Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [129]
I feel like the floor of the restaurant has just slid open. But I don’t show it, or at least I don’t think I do. R.’s placed his disclosure on the table beside what he’s said about L., beside the gossip and business of our lunch. To express sorrow or surprise would somehow seem impolite, would seem to underline the gravity of their situation in a way that won’t do. This dangerous field of contingency, shiny with threat, is where we live now. It’s 1994; of course we’re in this condition.
It’s later, after we’ve parted, after my walk through the park, sun gilding the benches and those who rest or sleep there, kids practicing violent or accomplished descents of the slopes on skates, the sparking narrative of casual cruising going on all around, story of possibility and of flirtation I love—it’s after all that, back in my hotel room, that it hits me.
Maybe, yes, R. and L. will be fine, maybe the men in the workshop will be all right; the old optimistic line, San Francisco, 1989, plays in my head, HIV is not a death sentence, and who knows how any individual will fare, who can predict it. But I’ve seen too much, I’ve lived the long corrosive descent, and now I want to moan or cry it out, from the depth of my stomach, I want to double over and push the grief out of me, for R. and L. and the circle of radiant or uncertain faces around that table last night, hopeful, disenchanted, sorrowing, exhausted, still quick with potential. The epidemic opens out and out, endlessly consuming my generation and the one before and the one after me, immense bitter wave, the floor beneath us pulling back, pulling away, a huge gap opening beneath whatever seemed momentarily solid, downward pull, dizzying absence: multiply, endlessly, these human faces.
I can’t stop thinking of a line of graffiti in Chicago, spray-painted on a lakeshore wall at the end of Lynda’s block:
“Does a snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible?”
Of course it doesn’t; of course I do. Not responsible for the avalanche, but to it, responsible in its wake.
My neighbor’s abusing his dog. Not an outright beating, but a kind of nattering, relentless cruelty that must be making the little spotted beagle crazy. It’s making me crazy just to listen. Every time the dog makes a yip or bark, the man yells at her.
Soon she’s out in the yard, tied to a post, but when she lets out a woof at a passing car or dog he’s at the door chastising her. She doesn’t seem to be able to stop herself, even though she seems to know what’s coming and modulates her barks to little yips I can barely hear.
But her master can hear them, and he comes running out of the house, grabs hold of her collar, and leads her into the back of his four-wheel drive, where her wire cage is waiting. It’s a hot day, and it must be steamy inside that black vehicle, but he locks her in the crate. From my front windows I see her fur gleaming in the shady interior, her pink tongue hanging long and loose.
I’m trying not to look, trying to stay away, but I keep going to the window to check on the dog, who still feels like yipping when something interesting passes by. Then the owner comes flying out of the house, the screen door slamming behind him, and he goes to the back of the car and starts to shake the cage.
Something in me snaps then; I don’t even think about what I’m doing as I run out of the house and out to the garden, and shout across the fence, “I’m not going to stand by and watch you treat that dog that way! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
I don’t even know what else I say; it’s an outpouring of defense for the animal and condemnation of the man, who stands there and sputters and says something lame like “She’s fine.”
Which only sets me off again. She’s not fine, this is not fine, I will not accept this. Wally, who lay nine months looking out these windows, would not have accepted this, would not have been able to bear it, would have spoken. Or would have