Love May Fail (12 page)

Brian the butcher may not have known the name of France’s most famous existential writer, but he knew enough to make his move on Mrs. Harper in a timely fashion, and when you have spent many months talking to a dog—albeit the best dog in the world—facts like these take on a heightened meaning.

You can’t make passionate love to a book, after all.

And dogs can’t trade words with you, no matter how much you pretend.

In the truck, with the engine still running and the heat on full blast, I contemplate the first question and briefly consider driving my vehicle into a tree at 120 miles an hour, which is the highest number on my speedometer.

But Albert Camus is still dutifully licking the salty tears from my chin; he deserves better, or at least a different ending, in this incarnation.

I get the sense that he truly enjoys our life together, and that’s not me projecting either. I love this dog; he gives me purpose and reason, but my longings for more are quite strong, I must admit.

Teaching used to fill the void that has opened up inside me.

This must be what “weariness tinged with amazement” feels like, I think, and then I utter the most dangerous question of all: “Why?”

Albert Camus stops licking me, and with our faces only inches apart, we look into each other. I still see humanity in his shiny black eye, even though he is a dog now.

“I don’t know if I can keep going, Albert Camus,” I say.

He cocks his head to one side as if to say,
Vous ne m’aimez plus?

“I do love you, Albert Camus. It’s true. I really do. With all my heart. But I’m afraid I can no longer answer the first question.”

Albert Camus licks my face again.

“Have you escaped the absurd, now that you are a dog? Is that why you can lick me and love me after some monster burned out your eye, and yet I have no longer been able to interact with my own species successfully since some monster gave me this limp?”

He yawns, and his breath assaults me.

It smells like a bucket of sea snails rotting in the August sun.

I stroke Albert Camus’s back, feeling the bumps of his spine, and his tail thumps hard on my thigh.

“If you weren’t so goddamn happy now, I might ask if you wanted to enter into a suicide pact with me. But can I live my life for a one-eyed dog? Can I find meaning in this?”

As if he understands my words, he ducks his head under my hand, begging for a scratch behind the ears, making me feel useful.
While I know this is just some sort of animalistic herd instinct—I am the alpha male in his mind, the provider of food and water and shelter—I find meaning, beat the absurd, answer the first question, via my one-eyed dog, if only for the moment.

He is enough.

We drive forty-five minutes to the chain grocery store.

Inside I order two thick prime dry-aged rib eye steaks and a bone from some pimply teenager in an oversize white butcher’s coat. He gags and makes retching noises while he weighs the meat, mumbles the words
disgusting
,
sick,
barbaric
, throws in the bone at my request and extends the bag over the counter, holding it at arm’s length like a sack of dog shit.

“Are you okay?” I ask, because he’s starting to look green.

“I’m a vegan, and my asshole boss forced me to work in the meat department today. What do you think?”

“That’s the absurd, right there.”

“What are you even talking about?” he says as he turns his back on me, and I recognize his type. He’s practically begging for me to hug him. I imagine the parents at home who alternately ignore and criticize him, offering no promise of better—providing no philosophy, no religion, no belief system whatsoever, which is why he’s chosen veganism, most likely the antithesis of his parents’ diet, as a means of protest.

“Here’s your tip, young man,” I say. “Read Camus. Start with
The Stranger
. Read him. He agrees with you. A vegan forced to work as a butcher—absurdism at its finest. There’s a whole world out there beyond this small town. You’re not alone.”

“Whatever,” he says, and I fight to quell my old teacher instincts.

As I peruse the pet aisle, throwing into my basket several months’ worth of overpriced treats for Albert Camus and some dental chews for his awful breath, I think about how that kid in the meat de
partment would have become my favorite student by the end of the year, back when I was teaching high school English. I always won over those types—the ones who were desperate for adult guidance, so terribly wounded and bruised. If you could stomach the apathy for a few weeks, give their minds something real to chew on, offer them the alternative they craved instinctively, what people like them have been finding in story for many thousands of years, they’d always come around. I look down at my cane.
Well, almost always.

Before I leave, I swing by the meat section once more, wave to get the teen’s attention. “You probably think I’m just some silly old fool, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that you’re in existential crisis. Look it up. You’re not the first. I’ve been there often. And, metaphorically, vegans have been working the meat counter since the beginning of time.”

He squints at me. “I gave you your order. I did my job. Now just leave me alone, okay?”

“Albert Camus. Read him. You’ll see.”

“Listen, old man,” he mumbles, looking around to see if anyone is listening. When he’s sure no one is within earshot, he says, “What the fuck—are you gay for me or something?”

“No. No, I am not. I am heterosexual and heartbroken, if you really must know. And I was just trying to—”

“Then fuck off, okay? How ’bout you try that?”

Maybe I’ve lost my touch.

And what the hell do I know? I’m just a cripple who lives with a one-eyed dog.

The kid’s behavior is a classic cry for help, but I no longer help teenagers.

Remember, Nate Vernon? You failed as a teacher. The universe beat the hell out of you with an aluminum baseball bat.

“Sure thing,” I tell the vegan butcher, and cane my way to the checkout line.

I let Albert Camus sit on my lap as I drive home, and he does so eagerly, licking my right hand the whole time, completely ignorant of the fact that our not wearing seat belts puts us in serious danger, forgetting how his last life ended, when he was a famous French writer.

Dogs do not understand the laws of physics, which is why they have never invented anything like the seat belt on their own.

I drink half a bottle of wine as I cook the steaks.

Albert Camus and I listen to our favorite CD—Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Cello Suites.

It massages our souls.

The smell of meat warming, cow blood boiling and evaporating in the frying pan, a virtuoso playing a genius’s compositions—all of it fills the house, and Albert Camus salivates worse than Pavlov’s dog until there is a puddle of drool on the black-and-white tile floor of the kitchen.

It takes me a long time to cut Albert Camus’s steak into tiny pieces on which it is impossible to choke, because little Albert inhales his meat, and I think about how I could really use a food processor, make a mental note to buy one the next time I visit civilization. The whole time I’m cutting, he paws sheepishly at my feet, and his saliva glands get an excruciating workout.

I try not to think about Mrs. Harper’s erotic nose, and am mostly successful.

My four-legged friend eats a good portion of the meat before his bowl even hits the ground. He’s licked the bottom clean and is working on his butcher’s bone before I swallow my second piece of steak, which is warm, bloody, and pairs divinely with the pinot noir.

As the spicy juices fill my mouth and give my taste buds an orgasmic high, I think about the vegan butcher.

“He’s like Sisyphus,” I say to Albert Camus, “rolling the metaphorical boulder up the hill, knowing it will roll down again no matter what he does. Over and over. He sees no future for himself. ‘Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd.’ Remember when you wrote that, Albert Camus? The vegan butcher sees no Mrs. Harper in his future. He sees nothing. What do we see in our future now that we’ve lost our Mrs. Harper, Albert Camus?”

He pauses his gnawing for a second to ponder the question, and then resumes scraping the bone vigorously with his little teeth.

I finish the first bottle of wine and open another, which I quaff deeply as Albert Camus gnaws and gnaws and Yo-Yo Ma works his magic bow and snow flurries outside and Brian what’s-his-face the ignorant butcher who doesn’t even know who the hell Albert Camus was—that guy probably makes passionate love to Mrs. Harper, who moans through her wondrous nose under the weight of her bare-assed, affable butcher.

The CD ends, and I finish the second bottle of pinot noir to the now slightly less fervent sound of Albert’s teeth chipping away at cow bone. I envy him; he looks much more content on marrow than I am on wine.

I see Mrs. Harper’s nose in my mind’s eye.

She knows who Albert Camus is—she must.

In all of my many fantasies she was well-read and sophisticated.

Mrs. Harper paired divinely with me.

I try to mentally undress her, but the gap-toothed butcher keeps popping up in my thoughts like a traffic cop of masturbatory fantasies, and he’s yelling, “Whoa, friend! Time out here. This woman
is going to be
my wife
. She’s engaged now. But there are other doe in the woods, if you know what I mean. So point your arrow elsewhere.” Brian the butcher winks and nods, and then he returns to making love to Mrs. Harper, whose gray wave of hair rises and falls over her titillating nose.

I briefly contemplate opening a third bottle of wine as my eyes get heavier—
What is this lit cigarette doing in my hand?
—and then my head is somehow down on the table.

And then . . .

And then . . .

And then . . .

And then . . .

I’m in bed with a desert-dry tongue that seems to have been smoked and cured into beef jerky without my knowing about it. A mind-numbing pulse is sounding an angry war-drum-like beat against my temples—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—when through the darkness I hear a scratching at the window. This seems impossible, because we are high in the air on the second-floor loft, and the window in question is maybe a good thirty-five feet above the wooden deck below. I wonder if a bird might be pecking at the window. What sort of bird would do that at the end of winter, in the dead of night?

When I turn on the bedside light, I see Albert Camus jumping up and clawing at the window.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” I say.

I look at the bedside clock’s glowing red numbers: 4:44 a.m.

Is that good luck or bad? All the same number. I can’t remember what my students used to say about that—whether I should make a wish or hold my breath or do something else. They were always so superstitious.

“Go to sleep, Albert. Get in your bed. I need to sleep off this wine headache.”

But he keeps leaping up and scratching at the window.

When I stand, my cane is wobbly. He begins to bark and growl as he continues to jump and scratch. He’s never behaved this way before. Was there something in his bone? Maybe that vegan teenager sprayed it with some sort of drug.

You can’t trust anyone anymore, I think. And that kid had motive.

But what sort of drug would make Albert Camus act like this, so intently focused on the window?

“Do you need to use the bathroom?” I ask as I make my way toward the light switch, feeling a bit dizzy and still very drunk.

My right foot sinks into a warm pile of Albert Camus’s shit, which squirts through my toes.

My left foot lands in a warm puddle of his piss.

He has never before had an accident in the house.

Never.

I honestly can’t remember if I took him outside before I went to bed, and I mentally berate myself for being a bad pet owner, an inhumane lovesick drunken oaf.

Before cleaning my feet, I need to apologize. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “The indignity. I’m the beast. This will not happen again.”

I kneel down next to him and try to pick him up and give him a few kisses, but he growls menacingly enough to scare me into letting him go.

“What’s wrong, boy? What are you trying to tell me?”

He keeps jumping up and scratching at the window.

Over and over.

Am I dreaming?

“There’s nothing out there. Nothing. Time for bed, buddy. Stop that. Come on now. Stop it!”

He keeps jumping and scratching, like he’s trying to run up the wall and onto the glass.

“Okay. Let’s see what’s outside.”

I open the window and feel the cold night air rush in.

When I bend down to pick up Albert Camus, so that I might show him there is nothing outside, he uses my thigh as a springboard and is through my hands and out the window before I know what happened.

“No!”

In the time it takes for him to fall, I remember that just yesterday I had the handyman shovel the snow from the deck, fearing that the weight was becoming too great for the wood; I immediately understand that a thirty-five-foot fall is enough to kill a dog the size of Albert Camus; and I also remember what I said to him earlier in the truck about the first question and the possibility of a suicide pact between us. And then I remember every single kiss he ever gave me, the feel of his Afro in my hand, the way he wagged his tail whenever I said his name, and my great love for him swells my heart to a dangerous size.

Do dogs ever commit suicide?

The thud of his skull hitting the wood below sounds like heavy knuckles striking a door.

I listen for a yelp, mentally beg for the sound of his toenails clicking on the deck below, but there is nothing but a deathly silence.

I race down the stairs just as fast as my limp and cane and drunkenness allow, tracking my dog’s excrement through the entire house, flick on the outside flood lights, and throw open the sliding glass door.

Albert Camus’s head is bent at a horrifically unnatural angle, and his little legs are limp, which is when some part of me knows he was killed instantly, that the impact snapped his neck. But I scoop up his little body anyway, cradling his head, trying not to damage the spine, retching at the lifelessness of the bones and fur in my hands. “Please don’t die. Please don’t. Don’t. I love you, buddy.
Please
. I’m sorry I talked so much about the first question. I haven’t been an easy roommate, I know, but I’ll change. I promise.”