Over and over and over: We live in the world.
Finally, the vet came. He was an old man, maybe eighty. Old and old-fashioned: a pocket square in his white coat, a stethoscope around his neck. His handshake was arresting: so much softness to get through before the bone.
“What brings you here today?”
“They didn’t explain?”
“Who?”
“I’d called.”
“Why don’t you tell me yourself.”
Was this a ploy? Like when they make a young woman listen to a fetal heartbeat before she can get an abortion?
He wasn’t ready.
“So, my dog has been suffering for a long time.”
“Oh, OK,” the vet said, clicking shut the pen with which he was about to start filling out a form. “And what’s the name of your dog?”
“Argus.”
“ ‘This is the dog of a man who died far away,’ ” the vet bellowed.
“Impressive.”
“I was a classics professor in another life.”
“With a photographic memory?”
“There’s actually no such thing. But I did love Homer.” He slowly lowered himself onto a knee. “Hello, Argus.” He held the sides of Argus’s face and looked into his eyes. “It’s not my favorite expression,” he said, still looking at Argus. “Putting down. I prefer letting go.”
“I prefer that, too,” Jacob said, as grateful as he’d ever been.
“Are you in pain, Argus?”
“He whines a lot, sometimes through the night. And he has a hard time getting up and down.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s been going on for quite a while, but it’s gotten worse in the last half a year. He’s barely eating. And he’s incontinent.”
“None of that is good news.”
News. It was the first time since the earthquake he’d heard anything else referred to as news.
“Our vet, back in D.C., gave him a couple of months, but it’s been almost half a year.”
“You’re a fighter,” the vet said to Argus, “aren’t you?”
Jacob didn’t like that. He didn’t like thinking of Argus fighting for the life that was about to be taken from him. And while he knew that age and illness were what Argus was fighting against, there they were: Argus and Jacob, and a vet to carry out Jacob’s wishes at the expense of Argus’s. It wasn’t that simple. Jacob knew it wasn’t. But he also knew there was a sense in which it was exactly that simple. There is no way to communicate to a dog that one is sorry that we live in the world but it is the only place that one can live. Or maybe there is no way not to communicate that.
The vet looked into Argus’s eyes for another few moments, now in silence.
“What do you think?” Jacob asked.
“What do I think?”
“About this situation?”
“I think you know this dog better than anyone, and certainly better than some old vet who’s spent a total of five minutes with him.”
“Right,” Jacob said.
“In my experience, and I’ve had a lot of it, people know when it’s time.”
“I can’t imagine ever knowing. But I think that just says something about me, rather than Argus’s condition.”
“Might be.”
“I feel that it’s time. But I don’t know that it’s time.”
“OK,” the vet said, rising. “OK.”
He took a syringe from a glass jar on the counter—a jar directly beside the treats—and a small vial from a cabinet.
“This is a very simple procedure, and I can assure you that Argus will neither anticipate it nor feel any pain whatsoever, other than the pinch of the needle, although I’m pretty good at concealing that. Within a second or two, he’ll pass. I’ll just warn you that the moment of death can be unpleasant. Usually it’s just like falling asleep, and most owners describe their animals as appearing relieved. But each dog is different. It’s not uncommon for a dog to empty its bowels, or for its eyes to roll into its head. Sometimes muscles seize. But it’s all perfectly normal, and wouldn’t suggest that Argus was feeling anything. For Argus it will be going to sleep.”
“OK,” Jacob said, but he thought, I don’t want this to happen. I’m not ready for this to happen. This cannot happen. He’d had that feeling two other times: when holding down Sam as he got his hand stitched back together, and the moment before he and Julia told the kids they were separating. It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live.
“It would be best if we can get Argus to lie down here on the floor. Perhaps you can get him to rest his head on your lap. Something comforting for him.”
He filled the syringe while he spoke, always keeping it out of Argus’s view. Argus went right to the floor, as if he knew what was expected of him, if not why. It was all happening so quickly, and Jacob couldn’t suppress the panicked feeling that he wasn’t ready. He gave Argus the sleep-inducing belly rub he’d learned in their one and only dog-training class, but Argus wouldn’t sleep.
“Argus is old,” Jacob said. There was no reason to say it, other than to slow things down.
“An old man,” the vet said. “Must be why we get along so well. Try to keep him looking at you.”
“One second,” Jacob said as he stroked the length of Argus’s side, his fingers slipping over and between his ribs. “I didn’t know it was going to happen this quickly.”
“Would you like another few minutes alone?”
“What happens to the body?”
“Unless you have other plans, we cremate it.”
“What kind of plans might one have?”
“Burial.”
“No.”
“So then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Immediately?”
“What’s that?”
“You cremate him immediately?”
“Twice a week. There’s a facility about twenty minutes from here.”
Argus gave a small whine and Jacob told him, “You’re good. You’re good.” And then he asked the vet, “Where are we in that cycle?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“I know it shouldn’t matter, but I don’t like the idea of Argus’s body sitting around for four whole days.”
Do people sit shmira for dogs? No one should be left alone.
“Today is Thursday,” the vet said. “So it would be this afternoon.”
“OK,” Jacob said. “I’m relieved to know that.”
“Would you like another few minutes? It’s no problem at all.”
“No, it’s OK.”
“You’ll see me put some pressure on Argus’s vein, so as to be sure the needle enters properly. You can hold him. Within a few seconds, Argus will take a deeper breath, then appear to sleep.”
Jacob was disturbed by the vet’s repeated use of Argus’s name, his seeming unwillingness to refer to Argus as him or he. It felt cruel, the constant reminder of Argus’s specific personhood, or of Jacob’s identity as Argus’s namer.
“Though completely unconscious, Argus might take a few more breaths. I’ve found that, for whatever reason, the older the dog, the longer the unconscious breathing goes on.”
“That’s interesting,” Jacob said, and in an instant, as the g freed itself from the back of his hard palate, his discomfort with the vet’s use of Argus’s name morphed into anger at himself—the anger that was often deeply buried, and often projected, but was always there. That’s interesting. What a stupid thing to say right then. What an unimportant, cheapening, disgusting remark. That’s interesting. All day he’d been experiencing fear, and sadness, and guilt about not being able to give Argus a little longer, and pride at having given him this long, but now, at the arrival of the moment, he was only angry.
“You’re ready to let him go?” the vet asked.
“Sorry. Not yet.”
“Of course.”
“You’re good,” Jaco
b said, pulling at the excess skin between Argus’s shoulders, just as Argus liked.
Jacob must have given the vet a suggestive look, because he once again asked, “Are you ready?”
“You’re not going to give him some sort of sedative or, I don’t know, painkiller so he doesn’t feel the shot?”
“Some vets do. I don’t. It can just as often make them more anxious.”
“Oh.”
“Some people like to be left alone for a few minutes first.”
Jacob gestured at the vial in the vet’s hand and asked, “Why is that fluid so bright?”
“So it’s never mistaken for something else.”
“That makes sense.”
He needed to let go, of the anger and everything else, but he needed help to do so, but he needed to do it alone.
“Could I stay with the body? Until the cremation?”
“I’m sure we could arrange that.”
Jacob said, “Argus,” naming him for the second time—once in the beginning, once at the end.
Argus’s eyes rose to meet Jacob’s. There was no acceptance to be found in them. No forgiveness. There was no knowledge that all that had happened was all that would happen. As it had to be, and as it should be. Their relationship was defined not by what they could share, but what they couldn’t. Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.
“OK,” Jacob said to the vet, still looking into Argus’s eyes.
“Don’t forget how it ends,” the vet said, readying the needle. “Argus dies fulfilled. His master has finally come home.”
“But after so much suffering.”
“He has peace.”
Jacob didn’t tell Argus, “It’s OK.”
He told him: “Look at me.”
He told himself: Life is precious, and I live in the world.
He told the vet: “I’m ready.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of two bestselling, award-winning novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and a bestselling work of nonfiction, Eating Animals. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University.
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