The Way of
the Dog
A NOVEL
Sam Savage
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS :: 2013
COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Sam Savage
BOOK DESIGN by Coffee House Press
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © David Nevala
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION
Savage, Sam, 1940–
The way of the dog : a novel / by Sam Savage.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56689-312-1 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-56689-318-3 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3619.A84W39 2013
813’.6—DC23
2011046604
FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING
An excerpt from this work was first published in the Paris Review (Issue 202, Fall 2012) under the title “The Meininger Nude.”
The Way of the Dog
I had a most marvellous piece of luck. I died.
—–JOHN BERRYMAN
I am going to stop now. A few loose threads to cut, some bits and pieces to gather up and label, so people will know, and then I stop.
I had a little dog. We went through the world together for as long as he lasted, through the world this way and that, just to be going. At the end he had grown so weak I had to prod him onward with my shoe. He is buried somewhere. His name was Roy. I miss him.
I am not well.
The woman who lives across the street is not well, I think. She looks dejected, downcast. She is not well psychologically, I think. I think she is a kept woman. They keep her because she is ill.
The dog didn’t reach halfway up my shin, unless he jumped up against my leg, which he would do when he was young, when he would first see me in the morning or when I would come back after an absence. Coming back after a long absence, like a traveler approaching his natal village after many years. Kidnapped by pirates, he says, though no one believes him. Sweetheart married and fat, parents dead, he can’t remember what it was he had set out to find. He can’t think of a reason to leave again, so he stays on in the village until he dies, an old man, childless, wifeless, who has spent his afternoons telling the same old stories.
The neighbor was standing in the yard looking down at some flowers when her husband left for work this morning. He backed the car out of the driveway, rolling it right past her. Her illness has cast a pall over the family. It has stunted her children, who are large, handsome, but stunted emotionally. It shows in their expressions, their body language. They are neat, well groomed, as if they had stepped out of a clothing catalogue, in their rigid adherence to the codes of their milieu. In their ordinariness, their normalcy, they strike me as fanatics. A husband and three teenage sons. Summer evenings they all four shoot hoops in the driveway. If she comes out of the house, walking past them on her way to put something in the trash, they stop playing and stand silently by until she is back inside. Eyes downcast, face drawn, she seems drowned, submerged. In the evening the husband and sons return from work, school, or play to a house in which the venetian blinds on the windows are tilted shut. She is inside, huddled, her gaze turned inward. They move around her, giving her berth, but they don’t acknowledge her illness even to themselves, even as they go from room to room twisting the rods that open the blinds.
There are other things. Turning in bed I see other things across the street, portions of several houses, a slice of sky, electric poles, a tree with large leaves, a catalpa. It blooms every June, big clusters of white flowers that bedeck the tree briefly and fall off and cover the sidewalk entirely. I see most of a gigantic elm. I can’t see the top of the elm from the bed but know that it canopies above the roof of a yellow bungalow. In that house live a very tall woman and an even taller man, who sally forth with black briefcases five mornings a week and dress up in matching red-and-black logo-spattered spandex to ride bicycles, lean and silver, on Sundays. I don’t know their names. We have never spoken. I think of them as the tall people.
Happy people, I have been thinking lately, sitting here at the window, are convivial by nature. They recognize one another by subtle signs. This neighborhood is full of them. On weekends they cluster and bunch in backyards and parks, smiling and wagging like dogs.
In the great prenatal sorting of souls I stumbled into the wrong species, I have been thinking. I was destined for something smaller, meaner, more solitary—a vile little insect, perhaps, like the character in Kafka’s great story, who wakes up one morning and discovers he has been transformed into a big cockroach. Of course “deep down” he was that all along, and one day he wakes up and knows it.
I have learned it gradually. A long descent into vileness.
Scaling desiccated skin of snake, bloated belly of toad, fleshless legs of bird, smell of goat, face of camel, mind of berserk elk pulled down by wolves. A hobbler, a foot-dragger, stumbling on cracks in the sidewalk.
I have a gun.
Hours, days, entire weeks pass without pain. For the most part I waste them in sleep; sometimes I sleep twenty hours a day. Otherwise I look out the window, eager to witness every event in this quiet neighborhood, or hobble down to the river, using a stick, or sit about and tell myself stories.
The same old stories, always about “the road of life,” the man who sets out on the road of life full of hope and promise and stumbles off it into a dark wood, becomes lost in thick undergrowth, skin ripped by brambles, until finally, lurching about in the darkness, he falls down a ravine, lies sprawled in the dry leaves and branches at the bottom, barely twitching, and so forth.
Diseases could be named, they have been named, I am not going to name them. This is not about diseases. Unless thoughts of death are a disease.
Roy didn’t think about death, he wagged his way up to it.
This is about scraps, about scraps of paper that won’t fit together. This is about litter.
I, Harold Nivenson …
In the beginning it was 5 X 8 index cards arranged in a steel index-card box. Later it was 3 X 5 index cards arranged in a fiberboard index-card box. There were several boxes, at different times, several steel boxes followed by several fiberboard boxes. Months ago, shortly after Roy died, when I had stopped going about as I used to, I ran out of 3 X 5 cards. I make do with ordinary typing paper now. I fold a sheet three times, then tear along the folds, making eight 4¼ X 2¾ slips that I carry in my pocket, keep in a box, or just throw away.
When I empty my pockets at night, I take the slips that have not been written on and stack them on the window ledge near the bed, where I can reach them if there is something to jot down. I used to put the others, the ones containing the day’s scribbles, in the cardboard box under the bed. Lately I have taken to throwing those away. It was after Roy died that I started throwing them away.
I have gone from a professionally manufactured index-card system to a homemade amateur system, which is not a system at all but just a stacking arrangement, a pile or even a boxful.
On the rare occasions that my scrawl runs on to a second or even a third, fourth, and fifth card or slip, I fasten them together with a paper clip, forming a sheaf or, more rarely still, a booklet.
I don’t know how long this has
been going on. I don’t remember when Roy died. I thought it was last fall, but it might have been the fall before that. Two men came to move my bed down to the parlor—that was last fall. So it was the fall before that. It is an antique iron bed. They put it where the sofa used to be. Now the sofa stands by itself in the middle of the room.
My lair, as I think of it now, consists of this room (the so-called parlor), a “studio” across the wide entrance hall, a dining room, a small “study,” a kitchen with adjacent scullery, and a screen porch accessed through a door in the kitchen. Upstairs are two big bedrooms, two smaller bedrooms, and a bath. The third floor, under the roof, holds a dormered attic that runs the length of the house, with exposed rough-hewn rafters. The bath is bigger than the smaller bedrooms; the plumbing is ancient. There was a bathroom downstairs until the floor rotted through. At the front entrance is a vestibule. Benches with hinged lids line the sides of the vestibule, and there are coat hooks on the walls above the benches. I don’t know whose coats are on the hooks. Hats as well.
I have pushed an armchair—a red velvet wing chair with matching ottoman—over next to a large window adjacent to my bed. From here I look out upon the small world that I have come to think of as mine. I have come to feel this chair as the center of the house. From here I make journeys, treks, painful forays, into the outer reaches, the bedrooms upstairs, the bathroom, the porch, sometimes out into the little yard in back.
On sunny days the big south-facing windows make this a bright room. At night it is dim and almost unbearably depressing. What lights there are—six tiny candle-flame bulbs in a brass chandelier, a standing lamp in a corner behind a second, leather armchair where I used to sit and read—make only feeble headway against the high, deep-blue ceiling receding into shadow above the chandelier, the uniform beige of the wallpaper. The large dining room, through an arched doorway, is papered in marbled Venetian red and is even more depressing than this one. I think of it as the melancholy room.
I could, of course, turn on the frame lights above the paintings. The room would be brighter then, but unbearable in a different way. The oppressive proximity of so many illuminated paintings pressing in upon me from all sides would make it a completely impossible room.
I shit and piss in a yellow plastic bucket that I keep under the bed and cover with a dinner plate when not in use. Some days, if I am feeling sprier than some other days, I haul the bucket upstairs and dump it out in the toilet. Otherwise I empty it in the sink in the kitchen and use a wooden spoon to force the stuff down through the drain sieve.
I used to shit in the bucket only when I was taken by surprise. Once I had to shit on the stairs, hanging on to the banister, taken by surprise. That was a phase, of dark thoughts and relaxed bowels. I am confident it is behind me now.
Roy was a tidy animal. When I was not able to take him out anymore he learned to shit in the basement, always in the same corner. I would do the same except that the stairs going down there are just as numerous and steep as the ones going to the second floor.
A small gingko tree stands in front of the house, and there is a streetlight on an electric pole across the way. When I have turned off at night a pale trapezoidal window lies across my bed, and in that window, if there is a breeze, leaf shadows move in ghostly silence. I hold out my hands, the leaves move over them, and it is eerie that I can’t feel them.
I can’t see Professor Diamond’s house from my chair. For that I have to stand and place my right cheek against the window casing. From that position I can see most of a large elaborately laced Victorian house artfully painted in pink and blue. I am not comfortable spending a lot of time in that position, so she comes and goes unobserved for the most part.
Professor Diamond possesses a thin mouth, prominent nose, deep-set eyes, black hair pulled back severely and tied in a bun, long neck, body of Venus aging. Her face is sculpted, handsome, and predatory. “Aquiline,” I suppose. She is not as old as I am.
My house and Diamond’s house are the largest on our street, which runs uphill five blocks to the avenue, to the Sunday bells of Saint Stephen’s Catholic church and the feudal towers of the YMCA, and down three blocks to the park, with only a single traffic light. A cyclist who catches that on green can roll the length of the street, from avenue to park, without pedaling.
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 exper
ience 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.