The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky Read Free Book Online

dog who’s been around a long time, not a dog who knows the rules of the run or the park, but the skinless runt of the litter who hasn’t even been neutered.
    Then it occurs to me: is she trying to find out about me, the life I’d rather keep hidden?
    “Excuse me for a minute,” I say. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    She says go ahead, as her eyes turn to the man in the pink bow tie.
    On the way to the restroom, I run into a professor from the English department whose eyes look off to the side. His mouth is tense. It isn’t Wyatt’s mouth; there isn’t a grimace in it, but it’s lonelier, less certain, as if he can already see ahead to difficult times.
    Does he see in my face what I see in his? Do we come to the same realization at once? Oh, yes. Denise is leaving us.
    2009 |  The upper room of Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology is low-lit, with candles in glass votives beneath a painting. The painting is a portrait of Laika, the Soviet dog, the first dog in space. There is an absurdity about the sentimentalized rendering, the aura of reverence in the room, especially in a museum that wants to test our relationship to what is being seen, interpreted, displayed. Are we being played with again? M and I don’t know. But even if we are being tested, we’re only further disoriented by this invitation to feel. Here, we’ve learned to wonder but to hold our wonder ten feet away. And now we’re just unnerved. We don’t know who we are, or what a museum is supposed to do.
    Is it too much, then, to imagine Laika’s last day on earth? It is plain fact that Laika never came back—we all know that, no one knew how to get her down. Let’s just say that Laika’s last day was her best day. Say that she wasn’t to be swabbed with alcohol and fixed with wires. Say she wasn’t to be subjected to tests of sound and heat and what it felt like to be weightless for hours on end. Instead, we will say she’s thinking of her time at Dr. Lavel’s house. Dr. Lavel, who gave her a cedar bed, and let her sleep at the foot of his own wide bed. Who cooked chicken especially for her, seasoned with marjoram, thyme, and rosemary. The smells of that house so familiar that she’d almost forgotten she’d ever been a street dog, sidling up beside street people to keep warm. And her diet, as if it could ever be called such a thing: pencils and garbage and lead.
    On the day of the Sputnik launch we will say Laika was met by a parade. Say President Khrushchev held her high above the crowd, and the crowd clapped and cheered and blew red plastic horns, scaring the crows away for miles. Say the people in that crowd knew they were meeting a hero, whose work would lead to sense and peace, and never to one more war. Decide that she was able to take in this praise, believe this praise was for her alone. As for her panting? Say it had nothing to do with stress, and if there was stress in the moment, it transformed her instantly into light.
    Decide that the capsule she was trapped in was comfortable, gave her room to walk around. Decide that she was touched on the face before they closed the door. That the rocket launcher wasn’t too loud, the temperature inside exactly right, all the food she wanted within reach. No trauma at all in being lifted off, as good as being lifted in Dr. Lavel’s arms. Decide that weightlessness is more blessing than curse. Believe that those on Earth are thinking not so much of measurements and controls, but of her well-being as she rockets farther and farther away from them. She always liked night, anyway. Decide that there will be someone to meet her on the other side, someone as kind and patient as Dr. Lavel, and when she looks back at Earth, she won’t think about any of the years on the street, or those first nights in the lab, but only about looking ahead. Seeing what’s next.
    2010 |  What is it that makes us turn away from the grieving?
    Language fails. No one wants to say the wrong thing. Grief