The Sarah Book

by Scott McClanahan

  And then the note finished like this:

  I want you to know that there IS another world. You are right. Scott is wrong. It’s a world that surrounds us and we’re all together just like right now. All the living and the dead. Sarah smiled and then I gave her a present from her grandfather. It was a stuffed animal he gave her long ago when she was a little girl. Sarah opened up the present and read what it said and then she cried and cried some more. Snot was coming out of her nose. I told her it was okay and that her grandfather loved her and it was okay to miss people.

  Sarah stopped crying and told me to shut up and I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand what she meant. She told me that my Christmas was creepy and that she didn’t really know her grandfather that well. She told me that she had bad memories of him and he used to call her brother Jack fat and make comments about her own weight and the way she talked. He didn’t want her to get a West Virginia accent. Sarah told me that when he re-married he put a few phrases in the pre-nup where he wanted his second wife to fix him omelets and mimosas three times a week and serve it to him in bed. I just shook my head and told her it must have been a joke and he must have been joking. Sarah said it wasn’t a joke. Then she told me that his second wife told her one day that a woman should always marry three times. The first marriage should be for money. The second marriage should be for good looks to pass on to your offspring. The last marriage should be for love. Love should come last. The woman told Sarah that you could tell a lot about a person by whether or not they followed these rules. Then Sarah told me that she found out the patient she called the pirate was a convicted pedophile and that’s why his family never visited him and that’s why he was alone. She told me Rhani showed her his picture on the West Virginia sex offender computer data base.

  Sarah wiped the snot from her nose and walked away. She wanted to go to bed. She was tired.

  I’d ruined Christmas.

  Then I saw that there are other presents. And they are full of nothing.

  They have notes attached that say: There is not another world. There is only this one. Your memories are just the dumb voices inside your head. Love is just biology and the urges of animals to pass on their genes like rats. There are others from grandmothers who say: We just wind up ashes in a stranger’s home. Unwanted and unknown. Others from mothers who say: You were always annoying. There is another from your father who writes: Thank god, I’m dead. We were never close. And we never knew one another. Never.

  And these are the true presents.

  This is the real past.

  In the days that followed, Sarah watched the things she loved grow older and die. Miss K. was this 80 year old woman who Sarah asked one day what the key to a successful marriage was. Miss K. thought for a moment and then she said, “Two things. The first thing. Keep your damn mouth shut.”

  “And what’s the second thing, Miss K?”

  Miss K. said, “Fucking, fucking and more fucking.” Sarah blushed hearing these words come out of an 80 year old woman. Miss K. said, “If you can fit together when you fuck, then you’ll have a lifetime of happiness.”

  That weekend Sarah told me about how she decided to check on Miss K. again and see if she needed her hair done, but she had a visitor. It was a man in his 60s with gray hair. Sarah went to check on her after that and there was another man there now. He already had her sitting up on the potty chair and he already had her hair fixed. Later that evening Sarah noticed a different man and he was filing Miss K’s fingernails. Sarah noticed yet another man on the final visiting hour and he was reading to her a book of love poems.

  “You sure do have a lot of visitors,” Sarah said to Miss K. who had been a schoolteacher.

  Miss K. smiled and said, “Yep those are my boys.”

  Sarah thought about having a whole room full of sons.

  Then Miss K. asked, “Did you and your husband do some fucking last night.” Sarah told her, “No.” Miss K. just smiled and said, “Well that relationship is doomed.”

  The next day Sarah was having a hard shift. She went into Miss K’s room and Sarah watched her sleep. It made her feel calm again when she watched the old patients sleep. Then she saw that Miss K. had a visitor and the visitor was sleeping too but then the gray haired man was startled and woke up.

  “Oh I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I was just checking on her.” Sarah started to leave. “No, stay,” the gray haired man said. He must have been only 50 or so. “She likes you and she hardly likes anyone.” Then the man in Miss K’s room took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was dreaming we were at the beach and it was years ago. It was before everything got so messed up. I took a picture of her on the balcony of our hotel and she looked beautiful. We sat on that beach and looked out at the ocean and all that rolling water and the moon.”

  Sarah was confused. What did he mean, “She always looked beautiful at the ocean?” Of course, Sarah thought that this man was just another one of Miss K’s sons. He looked so young. But then he told her he was one of her ex-husbands. Sarah said, “Oh well, I wasn’t sure she’d been married before. I knew she had sons.” The man stopped and told her no. She never had any children. There weren’t any sons. The men who had been coming to visit her and take care of her were all her ex-husbands. The man smiled and told Sarah that Miss K. had been married six times.

  “Well she must have been an amazing woman,” Sarah said. And the man just shook his head. “Yes, she was. We’re all still here helping to take care of her.” So that night Sarah walked to her car and looked up at the moon and it was the same moon from ten thousand years ago. It was the same moon that everyone looked at from the beginning of time.

  Miss K. never made it to the beach again. A week passed and then two weeks passed and then a month and then two months. Miss K. was still in the ICU. She was on the vent the last week of her life. Sarah came home one night and said Miss K. died and she thought it was the strangest death she’d ever witnessed. I asked her why it was so strange. Sarah thought about the people who she lost. Then she saw her father. He was sick and she couldn’t help him. She saw her mother and she was sick and Sarah couldn’t help her. Sarah saw her own children sick and she couldn’t help them. Sarah said Miss K’s death was so strange because there was so much love in the room. She said all of the husbands who were still living stood by her bed and they gathered around the bedside and then one by one they stooped and said goodbye. Some were crying and some whispered I love you and held her and touched her forehead and kissed her cheek. And then Miss K. who had not moved in weeks looked as if she was smiling and the men all held hands around her bed.

  They held hands and swayed and the former husband who had been a preacher shouted, “Hallelujah.” It was not a day of sorrow. It was a day of joy. And they would all be going home soon. Then he broke up and said. “Go away sweetheart, where we are all young and still in love.” Then Miss K. raised her arms into the air and Sarah wished for a thousand husbands. Sarah wished for ten thousand husbands, and they were all singing love songs for her and she saw a million husbands surrounding her and they were all wanting her and waiting on her. They were all waiting for her love.

  A few months later Sarah heard a story about Miss K’s ex-hus-bands. She heard they were all still living in Miss K’s house together. There were only three of them now but they were all there. They were together and they were all taking care of one another now. It made them feel close just to be around the things she loved.

  In the coming years, Sarah continued to watch the things she loved grow older and die. It started when Mr. King stopped walking. In the evenings he lay at my feet and our other dog Bertie came over and licked his eyes. She was his sister.

  Bertie licked the empty socket that was missing the eyeball and then she licked the eye that was blind. She licked the black juice that oozed from the empty eye-socket and she licked King’s ears that always had a strange odor and a brown fluid.

  Then she licked the eye socket again and King breathe
d heavy and then excited and then sleepy and then he yawned and you could see inside his mouth and the few teeth he had left. But then he would whine sometimes. Whine about how dark the world was and it was like he was scared of the dark now.

  But his sister was giving him a bath.

  “Aww,” Sarah said. “That’s sweet.”

  I told her that it wasn’t affection we were seeing but just something salty on King’s coat that tasted nice and we mistook it for love. Mistakes. He said she said bullshit. But then Sarah said that maybe even ants feel life and we just can’t communicate with them.

  I laughed and told her we were all animals licking empty eye sockets.

  Finally one night I said that it was getting to be time and that we needed to put Mr. King down. I told her that he’d lived a long life but he was just suffering now.

  Sarah asked me how he was suffering because she still thought he was the happiest animal she knew.

  “He just likes sitting and being,” she said.

  “That’s because he’s blind,” I told her.

  But Sarah said he’d suffered so much in his life and that I was just jealous because I still thought she loved him more. She told me she just wanted to give him more time in this world and she wanted to give him more time to enjoy his love and his treats.

  I told her that his teeth had fallen out and he couldn’t really enjoy anything because he didn’t have teeth.

  But I agreed to let him live.

  In the mornings I still picked him up and took him outside to piss and at noon I took him outside to piss and shit if he hadn’t shit in the house yet and then I’d take him outside in the afternoon to piss and shit and then at night I took him out to piss some more. But now he was using the bathroom inside. All of the time. Accidents. Then one night we looked over and he was sleeping and there was shit coming out of him. The house stunk. The shit kept pushing out of him like a giant shit worm and he didn’t even know or realize.

  He was sleeping.

  So we ran around.

  I cleaned him up and then a few minutes later it happened again. The wet shit balls dropped from his ass and flopped against the hardwood floor like cookie dough. I had to take him outside.

  My father-in-law was visiting from Virginia. Elphonza.

  He sat on the cold porch and chewed a piece of Nicorette gum and watched me wipe King’s ass with a paper towel and I sprayed King’s ass with the water hose.

  King had a look on his face like, “Is this the end? Perhaps this is the end for me. I was born a long time ago, but it doesn’t seem so long ago now.”

  I looked at my father-in-law who’d just lost his girlfriend Dagmar to a brain tumor. He showed me a picture of her from a few months before she died and I didn’t recognize her. Her head was swollen up like a rotten melon with eyes made of only slits.

  The eyes looked like cuts.

  Her head was the size of her body almost.

  “The steroids swelled her up like that,” he said. Then he handed me his phone and I looked at the picture. He said, “Life is something, ain’t it?”

  I looked at her head and it was swollen up and her face was swollen up and who would have known that when she was a baby she was snuck across the German border and hid from the Nazis inside of a suitcase. Her mother made her drink so much schnapps that her father thought she would die. They made her drink the schnapps so that she would be unconscious and sleeping and she wouldn’t cry.

  “You’re going to kill her,” her father told her mother. “She’s just a baby.”

  “We’re already dead,” her mother said as the baby screams grew less and less and then her infant was asleep. In the picture Elphonza showed me, Dagmar’s head looked like a rotten pumpkin and she had that same look on her face like Mr. King. Both pictures said, “Is this the way it’s going to end for me? ”

  I finished cleaning up King and I came inside and I cried. I told Sarah again that King needed to be put down. Sarah cried too but she begged me for another week. And so in this last week, Sarah tried to make the last days of Mr. King wonderful. For years we said Mr. King was immortal and we didn’t really know his true age. We imagined him in History Channel documentaries with Alexander and his Macedonians. We imagined him with Hannibal and his Carthaginians. We imagined him in the future with aliens. We imagined him 256 years old. Sarah made him hamburger steak and she let me feed him beer without getting mad. Mr. King and I partied well into the night each night and I told him about my life and how I met the woman who was his final mother. In the mornings Sarah took him on rides and she did his favorite thing. She just sat with him on her lap for hours and rubbed him. He purred and cooed and she held him like a baby.

  Mr. King was her baby.

  So King slept in her arms like a giant fat baby and there was a look on his face that said,“Perhaps this is not the end. Perhaps this is only a beginning.”

  But by the end of the week it was all different. He couldn’t walk at all now or even really crawl on his front legs. Then one afternoon Sarah and I watched him pull himself around the room on his front paws and drag his dead body behind him. Sarah wanted to pretend that it wasn’t happening, but then I noticed something being left behind as he dragged himself.

  I picked up Mr. King from the floor and I saw what it was. It was all over my hands and my arms and my shirt.

  It was blood.

  He’d rubbed his hip raw from the dragging and so I told Sarah it was time to call the vet. The next morning she did.

  Sarah cried when she told Mr. King goodbye. She told him she hoped that he was able to find some comfort in his final days and she told him she was sorry if her soft heart made him suffer more. She told him he was a good boy with the sweetest heart she had ever known and then she kissed him and hugged him and then she went away and shut the door to the bedroom behind her.

  I heard her crying.

  Our other dog, Bertie Mae McClanahan was outside on the chain when she said her goodbye to the strange dog who couldn’t see and who was afraid of the dark. She sat and looked up at what once were his sad eyes and I put King in front of her. Then she licked the sockets of his sick eyes for the last time.

  Then Bertie’s eyes looked to me and she said, “It’s a lonely world Scott McClanahan. Why do we have to lose things?” I didn’t answer.

  I took Mr. King to the car and put him inside and then I drove the few minutes to the vet. I let him out and he did something he loved for the last time. He went over to the grass at the corner of the parking lot and he raised his leg and pissed. His face smiled like he was saying that was the most amazing piss he ever took and then he said, “Isn’t pissing fun?” I told him pissing really was fun and then I took him inside the vet’s office. Mr. King sat in my lap but he was quiet now. There was a little girl there and she looked at Mr. King. She couldn’t have been more than six and she said, “That dog looks funny. He looks old.”

  I told her he was old.

  The little girl asked how old he was and I told her this. I said, “His name is Mr. King and you might not believe it but he is 256 years old.”

  Then the little girl laughed and said, “No he’s not. He’s more like 500 years old.”

  She laughed and I laughed and I watched the little girl keep looking at his eye. Then she asked, “How come his eye is missing? How come he’s blind?”

  I looked down and said, “Oh my god. His eye is missing?

  I always wondered why he couldn’t see. Thanks for telling me.”

  She laughed again and then I told her I guess Mr. King saw too much.

  Then it was time to go back and see the vet. I said goodbye to the little girl and walked away. The vet asked me how everything was and I told her. Then the vet looked sad and asked me if I wanted to stay. I told the vet that I did and I wanted to be with him in his last moments and Sarah made me promise. The vet gave him a few pets and said, “Well he lived a good long life.” Then she had the needle and then she was filling it full. I kept petting King
and talked to him. I said inside my head, “Don’t be afraid, Mr. King. Don’t be afraid.” I was talking to myself.

  But in the end Mr. King was afraid. I want to tell you now that he was peaceful and he just closed his eyes and went to sleep. I want to tell you he just went away. I want to tell you he licked my hand to show he loved me. But he didn’t. He died like this.

  The vet placed the needle in his hide and King panicked. He thrashed around. He shook his head and was so strong that he almost came off the table. I tried holding him down the best I could but the vet had to call for her assistant who came in and held him down as well. The vet pushed the needle in and Mr. King rose up on his front legs and whipped his head around. Then he did something else. He tried to bite me. He was blind so he couldn’t see what he was biting at and then he fell to the table and started shaking from a seizure. He clamped down on his tongue and then his life was gone from him. There was blood coming from his tongue and there was a bile foaming around his lips and there was something oozing from his eye.

  I sat with him for a while and the vet asked if I wanted to take him home or if I wanted them to dispose of him and I told the vet that I wanted him. They put him inside of a giant black plastic bag and then they placed him inside of a white box. They gave me the white box and I made a mistake. I left and instead of going out the side door I went back out through the waiting room in the front of the vet’s office. The girl was still there and she looked up at me.

  “Where is the blind dog?” I didn’t say anything. She looked at the white box and she knew.

  Then a vet assistant came out and said, “Sir, the children. Please go out the side door,” I was already on my way out the front though. So I put him in the trunk and then I came back inside and paid the 35 dollars it cost for them to stop his life.