The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  I dimly recall Mrs Griffith’s Golf approaching as Mr Peterson and I passed the tall privet hedge that bordered Mr Lloyd’s front garden. She couldn’t have been driving very quickly – certainly no more than thirty miles per hour – but at the time I was slow to recognize her. Mr Peterson saw her first, and was first to raise his hand as her car drew closer. Mrs Griffith, I should tell you, was one of the few people in the village to whom Mr Peterson spoke on a semi-regular basis (on account of all the stamps he had to buy each month). Nevertheless, I think that both of our waves were mostly mechanical that day. I suppose we were talking at the time, and so were partially distracted from our surroundings. Not that this would have made much difference. There was no time to react – it was all over in the same instant it registered.

  The noise, we later found out, was the firing to life of a chainsaw. Mr Lloyd had chosen that afternoon to straighten out his hedge. But at the time, since he was concealed from view, there was no way of knowing this, and no chance to prepare. There was simply an explosion of sound a little to our right, and in the same moment Kurt bolted instinctively in the opposite direction – onto the road and straight into the path of Mrs Griffith’s oncoming car. She had no time to react, and by the time she’d hit the brakes, the impact had already happened. There was a dull thud, a metallic screech, the smell of burnt rubber. Mrs Griffith’s car came to a halt about twenty metres or so down the road, and a second later, everything was still and silent. The chainsaw, evidently, had been shut off at the sound of the accident.

  Kurt was lying motionless a metre from the far kerb, and blood was already beginning to pool at his hind legs. It was only when we got to him that it was apparent he was still breathing.

  When Mrs Griffith joined us in the street she was shaking and her face was white as chalk. She had her fingertips held to her lips and just kept stammering the same two sentences again and again: ‘I didn’t s-s-see him! He just ran out in front of me!’

  Mr Lloyd, by this time, was standing at the end of his driveway with his mouth agape, still in a thick pair of gardening gloves and looking as helpless and incongruous as a freshly landed fish; and for some long moments, I was about as much use as he was. I didn’t know what to do or say. My mind had turned to solid ice. Mr Peterson, meanwhile, was trying to tend to Kurt and comfort Mrs Griffith at the same time.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he told her, ‘but we need to get him to a vet – right now. Can you drive us?’

  Mrs Griffith didn’t appear to understand the question. Mr Peterson had to repeat himself twice before she started nodding, and then once more to get her moving. He turned to me as she was reversing the car parallel to us. ‘I’m gonna need some help liftin’ him, kid. Can you help me?’

  I tried to speak but no words came. The bleeding from Kurt’s injured leg seemed to be getting worse, and the haunch was twitching every few seconds. I hadn’t ever seen that much blood before. But Mr Peterson, I suppose, had seen injuries far worse. He stayed completely calm and focussed.

  ‘It’s okay, kid,’ he said. ‘You’ll be okay. We just have to get him to the car. We’ll do it together.’

  He took off his jacket and wrapped it round Kurt’s hindquarters. Then he gestured to me. ‘All I need you to do is support his head and front legs. We’ll lift on three.’

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ I blurted.

  ‘Yes, you can. You’ll be okay. It’ll all be over in a half-minute. I just need you to be with me for that time. Okay?’

  I closed my eyes and took several ragged breaths.

  ‘Alex? Open your eyes. Stay with me.’

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘You’re gonna be okay. Just hold it together for a couple more minutes. On three . . .’

  Kurt whimpered loudly as we lifted him, and for a second, my blood ran cold. But then he was silent, and the worst was over. He was awkward to manoeuvre, but he didn’t weigh much, and within a minute, we had him laid across the back seat of Mrs Griffith’s Golf. Mr Peterson got in the back with him, and I got into the front passenger seat, and fifteen minutes later, we had arrived at the vet’s surgery.

  After Kurt had been sedated and one of his back legs had been bandaged, the vet called us back into the treatment room. Kurt was still stretched out on the stainless-steel table in the centre of the room. He looked very peaceful, like he was in a deep, dreamless sleep.

  ‘The bleeding’s not as serious as it first appeared,’ the vet told us solemnly, ‘but the leg’s broken in two places. I’m afraid when the sedative wears off he’s going to be in quite a lot of pain.’

  ‘But he’s going to be okay?’ I asked. ‘I mean, he’s going to live?’

  The vet looked at Mr Peterson and something seemed to pass between them. ‘All his injuries are treatable,’ she said. ‘But you have to understand that Kurt’s a very old dog. The chances of him making a full recovery are slim. Even in the best scenario, it’s doubtful that he’ll ever be able to walk on that leg again – not without considerable pain.’

  Mr Peterson nodded but didn’t say anything.

  ‘But he’s going to live?’ I persisted.

  The vet looked at me, then glanced back at Mr Peterson. ‘Would you like me to give you a few minutes?’

  ‘Yes, if you would,’ said Mr Peterson.

  ‘A few minutes for what?’ I asked, and at that point, I genuinely didn’t know the answer. I’d never been exposed to circumstances like these before. Outside of the rather unusual environment of my mother’s shop, I had no experience of how people spoke – or didn’t speak – about death.

  Mrs Griffith had taken a tissue from her bag and was dabbing her eyes again. Mr Peterson looked very grim and determined. ‘Kid, I’m sorry. The vet’s going to put Kurt to sleep. There’s nothing else we can do.’

  My stomach reeled. ‘The vet said it’s just his leg! She said it’s treatable!’

  Mrs Griffith put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Alex,’ she said softly, ‘I don’t think you understand what the vet meant. She said that the injuries are treatable – not that they should be treated.’

  ‘But if they’re treatable, then of course they should be treated. She didn’t have to say it. It’s obvious!’

  ‘It wouldn’t be kind,’ Mr Peterson said. ‘You have to understand that.’

  ‘The vet can save him!’

  ‘It wouldn’t be saving him – not really. I know it’s difficult, but you have to try to understand. Once he wakes up, he’ll be in a lot of pain – and it’s not the sort of pain that’s gonna go away. He’ll have to live with it all the time, for however long he’s got left. That’s what we have to save him from.’

  ‘We can’t just let him die!’

  Mrs Griffith squeezed my shoulder.

  Mr Peterson looked at me for a while, then said: ‘I’m sorry, kid. But we are going to let him die.’

  At this point, I started to cry. Mr Peterson’s expression never wavered.

  ‘He’s not going to suffer,’ he told me. ‘He’ll just drift off peacefully. It’s the only kind thing we can do for him now. You know that, don’t you?’

  We were all silent for a while.

  ‘What will happen afterwards?’ I asked finally. ‘After he’s put to sleep?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Mr Peterson said.

  ‘Can we bury him?’

  ‘Do you think that’s something that might help you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Then we can bury him.’

  The spot we chose was pretty much the only spot available – a large flowerbed close to the west hedge at the back of the garden, just past the shed and the greenhouse. The previous inhabitants had been a couple of rosebushes who’d succumbed to disease a year or so earlier. Mr Peterson had been meaning to replace them ever since, but it was only after the burial that he finally got round to it.

  It took a long time to dig the hole. It ended up being about five feet long, two feet wide and three feet deep. That’s thirty
cubic feet of dirt I had to excavate – more or less alone. Mr Peterson helped for a bit, but I could soon see he was struggling, and, really, I knew that this project was my responsibility, not his. I’d insisted on it, after all. So after a few minutes, I told him that I didn’t mind doing all the digging on my own. There wasn’t really enough space for two people to manoeuvre in, anyway. He smoked one of his marijuana cigarettes and watched me for a while. Then he went back inside. I think he understood that digging this grave was something I had to do by myself.

  As I’ve already indicated, this was the first time I’d ever encountered death as something more than an abstract concept on a tarot card, and this, perhaps, explains the strength of my reaction. In hindsight, I suspect I must have looked increasingly absurd as I dug out that hole in Mr Peterson’s former rose garden. By the time I’d finished, I was waist-deep in the ground, bone-tired and covered in dirt. All I can say is that at the time it didn’t feel absurd in the slightest. It felt necessary. I knew that my endeavour wasn’t going to change anything, and it certainly wasn’t going to make any difference to Kurt, but then, I suppose that’s always the way with funerals. Funerals aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living.

  I didn’t really take any breaks. I just kept soldiering on with my spade. A foot down, things became much tougher. The soil was more compacted, there were more stones and old roots to contend with, and, of course, the further down I got, the further I had to shift the soil. By the time I’d finished, the muscles in my arms and legs and back were very tender, and I had blisters on both my hands. But this physical discomfort made me feel better somehow.

  My hole was very impressive to look at, and very neat, with all its planes flattened out at right angles, or as close to right angles as I could make them. I thought that Mr Peterson would be pleased that I’d been able to dig such a regular grave. I felt like I’d achieved something important.

  Back inside, I phoned my mother to let her know what had happened and that I’d be home late, and then I phoned Mrs Griffith and asked her if she’d like to come over for the burial. This seemed like an appropriate thing to do. After all, she’d been through a lot that day as well. I thought being there for the burial might help her, and she agreed. She said she’d come over presently.

  At that point, it occurred to me that since I’d now taken charge of organizing a sort of funeral, it might also be my responsibility to say a few words before we put Kurt in the ground. Of course, I hadn’t ever attended a funeral before, and I hadn’t exactly had a conventional religious upbringing, but I’d seen enough television to know the approximate format that a funeral was supposed to follow. There are words you’re supposed to say: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ and so on. But I thought it wouldn’t really be appropriate for me to say anything like that. It would sound much too grand, and I wasn’t even a hundred per cent certain that you were allowed to perform that kind of formal funeral unless you were a clergyman, which I wasn’t. In the end, I decided that it would be better if I stuck to a short reading. Something from Kurt’s namesake seemed the most appropriate, so I dug out Mr Peterson’s copy of Sirens, where I seemed to remember there being several pertinent passages about dogs and death.

  The extract I’d had in mind I found on page 206, but it was much bleaker than I remembered:

  An explosion on the sun had separated man and dog. A universe schemed in mercy would have kept man and dog together.

  The universe inhabited by Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog was not schemed in mercy. Kazak had been sent ahead of his master on the great mission to nowhere and nothing.

  Kazak had left howling in a puff of ozone and sick light, in a hum like swarming bees.

  Rumfoord let the empty choke chain slip from his fingers. The chain expressed deadness, made formless sound and a formless heap, was a soulless slave of gravity, born with a broken spine.

  Apt and poetic though this was, it was simply too bleak to read at a funeral. Instead, I settled on Rumfoord’s farewell speech on page 207, which starts: ‘I am not dying. I am merely taking my leave of the solar system,’ and ends: ‘I shall always be here. I shall always be wherever I’ve been.’

  It was about eight o’clock by the time we buried him, but there was still plenty of sunlight in the back garden, so doing my reading was no problem. Afterwards, Mr Peterson helped me to fill in the hole. There were only two spades, so Mrs Griffith couldn’t help, but I think she was happy just to watch, and getting earth back into a hole’s much easier than getting it out. Within a few minutes, the flowerbed was pretty much back to its former state.

  A little later, while Mr Peterson was smoking another of his cigarettes, Mrs Griffith told me that she’d liked my reading very much.

  ‘It was Kurt Vonnegut,’ I said. ‘That’s who Kurt was named after.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Griffith. ‘Well, it really was a lovely reading.’

  Later still, after Mrs Griffith had left, when the sun had dipped behind the hedge and the sky had turned pastel violet, Mr Peterson came back out from the house and said that he thought I’d better be getting home soon, before my mother started to worry.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can I have a few more moments, first?’

  ‘Okay. You want me to wait?’

  ‘Yes, please. I won’t be very long.’

  I’d been wrapped up in my thoughts, and had quite lost track of the time, but I should tell you that I wasn’t feeling sad any more – not really. Neither was I feeling agitated. There was none of the tumult I’d come to expect in the quiet aftermath of a stressful event. It was very peaceful out there in the garden, with the sky darkening and no sound but the wind in the trees. If I closed my eyes, it felt like I’d drifted into the final scene from my meditation, with nothing around me but soft sunlight and the deep blue sea.

  ‘Mr Peterson?’ I asked after a while. ‘What do you think happens when we die?’

  He looked at me for a few seconds, as if trying to gauge something in me. Then he said: ‘I don’t think anything happens when we die.’

  I thought about this for a few moments. ‘Neither do I,’ I said.

  It was the first time I’d told anyone that. It was probably the first time I’d acknowledged it to myself. It felt like a big admission to make, but, still, I was glad I’d said it. It was an important thing to say.

  After that, we turned away from the flowerbed and walked back to the house.

  HALF A MONTH OF SUNDAYS

  In the weeks that followed, I grew increasingly concerned about Mr Peterson’s mental well-being. As I hope I’ve made clear, I think that I handled Kurt’s death as well as could be expected – all things considered. After the initial shock, I grieved, I dug my hole, and I came out a little stronger on the other side. But as for Mr Peterson, well, with him there was just a kind of blank wall, a silent muddling through. I wasn’t sure his response was healthy.

  One thing I noticed was that he seemed to be smoking a lot more marijuana, and although I now knew that he grew it in his loft under two rows of high-pressure sodium lamps, which had allayed my initial concerns that his drug use might be funding terrorism, I still had my worries about the physiological effects of his habit. It elevated his mood, I suppose, but only temporarily. Afterwards it made him sluggish and introspective. It slowed him down. Several times, I told him that I thought he might be smoking too much. This was his reply:

  ‘Jesus, kid – you’re not like any other fifteen-year-old on the planet!’

  I wouldn’t be fifteen for a few more months, but I let this detail slide. Mr Peterson never seemed sure how old I was from one minute to the next, and by his standards, this was an excellent estimate.

  ‘I’m worried about what it might be doing to your brain,’ I told him, very reasonably. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but brain cells aren’t like skin cells or liver cells. They don’t regenerate. People with perfectly healthy brains are always finding ways to mess them up; and, to tell you the truth, it ann
oys the hell out of me.’

  ‘Kid, I’ve been smokin’ this stuff for forty years,’ Mr Peterson pointed out. ‘I’m not gonna quit now just because you’ve got it in your head that it’s some kind of terrible vice.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a vice,’ I countered. ‘I said I don’t think it’s good for you.’

  ‘Jesus! Nothing fun’s good for you! Not in the sense you mean, anyway. For someone who knows so much about brains, you sure know squat about minds.’

  ‘I do know about minds,’ I insisted. ‘And I know that a healthy mind requires a healthy brain.’

  ‘Well, your view of a healthy brain’s pretty damn narrow,’ Mr Peterson objected. ‘We all need our crutches.’

  I wasn’t going to try to convert Mr Peterson to the wonders of meditation. I’d tried before, and failed. He didn’t seem to get the boat analogy at all. But it was obvious to me that he needed something other than marijuana to fill the hole that Kurt’s passing had left.

  The few times I raised the idea, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to get another dog – not in the foreseeable future, anyway – and I suppose it was this, as much as anything, that made me worry. I thought perhaps Kurt’s death had hit him quite a lot harder than he was letting on. After all, Kurt had been more or less the only company he’d had for the best part of three years. It looks very bleak set out in print like that, but this fact was true and unavoidable. Without Kurt, I couldn’t imagine him leaving the house nearly so often. He’d just revert to being a hermit.

  Although it might not be obvious to an outside observer, dog-walking in the countryside is quite a sociable activity. In a one- to two-hour walk, you’ll probably meet a couple of dozen people, and the presence of an animal or two tends to grease the wheels of friendly conversation like little else. At the very least, people will smile and say, ‘Hello,’ or, ‘What a friendly dog!’ And those people whom you see more than once will usually stop for a chat and say things like ‘How are you?’ or ‘I can’t remember the last time we had an August this wet!’ and so on. I thought that Mr Peterson was bound to miss all these little interactions, even if he didn’t realize it.