looked at me then, took my chin with his hand.
“I love you, boy,” he said. “And I promise I’ll never do that again. No matter what. I’m really sorry.”
He was blathering, he was drunk. But it made me feel so much love for him, too.
“You’re tough,” he said. “You can do three days like that because you’re one tough dog.”
I felt proud.
“I know you’d never do anything deliberately to hurt Zoë,” he said.
I laid my head on his leg and looked up at him.
“Sometimes I think you actually understand me,” he said. “It’s like there’s a person inside there. Like you know everything.”
I do, I said to myself. I do.
Eve’s condition was elusive and unpredictable. One day she would suffer a headache of crushing magnitude. Another day, debilitating nausea. A third would open with dizziness and end with a dark and angry mood. And these days were never linked together consecutively. Between them would be days or even weeks of relief, life as usual. And then Denny would get a call at work, and he would run to Eve’s assistance, drive her home from her job, impose on a friend to follow in her car, and spend the rest of the day watching helplessly.
The intense and arbitrary nature of Eve’s affliction was far beyond Denny’s grasp. The wailings, the dramatic screaming fits, the falling on the floor in fits of anguish. These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into the pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal and clear, like white-hot metal spraying out of a fire hose, we can appreciate the aesthetic while taking the worst of it straight in the face. Men, on the other hand, are all filters and deflectors and timed release. For men, it’s like athlete’s foot: spray the special spray on it, they say, and it goes away. They have no idea that the manifestation of their affliction—the fungus between their hairy toes—is merely a symptom, an indication of a systemic problem. A candida bloom in their bowels, for instance, or some other upset to their system. Suppressing the symptom does nothing but force the true problem to express itself on a deeper level at some other time. Go see a doctor, he said to her. Get some medication. And she howled to the moon in reply. He never understood, as I did, what she meant when she said that medication would only mask the pain, not make it go away, and what’s the point of that. He never understood when she said that if she went to a doctor, the doctor would only invent a disease that would explain why he couldn’t help her. And there was so much time between episodes. There was so much hope.
Denny was frustrated by his impotence, and in that regard, I could understand his point of view. It’s frustrating for me to be unable to speak. To feel that I have so much to say, so many ways I can help, but I’m locked in a soundproof box, a game show isolation booth from which I can see out and I can hear what’s going on, but they never turn on my microphone and they never let me out. It might drive a person mad. It certainly has driven many a dog mad. The good dog that would never hurt a soul but is found one day having eaten the face of his master as she slept deeply under the influence of sleeping pills? There was nothing wrong with that dog except that his mind finally snapped. As awful as it sounds, it happens; it’s on the TV news regularly.
Myself, I have found ways around the madness. I work at my human gait, for instance. I practice chewing my food slowly like people do. I study the television for clues on behavior and to learn how to react in certain situations. In my next life, when I am born again as a person, I will practically be an adult the moment I am plucked from the womb, with all the preparation I have done. It will be all I can do to wait for my new human body to mature to adulthood so I may excel at all the athletic and intellectual pursuits I hope to enjoy.
Denny avoided the madness of his personal sound-booth hell by driving through it. There was nothing he could do to make Eve’s distress go away, and once he realized that, he made a commitment to do everything else better.
Often things happen to race cars in the heat of the race. A square-toothed gear in a transmission may break, suddenly leaving the driver without all of his gears. Or perhaps a clutch fails. Brakes go soft from overheating. Suspensions break. When faced with one of these problems, the poor driver crashes. The average driver gives up. The great drivers drive through the problem. They figure out a way to continue racing. Like in the Luxembourg Grand Prix in 1989, when the Irish racer Kevin Finnerty York finished the race victoriously and later revealed that he had driven the final twenty laps of the race with only two gears! To be able to possess a machine in such a way is the ultimate show of determination and awareness. It makes one realize that the physicality of our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.
Denny cut back his hours at work so he could take Zoë to her preschool. In the evenings after dinner, he read to her and helped her learn her numbers and letters. He took over all the grocery shopping and cooking. He took over the cleaning of the house. And he did it all excellently and without complaint. He wanted to relieve Eve of any burden, any job that could cause stress. What he couldn’t do, though, with all of the extra he was doing, was continue to engage her in the same playful and physically affectionate way I had grown used to seeing. It was impossible for him to do everything; clearly, he had decided that the care of her organism would receive the topmost priority. Which I believe was the correct thing for him to do under the circumstances. Because he had me.
I see green as gray. I see red as black. Does that make me a bad potential person? If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don’t teach me to read, and you don’t give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am?
Denny did not stop loving Eve, he merely delegated his love-giving to me. I became the provider of love and comfort by proxy. When she ailed and he took charge of Zoë and whisked her out of the house to see one of the many wonderful animated films they make for children so that she might not hear the cries of agony from her mother, I stayed behind. He trusted me. He would tell me, as he and Zoë packed their bottles of water and their special sandwich cookies without hydrogenated oils that he bought for her at the good market, he would say, “Go take care of her for me, Enzo, please.”
And I did. I took care of her by curling up at her bedside, or, if she had collapsed on the floor, by curling up next to her there. Often, she would hold me close to her, hold me tight to her body, and when she did, she would tell me things about the pain.
I cannot lie still. I cannot be alone with this. I need to scream and thrash, because it stays away when I scream. When I’m silent, it finds me, it tracks me down and pierces me and says, “Now I’ve got you! Now you belong to me!”
Demon. Gremlin. Poltergeist. Ghost. Phantom. Spirit. Shadow. Ghoul. Devil. People are afraid of them so they relegate their existence to stories, volumes of books that can be closed and put on the shelf or left behind at a bed and breakfast; they clench their eyes shut so they will see no evil. But trust me when I tell you that the zebra is real. Somewhere, the zebra is dancing.
The spring finally ground around to us through an exceptionally wet winter, full of gray days and rain and an edgy cold I rarely found rejuvenating. Over the winter, Eve ate poorly and became drawn and pale. When her pain came, she often went for days without eating a bite of food. She never exercised, so her thinness had no tone, slack skin over brittle bones; she was wasting away. Denny was concerned, but Eve never heeded his pleas for her to consult a doctor. A mild case of depression, she would say. They’ll try to give her pills and she doesn’t want pills. And one evening after dinner, which was a special one, though I don’t remember if it was a birthday or an anniversary, Denny suddenly appeared naked in the bedroom and Eve was naked on the bed.
It seemed so odd to me