Dog Days

Some days—on days like today—I can hardly remember what it was like before we knew what the dogs could smell. It’s understandable, I tell myself. That’s because in the perfect painting of memory, nothing looks that different. I mean sure, girls wore that funny little bump in the front of their hair, and we used words like faggot and tranny, and there were only two mainstream political parties. But we were still arguing about health insurance, and complaining about our mothers and our jobs and the price of gas, and even all the way back then, I already loved him.

I didn’t have a dog then. The whole idea seemed ridiculous. Maybe that’s how our parents felt about smartphones—at first no one could imagine such a thing. Then, suddenly, everyone had one. I talk about how I should’ve bought stock in Purina the way my dad used to talk about Apple. We should’ve gotten in on the ground floor, Kath! But who can see these things coming, right? Well, maybe the dogs can do that, too. You never know anymore.

The first time I heard of anything like it was in one of those clickbait articles we all learned so quickly to disregard: “This Woman’s Dog Saved Her Life, And You’ll Never Believe How.” I didn’t believe it. Apparently the dog kept barking at her stomach—barking and barking—until finally she went to see a doctor. It was cancer, of course—late stage. The doctors operated immediately and her life was saved. But no one knew shit back then. Like everything, it started out as nothing.

Everything starts out as nothing, which is why we went to the clinic in the first place. It was summer, and the mint-colored paint was peeling from the humidity and the heat. That’s disturbing, right—a warm clinic? The reason we were there in the first place was to get cells refrigerated. Was the air conditioning broken, or was it always like this? Surely the temperate climate between his upper thighs was less destructive than the oppressive heat of the clinic. “Maybe we should leave,” I said.

Max laughed at me. “Were all those shots in the ass for nothing?” A woman in a floral jumper stared sharply at us. Shots in the ass. Right. We laughed again. We were going to have a baby, whether our bodies liked it or not.

He was in the back for a long time, and when I got bored of my staring contest with the lady in the jumper, I pulled out my list of baby names. I wasn’t pregnant yet, but I like to be ready to face whatever comes my way. Would it be a boy or a girl, just one or twins—and if twins, would it be one of each, or two of a kind? So I needed a list.

Under Nick and Jack and Sam, I added Sirius. We’d argue over that one later. We could argue over whatever he wanted once his balls were empty. Back in our twenties, we used to argue a lot. At the time it felt like the most exquisite torture adulthood could have to offer. You don’t see me! I would wail, my feet planted in the middle of the busy Friday night sidewalk, my face, yes, you guessed it, streaked with those hot hot tears. It wasn’t a surprise when he left me, but it was a surprise when he came back. I try not to cry so much anymore, but when I realized he was back to stay, I didn’t have as much reason to.

The nurse called the jumpered lady’s name—Brandy—and an older Jamaican woman with crisply ironed golden hair sat down in her place. She played a game on her phone with the volume turned up high; the game sounded like bubbles and candy.

I’ll never forget how the sound of barking bounded up the hallway towards me. It pounced and knocked me over, almost as if the dog itself had managed to escape into the waiting room. It was a mistake. Not Max’s diagnosis—we’d find out later that the dogs don’t really make mistakes— but the getting diagnosed. Max walked into the wrong exam room to hand over the sample and the dog in there went nuts and that was the story we told everyone for a long long time, long after we got tired of telling it. He walked into the wrong room and the dog went nuts and then so did everything else.

After Cassie was born, we always told the same story. “It was her fatty fallopian tubes,” he would say, “so blocked I thought her uterus would have a heart attack. But if we’d been able to make a baby on our own, I never would have walked by the dog.”

And then I’d say, “Cassie would be stuck with just me.”

Our friends all warned us how much harder everything would be after the baby came, how much less we would like each other and how much we would wish we were somewhere else. Instead he laughed more after Cassie was born, like he’d just been waiting for an excuse.

I couldn’t wish I was somewhere else, but not because I didn’t try, believe me. Trying to nurse Cassie in the hospital parking lot before heading back inside, watching the box of ice pops slowly defrost with every failed attempt to latch, I tried so hard to imagine I was elsewhere: the steaming markets of India in January, the spider-infested forests of misty Japan in the late spring. Occasionally I would dream of Paris, where I imagined the buildings were gilded and all the men wore silk scarves tucked into their breast pockets. But these fantasies were always interrupted by the memory of a dog’s persistent barking. And I would lose myself there, with the car door open and one foot resting on the pavement, one still perched up in the car, sticky red liquid pooling inside the popsicle box on my lap and sour milk leaking from the nipple Cassie wasn’t attacking, clutching the steering wheel and my child so hard she would break away from the breast and start wailing again. If there really were people in Japan right now, and there really was cancer in my husband, then why couldn’t I see those things in front of me? Or hear them, smell them, at least? How could a dog be so sure of something I couldn’t even sense with my head pressed up against my husband’s persistent heart, or with his dick alive in my mouth? The world that we experience is not the limit of that world. Things that we believe to be fundamentally unknowable are actually occurring in physically perceptible ways all around us. It was monstrous. I was nauseous a lot during that time. So was he—the ice pops I brought him were melted more often than not.

The air conditioning in the hospital was always too cold. We were in the full swing of one of our hot yellow summers when we were called in to see the doctor, and we both wore sweatshirts, actually hoodies from my alma mater, and we looked twinned in that desultory way that couples going through a tragedy often do, me with my comically unruly hair and he with his tragic scalp. The doctor was going to tell us something, and that’s all he said because that’s what doctors do, isn’t it—tell you they have something important to say but they can’t tell you over the phone, and you’ll have to make an appointment, and the schedule is full till next week. Imagine telling a cancer patient your schedule is full. Just imagine.

I had some time to imagine that because the doctor wasn’t in the office yet.

“It would be pretty funny if he called us all the way down here just to say it’s gotten worse, right?” Max smiled at me. Some people always say what they mean, and other people never do. His hands were wrapped up tightly inside his sleeves.

“Do you need some water?” I asked him, and when I came back with the smallest plastic cup, slowly balancing that thimble to preserve every precious drop, the doctor was already there, and Max was already smiling, and it’s hard to believe that anything could ever be ok again after something like that but you just give in to it against all your better judgement, how could you not when you’ve been waiting for that moment for so long and you know how irrational it is to cling to unhappiness.

“I brought someone to congratulate you,” the doctor said, and in trotted a familiar terrier with small brown ears and a broad grizzled muzzle.

The dog stared at us with its black eyes.

“Thank you,” Max said to the dog, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I’d never seen him so happy.

I kissed Max on the head. “Drink this,” I said, and then I kissed the dog on the head too. I guess I could have kissed it right on the mouth.

Maybe it’s because cancer is a growth, thick stalks of it rising rich and high, snaking its way through our bodies like a kudzu vine, that we like it to stand in for death. Its very substance makes it feel conquerable. Cancer is a multiplication of matter, and we feel that if we could subtract that matter, we might return to equilibrium. There is a something to grasp and to fight and to choke and to starve away until it dies. But there is no way to cut off the food supply to dementia, and no radiation can target the unlucky moment a foot steps off a curb and into traffic. Death has no thick stalks to hack off at the base, no roots to yank out. It’s not surprising that we thought it was cancer the dogs were smelling. A tumor is something you can hold in your hand, and so it is easy for us to imagine. It can be inside of us and then, if we are lucky, it can be outside of us.

As it turned out, we were wrong about the dogs. We thought it was cancer they were smelling, and we filled minute clinics and hybrid thrift store/ blood work establishments with a menagerie of canine diagnosticians. But the dogs were unreliable. Sometimes they would bark at the cancer with such force you’d think the subject they were barking at must be overflowing with cancer, crammed full of those rogue cells—and then the tests would come back clean.

But cancer is not the only way to be sick, and it’s not the only way to die. Death is like music, or like gravity. We can’t control the distant melody carried to our ears by a chance breeze or the unexpected recess of a missing step that seems to fall away suddenly. What I’m trying to say is that you can’t fight something that has no matter, no matter how much you care.

During the day, his body was his own. As he was recovering, he insisted on doing everything himself—walking, showering, even cooking. But at night, his body belonged to me. It wasn’t a new instinct; when we first fell in love, I would probe the gaping, gunked up pores in his back, squeezing out what sebum and secrete I could. When he hurt me, I could try to find the thing that made him the way he was and extract it, like if his back were clear and calm so too would his love be for me. Anyone prone to this kind of subcutaneous micro-management knows that squeezing, pushing, and picking is no way to keep any stretch of skin clear; inevitably, the quiet bacteria roaming the plains of his back and lurking in the shelter of my fingernails would travel on my probing fingers and burrow even deeper inside his pores. His back would always wind up covered with inflamed red pustules, angry avengers of their peaceful and unobtrusive blackhead brothers.

But after the cancer my exploration took on an even more desperate tone. Holding him at night, feeling under my greedy fingers the blood rushing through his major arteries, I began to wonder if maybe I might be able to feel what the dogs could. My fingers skulked at the edge of his nostrils; I probed his ears, checked compulsively beneath his eyelids. I listened for a more complex pattern to the beating of his heart. The better he got, and the sounder he slept, the longer I lay awake at night, searching. I wasn’t going to let something sneak up on us again—I just had to figure out what to look for.

One morning not too long after the president was shot, I found Max feeding Cassie individual pieces of cereal at the kitchen table.

“What kind of dog should we get?” He asked it casually, rolling the whole-grain O’s between his thick fingers.

“Why would we get a dog?” I pressed my hand against the dishwasher; it wasn’t humming, and a great cloud of heavy steam billowed into my face when I opened it.

“I just think it might be a good idea.”

I like to unload all the glasses onto the counter at once, and then put them in the cupboard, rather than stooping and stretching between the appliance and the shelf with only a fistful of glass every time. “I don’t want one in the house.”

“Why not?”

“It will shed everywhere”

“So do you.” He laughed at his own joke. “It will scratch the furniture.”

“All of our furniture is crap.”

I wasn’t looking as I unloaded a plastic container and warm white water spilled down the front of my shirt. “No one knows how they work. We don’t know what they’re barking at.”

He picked up the baby to burp her, holding her like a tiny sack of potatoes over his thin shoulder. “Babe,” he said.” Better safe than sorry, right?” But that’s not how it works, is it.

Would it have been easier if he’d died? The night was grey and disarmingly bright, the sky filled with storm light. Next to me his labored breath grated the dense silence into white noise. The baby monitor gurgled softly, too, but mostly the room was damp and quiet, the way the air gets before a summer storm. There was barely any extra driving to do anymore; the bills were mostly settled; the hospital visits were just checkups. If I could’ve climbed the fence from before and seen over to the other side, I would’ve wanted nothing more than to see this view, with all of it over and mostly ok. So why did it feel as if the ok had never quite arrived? Everything felt like a reminder of what could be happening—or worse, what I might not be perceiving. Death, made shadowy and ghost-like through our pathetic commitment to metaphor, had suddenly solidified. The dogs could smell it. Or maybe they just felt it in their blood: every cell a receptor, every nucleus a nostril. I traced my littlest finger around the contours of his nose before sliding it inside. It was warm and a little wet. The fine hairs that furred the delicate little cavity brushed against the sensitive side of my finger.

His voice was patient in the dark. “You can’t put your finger inside my nose when I’m sleeping,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “I know that.”

“I mean it, Kathy. You’re going to give me a nosebleed.”

The baby cried out from the other room. “I’ll get it,” I said, because I would.

“Are you sure?”

I paused in the doorway. In the strange storm light he looked exactly the way I’d always wanted him to. “I’m the one who woke you up in the first place,” I said.

What was I supposed to say? I could have let him get the baby, but it seemed unthinkable. He had survived cancer; how could I ask him to do anything ever again? And anyway, sitting in the stormy green light by the window, the baby clamoring at my neck and mouth and eyes and then finally drifting off into complacent sleep, I knew I could use it somehow—just in case I had to remind myself later that I had really done everything I could.

“I can never remember what that star is,” he said to me. “The brightest one in the sky. Close to the horizon.” After Cassie started sleeping through the night sometimes, we would sneak up to the roof and spread out an old blanket and look at the stars, the baby monitor gurgling up at the blinking planes tracing their flight paths through the black sky.

“I always say it’s Venus,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“I don’t know if that’s true, it’s just what I always say.”

He had eyes that turned pretty like a girl’s when he was lying down. They opened up wider and the lashes stretched long and matted—or maybe it was just the way he looked to me when he made a point of looking at me.

“So you’ve been lying to me all this time?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and when he smiled I climbed on top of him and let him look up at the stars while we fucked. He pulled my hair a little bit and I looked up at the stars too and the planes and the moon, and for a moment it was the loveliest thing, the brisk clear air and the rushing of the interstate and the cicadas rasping on the lawn and somewhere a dog barking. They were saying, the news sites and the radio and everyone, that the dogs could sense more than malignant growths, that they could smell the end itself, but no one could explain how. It seemed ok to believe the dogs were smelling a substance; it was harder to accept that they were smelling a fate. I guess some people prefer superstition—abstractly, I do understand its appeal. How wonderful to imagine that certain household objects are home to a wish-granting or fate-thwarting ghost. The tiny fairies that dance along the gentle incline of an eyelash, or a vengeful lover trapped inside a mirror, waiting to break free and transfer his curse to the clumsy individual who releases him. But personally I believe there’s an explanation for everything. The way I see it, a “fairy” might as well be an elegant field of unknown energy quietly collecting at the tip of the eyelash, waiting for the power of desire to loose its lash-bound bonds and send its wish-fulfilling energy careening out into the greater universe. It seems to me that superstition is only the layman’s way of describing what he’s observed—that the difference between the shepherd and the scientist is more a matter of vocabulary than of method. You see, we only understand the pattern of the stars above us because we laid a grid over the sky and plotted their locations, and when something bright and brief unexpectedly flares and dies above us, it looks like magic. But the stars were there long before our graphs and charts pinned them to paper. Magic isn’t anything more than the universe exceeding the margins of the map. Magic is a sign: your system is inadequate and incomplete.

“Kathy?” he asked, and when I shook my head, we rolled up the blanket and hurried inside without finishing.

Ruthie was an old grey mutt with kind brown eyes who couldn’t do much on her own. Her hind legs were failing and she spent most days curled up on the porch, pushing around the stuffing inside her tufted dog bed and lifting her hopeful eyes at errant passersby. Maybe I thought she was bored. Maybe I thought she needed something to keep her busy. Let’s see what this bitch can do, I thought. I waved spoiled food under her nose; I’d lead the limping dog around the garage every time Max went out on the bike. I took her on late night walks in parts of the park I’d be blamed, if it came to that, for ever going into alone. I never heard her bark at anything, though. Whatever that meant, either way, it made me feel better, so that, at least, was good.

Sometimes it wasn’t good. For instance, one time I thought I smelled gas in the kitchen. I said to Max that he should call the repairman, please, because Max was many things but he wasn’t handy, and with the baby, you know. But he forgot and when he came home from work that day, he found me sitting on the floor trying to talk Ruthie into the open oven. I’d put a treat inside, but her hind legs were shot and she couldn’t jump up onto the oven door, and he just lost it, he did—even after everything I’d done for him when he was sick, he couldn’t help but shout because the whole room smelled like gas, and when the repairman came over, he said ma’am, it’s a good thing you called me.

Later that night I accidentally woke him up trying to take a sample of his ear wax. The porch light pierced straight through the thin membrane, and against the glowing red cartilage, I could just make out the dark silhouette of a small piece of something that had come from inside of him.

“What’s wrong, Kath?” Nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong. The house was dark and so was the night and Ruthie snored in the dark corner and elsewhere, too, outside, there were more dogs. Nothing was wrong as long as the dog slept and did not bark.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“Hey Kathy?” he said. “Hey, Kathy.” And he ran his fingers through my hair and along my scalp and scratched behind my ears; he dragged his fingers along my scalp and his neck got wet from my face and the water was warm and the night was dark and that was something, at least, wasn’t it, that was something good.

But nothing could stop me. I thought about the dogs at work. I thought about the dogs in the car. I thought about the dogs when I was cooking and fucking and most of all when I was watching TV. Even on nights when mom would take Cassie and he was out with a friend—pausing to catch his breath at the front door, “I’m fine,” and “This is what I want to do, so don’t worry about me, it’s good to get out and feel normal, Paul is a big guy, he’ll catch me if I fall” (sticking out his tongue)—even on those nights when I was totally alone and free, finally, preciously, to do nothing at all, shut my brain off and take a break from everything, even then I heard the persistent whine of the dogs. I couldn’t make sense of how it worked, couldn’t stop running through the possibilities: the extra twist of a triple helix, a solidifying of immaterial matter, something carried in on a sudden change in the wind. Can you smell it? Still no.

What did other people think about the dogs? Maybe in another time I would have been able to say more definitively, when information and consensus was delivered left to right on a thirty-pound paper stock with a grey cast, and information was shared in an organized way, line by line, in 12” x 22” rectangular sheets, distributed at regular intervals along the gridded blocks of new world urban planning. Now our think pieces pool in the crevices inside which we cower from a barrage of unfiltered information. And we buzzed and bred in those puddles like insects in still water, oblivious to the fetid stench that accompanies life in a waterlogged wasteland, with the same solipsism that makes an infinitely expanding ocean of a two-foot puddle of garage water, leaked three weeks earlier after a persistent summer rain. No, I didn’t know what other people thought about the dogs. I never lifted my probing proboscis from that stinking pool to peer at the horizon. I was stuck there, sucking at the poison that presented itself.

I know it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time before the dogs. We didn’t know what they could do. We didn’t know that a dog barking up in Washington, D.C. could feel the round clicking into a chamber in Austin. We didn’t know that the dog who stayed up barking through the night, and kept everyone else up with him, could feel the sight imminently leveling with his master’s heart. That a microphone connectivity problem caused the leader of the free world to twist his shoulder at just the moment the bullet was meant to enter the cavity of his chest was a matter of pure luck, but the dog’s barking was no coincidence.

Suddenly our lives became different. Everyone was urged to own a dog. After a while some said one dog wasn’t enough. Charities and government agencies were erected to help subsidize food and vet bills for low-income families who couldn’t afford the expense. Then scandal, an investigation: inevitably, inhumane treatment of animals. Funding was cut. The issue dominated the next election. Was a heads up about death a right or a privilege? Who was entitled to a dog, and who was doomed to die?

These were grand questions. They didn’t address the heat of a car in summer that causes a child’s stomach to turn and heave, or the monotony of the continual trimming and squeezing and plucking that occupies the spaces between our days, or the short-lived pain and long-felt indifference that causes one to lapse in these habits—let’s face it, darling, by then you knew I was no hairless fairytale princess. Ruminations on death, in all its abstract grandiosity, its consequence-less finality, didn’t help to address the fatigue that tugged at my eyes and skin and flooded the cavities and crevices of a once-curious brain. The Tupperware always filled with water in the dishwasher, no matter how it was rearranged. I could’ve grated and scraped away the unsightly calluses on my heels, but then my heels might have blistered. I could have asked my husband why he came to bed later every night, but then we would have had to talk about it. And the money, and the lease, and the mortgage, and the endless yeast infections—life, as it turns out (and no one warns you) is really just an unbroken string of gynecological malady. I breathe deep and wonder at the majesty of the night sky when I remember to notice those brief interludes of pH balanced bliss.

But then a dog barks. Will I spend my life wondering at a mystery I can’t solve, preoccupied by an evil I can’t name? I’m no philosopher. I hate the dogs, and you will too, if you know what’s good for you.

One winter after Cassie learned to walk, we packed up the car and drove west to New Mexico. It was a long drive but it didn’t take longer than a couple days, and after an undeserved speeding ticket and a near collision with some black cows hiding against the black sky, we unpacked the car just south of the border at a small A-frame that belonged to my parents. During the day Ruthie limped around in the red dirt and Cassie toppled over in the patches of noon-melted snow. When the sun started to set over the mountains and lit up the face of the cliffs, Ruthie would fall asleep at the house, and we’d bundle up the baby and pull on long johns under our pants and walk down to the lake that you could still fish in even though part of it was frozen over.

The lake wasn’t but a short walk from the house, but I hate to be caught unprepared, and so I had a water bottle and some cellophane bags of snacks stuffed into my coat pockets. Cassie jumped and stamped in the red mud and Max skipped rocks, which was funny to see, because it made me imagine that he was just a boy who’d been around a while. I sat on the rocks and watched. Sometimes when I’m in a new landscape the view doesn’t feel real, and that was a funny feeling to have, watching people I knew for sure were real standing in a place I wasn’t so sure about. I was just looking at my family and the red mountain and the frozen lake, so I was the first person to see the deer. I saw the buck and the smallest doe first, and then two more doe stepped out from behind the aspens. I said, “look.”

Max stopped skipping rocks and held out his hand. He clicked with his tongue. “Psst. C’mere baby.” The deer looked at him sideways.

“Max, here,” I said, and I tore open the package of Fritos in my pocket and put some yellow crisps in the baby’s hand. “Here, sweetie,” I said, and I held out Cassie’s palm in my own. The deer weren’t shy except for the buck, and one doe with a white patch on her face came right up and ate the Fritos out of our hands. Max came over and I gave him some Fritos too, and we fed the deer until the sun got low and the Fritos ran out and the buck got antsy and left with the girls. On the way home Max carried Cassie on his shoulders and he and I stepped on the puddles frozen in the tire tracks and listened to them crack. That’s something I like to remember.

I was at home cooking mashed potatoes when the phone rang one night. Actually I hadn’t started cooking yet—they were peeled and quartered and lying in pale wet mounds at the bottom of a cold pot. I was going to make mashed potatoes but I noticed we didn’t have any milk. I like to boil my mashed potatoes in milk because you get the same taste as if they were made with cream, but without all the fat. I don’t really care about my weight, but at the time I felt like I was supposed to, so I did things like make mashed potatoes with milk and order my sandwiches with no mayo. It doesn’t make any difference to me now.

The rest of the meal was easy to prep but I wasn’t going to put the heat on anything till Max got back with the milk, so I got comfortable and started taking my time, really focusing on the vegetables. No one ever taught me how to cook so I’m not great at it, but I like to do it anyway. I just stare at the thing in front of me and it makes me feel calm. I like the challenge of picking up each vegetable and examining it. If you look closely, it’s almost as if the vegetable will tell you how to take itself apart: I’ve got seeds in the middle, cut me in half first. That’s a common one. If someone hands you a bulb of fennel you look at it and then you cut off the turgid green stalks projecting from the minty white bulb. They are clearly unwieldy and the fern of the fennel (not a technical term) is very delicate and will flake off in your hand and stick to any fresh vegetal incisions. Then you cut the fennel in half the short way across, and then you flip each side on its freshly sliced belly, and that’s when the dog barks. The dog barked and it took me more than a moment to realize what I was really hearing, and I looked up at the dog in amazement and dropped the fennel as I reached for Cassie and Ruthie kept barking and barking and then the phone rang. It rang and it rang and it rang.