The Animal Girl (10 page)

“I know,” Leah said.

“We know this is difficult for you. It would be difficult for anyone. We understand that. I'd like you to see a therapist.”

“That's her idea.”

“That's our idea, and it's a good idea. I think it could really help you.”

“No.”

“It could help you, Leah. It could make you feel better.”

“You mean,” Leah said, “that it could make
you
feel better.”

“Yes,” Franklin said. “It might. It just might.”

“No.”

Franklin nodded and looked down at his new shoes, and remained silent for so long that Leah had to say something. “She's got nicer boobs than Mom had. You must like that.” Leah hated the fact that she had more than a few times imagined them together: Noelle, athletic, strong in the hips, on top of the newly buff Franklin, and Franklin, made unrecognizable by sexual frenzy, turning her over, taking her anyway he wanted, sideways, from behind, against a wall.

“I'd rather you not share that sort of thought with me,” Franklin said.

“I have to tell someone.”

“How about a therapist?”

“Stop asking me that. And please … please don't shave your beard off.” Because Franklin was clearly more upset now than he'd been
since entering her room, Leah said, “I
am
a brat. I know I'm a brat. I don't want to be.” And in the abstract, she didn't. But she also knew that she would likely continue to be one.

“I want you to promise me something,” Franklin said.

“Maybe.”

Franklin gave her a look then that she had seen from him only a few times in her life, a look that would not stand for defiance. “I want you to promise me that you will treat Noelle better. You will treat her with respect.”

“Okay,” she said. But he didn't leave her room until she said the words he wanted to hear. “I promise.”

Max had been right about the dogs. They were the real challenge, the harder to watch die. They were mutts and came in all sorts and sizes: small and large, long- and short-haired, spotted, mottled, fat and far too skinny, long-nosed, pug-nosed, beautiful and ugly. As soon as they arrived and settled in their cages, they treated Leah like a mother, a good and caring master. They whimpered and whined; they licked at the thin bars of their cages and at her hands and fingers. At mealtimes, they dove into their bowls, wagging their tails, wagging their entire bodies, until the food and the activity of eating calmed them. Afterwards, when she took the dishes away, they leapt on her, they squealed and yipped and looked into her eyes with something like recognition, something that approached gratitude, that was, in fact, more than gratitude. It took Leah some time to put a word to that look, that recognition, and when the word came to her, she was certain the dogs felt it: trust. As soon as they stepped into her cage, they gave themselves completely over to Leah. The sheep, on the other hand, were indifferent. They hardly made eye contact and remained in their animal world, a stinky dark void without language, without sensations beyond fear and hunger. But the dogs invaded the human realm, leapt over and into Leah's world readily and with the assumption that they belonged there, that their home was with Leah. They trusted her. And what bothered Leah more than the dogs' eventual fate was how terribly misplaced this trust was. “Stupid, stupid dogs,”
she told them several times a day, and they didn't hear. They continued to depend on her for everything and to seem more than happy to do so.

Unlike the sheep, they didn't resist the short trip from the cages to the operating room. They always competed to be the first out, lunging toward freedom and toward Leah, who delivered a dog to the operating room at least every other day. Leah never chose the animal. There were three to a cage. If she had more than three dogs, she always chose the cage closest to the front of the room, where the most senior dogs, those who had been at the lab longest, stayed. The first out of the cage was the dog she would deliver. In this way, they seemed to choose themselves. To make things worse, they enjoyed the brief trip down the hallway, licking Leah's ankles, diving for her shoelaces, rearing up with excitement. A rubber ball in hand, Max usually made this trip with Leah. At the first sign of apprehension in the animal, he'd let the ball go and the dog would dive for it, focus entirely on the toy and forget everything else.

Leah didn't stay for the operations. Max had already told her more than she'd wanted to know. They were needed to test the utility of a new laser scalpel that might eventually be used on humans for common gallbladder operations. Their gallbladders were cut open, sewn up, and then the whole dog was disposed of. The scalpel cauterized vessels, staunching bleeding, as soon as it cut into the flesh. For certain tissues, such as the gallbladder, this sort of surgical instrument, if it worked, could be very useful. “And how do you know if it works?” Leah asked one afternoon when Max had stopped by her animal basement.

As usual, Max looked sleepy, as if he'd just woken from a nap, his hair tousled, in need of a comb, and his large, drowsy body filling Leah with the urge to grab hold and hug him. “You make sure it cuts effectively. You make sure it causes minimal tissue damage. You make sure it staunches bleeding. In short, you use it.”

“Why on dogs?” Leah asked.

“They're similar enough to us, and they're affordable.”

“So you cut a few dogs up and see if it works or not. Then you're done.”

“I'm afraid we need more than a few dogs. We need a few hundred if we want a statistically significant sample.”

“Okay,” Leah said. “So why not let them recover?” Leah was sitting at her big, perplexing clerk's desk and listening to the light-rock station turned down low. She'd tried to listen to the jazz station, but the sounds of horns—saxophones, trumpets, trombones—made her dogs (she had five of them now) howl in a forlorn, heartaching way. But harmless old rock songs like “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” didn't seem to bother the dogs.

“That would be too expensive,” Max said. “Too expensive and too painful for them.”

“Don't you think they'd rather live than be spared pain?”

“I'm not sure what they'd prefer,” Max said. “I'm not sure they have preferences. They're dogs. We're humans.”

“I know that,” Leah said, irritated by his insistence on playing the role of the teacher. All the same, Leah knew exactly what the dogs “preferred.” She saw it in their every gesture, every bark, howl, and scream. They preferred to live. “We're killing them so that we humans can piss more easily.”

Max laughed a little. “You're confusing the gallbladder with the urinary bladder. The gallbladder secretes gall.”

“OK,” Leah said. “We're killing them so that we can secrete gall.”

“Not exactly,” Max said. “We're killing them for knowledge.”

“And it's worth it?”

“I think so. Eventually. In the long run. Yes.” Then he added, “These dogs aren't pets, you know. They're not even strays. They're bred for the lab. No one has trained them. They've never lived in a home.”

Leah nodded thoughtfully. “I guess I agree.”

And for some stupid reason, Max had to ruin their little discussion of science and ethics by repeating his cautionary note to her. “It's not a good idea to befriend them, Leah.”

“No duh,” she said. Then she asked an odd question that had been on her mind for some time and that seemed both wrong and necessary to ask. “How much do they cost?”

“Not much,” Max said. “They've been donated to us. The transportation, the food, and your services are our main costs.”

Leah was surprised to learn that she was part of these costs. “Ten bucks? Twenty bucks?” she asked.

“More or less,” Max said.

It was to teach Max a lesson that Leah befriended a dog the next day. It was a medium-sized, long-haired mutt, its white coat spattered with muddy brown spots. He'd been delivered that morning with two other dogs, and Leah had noticed him immediately. He was the calm one, serene almost, amid his barking companions, who would probably spend the next hour jumping and howling at their cage until they discovered that it would not budge. He looked at her in the same moment she looked at him. And when she walked up to him, his companions becoming more frenzied even as he remained calm, she could not help saying, “Sit, boy.” Amazingly, the dog sat. “Lie down,” she said, and he obeyed. But what excited her most was when she said next, “Roll over,” and he did absolutely nothing. That decided it: He would be hers for the day.

As soon as he sauntered out of the cage and calmly plopped himself beside her desk, she sensed that she'd made a mistake. She liked him—liked him a lot—but she didn't want to like him. He edged closer until he was beneath her chair, resting his head on her feet. He licked the rubber toe of her shoe, then closed his eyes, snorted, and all at once fell asleep. Trying not to disturb him, Leah didn't move for nearly an hour. When she did, he followed her everywhere, as if terrified that she might leave him. He wanted to be close. He was at her side as she watered and fed the sheep, as she swept their cages and replaced the wood shavings; then he trailed her back to her desk. He was hungry for her fingers, licking them, nibbling on them whenever they came near. She tried to stop herself from touching him, but he looked at her with a wide, dopey gaze that pulled her in. She wanted to get him back into his cage, get him away from her, but she couldn't make herself do it.

When Max came by that morning to say hi, the dog was still at her feet. “What's he doing out?” Max was angry, and this made Leah angry in turn.

“He's my friend,” she said. Max shook his head and seemed too upset to speak. “His name is Ten Bucks.” She hadn't intended to name the dog, and as soon as she'd said those words the dog leapt to its feet, seeming to recognize its name, and once again Leah felt that she was wrong. She was making a mistake. And yet she couldn't stop herself. “Watch,” she said. She made him sit and lie down. “You said these dogs aren't trained. But he is. Somebody trained him.”

“You're playing with him, Leah. He's not to be played with. He's here for a specific reason. He's to be fed. He's to be treated with respect. But he is not a pet. He is the subject of an experiment.”

“I know,” Leah said.

“He belongs to the lab. We can't let you have him.”

“I don't want him,” Leah said. She felt something go cold in her. She felt something reckless and compulsive, something she'd felt too often lately, something that made her want to strike quickly and do damage before she could reflect enough to stop herself. Max didn't understand her. He didn't understand her the least bit. “We need a dog this afternoon, don't we?” Leah said. Max nodded. “We can use Ten Bucks. It's fine with me.” She looked down at the dog, who was again licking her shoe with that unbearable gaze of affection and dependence trained on her. It angered her. At that moment, everything did.

“Don't call him that, Leah.” She thought she saw Max squirm, inwardly shiver. Leah herself felt woozy, off-kilter.
I'm sorry,
she wanted to say. But she was determined not to. “Put him back in his cage now.”

She called the dog to the cage, opened it, and he readily—too damn readily—complied, though once she closed and latched the door, he looked at her from the other side with muted injury, with a few simple questions:
Why? What next?

Max crossed his arms. “I take it you're protesting what we do here. I take it you're not willing to work by our rules. Perhaps you don't really want to be at the lab with us.”

“No,” Leah said. “That's not it. I want to be at the lab.” And she did. She couldn't even begin to imagine the summer without her job. “I want to be here,” she said again.

“Then what's the point?”

“The point is,” Leah said, “that I'm not a baby. I don't fall in love
with dogs and sheep. I can handle it. It doesn't bother me. What you do here doesn't bother me.”

Max looked down at his old tennis shoes and seemed to consider Leah's words. From the back of the room, a sheep bleated. The radio began to play an old Chicago tune with a horn section that made the dogs begin to howl and yip so loudly that Leah had to turn the music off. “All right,” Max finally said. “You can take it. I get your point. That doesn't mean that you can play with these animals. They're not toys, Leah.”

Leah put her head down. “OK,” she said.

“The dogs stay in their cages.”

She nodded, and Max left her basement.

When he returned that afternoon and asked Leah to bring a dog, something terrible, if not altogether unexpected, happened. Ten Bucks, a name she could not take away, could not now disassociate from him, stepped out of the cage first. She had no one to blame but herself. She'd made herself his master and caretaker, he'd accepted, and now here he was, wagging his tail and wanting—she saw this in his eyes—to be her dog. So he volunteered himself. And when Leah pushed him back into his cage, into safety, the dog lunged forward again and was free. Had Max not been at the door waiting for them, had he not said, in his very concerned way, “Are you sure you don't want to start with one of the others?” Leah might have saved him, at least for a few more days.

“He's got to go eventually, doesn't he?” Leah asked.

She put Ten Bucks on a leash, though it wasn't necessary. He heeled perfectly, his head at her knee all the way down the hall. As usual, Max held the rubber ball and was ready to play with the dog as soon as he saw it become fearful. But Ten Bucks wasn't aware of any danger. It was dumbfounding: the trust of this creature, the strange, boundless faith it placed in Leah, of all people, and in Max and now in Diana, a complete stranger, at the sight of whom Ten Bucks wagged his tail and sat on his haunches.
So happy to meet you
, the dog was saying with his eyes, his open, slack mouth, his whole excited body. Cradling the dog in his arms, Max lifted him to the table.
Most dogs were so frightened of the electric razor that Leah and Max had to hold them down. Not Ten Bucks. He licked Max's palm as Diana stripped his shoulder of hair and exposed a bony, pinkish swath of hide. “He's a sweet one,” Max said.