Enslaved by Ducks (13 page)

A month later, however, she stopped eating again. Her balance
problems worsened. During dinner, Linda liked to reach down from her chair with a piece of the ubiquitous bread-machine toast that all of our animals loved except the cat. Bertha would stand on her tiptoes to reach a piece. Trying to rekindle her appetite, Linda tempted Bertha to her side with the morsel, but any attempts to reach the toast sent the rabbit crashing over backward. At the vet’s the following day, Dr. Colby told us that the parasite had a thirty-day breeding cycle. A second injection should eradicate the little buggers for good. But she passed along the bad news that the accompanying digestive problems had allowed a buildup of toxins in Bertha’s body, causing irreversible nerve damage.

“Rabbits’ digestive systems are extremely sensitive,” she explained. “If you make a sudden change in a rabbit’s diet, or if a rabbit goes too long without eating, toxins that are normally expelled with the feces get into their systems.” She told us it was imperative that, if anything like this ever happened to Bertha again, we should keep her eating by whatever means possible.

We saw Dr. Colby again the following month when Bertha’s symptoms recurred. A month later when another bout made her even weaker, she told us that nothing further could be done. She had researched Bertha’s condition. She had even consulted with experts at the Michigan State University School of Veterinary Medicine, and they had offered no solution.

We took her at her word and resigned ourselves to keeping Bertha as happy as possible no matter what the outcome. I combed our yard for tender dandelion leaves every afternoon and evening and coaxed her into eating these. Because she was occasionally too weak to chew the pelleted food she needed, we soaked her rabbit Purina in water or pineapple juice until it attained an oatmealish consistency. Shoving this under her nose several times a day, we erupted in delighted cries of encouragement whenever she took a
mouthful. I don’t know much about the alien psyche of rabbits, but I’m convinced that she ate the mush for our sake as much as hers.

By the end of the summer, she had lost so much strength that we were feeding her from a syringe. Even then, she seemed to enjoy life too much for us to take it away from her, stretching out in the sunlight in her pen and rolling delightedly on the ground. When I’d pick her up to carry her back into the house, she would give my hand a grateful lick instead of fighting me as before. A new round of nerve damage left her listing to one side like a cargo ship that had made too many transatlantic passages. Because she was no longer able to travel in a straight line and couldn’t slip away through the backyard fence, we finally gave her the chance to run free. As soon as I set her down in the warm grass, she took off in a long, smooth curve that eventually brought her right back to our feet. “We should change her name to Boomerang,” I joked.

One Saturday morning, when Linda was out of town and Bertha could barely sit up anymore, I took her to a vet down the road and had her put to sleep as I held her. Back at home I carried her around the yard until I found a pleasant spot beneath a large pine tree to bury her. A number of times in the ensuing weeks, I was sure I saw her ghost cantering through our living room or sitting on the upstairs steps.

I can think of no other circumstances where we develop such closeness with our animals as when we see them through serious illness. Linda’s attentiveness always put mine to shame. Each time Bertha had experienced a setback, I’d be so demoralized, I could hardly bear to be in the same room with the bunny. But Linda plugged away with a resolute cheeriness that helped me keep going. After Bertha died, my initial sense of relief shifted to a thick gloom. As sorry as I was about losing the bunny, I was sorrier for myself. I grew expert at sitting stonily on the edge of the bed in
half-darkness or lying sprawled on the couch with an arm cocked over my eyes. Motivating myself to simply move my brooding to another room required the gathering up of vast internal forces. Strangely, I was in pretty fair spirits at the office. The environment was different, the tasks were clearly defined, and attendance was imperative in order to keep the paychecks flowing. That meant I wasn’t as far gone as I acted at home, but still bad enough that I woke up shaking most mornings.

We were having dinner at our friend Claudia’s house one evening. Linda was praising the baked vegetables while I slumped in my chair next to the vegetable tureen. Claudia convinced me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist to try Zoloft, which she had just begun taking with good results. “It will make an enormous change in your life,” she insisted. “I heard about this old guy at a nursing home, he was one of these downtrodden guys people love to run over, and Zoloft worked wonders for that little man.” I considered this all the endorsement I needed.

D
R
. G
LASER CAME
close to proving the old saw that psychiatrists have more neuroses than the neurotics they treat. Tall, stiff with unease at being human, and wearing the demeanor of a fussy choral-group leader, along with a mustard-colored suit, he drifted into the waiting room and introduced himself. When I offered him my hand, he took it as reluctantly as if I had presented him with a halibut. Inside a charmless office that might have belonged to a loan officer, I gave him a detailed description of my bedspread concealment during Stanley’s sickness, prolonged sadness at Bertha’s passing, bouts of chair-gripping nervousness at breakfast, and panic attacks dating back to the Ford administration. “I just finished reading
Listening to Prozac
,” I said, “and it sounds like I’m living in what the author calls ‘the penumbra of
depression.’ I would like to try an antianxiety drug and see if it helps.”

“A parrot?” he inquired, after my outpouring had ended. “Was it a real parrot?” he asked in a tone of voice usually reserved for dealing with dangerous individuals. Immediately I understood the folly of choosing a mental health professional from the Yellow Pages based solely on proximity to home.

“Yes, it was a real parrot. An African grey parrot.” I answered. “Named Stanley Sue,” I heedlessly added, though he ignored this last ripe piece of Freudian fruit.

“Which antianxiety medication would you like to try?”

“I’ve heard good things about Zoloft,” I ventured, amazed that getting brain chemistry–altering prescription drugs should be this effortless. I had anticipated the kind of resistance my physician had mustered when I had asked him about serotonin drugs. Instead of writing me a prescription, he had suggested I take up racquetball instead.

“Zoloft is an antianxiety drug,” Dr. Glaser agreed, “and the side effects are minimal. What dosage would you like to try?”

“What would you recommend?” I asked, uncertain how my advice on this point could matter.

“The lowest clinical dosage is fifty milligrams. Would you like to start out on one hundred milligrams?” His faint smile conveyed a measure of genuine pleasure.

“You’re the doctor,” I rejoined weakly.

“I’ll have to ask you a few questions first.” He paused before cracking open his laptop. “Will the computer bother you? Some people don’t like the computer.”

“The computer doesn’t bother me.”

“If you’re sure.” On the Formica-topped desk behind him sat a second computer with a full-size monitor displaying the screensaver
Johnny Castaway. The cartoon depicted the misadventures of a luckless soul marooned on a desert island, which struck me as a bad choice for a psychiatrist’s office. Reading from a file on his laptop, Dr. Glaser took me through a series of questions concerning my medical history, upbringing, education, and propensity for suicide. At the conclusion of each question, he looked me squarely in the middle of my forehead. I was unsure whether he had a vision problem or was as adverse to ocular intimacy with his patients as he was to shaking hands. Lowering his head as if embarrassed by this aspect of his profession, he delivered the last queries in a monotone. “Do people follow you? Do you hear voices? Do people plot against you?” He spoke so quietly, he might have been talking to himself. I wanted to truthfully answer “sometimes” to each of these poorly worded questions in order to score semantic points, but decided it was better to tell him no and make a fast escape from the island.

Four days later, I experienced my first Zoloft jolt. Poised on the living room couch with a half-hour to go until
Wheel of Fortune
, I was enveloped by an energized calm. The world and my outlook on the world became suffused with light. “It’s as if I’ve had this cotton in my head for all these years, and now it’s fallen out,” I explained to Linda, who smiled warily in response. Anxious to share my newly acquired Buddha nature, I strode upstairs and petted Penny. Neither of us exchanged a word, but as I stared at her, I received a revelation. I suddenly saw her as a being. Not as a pet or an underling, but as a complex personality. On the one hand, her face and eyes revealed the same trapped intensity as a human soul stuck in a physical body, but on the other hand her depth far exceeded any anthropomorphizing I might throw at her. She was limitless and unknowable, and I was honored to have her as my friend. Then I changed her litter and floated back downstairs.

The next day, my mood was even brighter. Under a spell of unusual ambitiousness, I devoted my Saturday to long neglected tasks around the house rather than glumly avoiding work per my usual weekend schedule. I carted animal cages outdoors and washed them to a shine with a high-pressure hose nozzle. I revved up the gasoline-powered trimmer and decimated an army of weeds between the side yard and the barn. The evergreen tree under which we’d buried Bertha had succumbed to an unknown blight, and Linda had repeatedly encouraged me to hire a man to chop it down. Now, wielding my chain saw for only the sixth time since I had purchased it and somehow mastering my timidity at its ability to maim, I lopped down the tree, cut the trunk and branches into matchsticks, and scattered them to the winds beyond our fence. Toppling the evergreen revealed a three-foot-high redbud tree standing almost on top of Bertha’s grave. Neither of us had ever seen the tree before.

“It’s a gift from God,” said Linda.

The Zoloft, as it turned out, was not. As the day progressed, I burned too intensely with energy that was not my own, a 110-volt bulb spliced into a 220-volt line. By Sunday, my nerves were acting up. By Monday, I was a blubbering wreck barely able to quiver into the office. En route to an out-of-town relative’s house the following Saturday, I vaulted out of the car and collapsed wailing on the grass next to a freeway mileage marker. A call to my psychiatrist brought a surprisingly lighthearted response. “You might want to play with your dosage a little bit. Try cutting it in half.”

The half dosage turned out to be just the half ticket I needed to feel half human again. Events like eating an egg at breakfast felt substantially less threatening, and I could actually make it through an entire morning sitting at my desk at work for periods of up fifteen minutes at a continuous stretch. While I couldn’t claim to have
achieved the meditative state of mind I had hoped pharmaceuticals might bestow upon me, neither was I any longer a teakettle on rolling boil. I happily made due with simmer.

Things could have been a lot worse. I could have been a duck. A phone call from my sister, Joan, brought the news that her husband, Jack, had rescued a Muscovy duck from the parking lot of the automotive-parts business where he maintained the inventory database. The escaped domestic animal had blundered onto the property to search beneath a Dumpster for tidbits from employee lunches. Jack’s coworkers welcomed the hungry visitor with a mirthful stone-throwing contest until Jack eased the competition to a halt. Flinging a jacket over the bird, he caught her easily, stashing her in his truck until quitting time.

Stretching our kitchen phone cord to the limit, Linda relayed Joan’s description on a sentence-by-sentence basis of how they had managed to obtain the duck, while I sat in the bedroom, eyes foolishly brushing the same two sentences of a mystery novel. “Now they don’t know what to do with the poor thing,” Linda reported. “They would love to keep the duck, but they don’t have anywhere to put her,” she relayed. “She wants to know if we could possibly take her.” She pointed the handset at me from the doorway to the living room. “Here, talk to your sister.”

I waved off the phone in surrender. “Okay.”

“Don’t we have room for a duck?” Linda urged, certain she had misunderstood my answer. She tightened the phone cord even more to move a step into the bedroom, giving new meaning to the concept of a telephone extension.

“I’m perfectly happy to take the duck,” I assured her. At that moment, a lifetime with a duck seemed a small price to pay for avoiding her otherwise inescapable argument that a duck wouldn’t be any trouble at all. Having heard that line of reasoning speciously
applied to a rabbit and a parrot, I never wanted to hear it again. Anyway, two factors stood in the duck’s corner. First, we owned a barn large enough to house a family of duck-billed dinosaurs. And the barn was situated far enough from the house that with luck I would have little involvement in the duck’s upbringing, maintenance, and walks at the end of a leash. Second, we had visited a farmer who extolled the quiet voices of his female Muscovies. According to him, they made a gentle rasping sound inaudible at fifty feet.

“We can take her?” asked Linda delightedly, when she understood that I had caved in. “He said we can take her,” Linda told my sister. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to have a duck.” Averting her face from the phone, she passed along the news to me. “I’ve always wanted a duck.”

It had been just after dinner when Joan called, but in the inky recesses of the barn it seemed closer to midnight. Instead of expecting a duck to settle into such gloomy accommodations, we cordoned off the workroom from the rest of the basement with a plastic kitchen gate that Binky had once chewed through, establishing an equally gloomy area for the Muscovy that was at least inside the house. Linda spread two weeks’ worth of newspapers on the floor while I studied a wall bristling with six hand tools that had so far seen employment only in pen- and fence-building projects. I had hoped I’d never have to pick them up again, but I now experienced a twinge of foreboding.