Becky drove from the house to pick me up this evening at BART, a fifteen- or twenty-minute round trip. We returned to find Zeke lying on the floor, shivering. His back feet had gone out from under him on the hardwood, only a foot from the carpet runner I put down for him. He had pissed himself while lying there, I expect out of fear at his immobility.
I put my hands on his sodden belly and lifted him. He looked at me gratefully, gave me two wags of a painful tail. Becky led him outside for hosing off as I mopped up.
Yesterday he decided not to attempt the front steps. There are three of them, typical concrete porch steps, and he’s never had trouble descending them before. I assumed he was hurting too much for his walk. Becky is home these days and we leave the back door open, so I went to work feeling only a little guilty at the lack of walk. A bit later Becky tried again, and he balked again, and she carried him down the steps. They went to the park.
On Friday I came home and the house stank. There was not a square foot of the carpet runners unmarked by his shit. He couldn’t have helped it. He was sick. We have gotten almost used to the stray turd here and there, two or three some weeks, that seem to tumble out unnoticed, sometimes while he is sleeping. They are discrete and easy to clean. This was not. Successive scrubbings with soap and carpet cleaner could not remove it. We suffered the smell until the next day, then I scrubbed the dried shit out of the rugs with a wire brush.
He is happy still, aside from the pain. He still cherishes the mornings, the cats he wheezes at where they perch above him on the fence, the squirrels he runs those five stiff steps toward, barking. His nose buried in the low Pittosporum hedge on the way into the park, and then again on the way out, every bit as absorbed as four minutes before though no new dogs have come by in the interim. I get down on hands and knees and slap the floor, a play bow, and something in his eyes sparkles for a moment until he remembers, until he remembers. He stands with his left rear foot tucked beneath him and out to the right, a constant cycle of pelvic slump and straightening, staring for hours at the rabbit in his cage or pacing from hallway to bedroom and back all night.
He is ancient at fifteen and a half years old, and I am three times his age. I have changed much since we met, but mainly on the inside. Those changes cannot easily be sniffed out. I am an oak to him, a rock face. He surely no longer remembers the days before we sprang a lithe nine-month whelp from stir. I have been his world forever. My life stretches on past his for perhaps twice his allotted time or more, our time together the center of it. I am immortal to him and yet I find no comfort in it, nor in the prospect of a tidier house next year, an extra hour in the mornings. Were my lifespan flesh I would give him half. His expectant stare has always worked on me. I never managed to teach him not to beg.
