The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (5 page)

I jerked awake then, sat straight up in bed, and when I stood I swore I felt a slight tilt to the floors, as if we were keeling with a wave. Something, I knew, had happened, but what it was, or wasn’t, I couldn’t say. There was no noise anywhere, not inside, not outside where, in the dim dawn, a truck glided by without a sound, and down the street I saw the dark shape of a hunched figure opening his mailbox and from its innards a spill of brilliant white light, illuminating his hands as he reached in and pulled out a stack of letters. I tapped on the glass and with each tap I saw a spark—a pale prick of light—as my nail flicked the slick window, icy and beaded from the long moist night. I shoved my feet into slippers and peered in at my egg, looking over the rim of the shoebox, the box itself all off, de-squared, as if the long dark night had somehow wrenched what was supposed to be just a little to the left, so everything in our world was suddenly slanted. The box looked like a parallelogram, and it too was emanating light, like the mailbox had, and a rich roar of excitement went through me because maybe this all meant the egg was at its end.

I sometimes think that hope is a kill switch, ensuring that precisely what you want you will not get, some sort of punishment from god for desiring beyond your borders. I also think that hope is a hook, its point dipped deep in a toxin which, once its lodged in you, fills you with an ache that erases the sound and shapes of the world, so you lose sight of whatever it is you have in your hands, and the more sight you lose, the harder you hope, and so you go round in your barbed circle. Hoping, I looked over the warped lip of the box and saw in an instant that nothing in there had changed, and that the morning’s odd roar and tilt was either all in my mind or signaling some other event. The egg, clearly, was not the event. It seemed so smug in its solid shape, so sure of its own solidity, so happy to mock my desire, and then I let my eyes go lax and brought the box up close to my face so the egg doubled, two times the taunt; I put the box down. I picked a pencil up off my desk and then, holding the egg in my palm, I tapped twice on its shell with the blunt rubber end, thinking as I did of how my doctor tapped on my knee with his red rubber hammer and how my knee moved, no matter how hard I tried to keep still. Holding the egg now at a distance from my face I tapped twice more, bringing the pink eraser down hard on the speckled shell and then, to my shock, a crack appeared, a zigzag crack just
appeared
, all at once, materializing instantaneously, and the crack was leaking light, the same brilliant light that had spilled from the mailbox down the street and from the shoebox on my dresser and now from the body of the egg itself. I put the egg down, quickly, walked a swift circle around my room, and then picked the egg back up again, balancing it on my palm, closing one eye and looking at the orb with the other, and the zigzag crack,
right in front of my eye
, closed up, sucking its saffron light back into itself,
poof.
I held my breath and then gave the shell three hard raps with the nub of the eraser and the crack, so hairline, so deeply delicate, again appeared on the shell’s surface, this time larger, webbing its flank. “Do you see?” I said, for some reason using my mother’s question when she’d brought Tiny home. “Do you see now?” I said out loud. My voice, like everything else that morning, seemed all wrong in the quiet dawn, my sounds hollow, somehow false, a bit British, and I suddenly saw myself on a stage, people watching me. A red flush fell over my face. The crack closed up.

Who could I tell this to? No one, of course. I was old enough to know I would be mocked—
a magic egg?—
and besides, there were other obvious explanations, the scrawl of a shadow, my own tired eyes playing tricks on me;
do you see
? I adjusted the desk lamp and left my room, the morning sun now risen, beneath me the streets of the Golden Ghetto filled with cars.

The dog was dead. Like me, like the rest of us, he too had fallen down the steep slope of sleep, dragged under some dock, only he didn’t come up for air. He was lying on his side on the couch, and when my father put his palm right up at the animal’s snout, he could not feel any air. Strangely, my mother seemed unaffected by the unhappy event. She stood at the stove, frying an egg in a pan. “You were cruel to him,” she said, looking from the pan to my father, who leaned in the entryway to the kitchen. “I’m not the one,” my father said in a low stern voice, “who chose to give him Nyquil.”

“I’m not the one,” my mother responded, “who let him fall to the floor, too inept to hold him.” And then, as if to prove her point, she slid the spatula beneath the egg, the intact yolk warbling and beaming bright as she gently, skillfully, flipped it all over without any spill or seepage. “Perfect,” she said, sliding the egg onto a plate, its lacy edges browned, its golden center whole.

Two days later, when I got home from school, Tiny was gone, along with his bowl and leash. Gone too were the antics of my egg; it sat innocently in its padding as if nothing had ever happened and maybe nothing had. My mother’s boastful mood was also over; she was sitting at the dining room table, before her, hundreds of keys of all different shapes and sizes, some so small I could not imagine what sort of door they would open, others large and thick, edged with chunky serrations. “I bet you kids never knew I had a key collection,” she said to all of us, gathered round the table, still holding our book bags, and we shook our heads no, we’d never known. “This key,” she said, holding one up, “this key goes to the Shah of Iran’s stable. Do you want to know how I got it?”

We all nodded. Suddenly her face fell. It was as if someone had come along and simply swiped something central and essential from her, and she fell inwards and silent. She shook her head. “I forget,” she said.

The four of us stood there, looking at the keys, then at one another, then at the keys, then at her face, which seemed to be dissolving right before our eyes. “What about this key?” my older sister said, grabbing one from the table, holding it up, turning it in the sunlight, her voice loud and full of forced cheer. “Tell us about this key, Mom.”

My mother looked up then, glanced at the key, and then suddenly she raised her hand and knocked it from my sister’s grip so it clattered to the floor, bouncing twice and then lying, still, on its side. I looked down. It was a bronzed key, a car key maybe, threaded on thin wire with a tiny tag attached to it and on the tag some script too faded to read. “What about this key?” I asked, hearing something desperate in my voice, reaching for the littlest one she’d sifted off to the side, raising it up in the air and turning it. The key was silver, smaller than my pinkie, and it hung from a frayed red ribbon, and I said, “It’s beautiful, Mom.” She swiveled her head then, in my direction, her swivel all wrong, though, so slow we could practically hear the creak and crank of gears beneath the supposedly solid surface of her skin. And now she squinted up at me and then started shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and I said, “What, Mom?” and she said, “So many keys!” and before we could stop her she, in a single motion, swept them all onto the floor, hundreds of keys falling from the table and crashing at our feet, a sea of keys, she with her face in her cupped hands now, crying softly. We all stood still, not knowing what to say, and then with one hand she started it up again, petting and then scratching her neck, digging deep in, the skin there flushed and beginning to bleed, and we all said stop it, but she wouldn’t even look at us, never mind listen.

We gathered, then, in my oldest sister’s room while she called my father from the upstairs hall. My father came home from work, and we kids sat on the hall steps, listening to them murmur behind the closed kitchen door. Eventually my father opened the door, his face all haggard, and, as he walked up stairs, motioning for us to follow he said, “She’s agreed to go to a hospital,” and I said, “When?” and he said, “There’ll be a bed available in three days.” I didn’t quite understand that and saw in my mind a bed with wings floating aimlessly in the air, my mother’s bed, coming to us from across the sea, a trip that took some time.

Now that Tiny was gone, or maybe now that she knew she was going away, or maybe simply because some switch had flicked in her brain—the darkness coming earlier every day now, and on the East Coast, where we lived, there was very little light in mostly gray days, a hard and bare time of the year when the burst of autumn is long gone but the snow has yet to brighten the browned-out beds where flowers still stand on their stalks, all shriveled—her outbursts ceased entirely and a different demon came over my mother, one I’d never seen before. I can’t recall who cleaned up the keys; in my memory they are there, they stay there, scattered and heaped on the dining room floor for years and years to come, but that could not be true. I know I woke up that night late, the clock clicking in my ear, the second hand sailing around its flat lit face, and I couldn’t hear her. There was something about the quality of the silence in the house that suggested danger, but despite that sense I got out of bed, magnetically pulled, it seemed, by some strings from the sky, making my way down the pitch dark hall, feeling for the switch on the sconce but then pulled forward before I could find it, suddenly the stairs beneath me, lowering me by levels, and then a line of faint light at the base of the closed kitchen door.
Do not open that door
, a voice inside my head said, but the strings on my marionette body did differently, or maybe to say they were strings is all wrong, and I’m talking about a terrible urge, the need to know, to crack the casing, to come to the red-hot heart of the matter, where scum and stink live.
Do not open that door
, I said to myself, but Lauren was layered and the commands coming from the crust of my mind had no bearing on the urges of my mantle, my core. On the surface of our land we have houses and highways, our intentions spelled out in what we’ve built, even as, beneath us, the earth has a whole other agenda, its giant plates crunching up against each other, the core licking.

I opened the door and saw her almost clear as day in the iced light from a whole moon visible through the bay window, on the one hand just a woman sitting simply at a table, but if you looked a little deeper, something deeply wrong with the sunken stillness in the body, her head on her hand on her elbow, the posture frozen, she sitting so still, as though she could not move. “Mom?” I said, and, indeed, she did not move, not even a twitch to acknowledge my presence. “Mom!” I said again, and then, angry all of a sudden, I reached way forward and yanked her hand away from her face, and the hand fell to her lap, her face staying still, as if her hand were still there supporting it. And even though everything in me told me to keep my distance, I crept closer still, and suddenly I was back in the forest, crouched down on the needled ground, the trees all touching above me and above that the here-and-there chinks of sky. Now, crouching down, I held out my hand and the animal in my mother came alive, woke up; she moved her head and watched me with the sort of suspicion I’d seen before in the faces of fox and deer deciding whether to take whatever it was I offered on the platter of my palm, only now my palm was empty, or, rather, slick with sweat, lined with my whole life, all I had to offer her, and it seemed to work, sort of, she coming closer now, edging towards me in her seat, I with my palm held out and then a clicking came from my mouth, a
here, here
that is uttered simply through sound, and every animal knows it, and she knew it too, and her forehead fell into my outstretched palms, and I was holding her head there, like that, her hair hanging down around me, she just sitting with her head in my hands, and when the weight was just too much I slowly let her go, removing one hand, then the other, and instead of sitting up she sunk still deeper down, her head between her knees, I, not knowing what to do, her stillness much scarier than her sounds. I clicked again, but this time it seemed she didn’t hear, or refused to respond, such surrender a terrible thing to see, the psychic spine snapped. In school the next day a nurse came to inspect all of our spines for abnormal curvatures, and when it was my turn I knelt over the desk in the gym teacher’s office and held my breath as the powdered professional hands pressed the supposedly solid rod that held me up. The exam seemed to take a long time, the nurse’s fingers pressing down between my vertebrae, pushing at the pieces of me.

I came home from school that day, the feeling of hands all over my back. I opened the front door and looked left, towards the kitchen, the door ajar just as I’d left it the night before and somehow I knew she was still sitting there, in the same seat in the same way, and I didn’t want to see it. I tiptoed past the door and up the stairs, throwing my books onto my bed and looking in on my egg, as I’d done every day now for too many months, picking it up and turning it round and round, and then pressing it to my ear and hearing in there a second silence, and then eyeing the egg, so perfectly formed, so opposite us, with our keys clattering and our heads hanging down and a dead dog and our faces rumpled from fatigue and fear and everything else that goes along with being human. The egg was mocking me and at the same time the egg was calling me forward into a world that was shaped as it should be, the only thing between me and it this hard but slippery shell that I tapped on—
tap tap—
and then I picked up that pencil again and, again, using the pink teat of the eraser, I pressed down on this sphere of silence, and as I pressed an urge came over me to press again, and harder still, to drill down and through the silent shell, so I did, searching for the center, the living gel, the animate animus, the liquid life that is poured into the bottle of every body so deer dance and foxes prance and wrens sing in trees, and I kept going, putting the pencil down now and enclosing the sphere with my whole hot fist, bringing it to me, consumed, suddenly, with the urge to know what was in there, ready or not, I had had it, could no longer live in the liminal and needed, besides that, the shock of the shatter against my chest where the grief had settled like silt, so I pressed and I pressed and heard from within my fist a most satisfying crunch and crackle, and a concomitant loosening in the shell of my own skin, so I could cry, finally, about everything and nothing, about the faraway forest and the fact that I was almost ten and that she didn’t have a bed yet, the tears coming freely from my eyes, and on my desk a letter from the nurse to my parents because my spine went a little to the left and imperfections in the human form should be fixed.