Authors: Martin Kihn
“I believe in her.”
Gloria exhales on the line, as though trying to cool down her phone.
“You will be nervous,” she says. “Hola will pick up on that.”
“I’m meditating.”
I wait for a moment before saying what I’d really called to say:
“Do you want to come with us?”
I
DECIDE WHAT
the situation calls for is an immediate run-through of the Bernese readiness situation. I have to see if my citizen canine is prepared for public consumption.
Dogs, unlike people, are extraordinarily site specific: where they are is
who
they are. So seeing my double-coated darling-in-training on the wall of my brain in a stadium with a thousand people in a crush, hands extended like cattle prods to pet her, dogs all around her,
hot
dogs all around her … not to mention myself, the weak strand of hemp in the rope, exuding a profound lack of faith in her manners … well, none of this contributes to our canine-human equanimity.
So I run her through the CGC from beginning to end, for the very first time, in the lobby of my building. Our doorman Jesus functions as the “friendly stranger” because he has a bulldog, adores Hola, and knows how to act around dogs.
And I am happy to see Hola handle test items #1 to 3 very well: she sits as Jesus approaches me and shakes my hand, stands gently as he pets her, and is, of course, so perpetually gorgeous that “Appearance and grooming” (item #3) might as well have been written by her.
We punt the crowd scenes, items #4 and 5, making do with a guy who walks by with a mouse amp and a little girl.
And like most dogs who have taken puppy kindergarten five
times, Hola’s sit, down, stay, and recall are well-rehearsed and basically solid.
We skip “Reaction to another dog” (#8) because no other dogs happen by.
And her distraction resistance (#9) has been chiseled to an iron point over a half-decade trotting the sidewalks of Washington Heights.
Which leads us to the easy #10, “Supervised separation,” where the dog is left with an unknown person for three minutes while the owner goes out of sight. I have always assumed this item is so easy that not only have we never trained for it—what’s to train?—but we have never even tried it.
“Never mind the last one,” I say to Jesus, “you probably have to get back to the desk.”
“Let’s do it,” he says. “My Bo had big trouble with it.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
And I do.
I say, as we are instructed to do, “Will you watch my dog, please?” Then I surrender the leash to Jesus and walk away.
The requirement to pass this item is simple: the dog must
not
show signs of agitation, including, as enumerated in the evaluators’ guidelines: whining, howling, barking, pacing, panting, breathing hard, pulling, acting insecure, or eliminating on the evaluator’s shoe.
No sooner had I turned my back to leave than Hola starts in on the first one.
I go into the mailbox area, closing the door behind me, and I can hear her whining get more and more frantic. At thirty seconds, she has graduated to full-throated barks.
“Stay, girl! Stay there!
” from Jesus is replaced, within a few seconds, by:
“Calm the fuck down Hola!”
And her feet scratching on the marble floor and—
At forty-five seconds I swing open the door, and Hola rips herself away from Jesus and runs toward me as though I’ve just returned from ten years at sea.
“Well,” says Jesus with a certain unattractive wisdom, “that one needs a little work.”
And then my phone rings.
I
MEET MY FRIEND
D
ARRYL
, the soft-spoken lawyer, in the lobby of a new twenty-story condo on West Sixty-third Street, just east of the Lincoln Center–Fordham University complex.
The super standing next to him is pint-sized and flat-faced, black-haired, with a hard conspiratorial mouth, and as I come in off the street and shake out my umbrella from the rain, I see him and Darryl huddled over the house phone on the front desk, staring at it as though it is about to move.
“What’s going on?” I ask them.
The two older men turn to me with deeply tired eyes, and I realize this “situation”—as Darryl had described it to me on the phone—is a lot more serious than I thought.
“He’s not letting anybody in,” says Darryl. “Not answering the door.”
“His voice mail is full,” I say.
“This gentleman is going to let us in. We might have to take him … take him to—”
“He has a sister, right?”
“We called her,” says the super, whose name I never got, “but she’s tired of his bullshit.”
“Hold on,” I say. “He’s done this before?”
“Like twenty times. Can’t say I blame her at all. It’s horrible to say but—”
“Let’s just go upstairs,” says Darryl.
The whole way down in the cab I was obsessing about item #10. I could not believe we’d come so far, worked so hard, and that we still wouldn’t get our CGC because Hola had decided to make another item the one she just won’t do.
I’d succeeded in getting her to stop jumping on people, in controlled situations, and then the exercise I take for granted becomes the one she will almost definitely fail. Why that one? The
easiest
one? The one I then believed, wrongly, cannot even be trained.
It felt to me as though Hola was trying to mock me, trick me, yes, stab me in the back.
Dogs under stress will practice displacement, doing something like sniffing the ground furiously when you’re trying to train them to retrieve; it’s how they wish something away. Looking back, I was performing my own human displacement to avoid dealing with what Darryl had told me on the phone.
And, really, it isn’t until we follow the little super into the eighth-floor studio apartment and see what is in there that I let go of the CGC. For what we enter is a nightmare, one that in many ways still hasn’t stopped.
The hallway is very dark, although it is daytime. There is a mildly antiseptic smell in the air, like lemon-scented Lysol. We step over an arsenal of corrugated Grey Goose vodka cartons, and the super turns on the light in the hallway.
I remember the stunning silence, the scream of lowered shades.
Darryl forges down the hallway into the living room, repeating, “Clark? Are you here? It’s Darryl and Marty. The super let us in. Clark? Are you decent? Clark?”
He has a deep and calm voice, and a surplus of what Cesar would call calm-assertive energy. Usually dressed in country-squire casual from Orvis, he is a tall man with militaristic hair that he treats with floral-scented oils, strident blue eyes, a weakish nose, and a sharp chin he conceals behind some carefully pruned steel-gray foliage.
One of the top criminal attorneys in the city at one point, he is now retired to a duplex on West End Avenue with a third or fourth partner, a man he obviously adores, and a six-year-old adopted son with some developmental issues. He is about seventy, has ten years’ sobriety, and sponsors a lot of women and a few straight men, including Clark.
As the super goes into the kitchen flipping on lights, I follow Darryl into the living room.
Décor is Ikea modern but surprisingly sparse. A yellow-gold carpet covers the floor, and the furniture consists of a dark-brown leather sofa, a cheap halogen floor lamp, and the world’s largest HD television set bolted to the wall. I don’t see a book, a table, a picture, a pet.
I don’t see a life.
But then, stepping around the front of the sofa, I spot the distinctive navy-blue paperback cover of the Big Book lying on the carpet. On top of it, squared in its center like a design exercise, is the iPhone Clark has stopped answering.
In a way, the absence of clutter—things like pizza boxes, candy bar wrappers, crushed beer cans, cigarette butts—is much more alarming than a big pile of crap. It betrays a state of mind at a very odd angle from life.
“Not here,” says Darryl. “Are you sure he didn’t leave?”
“Sure, I’m sure,” says the super. “I watched him stumble up this morning, and I’ve been on all day.”
“There another way out?”
“Nope. Gotta go past me.”
“Then he’s in the bedroom,” I say.
Darryl and I look at one another and simultaneously think:
After you
.
I see now that this is a small apartment, maybe eight hundred square feet in total, much smaller than I’d imagined a successful banker with a large, rambunctious family would enjoy. I see no evidence that there had ever been a boxer named Joey living here, and, believe me, there would be evidence. The kitchen looks like a white box with a stove. The living room like a movie theater in the middle of the night.
And the bedroom—well, the bedroom is an absolute wreck.
The door to the bedroom is at the end of a short, windowless corridor. Darryl, being bolder than I am, leads the way. He flips the light switch, but nothing happens.
“Bulb burned out,” he says, needlessly. Then he knocks on the door, says, “Hey, Clark, you in there?”
And we go in.
Light-blocking shades are drawn, which makes the odor more prominent. Vomit, layered with the sickly twinge of something that smells like cough syrup.
“Clark?”
I step carefully to the window and open the shades. I see the walls first: they’ve been sprayed with a layer of bile, laced with blood, as though from an airbrush, but it happened days ago now because the residue is dried and flaking off the paint. The only furniture is a king-size bed whose sheets have been stripped and lie in a pile on the floor at its foot.
A thin pad of broken glass shards surrounds the bed as though they are tiles waiting to be set. A pile of a dozen or so
vodka bottles rises from the glass-mined carpet under the rain-spattered window like an offering to some pagan god of the hunt.
“Shit,” says Darryl. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” says the super. “We should’ve done this sooner. I thought he wanted …”
Then, as one, we pivot to the bathroom-door handle, which is turning, moving downward, and the door eases open and there is Clark the Banker looking like a hundred square miles of graveyard in a storm.
His habitual red rugby shirt is untucked and caked with mucous and spit, and his rumpled tan khakis sit low on his hips. He isn’t wearing his glasses and his eyes are cavernous and black, shot through with bloody spiders, and his skin is damp, pale, and loose. His hair, strangely, is wet; moisture drips onto his shoulders as he sways in place, staring not at us but at a point among us, below us, into a reality that is deeper than our own.
“Hey guysh,” he slurs, with a slippery smile, “hey there.”
“How you doing?” I ask him.
“Fuck you,” he says and falls forward.
After the EMTs gurney an unconscious Clark into the Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Room, Darryl and I sit for ten hours in the waiting area unable to learn much of anything, except that he is still alive.
I don’t know Darryl all that well, but those hours together bring us closer, and he tells me some of what I’d been unable to see for myself.
“I think Clark’s been drinking on and off for years,” Darryl says.
“He told me he had like ten years’ sober.”
“We are liars. You should know that.”
“What about his family? His wife?”
“He’s been divorced since I knew him, four or five years. There’s kids but he lost custody because of the drinking. He hasn’t seen them in at least that long. Doesn’t talk to his wife.”
“I can’t believe it,” I say. “He told me—what about his job? He should go to rehab, right? Can he take time off?”
Darryl looks at me with a kind of terrible pity.
“Oh, Marty,” he says to me, shaking his head, “he hasn’t worked in years. The guy lost everything. He doesn’t have anything left.”
“That dog? Was he a lie too?”
“What dog?”
“Joey the boxer.”
All Darryl does is shrug, and the badly dressed crowd suffers around us in the pain of mandatory bad news pounding them from the TVs mounted in the corners of the room.
“Oh my God,” I say suddenly, touching Darryl’s vivid orange Thomas Pink shirtsleeve. “I just realized something.”
“What?”
“Why Clark gave me that cat of his, Ruby.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew he couldn’t take care of her. He loved the cat.”
Around hour eight, when we are both beginning to wonder how much we really want to suffer for this guy Clark anyway, Darryl breaks a pensive silence: “It was the God Thing.”
We say it like that, capital letters: the God Thing. All of us know what it means. We’re in a spiritual program, a God-centered program, and a lot of people at first really wish that it weren’t.
“Oh, yeah?”
“How are you with that?”
“Okay,” I say. “I believe in God. More or less.”
“It sends more people out than anything else. It’s too bad. Clark kept saying, ‘I know I’m an alcoholic, but I’m just not comfortable with the God Thing.’ And I’m nodding my sympathy nod, you know, ‘Yes, I understand, of course; why would you be?’ ”
“Right.”
“But I’m saying, ‘So you think you’re the fucking center of the universe? There’s nothing more powerful than you are? Can you think of anything?’ He was saying, ‘No, I really can’t.’ And I start listing things like the government, the national parks, Yosemite, Alzheimer’s, earthquakes, the rain—”
“Harvard Business School—”
“You know, death. Death is bigger than you are.”
We stop talking for a while, both of us thinking that within a year Clark the Ex-Banker could quite plausibly be dead.
The next day I take Hola to church. It happens to be the annual Feast of St. Francis, the day on which good Catholic animals like Hola are blessed, so we drive down to my parish at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle near Lincoln Center.
“I’m going to need you to be properly receptive to the Holy Spirit,” I tell her. “Open your heart and pray for God’s blessing.”
What’s a Holy Spirit?
she asks, her eyes narrowing skeptically in the rearview mirror.
“It’s complicated,” I say. “It’s like a feeling you get.”