Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  There’s a bald man Gavin has never seen before at the dog park. He has a little black pug mix and a T-shirt that reads #alldogsmatter. When someone asks him what breed his dog is Gavin hears him answer, loudly, “He’s a rescue.” Gavin stays to the outskirts, talking to Chimichanga’s owner and trying not to hear the man lecturing about microchips and puppy mills and shock collars. But the rescue takes an interest in Ezra as he raises his leg to mark the fence and when the smaller dog approaches Ezra yaps at him. The owner scuttles over as the dogs bark and growl. Ezra lunges, teeth bared. Gavin races towards Ezra but he’s not quite there when the owner bends to scoop his dog up into his arms, the worst thing he could do.

  Ezra goes manic and leaps for the pug mix, who squirms out of his owner’s arms and lands on the grass in a rage of growls and bent necks, a fury of teeth and bulging eyes. Turf and fur spin in the air as the dogs tussle and snap and bite, both owners trying to wrangle their snarling pets. Gavin finally grasps Ezra’s collar and the bald man yanks his dog back up into his arms and Gavin tries to say sorry but the man is shouting at him.

  Gavin hears curses and gibberish and finally makes out “Jesus man, get ahold of your dog!” The adrenaline swells through his neck and chest, his biceps coiling. He knows whatever he says will be brash so he stays silent as the man asks with a quavering voice, “Is your dog even neutered?” It is not a question but an assault. Gavin gets Ezra on leash and as they walk away he hears the man shouting, “How dare you!”

  At home he is trembling as he tells Zara the story then announces that he won’t be going to that dog park anymore. He can no longer abide the PETA brigade, these people with all the answers. He will take Ezra to Point Pleasant or the Commons and he will simply walk, walk where he and his dog are not cornered in this bastion of norms.

  Zara shrugs and says, “Do what you’ve got to do,” turning back to her laptop. He feels it like a foot to the gut. Wishes that just for once she would simply take his side.

  Gavin sits down at his desk and starts a poem about doggie pills and doggie condoms. At the end Bob Barker appears on the stage of The Price is Right, wagging his liver-spotted fingers at a nation of suburban dream-home gamblers, commanding: “Thy dog shalt not fuck.”

  Pro: less prone to aggression.

  Con: may not reliably reduce aggression.

  Pro: dog will be calmer around unspayed females.

  Con: almost no unspayed female dogs left in urban dog culture.

  Pro: more focused on companion human.

  Con: dog will spend two weeks healing with head in cone.

  Pro: reduces leg-lifting.

  Con: triples risk of obesity.

  Pro: reduced likelihood of testicular cancer.

  Con: dog will be unable to reproduce.

  Pro: dog will be unable to reproduce.

  Con: coat may become patchy and haggard.

  Con: may lead to hip dysplasia.

  Con: ligament rupture.

  Con: hypothyroidism.

  Con: osteosarcoma.

  Con: geriatric cognitive impairment.

  Con: risk of death from anaesthetic complications.

  Con: risk of death or injury from surgical complications.

  Con: wilfully mutilating another living creature.

  Con: wilfully mutilating another living creature.

  Con: wilfully mutilating another living creature.

  Cindy, who’d clearly had a couple of pinots before they got there, has already put her hand on Zara’s thigh and winked at Gavin while hissing “this one’s a keeper” and now she’s talking about cats. They had ordered Thai food because Cindy claims not to know how to cook vegan and now the table around them is a Styrofoam jungle. Gavin tries to ask his mother about her new boyfriend the Via Rail conductor and then tries to ask about her job at Canada Post HQ but she glares over her glasses and keeps on about the feral cats. There are swarms of them in the neighbourhood, she says, fucking and fighting and eating all the songbirds, spreading diseases among the housecats. Cindy looks right at Zara as she rants, one eye drooping and the other fierce with an intimacy not natural between two women who’ve only met six or seven times. Cindy says one night a feral cat got trapped in her basement and it was spraying and crazed and she had to try to beat it out with a hockey stick but it would not move. So here she was, Cindy, alone in her own house with this cat locked in a room and the window was open but the beast would not vacate. They stayed up all night like that. Cindy tried to sleep but she could feel the cat there, poised and fearful, and in the morning she found it precisely where she’d left it in the corner of the room. She had breakfast and watched it some more and finally realized it must’ve been desperately hungry so she put some cold chicken by the back door with a saucer of milk and she left the house. Went around the corner to get a coffee. Waited as long as she could. When she came back the cat was gone, the dishes licked spotless.

  Cindy smiles smugly and pours herself more wine. Gavin exchanges a look with Zara and asks what the story has to do with feral cats and Cindy says sterilization. We need to sterilize them, of course. A silence thickens in the room and Gavin lets it linger.

  Gavin is readying himself to leave when Cindy invites Zara downstairs to see the collection. Zara looks surprised and says of course and so they head down to the basement where Gavin’s mother keeps her hoard of children’s body parts. They stand among the dust and the suitcases, looking at Gavin’s umbilical cord—grey and curled and stiff in its dusty Ziplock womb. The teeth come next. Why would his mother have kept every baby tooth and wisdom tooth and molar Gavin’s growing body ever shucked? After the teeth there are jars of hair: Gavin’s grade two rat tail, his grade ten Mohawk, his grade twelve surfer curls. As Gavin stands embarrassed in the midst of his personal mausoleum he wonders what would become of Ezra’s testes if they were removed. Zara recently told him about rendering and deadstock, about how “livestock management” companies cruise farms collecting horse and goat and cow carcasses, pulping those bodies into the stearic acids and slip agents that become bike tires, shampoo, plastic bags. Now he finds himself wondering if Ezra’s gonads will be cycled into kibble, fed back to other dogs in a canine parody of Soylent Green.

  This is what Gavin is thinking as Cindy unveils her masterpiece—a hand-made cedar box containing Gavin’s hospital bracelet alongside newspaper clippings from the electrocution and curled polaroid photos of the burns that permanently marbled his torso and sent purple tentacles flaring up his arms and calves. The burns he’s had to have cut and grafted twice since the accident because the scars stay still as his body grows and ages. Seeing those polaroidsGavin feels the burns brighten under his shirt, feels his gut turn tidal as he recalls the inane and drunken choice to climb that tower. Recalls the strange teenage logic that made him believe he could somehow reach Nancy up there. Gavin burns shameful but Zara is calm and sweet as she looks at each photo and newspaper clipping, nodding at Cindy’s comments then leaning into Gavin and whispering, “All of this is what you are, and I love all of what you are.”

  When Gavin was ten he went with Theo and Nancy to their family cottage in Hubbards. Nancy had just broken up with Theo’s father and it was just her and the two boys. They spent three mosquito-droning days at a two-bedroom cabin thick with the smell of pine. There were dunes with prickly grasses and a beach strewn with sun-bleached driftwood and ancient, sagging lobster traps. Each night they had bonfires and watched the stars and Gavin learned to love the taste of burnt marshmallows. On the last day Theo got an ear infection and had to stay in bed so Gavin and Nancy went down to the beach without him. Gavin found a dried-out lobster claw and pretended it was his hand as he put his arm around Nancy’s shoulder. When she saw that gnarled pincer at her clavicle she laughed and laughed and he felt himself large and noticed. When they went out into the water she watched him swimming and said “no no not like that” and then taugh
t him how to do a proper breaststroke, taught him it was all about timing—the smooth arc of the arms pulling you forward, the legs coiling together as the arms reset. The frog kick and the forward dart of the hands and that moment of skimming effortless across the surface. She explained it, then showed him. He watched her gliding seal-sleek in a black one-piece and then he got it, felt the astonishing ease of it as he shot through the brisk Atlantic on that still and sunny day.

  The cabin had an ancient, rusted outdoor shower with a rotting plywood door. Gavin was eager to wash off the salt and sand and so he rushed into that shower thinking Nancy was still down at the beach and found her naked and stooping to pull the sand from her toes. Her breasts dangling freely, dappled by the patches of sun leaking through the slats. They stood there looking at each other like cats crossing paths in an alley. Gavin took no more than a glance at those breasts—curiously pale, nipples like sand dollars.

  She did not say a word to Gavin on the drive home, even though Theo was in the back seat still suffering from earache and he was sitting up front. They drove in silence and Gavin stared out the windshield at the road slithering beneath the bright open blue, saw Nancy’s breasts in every cloud.

  On the walk home Zara says she likes Gavin’s mother. Gavin scoffs and asks why and she says how else would Gavin have developed such a dazzling corkscrew mind. He stops her and they hold each other in the middle of the street, a warm wind cloaking them in a swirl of grass and ocean. They make a pact not to talk about Ezra or sterilization so Zara talks about the tidal turbine in the Bay of Fundy. Highest tides in the world so of course they want to squeeze that churning power into dollars. And of course this green energy might not be so green and the lobster fishermen are concerned about the impact to the ecosystem, about the noise pollution diluting the whale song not to mention the plankton being sucked into the 1000-tonne rotors churning the waters of the ancient cove. The cove that bears the world’s only fossilized trace of the moment life managed to scuttle out of the ocean and stagger onto land.

  He’d been alone in the dark ocean among the lurking mines until Nancy appeared like a beacon. A younger Nancy, a less complicated Nancy, and as he watched her swim astride him he saw her legs melt and flick into a tail. A tail scaled with glimmering greens and blues, a glowing blur streaking the dark water. The water a volatile blackness and he knew it was cold but he also knew he could not feel that cold, felt nothing but Nancy’s pulsing proximity. She swam closer still and he was nothing but the thrill of her. He felt himself dancing in her nimbus and he wanted her. A vague want, a desire that did not involve genitals or fluids or climaxes. He felt himself drained of the precision of drives, acquiescing to a novel, blunt euphoria.

  They arrive at their apartment and find the back door swinging open. The dog is gone and Gavin is thinking of course. Thinking of fucking course and he and Zara are grabbing the leash and some treats and blasting outside wailing the dog’s name into the clammy summer sky. It’s almost midnight but some neighbours are out on the porch and they join in and soon the neighbourhood is a clamour of Ezz-ra, Ezz-ra and they are rounding two corners and coming out onto Gottingen. Gavin thinks they should split up but he doesn’t say this because he doesn’t want to be alone he just wants this to be not happening. He wants this not ever to happen but it also seems inevitable that their dog, their puppy, is gone. Inevitable that this tender love would swell and swell and burst.

  And likewise inevitable that Gavin should round the corner and turn out onto Gottingen and see a dark furry hump in the middle of the road. See the still-wet blood slanting across the yellow line and say Zara’s name in a tone that makes her stop and follow his gaze and sprint into the middle of the road through hornbleat and headlights.

  Gavin waits for the traffic to pass and walks slowly behind her, knowing already all he needs to know. He hears Zara sobbing as he gets closer but then her sobs become crazed laughter and he sees that the furry hump in the road is a raccoon, still wheezing. Its tiny mouth quivering, paws scrubbing together.

  Gavin looks stupidly around for a shovel but then he is back on the sidewalk, calling Ezra’s name again, and Zara is with him. They walk down Gottingen and through the square and then turn back, tracing and retracing the grid between Gottingen and Agricola, fattening the night on the name of their dog. Finally they agree to split up and Gavin says he’ll go home to notify the SPCA which is no doubt ridiculous but he does not know what else to do. When he gets home he finds the back door still slung open and Ezra cringing in the kitchen, sitting obedient and fearful. Gavin bends down and hugs him, feeling a brilliant and boundless love. More love than he’d known there could be in the world.

  Nancy iswordlessly calling him closer as she sways her green and gleaming tail but he can’t get near enough to touch her. Something keeps him an arm’s length from her face and shoulders and when he reaches up he finds that there is a large cone over his head. A cone that he cannot remove. He looks down to see whether there is a scar between his legs but he cannot see past the cone. She is calling to him, begging him closer, but the cone is between them. Has always been and will always be between them. Eventually she turns away from him and starts to pump her tail. She swims slowly, looking over her shoulder, her hair luffing like seaweed in a current. She is leaving and he is sinking down into the accumulating darkness, watching her shrink into the distance as he drifts into the bottomless below.

  Gavin awakes in the gut of night to find the bed empty. He listens to the quiet, locates a ripple through that silence and hears it swirl into murmur. Zara’s voice. He thinks of calling her name then thinks no. Instead he rises quietly and leans into the hall, watches her stoop over Ezra, rubbing the sweet spot above his haunch. Gavin hears her cooing and talking a formless gibberish that sometimes settles into “oh yes” or “Ezzy” or “good boy.”

  And then he sees it, a slick tulip blooming between Ezra’s legs. A tube of lipstick winding upwards from a bulb of fur. He knows Zara cannot see that wet and urgent flower as she leans over and rubs his back, and he knows that this canine erection might have nothing to do with her. But he also knows, as he watches this scene of intimacy, that there is something in that small sprout of flesh that he detests. Something that makes him uneasy. And he knows, knows and hates himself for knowing, that for all his talk about hypocrisy and repression and consent, he would be happy if that organ were to disappear.

  Zara turns and sees him standing there in the door frame. She does not appear surprised. “I’ve decided,” she announces, still stroking Ezra’s neck. “It’s up to you.” Gavin has to ask her to repeat herself and she says again that it should be up to him, that he cares more than she does and so if he feels like he needs to leave Ezra’s genitals intact that’s fine with her.

  Gavin puts a hand on the door frame. His heart is a fish flapping on a beach. No way out of the choice and no way to make it. “It’s on you,” she says and the onus slithers down his throat, fattens there. He thinks for the first time in their eleven months living together how easy it would be to leave her. How possible. To leave Zara, leave the lobsters, take Ezra to a cabin in Bridgewater and write poetry, live on beans. The thought is ugly and rank and he tries to dismiss it but it lingers like an eel in his sternum.

  Give the animal a mild sedative and inject with general anaesthetic. Place the gas mask on the muzzle or slip a tube down the animal’s trachea to administer the isoflurane. The anaesthetic gas will ensure the dog remains unconscious throughout the procedure. Once the animal is fully unconscious, make an incision at the tip of its scrotal sac, taking care not to sever the urethra. Pull one testicle out through the seam in the animal’s skin. Trim away the fatty tunica vaginalis, exposing the testicle. Clamp the testicular blood vessels and the vas deferens to ensure blood does not flow upon laceration. Slice the spermatic cord above the clamp, severing the testicle. Discard. Repeat. Suture.

  Gavin is walking Ezra on the main path overlooking t
he Northwest Arm as sunlight flickers down through the spruce. Squirrels scamper after bird feed. A seal chirps in the distance and Ezra bounds through the forest, staying close to Gavin and mostly ignoring the dogs on the main path. This is what Gavin likes: just walking. No standing in parks talking about groomers and breeders and crate training. What he likes is walking with his companion, the dog off-leash and racing through the forest as Gavin treads the gravel tongue running through it. Ezra returning now and then for a check-in, tongue curling out of his delirious grin. What Gavin likes is watching Ezra tear after squirrels, reaching full speed on the straightaway and then bounding impossibly over stumps and rocks. Watching Ezra stand ankle-deep in the glint of the surf and tilt his head to make eye contact, to share the measureless wealth of his glee.