The Way of the Dog (5 page)

Roy lost a lot of hair before he died. She has vacuumed the chairs and sofa, back and forth, back and forth over the upholstery, trying to get the hair off.

I dream that I am dead again. I lie naked on a steel table. In the dream I hear the word
gurney.
Even in the dream I know that this is not what a gurney is. The room is very bright, a brightness that in the dream I think of as
antiseptic.
I look up into banks of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. The pale-green walls are of painted cinderblock. I hear the words
sickly green.
I am held down on the table by wide leather straps across my body,
like the monster Frankenstein
, I think in the dream. Lifting my head—it requires a huge effort to lift my head—I see that I have my young body back, and that it has turned a repulsive greenish color. That is because I am dead, I think. In the dream I am reminded of Mantegna’s painting of the dead Christ.

Nowadays I write in block letters. I mean it to be all angular caps, but the letters are uncertain and wavy. It looks like a child’s writing, but the letters are tiny. It looks like the writing of a Lilliputian child. I am going to reach a point where the scribbling is illegible even to me. I will stop before then.

The smell of incense, sweetly malodorous, descends from her room and drifts through the house. I notice it even in the kitchen.

I was standing by the bed pissing in the bucket when she banged in through the front door this afternoon, holding the gathered handles of several plastic shopping bags. She didn’t say anything. She glanced in my direction and proceeded to the kitchen and banged around in there awhile. I sat down on the edge of the bed. I pulled the sheet up and wrapped it around me.

She carried the bucket upstairs, grunting, sent back the sound of flushing. I heard her stamping around in the rooms upstairs.

She comes in, walks in out of the blue, and takes over the house, as if she had never left.

She says, “I am not going to let you die like this.”

Ritual guides Moll and Alfie now, the rituals of death and the family. It is a system of morality that I personally consider entirely stupid, but the fact is they have me on their conscience.

She cleans constantly, turning the house upside down, going into crevices and the backs of cupboards to get at the concealed dirt, at the filth that has hardened over time, that has become practically part of the house, and this constant
fanatical
housework has upended what was in fact a peaceful pigsty. The obvious benefit, when it comes to sanitation, of this work for which I don’t pay a penny, fails to make her presence less burdensome, does not prevent the constant invasion of privacy, which means that I pay for it psychologically, in the discomfort her presence causes. Every minute that she stays in the house, even when I can’t hear or see her, even when she is hidden in the room upstairs, even when she is out shopping, I am conscious of being hindered by her.

I am going to make a statement, and then I will stop. A statement of principles, beginning, “I, Harold Nivenson, wish to make a statement.”

The entire justification for taking up the index-card habit once again was finally to make a statement.

I don’t sleep. I doze at best. I
oscillate
between a waking state marked by anxiety, foreboding, and remorse, and a twilight state in which consciousness is not lost, but the control of consciousness is lost, when I plunge into a sink of chaotic imagery, a tumbling stream of mental fragments, nothing resembling a dream. Every few minutes I rise to the surface, like coming up for air, and sink again, drowning. I go in and out of this state for most of the night, without actually sleeping. Or else I sleep, and I dream, and the dreams are nightmares.

As long as Moll is here my sister will stay away. That is an advantage of having her here, to prevent my sister from coming as she has threatened to do at several points during the winter. She has been telephoning more frequently in recent months, it seems to me, under the guise of finding out how I am, to ascertain that I am taking care of my health, as she likes to put it, and before hanging up she threatens to come. It is always better for her to stay away. When she is here we invariably end up in a fight, which often begins the moment she steps through the door, with a remark about one of my paintings, and the longer we put it off, the longer we manage to control ourselves, the worse it eventually is, when one or the other of us is pushed to the breaking point and finally
snaps.
She is here for only a short time, and right away we begin to argue about our parents. She persists in defending them, she wants to force me to accept her completely fanciful view of them as loving, indulgent people, where I vividly recall two monsters. These entirely opposite views of our parents end up spoiling every visit, so by the time she finally leaves we are once again hating each other as we did all through our childhood and adolescence. Moll is an
inoculating virus
protecting me from the more serious infection represented by my sister. The instant she leaves, my sister will show up. She will make the long trip here in order to put her stamp on the house again, in order to
erase
Moll from the premises. She will stay a week, two weeks, moving furniture back the way she imagines it is supposed to be, on her knees cleaning, reading to me out of books we both remember from our childhood, as if we were ten years old again. And finally she will once again face the fact that we have absolutely nothing in common, that we were so different growing up we were practically members of separate families, and she will depart in tears.

My brother and sister, the two of them alternating over the years, or even working in consort, I suspect now, personally bear the entire blame for my situation, a situation that amounts to a disability, a genuine incapacity brought on by the treatment I underwent from those two. Brought on directly by them but indirectly—and because of their position, more culpably—by my parents, who did not lift a finger to stop it.

Despite everything, my parents were always buying things for me, things they hoped would keep me amused, keep me occupied and out of their hair: puzzles, musical instruments, scientific toys, frequently several at a time, my mother or father stacking a dozen boxes in their closet, taking care always to have one or two in storage as antidotes, as emergency treatment for the episodes of literally paralyzing boredom that would overtake me even at that stage, when I would become insupportable, when I would become fantastically nagging and annoying. I was extremely fond of puzzles as a child, especially jigsaw puzzles. I was pathologically fond of them, some would say. I was in fact a small jigsaw-puzzle
fanatic.
I took an insane pleasure in them, a childlike, primitive, thoroughly
religious
pleasure in an activity that was in essence a ritual reenactment of the creation of the universe from chaos, an archetypal resurrection of a shattered world. Though they were blind to most things concerning me, especially to anything that was out of the ordinary or even remotely
weird
, my parents indulged my jigsaw addiction by showering puzzles upon me.

I was still quite young when my brother or my sister, or the two of them tittering and whispering together, devised their sibling torture regime. They would manage to sequester a
single piece
from a puzzle, and hide it from me or perhaps even destroy it. They would contrive to do this no matter how carefully I guarded the puzzle, keeping it in my room and never taking my eyes off it while one of them was around. Sometimes it seemed to me they would contrive to do it even before I had opened the box. I would always hope when I began assembling a new puzzle that
this time
I would possess all the pieces, that it would be possible
this time at last
to form the complete picture shown on the lid of the box. But even as I worked on the puzzle I could never entirely banish the fear that despite my efforts they had once again made off with a piece—a piece that now for this very reason became the
essential
piece. The bare
possibility
that this had occurred would produce in my younger self an anxiety that would thoroughly destroy the pleasure I might otherwise have derived from the puzzle. The slightest problem finding a desired piece would cause me to leap to the
fatal
conclusion that this was the
very piece
they had taken, though I had no more evidence of that than a temporary difficulty locating a particular piece among hundreds of similar pieces, a difficulty that is part and parcel of puzzle making. Sometimes, having leaped to this conclusion, having been driven to it by my intense anxiety, I would be overcome by despair, the psychologically inevitable final step in the siblings’ torture sequence, and in that final despairing state I could seldom resist sweeping the entire puzzle off onto the floor, the sound of the cascading pieces drowned by their howls of laughter.

The lure of puzzling was always too great, and eventually, sniffling and tear stained, I would gather up the scattered pieces and resume my work. I would continue working even though I knew with absolute certainty that they would
always
have succeeded in removing the essential piece. With pigheaded obstinacy, perhaps just to spite them, I would continue to work on something that I knew was impossible to finish. And indeed I always ended up “completing” a puzzle from which a single piece was missing. After a while, constantly working at something impossible to finish, I came to see this as the normal course of events. In place of the
impossible goal
I put the
hopeless project
, and this now became the real concealed aim of my actions. A person looking at one of my “completed” puzzles would scarcely notice the pictured scene. That scene, the ostensible goal of the puzzle, would in a sense have disappeared, completely destroyed by the absence of the essential piece, an absence that had now become
glaring.
All eyes would fly to the hole in the puzzle. In place of a fully completed picture of a busy barnyard or thrilling naval battle, for example, that person would see a fully assembled
representation of incompleteness
, a perfect picture of failure.

The smallest member of the family, I easily became the most burdensome member. I was accused of driving the others crazy, though in fact they had already driven me crazy. Faced with my robust, competent, one hundred percent healthy brother and sister, a brother and sister who were inevitably, even
naturally
victorious, I became the awkward, incompetent, sick one, the one who was
destined
for defeat. I became, in my family and
for
my family, and ultimately for myself as well, the representation of failure.

She has been shopping and has bought, among other things—mountains of groceries, a new vacuum cleaner—a shade to replace the broken one on the window by my bed. She has found a standing fan at a yard sale. The oscillating mechanism is broken, but she has set it up so it will blow on my chair. It is cooler today. She has not turned it on.

The middle of the night, and she is still awake. I hear the television in the bedroom. She spends a lot of time looking at television. She can’t sleep, or she sleeps with it on.

She spends the money Alfie has given her, money she has
extracted
, that she has practically
extorted
from him in exchange for taking me off his hands, I have to assume.

Wrapping myself in a blanket I go over and sit in the wing chair. Lights are still on across the street in the bungalow under the elm. The tall young woman is standing in the illuminated frame of an upstairs window, head bowed, talking to someone I can’t see, who perhaps is stretched out on a rug or a low bed. She makes large sweeping gestures as she talks. She is
carrying on
, I think,
remonstrating
with the person lying on the bed. She glances toward the window, and stops abruptly, as if suddenly aware of my presence. Stepping to the window, she opens her arms wide and with a swift embrace draws the curtains shut. Like slamming a door in my face. One by one the lights blink off, room by room, first downstairs, then upstairs where she was standing, and each time a window goes dark I experience a small shock of abandonment.

The tall people are in bed now, in each other’s arms, I think. Their lovemaking, I imagine, will be slow and languorous, giraffes coupling in the hot African night.

Envy begins in the solar plexus, climbs into the chest, the throat, gnaws with razor teeth. The ferret of impossible longing. That they should be young, and not I. Do you understand that?

In bed afterward, in the dense uncomprehending dark, I am conscious of something like a mask being pressed against my face: it is my own face, which I have drawn into a horrible grimace.

In the beginning was the wound. A psychic wound inflicted at a time when the self was still being formed, it is not reachable anymore. It was walled off a long time ago, so it would not be touched. It could not stand being touched.

Untouched, unremembered, unreachable behind the wall of the self, the wound decays, dries up, and shrivels until it is not a wound any longer but a hollow place, a howling emptiness within the brittle shell of the self.

The life struggle—the guiding principle of every thought and action—is to not fall into the hole within. The recurrent nightmare is of a man pitching backwards off a cliff, endlessly falling.

A man without a center. Unbalanced, you will say.

I would have pitched backwards years ago, but I held on to Roy.

In this neighborhood of strivers.

Thinking it over now, I am surprised at how entertaining I found watching the woman in the window, when as a matter of fact there was nothing entertaining about it. As a matter of fact this was just a quite ordinary woman silently carrying on, and I had not the slightest idea what she was saying. Obviously, the entertainment value had nothing to do with the woman or her holding forth and stemmed entirely from the fact that I was
spying.