowing smoke.

The next time he tried, his mother assured him that his father understood how everything worked and was rested enough to give it another go. She said that she'd be in the kitchen but that she wanted Harrold to try to do it on his own.

He tried not to become discouraged. It seemed to him that perhaps the format wasn't working. The speech therapist Harrold was working with told Paul she thought Harrold's reading comprehension was actually good. Some stroke patients developed a kind of dyslexia where written words and letters seemed
scrambled and incomprehensible, but Harrold had passed the tests she'd given him for that. Something else was holding him back. The therapist told Paul not to worry. So many different mechanisms come into play during the adaptive rewiring of the brain following a stroke. She believed Harrold understood the things that were said to him, and the words on the screen, but simply had great difficulty formulating a response.

Paul tried again a few days later.

He shut the computer off.

In the fifties horror movie, there'd be a good scientist gesticulating thoughtfully with his pipe as he pondered the big questions,
and maybe a comely female research assistant in a white lab coat who carried a purse, even on the surface of Mars, and of course a team of army generals who wanted to drop an atom bomb on the brain in the bell jar, when the tap of a small hammer would suffice. Paul felt alone.

He hoped no one was expecting too much from him.

T
his magazine article,” Paul said, looking up from his research on
Nature for Morons
, “says that dogs don't know why they bark.”

“Says who?” Stella asked, looking up from where she lay by the radiator.

“Says this dog-evolution expert from Hampshire College,” Paul said. “He's like the world's leading expert on canid behavior and he says that dogs just bark.”

“That could be the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” Stella said. “When someone's at the door and I go to the door to bark, what does he think I'm saying?”

“Well, I know, but — ”

“When my bowl is empty and I'm standing at my bowl, barking, does he think I'm standing there asking for a weather report?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Paul said. “Let me finish reading this.”

Outside, a clap of thunder shook the sky. Stella did not like the sound of it, not at all. She'd heard of too many dogs who'd been struck by lightning, some of them lying in their own beds, indoors. It could travel down telephone lines and television cables and leap out at you and burn you. Some thunderclaps, she'd heard, were so strong that the sound alone could knock your house down. Some of what she'd heard was exaggerated, sure, but there was simply too much anecdotal evidence to discount it all. She couldn't help it. She didn't like thunder.

“It says here,” Paul read, trying to distract her, “that they compared the DNA of wolves and dogs and that the difference was a single haplotype, meaning that you and wolves are virtually identical, genetically.”