The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

“It’s not his fault he’s not a cute little puppy. It’s not his fault he’s so big. And it might sound crazy, but I have this feeling that if I don’t keep him something bad will happen.

And I can’t let that happen. I have to save him.” Wife One says, “Who are we talking about.”

If Apollo was a toy poodle curled up on a special blanket at the foot of the bed, it would be nothing extraordinary. Why is it different when the dog is the size of a man and stretched out with his head on his own pillow? I acknowledge that it is. But let me say this: When you’re lying in bed full of night thoughts, such as why did your friend have to die and how much longer will it be before you lose the roof over your head, having a huge warm body pressed along the length of your spine is an amazing comfort.

Oh I'll cry

Certain friends, I’ve noticed, are avoiding me, I can’t help thinking at least partly because they’re afraid some day soon I’ll show up at their door with Apollo and a suitcase.

The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation calls to ask how I am. I tell him about trying music and massage to treat Apollo’s depression, and he asks if I’ve considered a therapist. I tell him I’m skeptical about pet shrinks, and he says, That’s not what I meant.

The friend who is most sympathetic about my situation organizes an intervention. The following week: a barrage of calls and messages from various people, some of whom I haven’t heard from in years. They don’t want to see me lose my home. They want me to come to my senses before it’s too late.

I see their point but also this is so rude

Healing won’t come from withdrawing into a fantasy world, isolating myself, spending all my time with a dog.

Wanna bet bitch !

“So what are you going to do? You can’t just sit around waiting for a miracle.” But that is what I am waiting for.

What do dogs think when they see someone cry? Bred to be comforters, they comfort us. But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them.

After a few pages Apollo assumes the half-open-mouthed smile seen all the time on other dogs’ faces but with worrying infrequency on his.

The position of his ears shifts in response to my vocal inflections.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.

I think of this story about Auden. I think about how there was a time when you and I believed that writing was the best thing we could ever hope to do with our lives.

Just noting that there is so much writing about writing and authors and I just don't care and don't think it adds anything. Like I get that it's her connection to the friend but I don't think these long paragraphs connect that well to him just by tacking on a sentence at the end that addresses the friend

Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other. What does that even mean? writes a student in her final paper. It’s just words. It has nothing to do with real life, which is where love actually happens.

Pinned beneath his weight, my feet have gone numb. I wiggle them and he wakes. Without getting up he seeks my hand, still holding the little book, and he licks it.

His giant jaws open and close around the new paperback copy of the Knausgaard book that I bought to replace the one he destroyed. Oh, not again! But before I can take it away, he gently places the book by my side.

It occurs to me that someone used to read to Apollo. Not that I think he was a trained certified therapy dog. (Would such a valuable animal end up a stray?) But I believe that someone must have read aloud to him—or if not to him at least while he was present—and that his memory of that experience is a happy one. Maybe it was just that whoever did the reading was someone he loved.

Or maybe, though not a professional therapy dog, Apollo had nevertheless been expected to help someone by listening to that person read, a responsibility he took seriously and for which he was praised and rewarded.

Maybe he understands that, when I’m not feeling so great, losing myself in a book is the best thing I could do.

If some dogs can predict seizures in people, as we know has occurred, how strange would it be for one to predict a looming fit of the blues?

It is curious how the act of writing leads to confession. Not that it doesn’t also lead to lying your head off.

What exactly did Simone Weil mean when she said, When you have to make a decision in life, about what you should do, do what will cost you the most.

Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do what will cost you the most. Who were these people?

Turn then to Virginia Woolf, who said that putting feelings into words takes the pain away. Making a scene come right, making a character come together: there was no greater pleasure, she said.

A story about Judy Garland’s children watching The Wizard of Oz for the first time. She happened to be away, working abroad, when the children and their nanny sat down to watch the movie, which was playing that day on TV. Though she was well past the age when she’d played Dorothy (sixteen), the children knew their own mother. So that’s where she was! Carried off to the witch by the flying monkeys! In an emotional state that does not bear thinking about, the children burst into tears.

This dog is my emotional support companion. How dare you question his right to be here.

See now we're talking

I should have known the therapist would want me to stay for the full hour. When I tell him I’ve left Apollo tied up outside, he says, Next time, why don’t you bring him in? Next time? That was the deal. The therapist would give me what I wanted, and in return I’d come back. At least for a couple more sessions, he says.

When the certificate arrives, I waft it under Apollo’s nose before sticking it under a magnet on the refrigerator door. You do realize, says Wife One, that you’re committing fraud. Even if it is for a good cause.

Wife One thinks it’s funny: Because the truth is, in this case it’s the animal who can’t deal, and you’re his emotional support human.

One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.

Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that hard nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?

It’s not that I can’t say how I feel. It’s very simple. I miss you. I miss you every day. I miss you very much.

Something bad happens to the dog in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

This book following me a year later still

The dog is given as a pup by the main protagonist, Tomas, to his wife, Tereza—for the very same reason, we are told, that he married Tereza: to make up for the pain and humiliation his incorrigible womanizing causes her.

This is still a Tomas hate account

Karenin and Tereza are devoted to each other. Reflecting on their pure and selfless bond, Tereza concludes that such love is, if not bigger, nevertheless better than the corrupt, fraught, eternally disappointing and compromised thing she has always had with Tomas.

Idyllic is how Kundera describes human relationships with animals. Idyllic because animals were not expelled with us from Paradise.

Others go further. Dogs are not merely untouched by evil. They are celestial beings, angels incarnate, furry guardian spirits sent to watch over and help people live.

Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.

A woman I’ve never met before giggles and says, Aren’t you the one who’s in love with a dog? Am I? Have I taken a dog husband as Ackerley took a dog wife? Will his death be the saddest day of my life?

“By the way, I meant to ask, what exactly did she tell you?” “That she was on a business trip and her flight was delayed because of a storm in Denver. That she tried calling you from the airport but there was no answer. Then the flight was canceled and she took a cab home, and when she got there she saw the note to the cleaning lady warning her not to come in. And to call 911.”

I started writing something else.” “What about?” “About you.”

Oh god

“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I should have said that it’s fiction. I disguised everyone.” “Oh, give me a break. You think I don’t know what that means? You changed my name.” “Actually, I didn’t use names. I unnamed everyone. Except for the dog.” “Jip? Jip’s in it, too?” “Well, not exactly Jip. There’s a dog. He’s an important character. And he has a name: Apollo.”

There I am in the hospital, at the lowest moment of my entire life, and you’re at the computer churning out pages. Not a very pretty picture. No. In fact, it strikes me as downright sleazy. What kind of friend—oh shame on you. Words fail you, I see. I’m amazed that you can even look me in the face. And did I hear you right, about a dog? The dog is a major character? Please say nothing bad happens to the dog.”

The medication is working, he tells me. The pain relievers and anti-inflammatories ensure that, though you may not always be totally comfortable, you are not in agony. Which could change, of course, and that is an agony to me. Because how will I know.

You’ll let me know, won’t you. Remember, I’m only human, I’m nowhere near as sharp as you are. I’ll need a sign when it gets to be too much.

The world doesn’t end, life always moves on, and we too would move on, doing whatever we had to do. And if that’s what he had to do in order not to suffer, on top of everything else, the pain of guilt, that’s all right with me. That’s all right with me.

You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time.

In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve of it.

And it’s not the thought that she must miss them, but that she’s no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad.

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.