by Mike McCracken
My dog, Mickey, was already eleven years old when I noticed that he no longer bugged me to go out all morning but just lay in the spot he’d been in since our walk to Dunkin. There’s a certain feeling you get at that moment. It’s like choking on sadness harvested from the future. You think, at least for a second or two, that this is just the first indicator of further calamities, and that soon you’ll be weighing the draining sands of experience—his joy in eating, your pleasure at feeling his head in your lap while you watch a movie—against the increasing prospects of pain and, frankly, plain inconvenience. In other words, is this life still worth it?
I called the vet. I have their number on my favorites list, since I have to go in all the time to refill a prescription for the antifungal cream I spread on his anus three times a day. I told them something was wrong with him and made an appointment for the next morning. They told me to bring a stool sample if I could. “Nothing I like better,” I told them.
Mickey was a Boston terrier. He was given that name, Mickey, by a three-year-old. And, yes, he was named after that other famous Mickey who is black and white with big ears, and who appeals to toddlers. I’ve been a little embarrassed about it since then, as I’ve walked through various parks yelling his name, trying to get him to come back. When people look at me funny, I reassure myself that his namesake could be Mickey Mantle for all they know.
The toddler in question was my son, back when his mother and I were still married.
I remember being happy those first few weeks after we got Mickey, but I think we’d gotten the dog in one of those impulsive moves that you hope will make everything different, but of course can’t begin to change your real problems.
Anyway, I got Mickey when she took my son to Oregon.
Routine became my relief after I watched everything I’d wanted torn away. And Mickey was a part of that routine. I walked him three times a day. I got his food from the store. I fed him the correct amounts at the correct times.
At the vet’s I did the usual waiting in the waiting room. Mickey sat on my lap, growling when other dogs got too close. I thought about how I would tell my son—if Mickey was really on his last lap. The kid loved the dog. He seemed to have some primordial memory of when we’d all lived together, as if it were some lost golden age—and seeing the dog gave him access to that lost age again. And, beside that, the dog was the one thing I had over his mother. She’d never let him get another dog. At my house, at least there was a dog. He hated me, but at least there was a dog.
The vet I go to is a big group practice, and they’d assigned me to some doc I’d never seen before. One of the nurses called me in. We went to the exam room, where I sat down again and lifted Mickey up to my lap. The nurse asked me the battery of standard questions, reading off a computer screen. The only thing that really seemed wrong was that he was a little lethargic. He was eating, he was fulfilling his other duties. “He just doesn’t seem to care about it anymore,” I explained. The nurse gave me an odd look, not knowing how to enter that one in the computer program.
Then they made me wait in the exam room for the doctor. Mickey should have been restless as hell, biting at my pants, scratching at the air at the bottom of the door. Instead, he just sat in my lap, snoring though he was awake.
The doc came in shortly before I made my mind up to peek out the door and see if anyone knew I was still there. She wore scrubs with short sleeves, and one of her arms had a tattoo of a dragon biting its tail, wrapping around biceps and triceps. She was skinny. She had a nose ring and black hair cut more like a boy’s than a girl’s.
“What a cutey,” she said when she saw Mickey, like she hadn’t seen fifty adorable mutts that day. “So, what’s the problem?”
I went through the explanation again, wondering if I sounded like a crazy person. But she seemed to get it. She nodded. She told me to put him up on the metal table so she could look him over.
Mickey hated this, of course. He started to scrabble and flail. The assistant moved up as if to take him, but I said, “Let me.” I held him tightly and calmed him.
The doc ran her hands over his shoulders and down his front legs. Her arm bumped mine. She leaned over to look at his mouth, and her hip contacted mine. She was quite attractive. She seemed to have nothing on under the scrubs.
She was the first punk vet I’d ever heard of, and I liked the bundle of contradictory ideas she seemed to embody: sympathy, rebelliousness, toughness, motherly caring, professional efficiency. But I think there was something more to what I felt. Some people just call to you. You try to find reasons for it, but it’s just some instinctual, animal thing. For me, this call came very rarely. It hit me hard.
“Hmm.” She stepped back and looked Mickey over carefully. I could see both uncertainty and real concern in her look. That made me all the more nervous and all the more drawn to her. “You brought the stool sample?” she asked.
“Sure.” I pulled a Ziploc baggy with a dangling turd from my pocket and held it out to her. It was not the height of gallantry, I suppose.
“Let me see what this tells us, and then maybe we’ll do some blood work.”
Mickey and I were left alone in the exam room again. I had read all of the posters between five and ten times. Most of them had to do with gastrointestinal ailments that afflict cats. We sat in our chair—no clock, no noise from outside. After a while there might as likely have been absolutely nothing outside the walls of the exam room as a hallway, connecting to the waiting room, the glass doors, the street, my Dunkin, the rest of the city. I just felt like there was nothing else worth caring about. There was just Mickey and me.
“Okay,” the doc said when she reopened the door. When I saw her again, I felt the upswing in interest. I suddenly wanted to ask her to go on a walk with me—something to prolong the contact—but I also knew I would never say the words. Many, many years of experience had taught me that. “We have something here.” She looked at Mickey’s face and then up at mine. “He has ball bearings in his stool,” she announced.
I must have registered some sort of confusion, because she responded with a quick explanation.
“We’ve been seeing this a lot lately,” she said. “It’s a progressive condition, you might say. The animal is slowly turning into a mechanical entity—you might say a robot—but while the animal part still has some force, the immune system causes some havoc, and we find symptoms like this. Some animals actually expel gears from the mouth or even through the skin. But ball bearings in the stool is the most common sign.”
“You said ‘robot’? Did I hear you?”
“Yes.”
“You mean Mickey is a robot?”
“No. Based on my exam, I’d say he’s about forty percent of the way there. The metamorphosis usually takes between two and six weeks.”
I decided she was playing a joke on me, and I couldn’t meet her eye anymore. I looked at the back of Mickey’s head—a little black dome. I suppose I felt like I deserved this cruelty for having presumed to pine for her.
She slid to the door, put a hand on the doorknob and then looked back. “I hope you’ll see this as a good thing,” she said in what I knew was her encouraging voice. “He’ll be around a long time, now. Maybe longer than any of us.”
She sounded too solicitous to be joking. Or if she was joking, she was taking it to some pathological level. I couldn’t reconcile that with her gentle voice, her understanding while she listened to my story.
I lowered Mickey from my lap to the ground. Was he a little heavier than he used to be? Was that because his bones were turning to alloy? It seemed ridiculous. But something was happening. I took an extra lap around the block on the way home, and Mickey trotted obediently, but not boisterously, beside me.
Despite my incredulity, I began to line up things I observed about Mickey with the idea that he was becoming a robot. The sprockets in the one matched up with the holes in the other and slid into place. If he didn’t seem to care about his food as much as he used to, well, why should he? If he were a robot, he wouldn’t have taste buds. If he seemed to repeat the same patterns day after day, couldn’t that be the result of programming?
I spent a fair amount of time just watching him, wondering if he was feeling anything anymore, or if his heart had turned to chrome, his soul to code. It was so hard to tell. Something seemed different, but it could have been age. We all change over time. We all lose our spark. Would someone observing me wonder if I were an automaton?
I found that when I sat beside him and pet him, though the sensation was the same (he still had body warmth and supple skin), my pleasure was diminished. Uncertainty ate at me. I worried that I was just going through a charade to trick my heart into believing it had caring company somewhere in the world.
I took him for a long, vigorous walk. He kept up an even pace the whole way. But rather than make me feel better about his health, this made me worry that he was now too efficient, too machine-like.
I imagined putting questions to the doc. Why is this happening? How long have you been seeing this? She looks at me with understanding and responds slowly and carefully—though I can’t clearly imagine what she might be saying. Is there anything I can do? What am I supposed to do? She puts her arm around my waist while I pet Mickey. We both lean over him to watch him, and I feel like she sees how he’s been a part of every turn in my life for its last epoch. He’s seen everything I lost. He’s sometimes been a compensation. She understands.
I stopped applying his ointment and for several days closely watched the spot that usually became enflamed. Nothing happened. He didn’t start licking or rubbing his backside on the ground as he did when I had missed treatments in the past.
I realized that when I caught a glimpse of him during the day, I couldn’t look away right away but instead watched him suspiciously. He never did anything definably different, but his programming and his wiring and his other features could be designed to imitate the living creature he’d been. I ended up feeling there was a reason for my suspicion, because if he were a real dog, I would get over it. My instincts would tell me.
He still trotted after me when I moved from the TV room to the bedroom at night. I still lifted him up on the bed, as I’d been doing the last two years or so, since he’d become too stiff to make the jump. One night, I got him in place, brushed my teeth, and then settled down. Mickey always lay in the middle of the bed, which was fine, since there was enough room and I liked feeling him against my hip. But this night, when I turned out the light, I couldn’t sleep. He felt too hard and too still. I could hear his breathing, but that just brought to mind the thought that it was a sham and all that was happening inside him was a shuffling of electrical impulses and a manipulation of small engines and pistons to drive a bellows. How could I know if he was a robot pretending to sleep, pretending to snore? How could I know if the only relationship I had kept alive was now a farce?
I went back to the vet’s office. Asked what the problem was, I would only say that it was a follow-up to the last visit. I wanted to talk about this only with the doc. They put me in the same exam room as the last time, and I waited with Mickey sitting on my lap (as he was programmed to do?), and I read the same posters over again, despite knowing they would only make me want to avoid ever being responsible for maintaining a cat’s gastrointestinal health.
The doc came in. As if she knew I was there for some very serious purpose, she didn’t say anything right away but rather looked Mickey and me over.
“Has anything changed?” she asked.
“No.”
“What’s the problem?”
I took a minute to try to find the words, and still I didn’t know what they would be until they were out. “I don’t think it’s right to go on living like this,” I said. “I don’t know if you can call it living at all.”
“Some people find it distressing. Some don’t mind at all.” She spoke softly, as if she could make reality kinder with the right tone of voice. If I’d seen her on the street, I’d assume she was some uncaring party girl. But I knew she was very different. I felt lucky to have this insight. “I can assure you the animal is not suffering.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. I wanted to hold Mickey, or look deep into his eyes, or give him a final heartfelt kiss and feel his warmth, but now I was convinced any emotion was wasted. He wouldn’t feel it. He might have some preprogrammed response. He might simulate affection or fear, but I was convinced there was nothing really in there. I felt the grief of being robbed of even grief. “I can’t take it.”
“We can shut him down,” she said.
“That’s what I want.” I cried. I couldn’t contain my sadness. No remedy, no comfort, no limit on despair could seem to have any effect. So much was lost and irrecoverable. Rather than sliding into a pit of sadness, I would say I suddenly noticed how far down I was.
She came over to me where I sat in the chair and kneeled down to my level. I wanted her close to me. I wanted to touch her, to hold her, like I had in my imagination. But I felt like I was stuck in my pit, peering up.
She ran her hands down Mickey’s chest, feeling through the fur. Her fingers found a catch and opened a panel just over where his heart should have been. She pried out the battery pack, and he went stiff.
