Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [88]
And though I am frantic with worry for him myself, what I hear in Wally’s voice, what shows in his face, is some panic and terror more primal than mine, a pain that seems to go all the way to the root of him. We drive through the parking lot at Herring Cove Beach, a place we often walk, thinking perhaps he might have run there. A town eccentric—a former therapist, I’ve heard, who’s become a vision of Father Christmas in his long white hair and beard, who dresses all in white and walks with a tall walking stick—is crossing the parking lot, and when we pull up beside him Wally rolls down the window and says, “Have you seen my dog?” It’s the voice of a terrified little boy, helpless, utterly alone.
Back home, having accomplished nothing, we’re looking down into the rough January water of the bay churning against the breakwater stones. “Where is he?” Wally demands, as if I or anyone could answer, “Where is he?”
Our descent seemed a long, imperceptible downward glide, but I can see now there were indeed precipitous drops, moments when we stepped down to a new level, a greater depth.
Arden’s accident was such a moment. In Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls there’s a weird and chilling scene when thunder shatters a glass of water on a bedside table; it is, somehow, the beginning of the speaker’s misfortune, the physical manifestation of his illness beginning. A glass shatters and a room goes dark; nothing is ever the same again.
What opened in Wally then was a depth of vulnerability and despair like nothing I’d ever seen in him before. It was about the real loss—was it?—of Arden, of course, but it was more than that, too, Arden and Wally both struck, everything out of his control, everything veering into his life, unstoppable, an event from which he couldn’t be rescued. We didn’t know where Arden was or how badly he might be hurt—did we know where Wally was, or how much he’d been harmed?
We tried to sleep that night, and did, fitfully. I remember walking the beach at five, a bleary dawn, whistling and calling. Late in the morning, the phone rang. Some neighbors, down for the weekend, had gone to town for breakfast, because it was a warm and sunny morning. Reading the bulletin board in front of the café, they’d recognized Arden’s name and description. Then, walking homeward, in front of the bank, Arden appeared, walking—with a rather confused and tentative look, they thought—in the same direction they were going.
“Arden?” they asked. And it seemed his name brought him back from wherever he’d been to the world of connection. He shook his head, as if clearing it, and looked at them uncertainly, and when they said it again he began to wag his tail and step toward them.
He wasn’t hurt; the vet’s poking and prodding later that day wouldn’t reveal a thing. He must have run in sheer terror, and hidden, not knowing where the familiar might be, not knowing how to return to his name.
The men stroked and talked to him until I got there. Wally said he couldn’t handle going, he was so afraid it would be another mistake, the wrong black dog, and he couldn’t bear it again. So I went alone, and when I stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk Arden came hurrying to me, and leaned all his weight against me, and buried his face in my coat.
Later, when both Wally and I were dealing perhaps most directly with the prospect of his dying (not the literal, actual illness, but the preparatory work, the—what to call it? consideration?—which went on about a year and a half ahead of his death) we both struggled in dreams to come to terms. And the dream that shook me most, night after night, centered on Arden. We were walking in a field, the three of us, near a highway, happy, at ease, and then Arden would catch a scent and bound ahead, wild with it, no calling him back, onto the road. He’d be hit, but in each dream there would be a variation—struck and killed, or run away, his situation unknown. I’d wake up in horror, afraid to sleep because I was afraid