penumbra
We teeter in the penumbra of Old Style sign glow and German-smelling hops. Noble gasses cast their OPEN sheen upon our liquor-glossed eyes, pupils swirling until the world tips back in sync. Time has begun to progress on a diagonal. The evening, which began as drinks at our usual woody pub, and quickly turned into a Lewis and Clark of Clark Street, traversing yuppies and schmucks, vacates semblance, like when a face is familiar only because of its unremarkability.
We depart mutely for what I think is the L, but some amount of time later the pavement sinks and sand claws unbeknownst to numbed nerves into our socks. Earlier today, running parallel along the lake effect aura of Foster Beach, I found a Barbie doll. It wore a bloated and castaway beauty, like Eljona the nighttime veterinarian, who moves with her husband through bungalows depositing pentobarbital into the sides of ailing cats and dogs, delivering them from the synonymous places of pain and the world. Eljona ages defiantly from the shine that won her teenage pageants across Eastern Europe, now wearing heavy perfume and extra weight and too much lipstick red as the Polish flag. Her face has grown familiar, and she moves in her nocturnal van silent as her transition from lavish gowns and two-piece swimsuits to scrubs. Her husband has no knowledge of medicine. Like a repo man reaper he carries pet corpses for his Mattel-motley wife. We call him pallbearer Ken.
The lake is a canvas sideswiped by rainbow’s BIV, and streaks of moonglow superimpose the flaps in lapping waves. The seagulls are up late, or more likely we’ve woken them with our aloof trudging; their notoriously shrill yips are sleepier and monotone. I watch their feathers drop like snow, an homage to winter on a night who’s breeze tightens the handshake between summer and autumn.
‘Isn’t this better than home?’ slurs Harlo, our boozehound Sacagewea. As if projecting these words was a disruption to his shaky equilibrium, he missteps thrice where the sand becomes damp and falls to his knees in the heavy shore. He rests on right-angled fours, the receding lakewater pulling through him like a sieve.
It was Father’s Day, years ago, when I called Eljona for my dog Henry. He was a wolfhound-schnauzer mix with salt and pepper fur, and the only son figure in my life. His slow-moving cancer had stolen two senses, eyesight and scent, and on that holiday morning, when I watched Henry eat a full bowl of the generic kibble he had scoffed at all his life, I knew his taste had been taken as well.
I suppose this was the logic to my condemning choice, or at least as much rationale euthenasia could soundly support. Still though, how could I not feel the ghost of Marvin Gaye Sr, or hear ‘If I Should Die Tonight’ every time I looked into Henry’s hazel, broken eyes?
Eljona would try to be there, she said, around midnight, with her husband and syringe. ‘Tonight’s a busy one,’ she said, busy a euphemism wrapping in static as it traveled and coiled through the phone cord, pushing through my ear and dropping into my heart like a waterlogged tumor. I remember when I listened to the Voyager Golden Records, “The Sounds of Earth,” for the first time. After a heaping disc and a half of mostly Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, a young girl from Peru sings “Song of Marriage,” and listening for the first time to her voice, which hangs dainty like saliva strung from kissers’ mouths pulling their lips apart, and vibrates the fuzziness of mosquitos nipping at one’s legs, like their blood-rich proboscis, I was on the edge of something real. And now, in an entirely inside-out way, here again was real, or at least an obsidian shell of the geode nook I had carved for myself in that young mountain girl’s voice. And perhaps I had never known a true voice until I knew hers, and perhaps you can only live in one voice at a time.
‘Would you like us to make a cast of his paw, for twenty dollars more?’ Eljona asked. I don’t know what I said, or twenty dollars more to what, because a Hemingway line had suddenly sprouted from the denial in my chest and used all my breath to photosynthesize and enlarge, and it said The sea is big and old — Throbbing ships scorn it, and Eljona said, ‘Do widzenia.’
