I Thought You Were Dead (19 page)
Read I Thought You Were Dead Online
Authors: Pete Nelson
“Like guard sheep?”
“Like guard sheep, and pull carts ⦔
“And rescue people?”
“And rescue people by using their keen sense of smell. Dogs even guarded children from other beasts in the wilderness. Dogs were very helpful and very happy to earn the table scraps the humans would give them, and the humans were very grateful to have dogs as friends. Humans and dogs had learned to love one another, in a way that no other two species have ever learned to love one another. Out of all the other animals on the planet, there's never been another example of two species that decided to love one another.”
“Not cats either.”
“No, not cats,” Paul said. “People love cats and cats certainly enjoy people, but cats don't lay down their lives and die for people the way dogs do. Cats don't swim out into lakes and pull drowning children ashore, or run into burning buildings, or leap into the darkness when they hear a threatening noise. And if a person dies in a cabin in the woods, and there's a cat in the cabin with him, the cat will eat the human's dead body rather than starve to death, but a dog would starve to death too, rather than betray the friendship. Some people say that makes cats smarter, but I say that makes dogs better.”
“So if you died, I couldn't eat you?”
“You wouldn't want to.”
“I wouldn't?”
“No.”
“Could I roll in you?”
“Sure, that would be all right.” The lightning and thunder had stopped. It was still raining.
“So people let dogs live in their houses because they loved them, not just because they needed their sheep guarded.”
“That's right,” Paul said. “And it used to be that lightning would hit houses and make them catch fire, but that doesn't happen anymore because of lightning rods.”
“What's a lightning rod?”
“It's a thing that directs the electricity away from the house.”
“What's electricity?”
“That's what lightning is made out of. It's too much to explain right now, but the point is, you're going to be all right in the house because you're safe and dry and I think the storm is over. Do you feel better?”
He listened and heard only the sound of rain drops dripping from the trees.
“A little.” She was calmer. She looked at him. “Are you still going out?”
“No,” he said. “Feel like lying in bed and watching television?”
“Sure,” she said. “The bed is the softest place in the house.”
He lifted the bedspread and let her out from their improvised shelter beneath the table. When he looked down, he saw that Stella had had an accident â the storm had literally scared the crap out of her, a solid turd on the linoleum beneath the table. He picked it up using a wad of toilet paper, wiped the floor clean, and flushed it all down the toilet. He saw no need to tell her. He cleaned her up, put the bed spread back on his bed, and lifted her up onto the mattress, where she lay down with her back to him, one leg up, asking for a belly scratch. He complied, turning on the television to
The Tonight Show.
“Whatever happened to that white-haired guy?” Stella asked.
“Johnny Carson?”
“Yeah.”
“He retired a few years ago.”
“I miss him. I knew him my whole life.”
“Me too.”
“He was really kind to animals. These new guys just make fun of them. What's he doing these days?”
“Playing tennis, I guess,” Paul said.
“That's good exercise,” Stella said. “I love you, Paul.”
“I know. I love you more.”
“Yeah, probably. Just kidding.”
Water Bears
O
nce Stella had fallen asleep, her legs twitching, Paul went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He opened a book he'd been reading about protozoans and spent a few minutes with it but lost energy. It was still raining. On CNN, the pundits were calling for the president's impeachment because he'd lied about getting a blow job in the White House cloakroom. He turned the TV off and logged on to his computer, where he discovered that his father was online.
PaulGus:
Are you feeling better than you did yesterday?
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Did you have a good dinner? You have to eat, you know.
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Are you still having trouble remembering things?
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
You never complain. I don't mean now. I mean before.
HarrGus:
NO
PaulGus:
You just soldier on.
HarrGus:
YES
Maybe it was his annoyance with the CNN pundits, the hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou Republicans with past and
future Lewinskys of their own, channeling their obvious arousal over White House revelations into spluttering outrage. People were emotionally complex. The ones who weren't, or pretended they weren't, were the freaks. For whatever reason, he thought he might push his father a bit, nudge him toward an examination of the inner life.
PaulGus:
Good in theory. In practice, that doesn't help children learn how to deal with their problems. Children aren't soldiers. If you spend your life keeping your problems to yourself, your children have no coping mechanisms in place other than to “take it like a man” when the shit hits the fan for them. Pardon the expression.
PaulGus:
Just a thought I had. No need to respond.
HarrGus:
NO
PaulGus:
I met a guy once who bragged that he never cried. To me that's like saying he never laughed. An emotional IQ approaching zero. Anybody who buys the idea that God created us would have to admit he gave us each a complete set of emotions to help us get by, right?
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Doesn't it dishonor God not to use the tools he's given us? I just mean being open to our own hearts and trusting them. Good idea, don't you think?
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Like in the old Westerns where the cowboy gets shot full of arrows and passes out and his horse finds the way home. Give the heart its head.
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Mine would probably walk off a cliff in the dark.
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
You needn't agree so quickly. Have you ever loved a woman other than your wife?
HarrGus:
NO
PaulGus:
Here's another one â who do you think knows more about love, a person who's had a series of complex and involved relationships with a number of different people, or someone who's had a single long-term, deep, satisfying relationship with only one person?
PaulGus:
I can't answer that either. I used to think I knew all the answers. Then I thought I knew maybe a few of the answers. Now I'm not even sure I understand the questions. Nobody knows anything.
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Did you love your parents?
HarrGus:
YES
PaulGus:
Just fishing â do you love your son Paul?
HarrGus:
NO
It was as if he could hear his father's voice, even though the word
no
had been nothing more than a series of pixels arranged on a screen.
He turned off the computer and went to sit on the porch swing. He heard a peeping sound. A bird of some sort had built a nest in the broken downspout beneath the eave. He listened to the rain, the traffic, the night, then went back to the computer and got online again, happy to find that Tamsen was available for instant messaging.
TamsenP:
you're up late.
PaulGus:
Working. So are you.
TamsenP:
working. is it raining there?
PaulGus:
Yup. It was pretty loud thunder a while ago. Stella freaked out a little bit.
TamsenP:
it poured here. how's your book coming along?
PaulGus:
Researching. I have a book right here that says
there's a little microscopic animal called a water bear that can survive for 85 years without water in temperatures ranging from 100 degrees below zero to 200 degrees above. They can even live in the vacuum of outer space, bombarded by cosmic radiation.
TamsenP:
why do they call it a water bear if they live without water?
PaulGus:
Because they can completely dehydrate themselves and come back to life years later when it rains, I guess. Like sea monkeys.
TamsenP:
sorry not to be more responsive. i'm not in the best mood. they laid off 500 people today. i tried to phone you.
PaulGus:
I'm so sorry. You weren't laid off, were you?
TamsenP:
not me, but i think it's a sign of things to come. we've been blowing through untold millions of v.c. dollars and now they're trying to sell the whole thing to jeff bezos.
PaulGus:
Who?
TamsenP:
amazon.com. buy stock in it if you have any excess funds. it's going to be huge.
PaulGus:
I always thought that had something to do with lesbians. Amazons, etc.
TamsenP:
it has nothing to do with lesbians.
PaulGus:
Are you going to have to start looking for work?
TamsenP:
can you keep a secret? i don't have to start looking. i got a call from the competition, hoping to lure me away. bottlerocket.com
PaulGus:
What do they do?
TamsenP:
they don't do anything either, but they don't do a whole lot more things than we don't do. it's just really hard. people picked up and moved their families to be here.
PaulGus:
I'm really sorry for you. And for your friends.
TamsenP:
how are you?
PaulGus:
Had kind of a hard night myself.
TamsenP:
what happened?
PaulGus:
My father told me he doesn't love me. Other than that, everything's peachy.
TamsenP:
what do you mean? i don't understand.
He copied and pasted the entire conversation to Tamsen, who said she needed time to read it. He read about water bears. Positing an omniscient and benevolent demiurge ruling over a meaningful universe, why give the most dramatic survival mechanisms to so low an organism? Wasn't it supposed to be man whom God favored above all others? Why make man the weakest, the most vulnerable? Water bears could survive at one hundred degrees below zero for nearly a century. Paul wanted to crawl off and die at a single word.
TamsenP:
interesting.
PaulGus:
It felt like it was going pretty good. We were talking about love.
TamsenP:
you're sure he wasn't goofing with you?
PaulGus:
Not his style of humor.
TamsenP:
you know you're a fine person, don't you? you don't have to hear it from him to know that. you're lovable. lots of people love you. just because your father can't deal with emotions is no reason to get down on yourself. you're totally cool.
PaulGus:
In theory.
TamsenP:
paulie, paulie, paulie â this has to be a misunderstanding. it's not his fault. he had a stroke. you can't take anything he has to say ⦠i was going to say seriously, but maybe i mean literally. you need to take it with a thousand grains of salt. and put all this stuff out of
your mind and wait for the day when he's more rational. he's not himself.
PaulGus:
He's not irrational. There's nothing wrong with his mind, other than that he can't get it to tell his body what to do anymore. He's the same guy.
TamsenP:
you don't know that. people who've had strokes might have all kinds of issues. he can't talk. he can't ask clarifying questions. he can't tell you what he's thinking. he can only click yes or no. if he could talk, i'm sure he'd explain what he meant.
PaulGus:
There's nothing ambiguous about being asked, “Do you love your son Paul?” I don't see how he could misconstrue that.
TamsenP:
he's not himself. just forget about it. he played baseball with you and threw footballs and put you through college. you had a few disagreements, big deal. par for the course. you really think he could say he didn't love you?
PaulGus:
You're absolutely right.
TamsenP:
it must have hurt a great deal to read that.
PaulGus:
I used to think that if my dad went golfing, for instance, and they needed somebody to make a foursome, and there was a guy, just like me, hanging around the putting green, some liberal-humanist, agnostic, pro-abortion, anti-death penalty Democrat who likes to go out to bars and listen to music and drink beer â if my dad met a guy just like me, he wouldn't like him. He'd say to himself, “This person is not my cup of tea.”
TamsenP:
you're wrong. they love you. they know you. they've seen you grow up. they changed your diapers. they looked at your poop. let it be. they know the real you, and they accept that, and they love that. go easy on yourself.
PaulGus:
I'll try.
TamsenP:
i have another conference in worcester in two days. maybe i'll drive to northampton when i'm done. would that be all right?
PaulGus:
That would be good.
TamsenP:
i'll call you when i know more. can you hang in there?