Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(191)

The place was called Hope Clinic. Somehow Jacob had forgotten that, or never bothered to know it. It reminded him of a Kafka quote: “Oh, there is hope, an infinite amount of hope, just not for us.” Just not for you, Argus.

They went to the reception desk.

“This is a checkup?” the secretary asked.

“Yes,” Jacob responded.

He just couldn’t. He wasn’t ready. He’d have another chance with the vet.

Jacob browsed a magazine without focusing his eyes. He remembered the first time one of his kids called him out for looking at his phone instead of at them.

“That’s my boy,” he said to Argus, scratching under his chin. Had he ever called him his boy before?

The tech came and led them to an examination room in the back. The vet took forever, and Jacob offered Argus treats from the glass jar on the counter. But Argus just turned away.

“You’re good,” Jacob told him, trying to be as calming as Max had been. “You’re so good.”

We live in the world, Jacob thought. That thought always seemed to insert itself, usually in opposition to the word ideally. Ideally, we would make sandwiches at homeless shelters every weekend, and learn instruments late in life, and stop thinking about the middle of life as late in life, and use some mental resource other than Google, and some physical resource other than Amazon, and permanently retire mac and cheese, and give at least a quarter of the time and attention to aging relatives that they deserve, and never put a child in front of a screen. But we live in the world, and in the world there’s soccer practice, and speech therapy, and grocery shopping, and homework, and keeping the house respectably clean, and money, and moods, and fatigue, and also we’re only human, and humans not only need but deserve things like time with a coffee and the paper, and seeing friends, and taking breathers, so as nice as that idea is, there’s just no way we can make it happen. Ought to, but can’t.

Over and over and over: We live in the world.

Finally, the vet came. He was an old man, maybe eighty. Old and old-fashioned: a pocket square in his white coat, a stethoscope around his neck. His handshake was arresting: so much softness to get through before the bone.

“What brings you here today?”

“They didn’t explain?”

“Who?”

“I’d called.”

“Why don’t you tell me yourself.”

Was this a ploy? Like when they make a young woman listen to a fetal heartbeat before she can get an abortion?

He wasn’t ready.

“So, my dog has been suffering for a long time.”

“Oh, OK,” the vet said, clicking shut the pen with which he was about to start filling out a form. “And what’s the name of your dog?”

“Argus.”

“?‘This is the dog of a man who died far away,’?” the vet bellowed.

“Impressive.”

“I was a classics professor in another life.”

“With a photographic memory?”

“There’s actually no such thing. But I did love Homer.” He slowly lowered himself onto a knee. “Hello, Argus.” He held the sides of Argus’s face and looked into his eyes. “It’s not my favorite expression,” he said, still looking at Argus. “Putting down. I prefer letting go.”

“I prefer that, too,” Jacob said, as grateful as he’d ever been.

“Are you in pain, Argus?”

“He whines a lot, sometimes through the night. And he has a hard time getting up and down.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s been going on for quite a while, but it’s gotten worse in the last half a year. He’s barely eating. And he’s incontinent.”

“None of that is good news.”

News. It was the first time since the earthquake he’d heard anything else referred to as news.

“Our vet, back in D.C., gave him a couple of months, but it’s been almost half a year.”

“You’re a fighter,” the vet said to Argus, “aren’t you?”

Jacob didn’t like that. He didn’t like thinking of Argus fighting for the life that was about to be taken from him. And while he knew that age and illness were what Argus was fighting against, there they were: Argus and Jacob, and a vet to carry out Jacob’s wishes at the expense of Argus’s. It wasn’t that simple. Jacob knew it wasn’t. But he also knew there was a sense in which it was exactly that simple. There is no way to communicate to a dog that one is sorry that we live in the world but it is the only place that one can live. Or maybe there is no way not to communicate that.

The vet looked into Argus’s eyes for another few moments, now in silence.

“What do you think?” Jacob asked.

“What do I think?”

“About this situation?”

“I think you know this dog better than anyone, and certainly better than some old vet who’s spent a total of five minutes with him.”

“Right,” Jacob said.

“In my experience, and I’ve had a lot of it, people know when it’s time.”

“I can’t imagine ever knowing. But I think that just says something about me, rather than Argus’s condition.”