“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.”
There’s blood trickling out of his mouth, and his one eye has rolled into the back of his head, but I grab my keys, lay him gently on the passenger-side seat of my truck, and—even though my veterinarian is an hour’s drive away and most likely won’t be in her office for another four hours or so—still barefoot, I shift into drive and hit the gas.
“Wake up, Albert Camus. You’re going to be okay, little buddy,” I say, looking over at him, patting his still-warm head, paying no attention to the fact that I am driving a truck.
Toward the end of my steep dirt driveway, my right front tire slips into the rut I’ve been meaning to have the plow guy fill in, the steering wheel jerks right, and I smash into an old oak tree.
The airbag inflates, punching me in the nose.
I blink.
My vision blurs.
I throw up two bottles of red wine and a pound of bloody meat onto the deflating airbag and my lap.
I cry.
I punch the dashboard.
I hyperventilate.
I try to spit out the awful taste in my mouth.
A rush of blood fills my head and then drains away too quickly, like an ocean wave crashing on the shore, grabbing everything on the beach and retreating back to whence it came.
A strange feeling comes over me, and I hope it is death.
I’m done.
I surrender to the first question.
Finally, I black out.
CHAPTER 8
The winter sun wakes me rudely.
Albert Camus is dead on the passenger-side floor; he’s stiff as a stuffed fox.
I grab my cane and get out of the truck.
The hood is crumpled. The front bumper has become a part of the thick and noble oak tree—almost like an accessory maybe, a tree belt.
Part of me knows that this is it for me.
I live at the end of a dirt road. I picked this property because no one is ever around. No neighbors. No passing traffic—the connecting road is three miles from my driveway, and I have not walked more than a half mile or so in one stretch since the series of surgeries that put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I do not own a telephone—land or cell. No computer or Internet. This is my Walden, the closest I’ll ever get to being Henry David Thoreau.
I have no friends. No one would ever visit. I have to drive to my handyman’s home whenever I need him. The plow man is contracted to come whenever more than three inches of snow falls, but we only had a dusting last night, and according to the paper I read on Sunday, no storms are forecast for the coming week, so I know I can pretty much die alone out here without anyone trying to save me.