Love May Fail (13 page)

There’s blood trickling out of his mouth, and his one eye has rolled into the back of his head, but I grab my keys, lay him gently on the passenger-side seat of my truck, and—even though my veterinarian is an hour’s drive away and most likely won’t be in her office for another four hours or so—still barefoot, I shift into drive and hit the gas.

“Wake up, Albert Camus. You’re going to be okay, little buddy,” I say, looking over at him, patting his still-warm head, paying no attention to the fact that I am driving a truck.

Toward the end of my steep dirt driveway, my right front tire slips into the rut I’ve been meaning to have the plow guy fill in, the steering wheel jerks right, and I smash into an old oak tree.

The airbag inflates, punching me in the nose.

I blink.

My vision blurs.

I throw up two bottles of red wine and a pound of bloody meat onto the deflating airbag and my lap.

I cry.

I punch the dashboard.

I hyperventilate.

I try to spit out the awful taste in my mouth.

A rush of blood fills my head and then drains away too quickly, like an ocean wave crashing on the shore, grabbing everything on the beach and retreating back to whence it came.

A strange feeling comes over me, and I hope it is death.

I’m done.

I surrender to the first question.

Finally, I black out.

The winter sun wakes me rudely.

Albert Camus is dead on the passenger-side floor; he’s stiff as a stuffed fox.

I grab my cane and get out of the truck.

The hood is crumpled. The front bumper has become a part of the thick and noble oak tree—almost like an accessory maybe, a tree belt.

Part of me knows that this is it for me.

I live at the end of a dirt road. I picked this property because no one is ever around. No neighbors. No passing traffic—the connecting road is three miles from my driveway, and I have not walked more than a half mile or so in one stretch since the series of surgeries that put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I do not own a telephone—land or cell. No computer or Internet. This is my Walden, the closest I’ll ever get to being Henry David Thoreau.

I have no friends. No one would ever visit. I have to drive to my handyman’s home whenever I need him. The plow man is contracted to come whenever more than three inches of snow falls, but we only had a dusting last night, and according to the paper I read on Sunday, no storms are forecast for the coming week, so I know I can pretty much die alone out here without anyone trying to save me.

The smell of gas is pungent, and I see that the truck is indeed leaking—most likely a fuel hose has come loose. I think about lighting the whole thing on fire, sending Albert Camus to his next incarnation in a blaze of glory, like he’s a Viking dog king and our truck is his boat, which it sort of was. But instead I start to strip off my puke-covered clothes and throw them onto the snow piles melting on the sides of my dirt driveway as I cane my way back to the house.

Without bothering to take off my underwear, I enter the shower and let the hot spikes rain down on me until the water heater’s tank is exhausted, at which point I towel off, dress, and examine the window in my bedroom, which is still open.

“What did you hear or see, Albert?” I ask the cold air.

I stick my head outside and look around.

Nothing.

No animal prints in the snow.

Nothing at the edge of the woods.

Nothing.

I shut the window.

I think about whether my dog may have actually committed suicide, and decide it is possible—especially since I named him Albert Camus, and went on and on about the first question for years.

It was like I had been training him to find meaning or perish, then I continually told him that there was no meaning. And the suicide pact I offered him—how was he to know I wasn’t invoking it with my heavy drinking last night? I mean, he was only a dog. His brain was smaller than a peach.

What dog could live up to such a weighty name when it came to solving his master’s existential crisis?

Maybe I put too much pressure on him.

Perhaps his heart was like an emotional tick, absorbing all of my
anxiety and regrets and inaction and sadness, swelling until it outgrew his little toy poodle chest, until he just could no longer take the anticipation of the inevitable pop.

I remember once reading an essay by or an interview with David Foster Wallace, in which he says that suicide is akin to jumping from the top floor of a burning skyscraper—it’s not that you are unafraid of jumping, but the fall is the lesser of two terrors.

Was jumping out the window preferable to living with me?

Had I emotionally abused Albert Camus without knowing it?

He had never before shown any interest in the bedroom window—none whatsoever—so why last night?

These questions are beginning to hurt my head. I go to the kitchen and open up another bottle of red wine—a rioja—and spark a Parliament Light cigarette for breakfast.

I pour a glass and down it in one gulp without even tasting.

I pour another glass, and try to figure out what to do.

I light a second cigarette just as soon as I’ve finished the first.

“You killed your dog,” I say to myself. “What type of a man drives his dog to suicide?”

As I chain-smoke and drink away the morning, I can’t help but think about Edmond Atherton, the kid who smashed my bones with a baseball bat and ended my teaching career.

For six months he sat against the right wall of my classroom, just under a black-and-white photo of Toni Morrison, and he never made a sound as the rest of the class discussed Herman Hesse, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camus, Ivan Turgenev, Paulo Coelho, and so many others.

And then one day Edmond Atherton raised his hand and asked if he could speak with me after class. It was a strange request to make in the middle of the lesson, and out of the blue, but I agreed, and redirected the class back to the discussion at hand.

I remember Edmond stayed seated when the bell rang, waited patiently for everyone else to leave the room as he sat almost lifelessly. His calm gave me goose bumps; it was so eerie and . . . forceful. Something had shifted inside him, I’m certain of that now, but it was just a suspicion on that day.

Once we were alone, I said, “What’s on your mind, Edmond?”

He put his hands together with a clap and held them in front of his face like he was about to pray. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I think I found a major flaw in your teaching philosophy. I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of the entire class, which is why I asked to speak privately. But there’s a serious problem regarding your message.”

“Okay.” I forced a laugh. But something inside me knew that this was not going to go very well—that the reason for this talk was more than just regular teenage attention-seeking bullshit. Part of me knew that I was in trouble. Even still, I said, “Let me have it.”

“Are you sure?” he said, tapping his nose with the ends of his forefingers in this almost giddy way. “Because I think you might not be able to teach the way you do once I point this out.”

“Believe me, Edmond, I’m a grizzled veteran with decades of teaching experience under my belt. I can handle it.”

“Okay, then.” He slapped his hands down on the desk hard, which made me flinch, and then he smiled and looked at me for too long, creating a silence that hovered like mustard gas between us. “I admire what you’re trying to do for us, I really do. I mean, it’s nice to be told that we’re all special, capable of the ‘extraordinary.’ Like in that
Dead Poets Society
movie clip you showed us. It’s nice to think we can all seize the day. That we can all make our mark on the world. But it’s not true, is it? I mean, just consider the definition of the word
extraordinary
, right? It’s
an exclusionary word, after all. There have to be many ordinary people for the word
extraordinary
to mean something!”

He was smiling in this madman way.

“What do you really want to talk about, Edmond? What’s eating you up?”

“Your class. I’m getting a little tired of the happy bullshit.”

“Happy bullshit?”

“Yeah. I stomached it for as long as I could, but I just can’t anymore. And I don’t think what you’re teaching is right. I mean, all of the teachers in this school are full of shit, but what you teach is dangerous.”

“Dangerous? How so?”

“I watched the rest of
Dead Poets Society
. The main character kills himself. Is that what you’re trying to do? Get us to kill ourselves too?”

I could see the madness in his eyes, and knew right then that any attempt at defending myself would be unsuccessful, because we were no longer having a rational conversation. But this wasn’t the first irrational conversation I had had with a teenager. So I swallowed my pride and said, “I’m not sure I understand—”

“You tell us that we should all be different, but if we were all different, we’d be the same. Can’t you see that? Not everyone can be different, or we’d lose the sense of the word—just like everyone can’t be extraordinary. You can’t tell average people to be extraordinary and get away with it forever. It’s a mindfuck. And it’s a lie. A pyramid scheme. At some point, someone is going to make you pay.”

“
Pay?
What are you trying to tell me here, Edmond? Because that sounds like a threat to me. Should I feel threatened here?”

“I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. No one listens to me.”

“I’m here, Edmond. And I’m all ears.”

He stood up and put on his backpack very slowly.

Then he looked at his sneakers and giggled like an elementary-school kid who had farted loudly in the middle of class. “I’m sorry, Mr. Vernon. I’m really sorry. I’m just messing with you. You’re the best. High five.”

He raised his hand in the air.

I did not raise mine.

“Are you okay, Edmond?”

“Aces, teach. No five? Okay. I’ll just go then. Off to be extraordinary. I won’t let you down.”

I let him go mostly because I was feeling exhausted that day, and then I forgot about Edmond Atherton as I taught the rest of my classes, went to meetings in the afternoon, and then helped settle a fight between the leads in the school play, who had apparently “hooked up,” which didn’t work out all that well, making their onstage chemistry dodgy at best—and there were tears, which took a lot of energy.

I thought about Edmond as I drove home that night and decided I would ask to speak with him again at the end of class the next day. Maybe he was looking for some extra attention and was attacking as a way to alert me to the fact that he had needs that weren’t being met. I had seen this approach before, and Edmond Atherton was not the first teen to challenge me.

When Edmond arrived in my classroom the next day, I asked if he would stay after class so we might talk, and he said, “Sure, sure, sure. Sure thing,” and then started giggling again.

“Something funny?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said and took his seat.

We were discussing Paulo Coelho’s
The Alchemist
, debating whether there really was a universal language, and whether each of us had a personal legend, when Edmond raised his hand again.

“What if the universe tells you to do something the rest of the world would condemn?”

“Many people have asked this question before. Think about our founding fathers writing the Declaration of Independence. England sure condemned that,” I said. “And that’s only one example.”

“And it’s good to do things that others don’t do, right?” he said. “That’s what you’re always going on and on about in here. The importance of being different?”

Before I could answer, he pulled an aluminum baseball bat from his backpack and charged me.

I remember hearing these awful noises like tree branches breaking and then high-pitched screaming.

He’d hit me half a dozen times before my mind even registered what was happening—elbows, kneecaps, shins, forearms—and all before I hit the floor and lost consciousness.

Later in court, a straight-faced and utterly remorseless Edmond Atherton said he never aimed for my head because he wanted me “to remember” that what he had done was the punishment for my being “wrong.”

They locked Edmond away in an institution for disturbed boys, covered my medical bills—which were astronomical—and gave me a settlement large enough to let me retire and move far away to the woods of Vermont, a place I had never been before in my life. After all the media coverage—not to mention all of the time spent in the hospital recovering from multiple surgeries and then the painful rehab, during which I couldn’t even walk, so I was an easy target for any reporter who was heartless enough to stick a microphone in my face as I wheeled, crutched, and then caned my way through parking lots—I just wanted to be alone, far, far away, where no one would know my name or face. Vermont sounded like such a place.

And that’s how I ended up in this two-story cabin in the middle of the woods, where I’ve rubbed my aching joints, downed Advil at an alarming rate, and served out my time in this ruined body where no one can see me.

“I never thanked the students who stopped Edmond before he killed me,” I say to my wineglass as I light up another cigarette. “Was it because I secretly wanted to die all along? Was it because Edmond was right? He may have been my most extraordinary student ever. That’s the truth, isn’t it? It’s almost funny, when you think about the word
extraordinary
and how many times I used it—like I was Robin Williams playing Mr. Keating.”

I open another bottle of wine.

I also open a second pack of cigarettes and cough up a tremendous amount of phlegm before I resume smoking, wondering how long it will take for a strict diet of cigarettes and wine to kill me.

When I am drunk enough, I retrieve Albert Camus’s body from the ruined truck.

On my deck, sitting in the wooden Adirondack chair, I lay him across my lap and stroke his stiff back, hoping that I can pet him back to life.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I say. “I shouldn’t have talked so much about suicide. But a pact is a pact, right? And maybe we will be reincarnated, find each other again—just as soon as I manage to hold up my end of the bargain.”

I’m very drunk, but I still realize it’s morbid to be petting and talking to a dead dog, and so—through snot and tears and cigarette smoke—I put some wood into the clay chimenea, lay Albert Camus on top, retrieve the gasoline can from the shed, soak my friend, and then toss in a match.

Flames shoot up through the little chimney, followed by a steady thick black plume that is slightly less nauseating than the hiss
ing and bubbling and crackling noises Albert Camus’s carcass is making.

“I’m sorry,” I say over and over as the cold bites my face and hands, while tears burn my cheeks.

When the fire goes out, I know I am truly alone.

I contemplate methods of suicide.

Jumping from the roof seems risky. I may not die immediately, and I don’t want to be eaten alive by coyotes as I rot on the deck in a human nest of broken limbs.

The chain saw in the shed seems too extreme.

Kurt Vonnegut style is an option—I have pills and alcohol and cigarettes.

But I settle on starvation, as it will be a horrific penance for having caused my dog’s suicide.

This is the death sentence I give myself: You will consume nothing but wine until you die, and you will die alone, because you deserve it.