The smell of gas is pungent, and I see that the truck is indeed leaking—most likely a fuel hose has come loose. I think about lighting the whole thing on fire, sending Albert Camus to his next incarnation in a blaze of glory, like he’s a Viking dog king and our truck is his boat, which it sort of was. But instead I start to strip off my puke-covered clothes and throw them onto the snow piles melting on the sides of my dirt driveway as I cane my way back to the house.
Without bothering to take off my underwear, I enter the shower and let the hot spikes rain down on me until the water heater’s tank is exhausted, at which point I towel off, dress, and examine the window in my bedroom, which is still open.
“What did you hear or see, Albert?” I ask the cold air.
I stick my head outside and look around.
Nothing.
No animal prints in the snow.
Nothing at the edge of the woods.
Nothing.
I shut the window.
I think about whether my dog may have actually committed suicide, and decide it is possible—especially since I named him Albert Camus, and went on and on about the first question for years.
It was like I had been training him to find meaning or perish, then I continually told him that there was no meaning. And the suicide pact I offered him—how was he to know I wasn’t invoking it with my heavy drinking last night? I mean, he was only a dog. His brain was smaller than a peach.
What dog could live up to such a weighty name when it came to solving his master’s existential crisis?
Maybe I put too much pressure on him.
Perhaps his heart was like an emotional tick, absorbing all of my anxiety and regrets and inaction and sadness, swelling until it outgrew his little toy poodle chest, until he just could no longer take the anticipation of the inevitable pop.
I remember once reading an essay by or an interview with David Foster Wallace, in which he says that suicide is akin to jumping from the top floor of a burning skyscraper—it’s not that you are unafraid of jumping, but the fall is the lesser of two terrors.
Was jumping out the window preferable to living with me?
Had I emotionally abused Albert Camus without knowing it?
He had never before shown any interest in the bedroom window—none whatsoever—so why last night?
These questions are beginning to hurt my head. I go to the kitchen and open up another bottle of red wine—a rioja—and spark a Parliament Light cigarette for breakfast.
I pour a glass and down it in one gulp without even tasting.
I pour another glass, and try to figure out what to do.
I light a second cigarette just as soon as I’ve finished the first.
“You killed your dog,” I say to myself. “What type of a man drives his dog to suicide?”
As I chain-smoke and drink away the morning, I can’t help but think about Edmond Atherton, the kid who smashed my bones with a baseball bat and ended my teaching career.
For six months he sat against the right wall of my classroom, just under a black-and-white photo of Toni Morrison, and he never made a sound as the rest of the class discussed Herman Hesse, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camus, Ivan Turgenev, Paulo Coelho, and so many others.
And then one day Edmond Atherton raised his hand and asked if he could speak with me after class. It was a strange request to make in the middle of the lesson, and out of the blue, but I agreed, and redirected the class back to the discussion at hand.
I remember Edmond stayed seated when the bell rang, waited patiently for everyone else to leave the room as he sat almost lifelessly. His calm gave me goose bumps; it was so eerie and . . . forceful. Something had shifted inside him, I’m certain of that now, but it was just a suspicion on that day.
Once we were alone, I said, “What’s on your mind, Edmond?”
He put his hands together with a clap and held them in front of his face like he was about to pray. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I think I found a major flaw in your teaching philosophy. I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of the entire class, which is why I asked to speak privately. But there’s a serious problem regarding your message.”
“Okay.” I forced a laugh. But something inside me knew that this was not going to go very well—that the reason for this talk was more than just regular teenage attention-seeking bullshit. Part of me knew that I was in trouble. Even still, I said, “Let me have it.”
“Are you sure?” he said, tapping his nose with the ends of his forefingers in this almost giddy way. “Because I think you might not be able to teach the way you do once I point this out.”
“Believe me, Edmond, I’m a grizzled veteran with decades of teaching experience under my belt. I can handle it.”
“Okay, then.” He slapped his hands down on the desk hard, which made me flinch, and then he smiled and looked at me for too long, creating a silence that hovered like mustard gas between us. “I admire what you’re trying to do for us, I really do. I mean, it’s nice to be told that we’re all special, capable of the ‘extraordinary.’ Like in that Dead Poets Society movie clip you showed us. It’s nice to think we can all seize the day. That we can all make our mark on the world. But it’s not true, is it? I mean, just consider the definition of the word extraordinary, right? It’s an exclusionary word, after all. There have to be many ordinary people for the word extraordinary to mean something!”
He was smiling in this madman way.
“What do you really want to talk about, Edmond? What’s eating you up?”
“Your class. I’m getting a little tired of the happy bullshit.”