The Way of the Dog (9 page)

I was overwrought, I was talking in a voice that they all could hear was laden with feelings that no one, myself included, had expected from me. The three of them stared wide-eyed, as if listening to a crazy person.

I am going to stop. I draw up a statement of principles and then I stop.

I will write
Statement
at the top of the page. Or maybe
Statement of Principles.
Or maybe just
Principles.

It will be Euclidean. It will have theorems, corollaries, and definitions.

Begin with a definition of stopping. Ceasing to move, to think, to want. Desistance. Aboulia. Ataraxia. No flutter of eyelids. No twitches.

The aim is not a definition of stopping, but a definition of going on. Begin with a definition of going on. Or a definition of beginning. Work toward a theorem of happiness, for example. The pursuit of a loved object, for example. Life in that perspective. The loved object: a stick, a ball, or even a sock. Roy was never a fetcher. He could not understand the obsessive-compulsive behavior of retrievers. If I threw him a stick he would amble after it, then just go off into the bushes and chew on it. I imagine he was happy doing that.

I obsessively take my pulse.

She has brought two of her kitchen guests in to look at the paintings: an archetypal neighborhood couple, indifferently dressed in the thoroughly false manner that has become compulsive among people of their sort, a mandatory
casualness
that is at bottom a new formality, as oppressive and obligatory as the old. In just the same way, it occurs to me when she brings them over to my chair to greet me, that their obligatory friendliness is, at bottom, a
distancing mechanism
whose real aim is to make serious talk impossible. They stroll around the room looking at the paintings. The woman says “expressive” or “impressive” a dozen times, the man puts on a show of authority,
pegging
the paintings with art-critical jargon, then glancing at me in search of my approval, as the
owner
of the paintings, and as a fellow
man.

When they have left I feel, if possible, more depressed than ever.

Unable to pick up the pill I sweep it off the tabletop into my palm.

Walking down to the park, I cross Professor Diamond coming up from there on the opposite sidewalk, walking briskly with long strides, a folded deck chair under one arm. That way of walking was considered “mannish” when I was young. She doesn’t turn her head in my direction, and I don’t look in hers, hobbling downhill, using my stick. I watch her from the corner of my eye. From across the street I can’t make out her eyes, can’t quite see if she has sent a reciprocal glance in my direction, but I feel her gaze on me, brushing my face, fly-like. I am the only other person on the street. I am, with my halting gait, my stick,
impossible
to overlook. In order not to turn her head in my direction she is obliged to actively
avoid
turning her head in my direction. This active and conscious avoidance is in essence a form of
staring
, I am thinking. It is staring in a deficient mode, just as her active avoidance is a deficient mode of actual contact and for that reason all the more striking to us both. From now on she will think of me as someone to be avoided, and I will think of her as someone avoiding. In the smooth course of her daily life I stand out as an obstacle.

She would prefer that I not make a statement, I am sure.

Moll in brand-new overalls, on her knees in the narrow band of vegetation between the house and the sidewalk, resting her weight on one hand, pulling at weeds. She knocks the dirt from the roots and tosses them on the pavement. I rap on the pane. She looks up, red-faced and sweaty, and I shake my head violently. She shrugs and goes back to weeding. Half an hour later she is humming in the kitchen.

Scarcely a garden, that weed-infested band of unruly vegetation, but I contemplate it with perverse satisfaction, with what feels to me like satisfaction—a seamless blend of petulance and spite. Though it happens on a regular basis, I am amazed every time I look out and see one of my neighbors in front of his house hacking away at the grass shoots that poke up through cracks in the sidewalk, pulling and hacking at them with small-minded viciousness. I feel completely estranged from people who want to pull grass from cracks in the sidewalk—so estranged that it strikes me as odd I can understand them when they speak.

The other foot is dragging. Two sticks now.

I remember striding, the physical feel of it, the sensation of abundant energy, a plenitude of life, arms swinging at my sides, a spring in my step, air rushing in and out of the lungs as I strode effortlessly. The feeling returns in dreams, as if the body were dreaming. Perhaps I am only truly happy when I am asleep, when the broken body has healed itself in dreams.

In place of the old wooden cane I have two new metal ones. Their length is adjustable and they have rubber tips that prevent slipping. They are depressingly medical, but they weigh almost nothing. If anything they are too light, too responsive to the involuntary jerks and twitches that have plagued me lately, making them difficult to control. I lift a cane, intending to move it forward, and it shoots off to the right or left.

She has brought home a recording of Mahler’s
Adagietto.
She plays it over and over. She wants to drive me crazy. She knows how I feel about Mahler, how my emotional life was dominated by him for a long time, how my emotions were structured by his music, how it was only listening to his music that I was able to feel anything that I would call genuine emotion, healthy emotions that were not contrived and sick, and so she is using that music to destroy me, playing it over and over until it is thoroughly trite.

She knows there was a period of life when I was
prostrate
because of Mahler’s music.

First it was television, now it is Mahler.

By the time I was eighteen I was already practically insane. By the time I was twenty I was already completely crazy. I must have been partly crazy for a long time before that, perhaps from birth.

I suppose it is still not possible to examine a newborn and determine if it is insane or bound to become insane, though I expect this will become possible in the not-too-distant future.

A note on the kitchen table: “sandwich in fridge.”

A young American woman was in a bookstore in Strasbourg, France. It was 1954 or 55. She was very young, scarcely out of high school, traveling alone, it was her first trip to Europe, where she knew no one. It had snowed in the night, the snow turning to sleet in the morning, and she had come into the bookstore to get warm. It was a very good bookstore, with books in several languages, though she did not know this before entering. Now, standing among the books in many languages, she was aware that she was in Europe, that Europe was everywhere around her, and that America, where she had been unhappy, was far away. She thought of herself as taking the first steps in what would become her new life, though she as yet had no clear notion of what this life would resemble. She was at the rear of the store, looking at books in German, though she could not read German, pulling them from the shelves and opening them, because of the magic of the names—Hölderlin, Rilke, Schopenhauer, Trakl. The shop was unusually crowded—people like her who had come in to escape the weather, many of them standing about talking and paying no attention to the books. Among them was a young man, slight of build, handsome in an acerbic way, sharp nosed and thin lipped, perhaps no older than the American girl, though the angular features made him appear older than he was. If the girl had looked in his direction and later written home about it she would have described him as a “European intellectual.” And she would have noticed that he did not take his eyes off her. He watched her as she slowly turned the pages of a thin volume she had pulled from a shelf in front of her. She held it almost level with her face and was silently mouthing the words. Though she could not understand the words, she felt, mouthing them in this way, that she was penetrating their deepest, most mysterious meaning. She had often imagined a future for herself in which she would speak several languages and write poetry that would appear in books as handsome as this one. Had she turned her head only slightly to the left she might have noticed the young man. She would have been struck by his appearance, his graceful build (like a bullfighter or a dancer, she might have thought in her typically romantic way), his shock of black curls and his pinched, concentrated features, but she did not turn her head. After a time she left the German books and went over to a table displaying travel guides to European countries. The young man, passing behind her, went to the rear of the store and took down the book he had seen her reading. Holding it against his jacket, in case she turned, he carried it to the cash register. It was only then, when the clerk was folding brown paper around the book to protect it from the sleet outside, that he saw the title: it was Büchner’s
Woyzeck.
And that, it seemed to him now, was exactly the book he had imagined her reading. He left the shop. Stopping on the sidewalk outside, he opened the book and wrote in German under the name of the author: “Meet me at six this evening in front of the cathedral.” Then he waited. He pretended to study the books on display in the shop window. He stamped his feet on the snow-layered pavement. He was very patient, and very cold. When, after almost an hour, she stepped from the door, his teeth were chattering. He rushed at her, muttering, “Bitte, ein Geschenk,” and tried to shove the book into the gloved hand she thrust defensively in his direction. Startled, she clasped the book, but then, recoiling, let it tumble to the pavement at her feet. Overcome by embarrassment, he spun on his heels and walked rapidly away without looking back. The woman picked up the book from where it lay open in the wet snow. She held it away from her body so as not to dirty her clothes and returned to her hotel, where she put it on a chair to dry. Two days later, packing to leave, she was placing the book in her suitcase when she noticed the inscription and slipped it in her handbag instead. She was checking out, and she showed the inscription to the clerk and asked him to translate it. She did not leave that day, and in the evening she went to the cathedral. She had not hesitated, she had not debated with herself about whether to go. Not for a second had she wondered why she was going. She was compelled to go by the logic of a story she was beginning to tell herself, a story that began somewhere in her childhood and ran on unseen into the future in front of her. She went before dark, and she stayed until there was no one else in the street, but two days had passed and he failed to appear. The following day she went again, and a third time as well. On the fourth day she left. She never saw the man again. She never learned his name, but he poisoned her life. The lost
possibility
of that man and the life path he represented poisoned her life. In the core of her being she was constantly aware that somewhere out of sight her true story was unfolding, that her true life path was running on without her. She had many lovers, she had husbands and children. She led a rich, cultured,
cosmopolitan
life. She became wealthy and a patron of orchestras. She even published a small book of stories. But she was always dissatisfied, always conscious of a hollow within. At every check and turn in her rich, eventful life, in the depth of every crisis, she would remember Strasbourg and her failure to open a book until it was too late. It became for her an ever-present
emblem
of loss. She once said to her daughter, “I was given the book of life, and I failed to open it,” but the daughter thought this was just a metaphor and failed to understand.

A story is like a path through a wood. It is marked by a series of signs, like directional arrows that say, “Go this way.” A story compels us to go that way.

A story is a puzzle in which the pieces instead of fitting together in space fit together in time.

Either way, the result is a picture.

I sometimes imagined,
hopelessly
imagined I think now, a different kind of story, one for our time, that would be the wood itself, without any path through it.

Two packs of ruled index cards. She has placed them on the windowsill by my bed.

I am not so stupid as to begin again. It is only the end that matters in any case, if anything matters. The end, and a few things before that.

Say something before the end.

Two hundred cards will be enough. But if they don’t fit together, if the
essential card
is missing?

Nothing but scraps.

A thicket, and no path through it.

We met again this morning. She was walking her bicycle on the sidewalk. I hobbled toward her with the aid of two sticks. We approached steadily. I am tempted to say that we approached
relentlessly.
Gaze averted, we drew nearer and nearer until the bike was rolling between us. A brief thrust and parry as our eyebeams crossed and clashed: I am certain she knows who I am. Perhaps not my name, but that I am, that I dwell opposite and down a ways, that I walk with difficulty, leaning on two sticks, that I am not well.

John Berryman jumped from Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge toward the frozen Mississippi. Onlookers report that he waved. Hapless to the end, he missed the river entirely, landing on an earthen knoll at the base of the bridge.

The jumpers wave.

Virginia Woolf placed a large stone in her coat pocket before stepping into the river.

Ann Quin swam out to sea by Brighton’s Palace Pier.

De Staël also jumped. Pascin slit his wrists, wrote in blood on the wall, then hanged himself. Hedayat chose gas.

It is also possible (accounts differ) that Empedocles fell from a carriage and died that way, or fell from a boat and drowned. There were also rumors that he hanged himself. The story of the volcano prevailed. Because it is a story. The others merely offer facts.