The Way of the Dog (2 page)

Standing by the railroad tracks at the edge of the park one can look across the river to the hills beyond. In summer the buildings over there and the distant hills are smudged in gray-violet haze.

On hot summer nights I used to go down and sit in the park, hoping for a breeze off the river. Sometimes, somewhere on the other side of the river, I would see white lights above a stadium of some kind, but I was never able to find the stadium in the daytime, pick it out from the beige and gray jumble of the other buildings.

Every morning and evening, no matter the weather, I walked Roy down there, and sometimes we followed the tracks along the riverbank. Walking at the water’s edge, I steered Roy away from broken glass, picking a path over the rocks. There are no more trains on those tracks.

When there were still trains, there were train horns at night. Twice in those years someone from the neighborhood lay down on the tracks and was killed by a train.

I always knew what to do while Roy was alive. A walk in the morning, a quick piss at noon, a long walk in the afternoon, supper at six, a turn around the block before bed—an agenda that was practically a life program. I never woke up with the paralyzing thought that
I had no plan.
When we were out together Roy would walk a few paces behind me, stopping now and then to lift a leg or sniff at something, then scamper to catch up, but in a larger existential sense I followed him, adapted myself to his life program.

My life followed a dog’s rhythm.

They will say, “In his final years he got down on the dog’s level.”

When Roy died, I let myself go. Without being conscious of it happening, I lost my grip. One day was like another, one minute was like another. I was going downhill. After a couple of months I began to notice what was happening, and from that point on, from the moment I noticed, I began to actively push myself downhill. I went downhill deliberately and at an accelerating pace, actively deteriorating until I was a total wreck.

Falling, one is seized by sudden panic. One puts out a hand, clutches empty air. But as the distance to the ground closes, the panic gives way to resignation, as the imminence of the actual swells and possibility shrivels, until in the millisecond before impact, when the door to the future is slamming shut at last, one is filled with a momentary, sudden, immense boredom.
So that was life
, one thinks. One is tempted to yawn, but there is not time.

The house is filthy, more or less choked with clutter. Clothes I don’t wear, books I don’t read, gadgets I don’t use.

They will say, “He lived in a pigsty.”

I look around, at the dirt and litter: Harold Nivenson’s droppings.

The average American in the course of an average lifetime produces seven thousand times his own weight in waste product, in droppings, I read somewhere. To this heap of inevitable and in that sense
natural
waste I have added my two cents in the form of thousands of scraps of paper. Tens of thousands of bits of paper stuffed in drawers and boxes. I can’t open a book without paper falling out. I don’t know what I was hoping for.

In the dream I am lying on my back in bed. My eyes are open. I am surprised at how dark it is, and I wonder if the streetlight is out. There seems to be something going on with my heart, I am worried about my heart, so I check my pulse. I try for a long time, but I can’t detect a pulse. Someone approaches the bed, bends over, leaning close as if inspecting my face. “Help me,” I say. “Help me.” The figure seems not to hear and gently presses my eyelids, closing them. It moves away. I don’t see it, because my eyes are closed, but I feel it moving away. It occurs to me that no sound has come from my mouth. I think, So this is what being dead is like. I am not asleep, I am immobile and conscious, and I am completely dead. I experience a sudden inrush of horror as it dawns upon me that I am going to have to stay awake “in perpetuity,” that I am going to have to experience being dead forever.

The neighborhood used to be “artistic.” That made it attractive to the sort of people who have come here now. It was artistic and eclectic, people said. Before that it was drab. Run-down and drab but not quite a slum. The fact that it is now a thoroughly restored neighborhood that used to be artistic makes it attractive to people like Professor Diamond, who are well-to-do, who are “financially comfortable,” as they say, and also artistic and eclectic themselves.

I am not at home here. Two decades of improvement and renewal, and now I am not at home. The people I used to know, people I was almost comfortable with, have been sanitized out. The small abandoned brick factories with their tall metal-framed windows, the squat brick warehouses, even the old school buildings, have been made over into luxury studios, so-called artist-loft condominiums, into shops, galleries, and restaurants with trendy
industrial
decors. The drab, run-down houses, with their air of narrow working-class prejudice and sordid conviviality, have been taken over, invaded by strivers, by good-natured
professional
people, young, insecure, ambitious parents with precocious, protected children. The old, collapsing houses have been shored, restored, and refurbished, outfitted with new wings, dormers, decks, skylights, repainted in the vivid colors of the hotter nations where the people who now live in them go on vacation. The houses have received
contemporary
facelifts and been made comfortable for
just that type of person.
As more financially well-to-do people move into it, the neighborhood houses ever-fewer actual artists while becoming ever more “artistic,” containing ever-more art galleries, art restaurants, and other “art outlets,” while pursuing the unconscious collective aim of becoming one hundred percent artistic and one hundred percent well-to-do.

Sitting at the window lately I have noticed the same people passing at frequent intervals. They come from one direction, and a little later they appear again from the same direction, circling, it seems, or they go to the end of the block and turn around. It is
perfectly normal
, I tell myself, for people to notice a house like mine, one that stands out from the others and must look to them like an abandoned building, though they have been glancing this way more frequently lately, it occurs to me now, sitting in my armchair and looking out the window at three women who have stopped on the sidewalk across the street and are pointing in my direction,
obviously
talking about my house. It occurs to me that in this completely upscale neighborhood my house alone still stands erect. I find myself thinking of it as “flying the banner of decay.” Paint peeling, soffit boards hanging loose, curling roof shingles, broken steps, a rotting three-story
hulk
, it looms as a monument to mortality, an edifying lesson on the erosions of time, a mute reproach to the vanity of home improvement.

I should have gotten out of here twenty years ago. I should have left the minute I came back, when it was still possible to get out, when I might still have made something of myself.

With everything improving around me I find myself willfully deteriorating. Despite my obvious struggles to make something of myself I have discovered that I never had any intention of making something of myself.

What I really wanted to make of myself was a wretched failure at everything.

It was not always like this. There was a time when I had the feeling I belonged here. I would come back from a trip, drop my suitcase by the door, and collapse in an armchair. Sitting in the chair I would look around and think: home at last.

Now I think of myself as “the only one left,” as “the last of the old gang.”

Buying this house was the greatest folly of my life. With the money that had unexpectedly come to me, that had fallen to me as a consequence of my parents’ death in a freak accident, I bought the house and had it repaired and decorated the way I wanted. I put a considerable portion of my small fortune into it. The house, I thought, would be a
launching platform
for a new life.

I bought this historic house, though I never bothered to learn its actual history.

It was the end of me. I thought I was buying freedom but I was buying imprisonment. I was buying imprisonment accompanied by an illusion of freedom. I imagined that with the house “as a base,” as I thought of it then, I could go and come as I pleased, free as a lark, as I phrased it, actually saying this trite phrase to myself: “Now I am free as a lark.” I imagined I would be free to travel, to take off at the drop of a hat, but in fact the house
restricted
my travels, made them so difficult they became practically impossible. I stayed only because the house was here, I came back because it was here. Without the house I might still be wandering, walking along a seashore under the stars, sleeping among sheep on a hillside somewhere. Instead of travels, with the effect of broadening my horizons, my trips became periods of recuperation, periods of rest and recovery from the burden of the house.

In college I studied agronomy, geology, comparative literature, Chinese history, et cetera. I thought of pursuing each one professionally, but after a short while each was pushed aside by something else. So I did not actually give them up in the sense of giving up on them; I was still actively engaged with them when they were pushed aside and replaced by something else that suddenly struck me as more interesting. This
flightiness
, which I thought of as openness to innovation, looked to others like frivolity, but it was in fact a crippling disability. Following the road of life, as they say, I kept wandering off into the bushes. Buying this house, I see now, was a way of trapping myself, since whatever might happen in the future, here was something I was stuck with.

Sometimes I think of it as an attempt to bury myself alive.

I thought I would completely refashion the interior of the house, I thought I would put my
stamp
on it, but after eighteen months of repairs and painting I completely lost interest in that as well, and got no further in putting my stamp on it than changing the wallpaper and replacing the plain Greek Revival chimneypiece in the parlor with a marble Italian Baroque chimneypiece.

Hanging paintings on every square inch of the walls, I thought, would make my house look like the Paris house of Gertrude Stein, who had paintings covering every inch of her walls and even a portion of the ceiling. In those years Gertrude Stein’s house was superior to any museum or gallery in the world if you wanted to view the best of contemporary painting. At the time I put up my paintings I saw myself as a person of exceptional taste, someone aware of genuine art trends and not easily tricked by phony intellectual art chatterers. The house did not look like an art gallery, it was too crowded to be an art gallery, it was obviously a
collector’s
house, I thought. It was like a storage house for paintings. Many of these paintings I had purchased with funds from my small fortune, some had been given me by artists grateful for my support, others had been abandoned in the house by artists passing through. I thought they were advanced, groundbreaking, completely exceptional paintings, though I can see now that they are antiquated, old-fashioned, derivative
imitations
of an advanced painting style that is itself already old-fashioned and completely dated. Paintings that I don’t even look at anymore, that I am incapable of seeing with fresh eyes, that have sunk into the background, blended with it, become psychologically indistinguishable from the wallpaper.

The pistol is in a box under the bed, a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .38 Special, bought when the neighborhood was still considered a dangerous place. I bought the house, and before moving in I bought the gun.

Slowing, the newspaper lady spins a paper from her car window, into the yard across the street. Later, when the man comes back from work, he will pick it up, slipping it from the blue plastic bag as he climbs the walk to his front door. He will go inside, open the blinds, sit in an armchair by a window, and read about the catastrophic state of the planet, the repulsive so-called advance of the earth-killing human species, but it won’t actually penetrate his thoughts, it will not make it impossible for him to go on living.

That they can go on doing this, that he and his
cohorts
, as I think of them, can blindly continue to live in this way, is a sign of basic good sense, of their
robust health
, I remind myself.

The adventures of a stick: I lean heavily on it until it practically groans, unless I am feeling better, in which case I thrust it in front of me with a wild stabbing gesture, bringing it down so forcefully the pavement rings, while on the days in between, neither good nor bad, I sometimes drag it on the sidewalk behind me, the drooping tail of a beaten animal.

People will say, “He dragged his stiffened right foot like a stick. Sometimes he dragged a stick as well.”

They have pulled tables from all over the park and placed them end to end for a picnic under the oak trees, where some are still seated, talking, elbows in the litter, while the rest, young men and women, play touch football in an open grassy space nearby. Wide-eyed, smiling faces, easy gaits, healthy bodies, they call out to each other, jostling, hands in the air, shouting, “to me, to me.” When they look in my direction, to where I am stopped on the paved walk watching, their gaze sweeps over me. Quietly beyond their shouts and cries, through the trees, the river flashes in the April sun. I step from the path, walk in the direction of the river, down through the middle of the game, and they stop playing, they leave off and stand idly by, good-natured, chatting, while I cross the clearing along the line of scrimmage, jabbing at the ground with my stick.

As a child I was fat, plain, nearsighted, and dirty.

Do you know what it is like to be at the mercy of sadists? To be small and at the mercy of giants, who can bring a blade down and sever your head at a whim or put a filthy boot on your nape and press your face into the mire, if it amuses them? Probably not. Then you can’t imagine how it was in the wood-paneled halls and fluorescent chambers of the expensive private school to which I was sentenced as a child.