Remember, Nate Vernon? You failed as a teacher. The universe beat the hell out of you with an aluminum baseball bat.
“Sure thing,” I tell the vegan butcher, and cane my way to the checkout line.
I let Albert Camus sit on my lap as I drive home, and he does so eagerly, licking my right hand the whole time, completely ignorant of the fact that our not wearing seat belts puts us in serious danger, forgetting how his last life ended, when he was a famous French writer.
Dogs do not understand the laws of physics, which is why they have never invented anything like the seat belt on their own.
I drink half a bottle of wine as I cook the steaks.
Albert Camus and I listen to our favorite CD—Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Cello Suites.
It massages our souls.
The smell of meat warming, cow blood boiling and evaporating in the frying pan, a virtuoso playing a genius’s compositions—all of it fills the house, and Albert Camus salivates worse than Pavlov’s dog until there is a puddle of drool on the black-and-white tile floor of the kitchen.
It takes me a long time to cut Albert Camus’s steak into tiny pieces on which it is impossible to choke, because little Albert inhales his meat, and I think about how I could really use a food processor, make a mental note to buy one the next time I visit civilization. The whole time I’m cutting, he paws sheepishly at my feet, and his saliva glands get an excruciating workout.
I try not to think about Mrs. Harper’s erotic nose, and am mostly successful.
My four-legged friend eats a good portion of the meat before his bowl even hits the ground. He’s licked the bottom clean and is working on his butcher’s bone before I swallow my second piece of steak, which is warm, bloody, and pairs divinely with the pinot noir.
As the spicy juices fill my mouth and give my taste buds an orgasmic high, I think about the vegan butcher.
“He’s like Sisyphus,” I say to Albert Camus, “rolling the metaphorical boulder up the hill, knowing it will roll down again no matter what he does. Over and over. He sees no future for himself. ‘Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd.’ Remember when you wrote that, Albert Camus? The vegan butcher sees no Mrs. Harper in his future. He sees nothing. What do we see in our future now that we’ve lost our Mrs. Harper, Albert Camus?”
He pauses his gnawing for a second to ponder the question, and then resumes scraping the bone vigorously with his little teeth.
I finish the first bottle of wine and open another, which I quaff deeply as Albert Camus gnaws and gnaws and Yo-Yo Ma works his magic bow and snow flurries outside and Brian what’s-his-face the ignorant butcher who doesn’t even know who the hell Albert Camus was—that guy probably makes passionate love to Mrs. Harper, who moans through her wondrous nose under the weight of her bare-assed, affable butcher.
The CD ends, and I finish the second bottle of pinot noir to the now slightly less fervent sound of Albert’s teeth chipping away at cow bone. I envy him; he looks much more content on marrow than I am on wine.
I see Mrs. Harper’s nose in my mind’s eye.
She knows who Albert Camus is—she must.
In all of my many fantasies she was well-read and sophisticated.
Mrs. Harper paired divinely with me.
I try to mentally undress her, but the gap-toothed butcher keeps popping up in my thoughts like a traffic cop of masturbatory fantasies, and he’s yelling, “Whoa, friend! Time out here. This woman is going to be my wife. She’s engaged now. But there are other doe in the woods, if you know what I mean. So point your arrow elsewhere.” Brian the butcher winks and nods, and then he returns to making love to Mrs. Harper, whose gray wave of hair rises and falls over her titillating nose.
I briefly contemplate opening a third bottle of wine as my eyes get heavier—What is this lit cigarette doing in my hand?—and then my head is somehow down on the table.
And then . . .
And then . . .
And then . . .
And then . . .
I’m in bed with a desert-dry tongue that seems to have been smoked and cured into beef jerky without my knowing about it. A mind-numbing pulse is sounding an angry war-drum-like beat against my temples—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—when through the darkness I hear a scratching at the window. This seems impossible, because we are high in the air on the second-floor loft, and the window in question is maybe a good thirty-five feet above the wooden deck below. I wonder if a bird might be pecking at the window. What sort of bird would do that at the end of winter, in the dead of night?
When I turn on the bedside light, I see Albert Camus jumping up and clawing at the window.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” I say.
I look at the bedside clock’s glowing red numbers: 4:44 a.m.
Is that good luck or bad? All the same number. I can’t remember what my students used to say about that—whether I should make a wish or hold my breath or do something else. They were always so superstitious.
“Go to sleep, Albert. Get in your bed. I need to sleep off this wine headache.”
But he keeps leaping up and scratching at the window.
When I stand, my cane is wobbly. He begins to bark and growl as he continues to jump and scratch. He’s never behaved this way before. Was there something in his bone? Maybe that vegan teenager sprayed it with some sort of drug.
You can’t trust anyone anymore, I think. And that kid had motive.
But what sort of drug would make Albert Camus act like this, so intently focused on the window?