Hot Pink (19 page)

And so they did (his spirits lifted) when he entered the garage with the dog to go to the store. At the sight of his in-backed, green Swedish car, the man was reminded that, in general, his intentions were good, and he began to feel a lot less terrible. He wasn't a lazy or careless person. Quite the contrary. He was a two-point-turning nightly flosser, someone who was willing to do the harder thing to better ensure the safety and well-being of those he loved. And he remembered—or
imagined
he remembered
(the distinction between memory and imagination being as thin a distinction as any, really)—that his reasons for feeding the dog the gel-smeared bacon weren't nefarious reasons at all. It is true he'd been aware that the gel might be a poison, but he was no more aware of its potential toxicity than he was of its potential capacity to enhance the dog's life. Was it so unlikely the gel was
good
for the dog? Might it not have been something healthy, like a vitamin supplement? Or maybe something that, healthy or not, could provide the dog some pleasure, such as that which, say, catnip did for cats? After all, he loved the dog, so even if, in the spirit of adventure and scientific discovery, he'd gotten a little bit carried away and fed it some gel that might be—
might be
—poisonous, he surely must have done so in the hopes that the dog would profit.

“You might still, yet,” the man said to the dog.

They were driving around now, the dog riding shotgun, facing the man, and happy-sounding chuffing sounds were chuffing from its nose.

“Profit, I mean,” the man said to the dog. “You might profit yet. I remember the first time I drank a beer. It tasted just awful, didn't it, boy? Like a cross between an ashtray and an uncooked potato, but wet—still, I finished it off. I drank the whole can, didn't I? Yep! I drank the whole can down in Billy Toomer's basement, and by the last couple sips, I didn't even mind the taste. I was really very happy, and so were all my friends. We were happy to have beer and happy to have drunk it. Moreover, we were happy to be happy, because all of us, at first, we all hated the taste, and we didn't understand why men enjoyed beer, so all of us were worried we'd make shoddy men, or maybe even that we'd fail to ever become men, except then we understood—or at least thought we understood—why men enjoyed beer. It wasn't the taste. Who cared about the taste? Beer made you happy, boy! Beer made you laugh! That's right! Like that! Chuff chuff chuff! And we giggled like little girls did at church in the movies, and we drank second beers and talked about girls, mostly their chests, and how some of us had put our hands on their chests—not me, of course, this was only seventh grade, and I wouldn't even kiss a girl till junior year of high school—and we talked about how girls—by ‘we' I mean my friends—they talked about how girls seemed to really enjoy it, being groped on the chest. There were sounds the girls made. My friends reported gasping sounds, moaning sounds, quiet little chuffing sounds—yeah, just like that—and I remember thinking, even though I didn't say it, that maybe those weren't sounds of enjoyment, but pain. I'd seen people gasp, moan, and chuff from pain. I had, myself, made those sounds when in pain. And I wondered if, maybe, getting groped on the chest was, for girls, like drinking beer was for us. I wondered if maybe the sounds the girls made
were
pained sounds, like maybe they really
didn't
enjoy being groped on the chest, or, more likely—more likely, I recall thinking, because the girls, at least according to what my friends said, kept putting up with the groping—more likely the girls
learned to enjoy it
and just forgot to change the sounds. And then—and this is the important part of what I'm trying to say, I think—then I wondered if I was full of shit. Just completely full of shit, you know, boy? Shit. I wondered if even though I seemed smart to myself and my parents, I was actually pretty dumb, plus completely full of shit. Do you see what I'm saying? I might have been making something out of nothing. That was the first really deep thought I ever had—or, at least, it's the first one I can remember right now—and, just as I had it, I started feeling dizzy. All of us did. Our faces got long and our mouths were dry. Billy Toomer suggested we try drinking more—that the problem we were having, contrary to how it seemed, was that we hadn't drunk
enough.
That we needed more beer to counteract our sick feelings. So we drank more beer, and man oh man did we get sick then! What I'm trying to tell you, though, is I'm sorry I've been acting so crazy lately—I'm sure you've noticed I haven't been myself. What I'm hoping is that bacon I fed you will make you a happier dog, like the way the beer in Toomer's basement, at least for a little while, made me a happier boy. I can't, if I'm honest with myself, say that that's what I was hoping all along—if I'm honest with myself, I don't know what I was hoping—but I'd like to think, I mean I'd
really
like to think that that's what I was hoping, and, more to the point, I am absolutely certain that's what I'm hoping now. You're someone I care about—you're someone who, frankly, I love. And I trust you. I trust you to guard me while I sleep, and to guard my wife, and I trust that when he or she is born, knock wood knock wood, you'll guard our child, too. I hope you won't be jealous. We won't love you any less. And you have my word that if you don't show some signs of being a happier dog in the next little while, I will never feed you that gel again, and I can only hope, if that's the case, that you'll be able to forgive me. And I want you to know that I'm learning from this, it hasn't been a waste, that what all of this has taught me, this whole experience with the crack and the gel—what I've learned from all of it is something I guess I've known, at least in part, ever since that day in Billy Toomer's basement, something I've known all along but forgotten: that there are lots of things that can't be known.
Important
things. And I'm saying I guess that's the point of the journey. By
the journey
, I mean life. Life might actually have a point, I'm saying, and that point is that you just can't know. Or maybe it's less that there's a point to the journey than that accepting that you just can't know some things, especially the important ones—accepting that is the key to enjoying, or
surviving
, the journey. And what a liberating thought that is, boy, isn't it? Do you see what I'm saying? As long as I'm accepting that
I just can't know
, I might as well enjoy believing whatever I believe. This moment we're having right now, for example. I'm talking to you, boy, I'm baring my soul to you, and even though you're incapable of speaking any of the words I'm saying, let alone defining them, I nonetheless believe you understand what I'm saying. I believe you understand what
underlies
all these words. You understand that I'm here for you, boy, that I'm here to protect and take care of you, boy, and you understand I'm sorry I fed you that gel. I don't have any evidence that you understand me—that's true. But I don't have any evidence that you
don't
understand me, either. So why shouldn't I believe it? That you understand me, I mean? I should believe it. That's what I'm getting at. And what's more, I do. I do believe it. And furthermore, boy, I enjoy believing it, and I
should
enjoy it! I
do
enjoy it, boy. And for that I am grateful. Thank you for understanding me, boy. Thank you for being such a—ooh! Shit. Oh no. No.”

The dog had vomited, warmly, onto the man, startling the man. In turning his head to examine what had startled him, the man turned the steering wheel hard. The car was traveling forty-nine miles per hour in the highway's right lane, and he had just enough time, before it struck the pylon supporting the overpass, to brake to forty-one, which put the car into a spin, and to wonder if the gel had caused the dog to vomit, or if, as his wife would probably claim, the bacteria on the bacon was the culprit.

The coma seemed to last for about thirty seconds. The man had a vision of the crack oozing gel and thought of a cummy vagina, a “creampie.” That's not what it was, though! He felt so dumb, just dumb and
iniquitous
to even think such a thing. It wasn't a “creampie” at all, but a crack. A crack in the wall oozing gel is what it was, and now he noticed how the light was reversed, like a photograph's negative: the gel a bright, pearlescent white, the crack even brighter, the wall black as onyx. He stared at the crack. It was a lovely crack, beautiful, perfect even—its width, its length, its distance from the ground. How could he have missed that? How could he ever have wished it away? What a fool he had been! The crack was a blessing! The crack was a gift! It was there for him—
his
crack. He knew it all at once, and in the most basic way. He knew it the way he knew he loved his dog. Now all he wanted was to tend to it lovingly, to give it a long, tender wiping—but he couldn't. He couldn't move his hands! He couldn't
feel
his hands, much less find a tissue. He needed a tissue. All he needed was a tissue and one working hand on an arm that could reach. This poor, gorgeous crack, he thought, in need of a wipe! But wait a second, wait. He
could
feel his head. He could feel it
inside
—he could feel his mouth. His mouth was so dry. If he could feel his mouth, he could move his head!

The man sprang from his coma, sitting up straight, licking at the air. The side of his head hurt. Everything was white and beepy and glugging. He heard his wife's voice. “Thank God,” she was saying. “Thank God, thank God.” His sight adjusted. The room he was in was small and overlit, a hospital room. His wife was huge.

“Thirsty,” he rasped.

She brought him a crinkled paper thimble of water, held it to his lips. He sipped and he swallowed. The side of his head hurt. He remembered the dog, the vomit upon him, the stab of panic just before impact.

“I missed you,” his wife said. “I missed you so bad.”

“I missed you, too. I've been such a fool. I was wrong about the crack.”

“Wrong?” she said.

“Yes. I was wrong. I…” He couldn't explain. He couldn't phrase it right, not with any dignity. His knowledge was a private kind
—
it wasn't even, he now realized, knowledge. It went beyond knowledge, was better than knowledge. What it was was belief. The crack was
good.

“How's the baby?” he said.

“Still ticking,” she said, and patted her belly.

“And the dog?” he said.

“The dog?” she said. “The dog,” she said. “The dog,” she said, and she burst into tears. In came some nurses. She must have pressed that button.

They told him his coma had lasted three months, that the pain and the scars along his temple and cheek should fade with time. They told him he'd T-boned his car on the pylon. That all of the Swedish airbags had deployed. That the dog, whose mouth had been wide open—they'd found its vomit all over the car and deduced it had been in the midst of heaving when the car struck the pylon—was thrust, face-first, against the man's head. That the thrust was so violent, its jaws snapped at impact and “opened like a book.” That nine of its teeth, sunk to the gums, were lodged inside the man's head when they found him. That the dog, most likely, went instantly unconscious and asphyxiated on vomit. That they hoped that's what it was; that that fate was superior to bleeding to death (a much slower way to go). And they told him the EMTs were blown away, had never, in all their careers, seen anything like it. They told him that he should be thrilled to be alive, and twice as thrilled yet, coma and head wounds notwithstanding, to be entirely intact. He was. He was thrilled. He was thrilled and he was grateful.

They wanted to keep him around for a week, but he left in three days. It wasn't the insurance—he had the best insurance. He needed to get back home.

The crack on the wall was a mess of oozed gel that had hardened and crusted, ruptured, dripped, re-crusted, grayed. At its center, the mess protruded from the wall by as much as half an inch, and resembled, more than anything, a volcanic mountain range mapped topographically. The man knelt down on the floor before it, staring intensely, committing the features of the mess to memory; he wanted a stick to brandish at himself on the off-chance he ever grew tempted to abandon his crack-wiping duties (for a carrot, his vision from the coma would suffice).

Once he had the mess memorized, he drove the new car (same model as the old car; their coverage was excellent) to the hardware outlet, and purchased organic natural sponges and a non-abrasive solvent made with berries, milk, and mink-fat that required refrigeration. (“The Lamborghini of cleansers,” the salesperson told him. “A little blob'll do you.”)

As per the instructions printed on the tube, he applied a dime-size gobbet of solvent to his wetted (with filtered water) sponge, and waited for the solvent to turn from green to silver. Once the color had changed, he held the sponge to the wall an inch above the crack, pressing just enough to allow a few drips, and then he made the magic happen. The entire mess of crusted, hardened gel came off with one gentle, downward stroke of the sponge, and the crack, shimmering and wet, was freed. He blotted up the moisture with a second special sponge and threw both sponges away in the garage. On his way back upstairs, he stopped in the kitchen to pick up a jelly jar. The mess had slid down the wall intact, but had broken in two—mountains and foothills—when it struck the floor. He put the two pieces inside of the jelly jar, screwed the cap tight, brought the jar to the yard, and began, with a spade, to dig a hole in which to bury it.

Through the sliding-glass door, his wife saw him digging and went outside.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I'm burying this mess.”

“Why?” she said.