Eugene Fischer - Husbandry

When he goes into the clinic and his receptionist asks after Marilyn, Gerry tells her that Marilyn is comfortable at home and doing very well. That is his standard answer to questions about Marilyn. The truth—that she seems to be getting worse every day, that sometimes she can't remember words, that he is planning to sell her car next week and hasn't discussed it with her because there would be no point—the truth is a little cumbersome for people to grapple with.

Today Gerry's first patient is a standard poodle with arthritis. It moves with some difficulty, but it is a friendly animal. It goes out of its way to lick Gerry whenever one of his appendages comes within range. Its joints are not in bad enough shape to warrant surgery. Gerry recommends putting the dog on glucosamine.

Next is a family with a nine-year-old boy and a dead parakeet. They aren't just dropping off the carcass for deactivation and disposal, they've come to have Gerry, a professional, explain death to their son. It's not an uncommon request; "disposal lesson" is a preprogrammed item in the clinic's computer billing system. Gerry talks to their son about what happens to the bodies of animals when they die, and points out to him the things that make it clear that his bird is dead: the uncoordinated motion, the abandonment of normal behaviors, the lack of interest in water. The bird is recently dead, and probably isn't terribly poisonous yet, but Gerry tells the boy that the longer it remains active after death, the more poisons will build up inside of it. He gets out a cotton swab and pokes the bird through the bars of its cage, trying to get it to demonstrate some aggressiveness, but this particular carcass is, at least for now, more insensate than ferocious.

Gerry puts gloves on, opens the cage, corners the bird and removes it. He has the family follow him out of the examining room and takes the bird to an operating table and straps it down. "Do you want to help me with this?" he asks the boy, and glances at the boy's parents, who nod. The boy says he does, and Gerry gets him a small pair of nitrile gloves. Then he shows the boy all the different sizes of clippers and asks him which one would be the best size to use. Sometimes kids, boys especially, will say that Gerry should use the largest one, regardless of the size of the animal. But this little boy picks the second smallest, and that is the one they use. Gerry gets a stool for the boy to stand on, and lets him hold the clipper. He puts his hands over the boy's hands on the handles and helps him guide the tool so that the parakeet's neck rests under the upside-down V of the blades. Then they push the handles in and together they snip the bird's spinal cord, and it stops moving.

Gerry never talks about people when he is giving one of these lessons. He always says, "this is what happens to the body of an animal when it dies." Humans are outside of his jurisdiction, and he leaves that to their parents to take care of. Or to pass off to someone else, the way they passed responsibility for explaining the death of a pet off to him. Maybe to their Sunday school teachers. When Gerry was in Sunday school he was taught that when a person dies his or her soul goes on to the afterlife, and the person's body becomes so distraught that it wanders the Earth, looking for a new soul to live inside of it. But then, he was also taught that animals don't have souls, even though they are just as active after death as people are. Now he thinks that maybe the church has it backwards. Maybe, after death, the soul stays in the body, trapped in a genie's bottle of nervous tissue, until the body breaks and sets it free from its captivity.

"So what does the biology department plan to do with a coyote?" asks Gerry of the redhead sitting across the table from him in the university commons. She had shown up at the end of Gerry's shift at the university animal hospital to pick up a specimen that had been delivered there. The specimen turned out to be a coyote in a bulky cage, which, after the redhead mentioned that the elevator in the biology building was out of service, Gerry offered to help transport across campus to the lab that would be its home for the foreseeable future. The two of them had to carry the cage up four flights of stairs. Gerry took the bottom end, and the coyote inside poked its twitching proboscis through the door of the cage at his face as they climbed. By the time their exertions were over, so was Gerry's shift, and he invited the redhead, who said her name was Marilyn, to lunch with him. She accepted.

Marilyn digs through the basket in front of her for a crunchy-looking french fry, and asks, "Do you know anything about the research that Dr. Zilker is doing?"

"I've never even heard of Dr. Zilker," says Gerry.

"He's the principal investigator on my project. His research is on the sensory organs of carrion hunters, like coyotes. We know that coyotes use those long noses to smell dead things, but we don't really know how it works. So the project is to come up with a model for how they identify the dead, and then reproduce the effect in the lab."

"So you're building sort of a death-detector?"

"Well, right now I'm analyzing aerosols. But yeah, if we are actually able to reproduce the effect, the next step will be to build a sensor. Dr. Zilker says he might collaborate with some people in engineering if he gets that far."

"That's actually really exciting!" says Gerry. "I hope you get it working. A sensor like that would be pretty useful for us veterinarians. Did you know that we have to role-play in class dealing with people who refuse to believe that their pet has died?"

"Oh no. Is that very common?"

"It's common enough. Actually, I was one of those people once. When I was a kid, I had a goldfish, and I refused to believe my parents when they told me it was dead. I screamed and screamed at them that they were wrong."

Marilyn laughs at his story. "It's funny that you mention fish," she says. "That would actually be one of the most exciting applications of the sensor if we could make it. Since the behavior of a fish out of water is more or less the same whether it is alive or dead, any given fish you pull out of the ocean may be alive or may have been dead for weeks. Having to do individual safety testing really limits commercial—" She stops short, because her cell phone starts ringing. She digs it out of her purse and looks at it, and her face falls. "I'm sorry. Just a second," she says, and answers the phone. "Hello, Richard. No, I'm busy right now."

It is not wrong for a man to take pleasure in the body of his wife. That is what Gerry has to remind himself. There are long periods when Marilyn is unresponsive, and sometimes it makes him feel like a rapist. But it is just a change in their relationship; they need to learn how to relate to each other in this new circumstance. Marilyn has been a sexual being for a lot longer than she has had EOA.

He always tries to find a way for her to enjoy it. He strokes her hair and massages her back. He has found that she enjoys sweet things, so he keeps a box of breath mints next to the bed and will put one in her mouth while they are making love. She likes that. But it is hard for him to adjust to always being the initiator, and to doing all of the work. She often can't remember how to stimulate him, or if she can is liable to suddenly forget what she is doing. During times when she is unresponsive, Gerry avoids kissing her on the lips, because she often does not remember that she is supposed to kiss back.

This was what she wanted. She wanted Gerry to take care of her. "I'm not going to some retirement home to die of infected bedsores," she had said.

"That's not what we're talking about!" said Gerry, who had printed out a brochure for an assisted living center in Des Moines that specialized in Alzheimer's patients.