The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [151]
The vet came in armed with a hypodermic full of barbiturate, which he inserted into the IV of one her hind legs as Martin kneeled down and placed one of his big hands over her tiny stomach and a finger under her head. “You’re going to sleep now,” he managed as the vet plunged the syringe into the IV and Martin looked into her dark green eyes for the last time and saw a flicker of the aurora borealis, and then nothing at all, and he knew that she was dead. He felt baffled by her lifeless form as he picked her up and held her for the first and last time while great drops splashed out of his eyes against the floor. He considered her mitten-paws, which he caressed between his thumb and index finger, and thought about the cold and arbitrary side of nature, its complete disregard for fairness or worth in the choice of life or death. With this certainty came a rush of hatred for life, if it meant having to die in a clinical hell so far from anything of comfort you had ever known, nor did he hesitate to acknowledge an even deeper hatred for those he felt confident would belittle this display of grief from a very large and once athletic man for a very tiny cat, probably just one of thousands that were dying all over the world at this exact second; he recalled a piece in the Times lamenting the money spent on pets with so many disasters in the world, as if one were the cause of the other, and he hated the logical part of himself that agreed with all of them, and the accompanying sense of shame he felt at his incapacity to love anyone more than Beatrice.
But as this crippled truth washed over him, it felt as pure as anything he had ever known, and he swore that as long as Beatrice was dead—and her tiny, limp body, fifty times smaller than his own, proved that she was—he would not forget her, which was the only faith he would ever believe in. He tenderly placed her back onto the stainless-steel table and covered her with a hospital blue plastic padded blanket, so that only her head poked out from underneath. He thought of the many nights when she, in effect, had done the same for him, watching over him as he had drifted off to sleep. She had been so small, so fragile, and so ephemeral, really a most insignificant piece of the universe, and in this regard—he realized as he considered the futility he had experienced trying to save her—no different from him. Yet she had been aware and unstinting in her awareness, for was it not true, he next realized, that, as much as he had provided for her—in the most obvious and practical of ways—she had also cared for him?
He touched her one last time and tried to close her eyelids, which did not work. He felt her paw and then opened the door. “Requiescat in pace, Beatrice,” he whispered through the glass pane and, looking back, feared he would never leave the room behind.
OUTSIDE, HE SLOWLY walked west under an alabaster sky marked by the blue perimeter of an infected blister; it more than festered, it felt permanent, and he tried and failed to imagine a time when it had not been one hundred degrees, when he could take more than two steps without feeling the sting of sweat in his eyes, or the spongy wet elastic of his boxer shorts as they expanded and contracted around his waist. He looked at his arms, where the scratches were starting to heal, and he regretted that, soon enough, every sign of Beatrice would be forever relegated to his dreams and memories. In a daze, he stumbled across Central Park. He considered taking a cab, but the thought of stopping and starting made him nauseated; he again opted for the subway but decided to get