Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  Days later, disgruntled at not being fed for twelve hours, Arden is trundled off to Dr. Tupper just after dawn, only to wait in a huge line of pets seeking attention. There’s a backup in surgery, crises abounding, and it’s late in the afternoon before we hear that Arden has been found an unsuitable candidate for anesthesia: his heart has a funny wobble to it, and his liver is shrunken. What this means is left vague, though it seems his death rattle may be imminent. We’re instructed there’s nothing to do but further tests, which, she cautions us, may well prove inconclusive, but Tandy recommends a visit to the state-of-the-art animal medical center, where it takes months to get an appointment. The other option, she mentions in passing, is to keep an eye on him and hope for the best.

  Emily Dickinson says that hope, that thing with feathers—That perches in the soul, cannot be silenced; it never stops—at all—But because she is a great poet, in a little while she will say a completely contradictory thing. She who felt a funeral in her brain, the underlying planks of sense giving way, most certainly understood depression and despair. Perhaps even in her famous poem figuring hope as a bird, she hints at the possibility of hope’s absence, since if hope has feathers, it is most likely capable of flying away.

  Paul has a bracingly Slavic attitude toward hope. His ancestors starved in the fields outside of Bratislava, between plagues and invasions, and their notion that hoping for a better future would have been a costly act of self-delusion seems practically written into his genes. He would agree with Virgil, who says in his Georgics, “All things by nature are ready to get worse.”

  But this is ultimately something of a pose, a psychic costume for a sensibility no less vulnerable than my own. He believes that low expectations about the future will protect him—whereas I, six years older and thus a child of the sixties, can’t stop myself from thinking, perhaps magically, that our expectations shape what’s to come.

  Though it’s true that I, who am more likely to hope overtly, publicly, am also more likely to crash the harder when that hope is voided.

  Back in Provincetown, we see our old vet, and Arden’s body is declared quirky but workable. Both dogs test positive for exposure to Lyme disease, though—the consequence of all those years of walking the brushy trails of the Cape. The implications of the test results seem murky; being exposed to the disease doesn’t mean you have it. Arden’s antibody count is so low that the diagnosis is in doubt, but Beau’s definitely a candidate for a course of antibiotics. Has he been a bit less energetic, is his coat a little bit oily? It’s hard to be sure. The first pill we try—fat tablets wrapped up in a slice of cheese—makes him woozy; if he were a cartoon dog, he’d have little X’s for eyes and some wavy lines floating around his head. Antibiotic number two doesn’t seem to bother him a bit.

  Back in Houston, time for an annual checkup. Tandy T. declares that Arden may well be perishing before our eyes, though he’s doing so quite slowly. But then she puts Beau on the scale, finds he’s lost six pounds since last year, and has this intuition something’s not right, not Lyme disease this time, something else.

  I know it’s true, and little pieces of evidence suddenly seem to have meaning. Doesn’t he stand in the spraying water of the dog fountain a bit longer, not moving at all? And once, as he was standing by the kitchen door, waiting for his dinner, didn’t one of his hind legs step backward, in a little twitch that looked—well, not right. Of course it’s true—I know it in the way you know things, once they are named, that have been right under your nose all along, visible but not really acknowledged—as much because they are frightening as because they are not named. He’s not the same dog. He lies in the dining room, all sprawled out, or with his head stretched out on the floor, chin flat in front of him, in a way that conveys listlessness. He greets and thumps his tail but he doesn’t leap up, and even his thumping seems of briefer duration.

  But the general bedlam of the very popular Dr. Tupper’s office and that dire-crisis mentality make me feel that this is not the place to figure out what’s up. She hasn’t exactly gotten anywhere with Arden, though he’s exasperatedly fasted and we’ve spent hours upon hours waiting to get him into surgery. That’s how, through one of my student’s enthusiastic recommendations, we come to Dr. Frank.

  His office is a calmer, much less fancy place in an unpretentious neighborhood. The Hispanic woman behind the desk has pictures of her kids taped to her computer; all over the walls are letters and cards from people thanking Frank for taking care of their cats and birds, lizards and snakes and dogs. The place has a nice multiracial mix, a good-spiritedness, people calmly going about their business.

  Frank himself has slicked-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses; he’s lean, energetic, and somewhat awkward. He gives the impression of one who probably isn’t socially confident or authoritative in arenas other than this one. In the office, he’s commanding, engaged, and he gives his numerous assistants orders with the firm demeanor of a surgeon in a TV show—save that, one senses, there’s affection all-around for him, despite, perhaps, a bit of eye-rolling about the extremely specific way in which he expects things to be done. Animals are carried in this way; a needed tool is provided from this side; alertness is always required—no daydreaming! His assistant—clearly new—a soft-featured, muscled man with many tattoos, wears his blue scrubs like a prison uniform and never utters a word.

  Frank notices the texture of Beau’s coat—the way it leaves a slight shiny residue on your hands—and the way you can grab a good-size handful of skin on his back and pluck it up away from the muscles: evidence of dehydration. Dr. Frank already has a theory, and the blood work shows he’s right: Beau has kidney disease, which means his body can’t adequately process the protein in his diet, which means his health is failing.

  There isn’t a cure, but there are things to do. Primarily, a low-protein diet—rice with, say, a tiny bit of chicken to make it tempting, that kind of thing. If the protein’s lowered, Frank says, then his kidneys can last longer, hard to say how much.

  But, first, a night in the hospital, getting filled up with fluids intravenously to replace those he’s lost and get him hydrated. Beau trots off with the tattooed attendant, quite pleased to be going, not at all aware that we aren’t coming along. Then he turns back to look, understands that I am not coming, and starts to bolt back to me. I scratch his ears and his beautiful rump, about to let him go. But Frank is perfectly happy to let me walk with him back into the hospital room, where the patients go but the clients usually don’t. I can say good-bye to him there, and hand him over to the attendant—who is, I can tell, already smitten with him.

  Beau comes back looking a whole lot better. It isn’t until I see him the next morning in Frank’s waiting room, enlarged, shining with all the water he’s taken in, that I understand just how much he’s faded. When we see those things happen gradually, of course, day by day, it’s hard to measure how far they’ve gone. Paul and I have been speaking as if there were hope, because it seemed necessary for us to do so together, as if to name what we both felt, beneath the surface, were too dangerous—would make his dire condition too real, solidify it in words.

  But now we’re startled at how great he looks, and the hope that we have steeled ourselves against feeling begins to stir.

  We begin the dietary regime, which involves boiling up large quantities of rice to keep in the refrigerator and commingle, at mealtime, with various temptations. There’s a specially formulated canned dog food you can buy, too, but it has a density and weight that suggest some kind of modeling compound, and we never succeed in convincing Beau that there’s much about it to like. We are regular visitors to Frank’s, for blood work, and it’s soon plain that Beau is the most popular dog in the clinic. He is welcomed by everyone, affectionately greeted, and even walks from room to room without a lead; when someone says, “Come with me,” he trots behind, and seems cheerfully to allow the necessary procedures, as if proud of himself and devoted to maintaining his reputation.

 
; Still that funny tremble in one hind leg, now and then.

  Frank puts him on a round of steroids, injections that will start to replace some of the muscle he’s lost. We joke that Beau’s becoming a Chelsea boy, ready for a circuit party. Over the course of a week or ten days, we can see that they’re working: Beau begins to move with a bit more energy, to seem more like his old self, to Frank’s delight. It’s then I understand that he’s an artist; this is what he makes, animals in better shape, human happiness. Whenever I go to see Frank, he tells me a story—a beaten and abandoned dog he’s taken in, pro bono, a bird who dropped dead on his watch, his first month out of vet school. His work is, as well as medical, narrative; he’s weaving a set of tales, stories of education and restoration.

  Frank has been literally weaving some stories, as well; he reveals, in one of our conversations, when he finds out that I’m a writer and a teacher, that he’s written a novel, a detective story featuring a sleuthing vet. I’m so grateful for what he’s done for Beau, and for the sweet, steady attention we’ve received from all of Frank’s crew, that I volunteer to read it.

  The book’s about a small-town vet, who punctuates his reports on tracking down a murderer with chapters recounting particular encounters with particular pets. There’s that undiagnosable bird, and recalcitrant cats, and dogs of great heart and persistence; the vet stories are delightful and unmistakably real; the detective part is—well, not my cup of tea. I bring the manuscript back to Frank with encouragement, and he confesses that the murder bit is just there to get the reader interested. I tell him where he can sign up for a memoir class, and he’s boyishly delighted at the idea that I really think he ought to.

  One of the things that being a vet is about is the continual restoration of hope, bringing back the possibility of companionship, making a stage upon which love may continue.

  Can hope really be in vain, can you be harmed by hope? Obviously, there is hope that amounts to nothing, in terms of the wished-for result, the longed-for cure, the desired aim. But is that hope in vain, is it simply lost? Or can we say that there’s some way it makes a contribution to the soul—as if one had been given some internal version of those steroid shots, a dose of strengthening?

  Hope is leaven; it makes things rise without effort. I have moved forward at times without hope, when Wally was sick and dying, and there wasn’t a thing in the world to do but ease his way. Without hope, you hunker down and do what needs to be done in this hour; you do not attend to next week. It is somehow like writing without any expectation or belief that one will ever be read—only worse, since even a Dickinson secreting her poems away in private folios sewn by hand expects, at some unknowable time, her treasure to be found, her words to be read. Hopelessness means you do the work at hand without looking for a future.

  Beginning to believe that Beau could be…not healed, but live well a good while, that’s a good thing, isn’t it, that gesture of belief? It doesn’t hurt him, our trying, and there was that burst of gain that made Paul and me feel, well, he could…

  And it’s as if Beau feels it, too, especially one day in the dog park. Lately, he sits and watches, where he used to energetically chase after tennis balls, or run in some temporary pack. Gradually, he hasn’t trusted himself in the group, unable to rely on his old strength, and more of the time he’s just been a watcher at the rim. But one day, after the steroid shots, he moves forward with interest when someone throws a ball, and then, instead of allowing the impulse to fade away, he instead hurtles forward, an amazing burst of energy and speed, a surprised look on his face, as if he didn’t know he could still do it, as if he himself has filled with hope, having found his body can still fly.

  So different from what I see, in a few weeks’ time, when we’re on our way to New York. A visiting appointment at NYU brings with it a large apartment in the Village, and they even let us have dogs there. We go home to Provincetown for a few weeks on the way, for December in our old, beloved house, the lights stringing the tower of the Monument down the hill, wind off the bay, a dose of cold New England Christmas. I’m alone with the dogs in woods we know well, paths winding through beech and oak groves and outcrops of dune, and we turn to hike up a familiar hill—a slope Beau would have gone racing up, last year. He begins, as if his body leads the way, and suddenly there’s a hesitation, and he stops, his shoulders lowering back down out of the anticipated sprint upward in what appears to be a sort of sigh of resignation, a relinquishment. The hill is too much. We take a low path toward home.

  Entr’acte

  Old Photo

  Here’s a photo taken years ago: Arden and Beau, running up Pearl, our Provincetown street where we’ve lived all these years. I don’t remember taking this picture, but I must have been standing at the bottom of the street, close to the bay; up the snowy slope of the hill, the two rumps of the dogs, their two plumed tails in the air, one black and one golden. Pearl Street curves up from the harbor; the story goes that the curve is because in the old days, when wheelbarrows were pushed up the hill full of dried salt cod, it was easier to make it up the low dune there if you didn’t try to go straight uphill. Now that curve is made permanent, and lined with houses that have seen, over our fifteen years here, wild changes. Here was where Billy lived, and here the elderly widow of a painter; here was the guesthouse Hans ran, living in devotion and thrall to his Turkish boyfriend, who’d take the bus to go window-shopping in Hyannis, and dismount again exclaiming about the beautiful jewels he’d seen in the stores there at the mall. Here lived Franco, who in the last years of his life converted part of his apartment into a gallery selling art deco objets d’art. Here lived Antony, in my favorite house, a narrow little Dutch gambrel whose shingles were overtaken by moss. Antony had been born there, and lived out his days in that tiny place, repairing violins and caring for a succession of springer spaniels. By the time I knew him, he was ancient, though no one could seem as old as his spectacularly moth eaten spaniel, with his matted tangle of fur, who liked to lie in the yard like a heap of ruined tapestry. Antony seemed matted himself; the same army woolens winter and summer. He was entirely deaf but loved to talk to anyone who’d listen. The story went that his mother was deeply devoted to scrubbing and the cleanliness of the body, and that upon her death, Antony renounced all such practices forever. When her washing machine fell through the weary floor of his little house, there in the cellar it remained.

  Now Antony’s house has been gutted and sheetrocked and equipped with recessed lighting and a huge new window to accommodate the view; the mossy shingles have been hauled to the dump—just as the last of Antony’s dogs and then Antony himself were also hauled away—and the new shingles shine with a sort of chocolatey-plum varnish. The whole thing gleams like a vaguely dangerous piece of pastry. It has a koi pond and a fountain. Billy’s old place is outfitted for groups of sleek summer renters from Boston and New York, who throw parties that spill out through the new French doors onto the stairs. Hans’s old guesthouse was dormered, renamed, decked, and painted aqua blue. Later, sold again, it’s coated a strident shade of red. Of Franco’s retail experiment, there remained for several years an odd little lamp beside his old shop door marked with a thirtiesish design that would have held no meaning if you didn’t know what it had illuminated—but now that’s gone, too.

  I hate the wild reinventions of time on my street, and I try to remember that they were, of course, going on long before I got there, and that I myself took an old house—once lavender, with a few straggly irises out front—and remade it in my image of what an old house on the Cape ought to be. I planted roses where some flintier soul was content with grass. The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

  But in the photo, my two princes are still loping up the street, walking in step, as
they often did, in the early winter darkness that’s just beginning to deepen, headed through a snow which has stilled any traffic and muffled the town, so that there’s no sound but a little wind and wave-lapping, and the chink of some beached boat’s chain, and the footfalls of dogs headed toward a towel-drying, to wipe away the melted snow that’s chilled their coats, toward dinner and then the long ritual of licking paws, cleaning away the residue of damp, and then sleep, in a warm house, while the enveloping night comes on.

  Chapter Ten

  How can you hide, wrote Heraclitus, from what never goes away?

  Death is always present—peeking out of the pocket, down in the socket of the bone, the shadow in the photograph, the fleck in the iris of a living eye, deep blue underside of the wave. Never out of sight, only out of mind, and how do we learn to live with such corrosive pressure? Every time I think I know, death laughs at me and pulls the dark hat a little lower over my eyes, takes one of my hands and leads me firmly toward what I am to see: reminders, evidence, memento mori. Vanitas. The bubble breaks, the taper’s extinguished, the eye sockets of the skull fill with a darkness scented with that spent candle’s smoke.