At the very end of a very long and very winding road—which was made out of dirt, of course, because roads like this one are all the same, and they are all quite rudimentary, and they are all made out of dirt, for there hasn’t been a good enough reason yet for the county to pave the road, so unpopulated and underutilized it is—is a house, and in that house is a family, and in that family only two parents remain. The kids, if there ever were any kids, are long gone.
“We don’t remember what happened to them,” the mom thinks, “but it seems like they’ve all either grown up and gone on to live quite ordinary and unremarkable lives, or they were killed in some kind of fiery incident.”
She can’t quite recall, because the feeling of their absence is the same. It doesn’t matter what circumstances surround their absence, because the result is just what it is: absence.
Their absence—the kids’ absence, I mean—is compensated by the presence of a certain animal of the species dog. It is a dog who accompanies the mom and dad on their journey through empty nesthood. The dog has remained quite loyal to them for the past decade, and maybe even a little longer than the decade.
Truthfully, the mom stopped counting the years after the dog turned seven, because she felt it would be unlucky to call it anything past seven. Anything past seven just reads to other people as “Your dog is about to die soon.” So, when people would ask her “how old is the dog” over the past four years, she would simply smile at them and nod slightly, and then she would hold their eye contact in hers, and she would wait until it flickered away, and they would look somewhere else. She would do the eye contact equivalent of winning a thumb war, and then the point would be dropped, and the person would forget they’d asked the question.
Despite all of mom’s dancing around the topic of age, the dog has, for all intents and purposes, reached the age of eleven, and today is a day in which things are not looking good for the dog, nor for anyone who loves the dog.
It is looking good, on the other hand, to a certain executioner. Enter the executioner. He is a young, twenty-something man who has found his way into this industry not for lack of trying anything else, anything more normal, but perhaps for an abundance of trying normal things.
He tried being a waiter, first and foremost, right out of high school. He never had any interest in college, not really, because he was told growing up that it’s a scam. He held this somewhat superior thing about him when he would think about others going down that path of college. He imagined the things they must be learning about with disdain, and he stayed firmly on his own path to normalcy. He did the waiter job, and he felt like his soul was being slowly sucked out of him. He felt that everyone was looking at him like he must be dumb, and the customers, being that they lived in a small town where the roads were windy and made out of dirt, didn’t tip him well at all. He certainly wasn’t female or busty enough to get tips from the creepy old men who frequented the joint where he waited.
But it’s no use rehashing ancient history. He did that job and some others, until he found himself working at the local veterinary office. He found himself as a humble assistant, or maybe he worked at the front desk. The details, of course, matter little to us now, now that he has found a job that pays in spades like this one. The executioner.
To make a long story short about the vet’s office—because it really does matter for our story here—just some of the details, though—our main character, our executioner (his name is Andy. It’s short for Andrew), Andrew, or Andy, worked at the veterinary office as an assistant (or a secretary), and he went into it expecting the same treatment as he’d gotten in his previous jobs: the job would realize he hadn’t gone to college, and they would have some kind of reaction about that, such as “You’re a smart young man, realizing that you can just get out there in the world and start workin’, no need to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a degree you’re never going to use, especially not in this day and age, you know; these liberal arts degrees are about as useful as a fuckin’ hologram that tells you when to jerk yourself off at the end of the day (which, by the way, is also a thing in this world. We’re a little bit farther in the future than the times when you and I might be reading about a tale like this. We’re in an age of holograms that tell you when to jerk off).” Yes, that was one common reaction. The other one was just a blank stare. That’s how he could tell who in the world has gone to college and who hasn’t. The ones who have would just give him a blank stare quickly followed by a polite smile. He would get some overly emphatic nodding from the wokies who went to college and now know about the working class in some detail, but only through the lens of the books that they’ve read, the books which have rotted away their faculties much like Don Quixote. Not that the executioner, Andy, would know about Don Quixote, you might think, except that he does. Except that he does.
It was a long and winding road that Andy took to get to where he is today. It’s been about three or four or five, or even six or seven years, maybe eight or nine, ten—he’s totally lost track—since he graduated high school. In that time, he hadn’t had any kind of teacher breathing down his neck, no curriculum to follow, but he still did have a thirst for knowledge, a desire to see what had been written by the people who came before him.
He started picking up reading after high school. He really did see some value in liberal arts education. He saw something in it. He had friends who went to college, plenty of friends who went off to these fancy institutions and came back with a stick up their ass and an inability to stop talking about the classics and how hard it is to have all this reading to do and how they wish they could have some more time to read these things, but instead, their stupid dumb idiot professors had assigned them two hundred pages to read in the span of a few days, and they were surviving their curricula by the seats of their pants.
When his friends came back home from school he would ask them little questions like “What are you reading right now?” and the friends would take it as an invitation to start bitching about their coursework. But through the noise, he would hear the name of a book, the name of a class, some kind of lead he could use to educate himself. He would hold onto it and tune out the rest of the conversation. The first time, it was a book called Don Quixote, and the conversation went a little something like this:
Andy: So, what are you reading in your literature class right now?
Friend: Some old dusty book by this Spanish guy, Cervantes. It’s called Don Quixote, and it’s so fucking long, and it’s going to take me so fucking long to read it. Like, I have to spend two hours a night just to read this thing, dude and….
And that’s about when Andy tuned it out, or maybe even a few extra words past Andy’s tuning-out point. As soon as he heard the name of the book, he was on track to figure this thing out and read it for himself.
So he went to his local library and walked up to the librarian. He had no idea how he would spell the name, so he said it phonetically: don-key-hoe-tay. That’s how he said it, and the librarian looked at him with a look of recognition. She looked like she had a lightbulb inside of her head that lit up when she heard the syllables.
He saw her face change, and that’s when he started getting really into reading. He didn’t know the power of these books, having not been to college, but since he did have his local library, and his librarian knew at least a thing, or maybe two, about the world of literature, he looked to her reaction to gauge whether it was a good book for him to be reading.
He read the book in just under twenty-four hours. He picked it up and was unable to stop. He felt as though the suggestion that Don Quixote had lost his mind due to reading too many books was a threat, an invitation, a threat, he could never decide. But he was totally unable to stop reading the thing, and he finished it, the whole thing, within twenty-four hours.
When he brought it back to the librarian, the librarian had a strange look on her face; she didn’t believe that he could’ve finished the book so quickly.
“Didn’t like it?” she said.
“Oh, no, thank you, I really did like it, I thought it was really well done, and the ending was so meta, don’t you think, it was just so…,” Andy said. “I’ve never seen a book contain itself in that way, you know what I mean?”
He said stuff like this, all kinds of things that alerted the librarian to the fact that he had read it after all. This was the beginning of a sweet strange relationship between Andy and his local librarian.
You may be wondering how all of this even fits into the story that we’re trying to tell today. Well, how does it fit in? Does it at all? Is there anything of substance here? What happened to the vet’s office? What happened to the family who lived at the end of the long and winding dirt road? Will there be any answers to any of these questions?
Of course there will be. Of course, of course, of course. I just wanted to give you that little episode about Don Quixote to show you our fearless hero’s thirst for knowledge and voracity for reading.
Now I’m going to bring you back into that vet’s office, and I’m going to explain something to you. I’m going to explain to you what happens when someone walks into the clinic. I’m going to explain what happens when the mom we just talked about walks into the clinic.
That’s right, this is the moment when we are finally having some of our loose ends be tied together, woven into a single story.
So, we have the mom of our beloved empty nest coming into the vet’s office. We are in a small town, though, remember, so she had to make quite a drive to get there. Her name is Cynthia. That’s the mom’s name. Her name is Cynthia, and she is well known in the town as something of a philanthropist. She is well liked, but she is also well known for having a boatload of money. How else could she find such a beautiful house at the end of such a long and winding road? Other people in town just lived in the middles of roads. There were no long and winding roads that led to other people’s houses, only roads that led to commercial destinations elsewhere, along which people’s houses happened to be placed. That kind of thing.
So, when Cynthia walks into the animal clinic, she has her animal in tow. The animal is a beautiful and large golden retriever who has never had a haircut in his life but still maintains the most glorious and beautiful body of hair. The hair is soft, and Andy sees that it seems to catch the light as if it’s a disco ball, but a disco ball in which all of the shattered pieces of mirror are blended together with beautiful brushstrokes, and as if the person who put the brushstrokes in place were god himself, and as if the sun rearranged itself in all kinds of beautiful formulations, only to strike the mirror ball of the dog’s surface—the dog being named Jiminy. The dog waltzed into the vet’s office looking oh-so-beautiful, don’t you know, don’t you know how beautiful this animal looked.
But I didn’t tell you something about the temporality of this particular event. This particular event happened after the dog, Jiminy, had turned seven. It was the dog’s seventh birthday, actually, and the dog had come in for a routine checkup. That’s right, we are in the past right now.
Cynthia had taken the dog in for a yearly checkup, and that is when the vet and Andy had been shooting the shit about something the vet had learned in school. The vet had learned that animals who remain healthy throughout their lives often find that they get much sicker much faster when the time comes for the end of their lives. Other animals, like the ones who are neglected or not given good food or they come from broken homes or they are grossly overweight, they often have longer struggles with chronic illness, and it’s a bit like watching an old person slowly deteriorate, and it’s really hard to watch, and for the people in the family, it’s almost like you’re wishing each day for months and sometimes years on end that the lord will have mercy and your dog will wake up dead one day. But the case is different for animals who stay healthy, and that is why the vet got into this business: to try to keep animals healthy so that when the moment of their death does come, it is not preceded by months and years of suffering.
“That is quite a noble mission,” Andy said, and that is when Jiminy the dog and Cynthia the dog-owner came in for their yearly checkup.
“Everything is looking just absolutely amazing, but I’m sure you know that, Cynthia,” said the vet, who was named Shelby, and she was a woman; did you expect her to be a woman? Cynthia simply smiled and nodded politely—very politely, very humbly. That’s what she was known for.
Cynthia replied, “I’m so glad. I’m so very, very glad about that. Thank you so much, Dr. Shelby—can I call you Dr. Shelby? I just came in to make sure that we were doing everything we can to make his life as good as we can.”
Dr. Shelby replied, “Of course, you can call me whatever you want, my love, and I want to thank you for taking your role as dog-owner so seriously. You are the reason why I got into this business, and you make my job so gratifying. Thank you for doing this and letting me see this beautiful creature that you bring to the world. Thank you.”
Cynthia and her dog, Jiminy, took their leave, not requiring any prescriptions for any kind of medications, and Shelby and Andy were left alone in the vet’s office, the small vet’s office, the one that is there in the woods at some random location, not at the end of any road that is particularly long or winding, but also not smack-dab in the middle of a regular street—more like a combination of the two. It’s on the outskirts of one of the more major cities in the area, population about ten thousand, and it’s quite a bustling office, and it does well for itself, and Shelby is quite proud of the establishment she’s established here, and she took a chance on Andy when she hired him, but Andy did a good enough job, and he was really interested in learning things, unlike some of the other assistants she’d worked with, who were just on their phones all goddamn day long.
But we’re probably getting bored of this same old story by now, aren’t we? And we are probably wanting to know what happens in the present day, isn’t that true? Yes, it is true. So let’s go forward, at least a little.
Andy doesn’t work at the vet for much longer, because there is something about the work that bothers him, something he can’t put up with after a certain point. That is euthanasia.
surprise He finds after a few months of working at the vet’s office that a significant part of the job is putting people’s dying animals “down.” He has to go through a whole thing with this idea, as he has been raised in the Buddhist tradition. Boom, surprise, right? We weren’t expecting that—for someone in a small town like this one to be raised in the Buddhist tradition—right? But he really was. His family is not from here. They are from parts unknown and unspellable to anyone who lives in this small town. His life and way of thinking are somewhat incoherent to anyone who lives here, and he’s known that for as long as he’s been alive, so he prefers to keep things related to his faith unannounced to the people around him—even Shelby.
So, when he sits there as Dr. Shelby presses the plunger of a syringe and pushes poison into the veins of these animals, he has to just watch it happen. He wants to bear witness to the suffering, and he wants it to register in his brain, and he wants to let the complex workings of his consciousness determine what to do with it, because for those few months of working there, he is at a loss. But he falls back on his spiritual training, and he is allowed to survive it. Don’t you worry about that.
One day after work he has a dream. He has a dream, and it is a dream in which he is visited by an animal that he had watched get put down. It was one that was particularly unresponsive to the anesthesia that Shelby had given, and it was one that was not fully sedated by the time she pushed the poison into its veins, and it was one in whose eyes Andy saw something like primal fear. He saw the animal not wanting to die, and he felt as though the animal must have felt every drop of poison as it scraped through the veins, sucked up the blood and turned it to acid, turned it to needles and knives in the animal’s skin, and the animal died right there, right in front of him.
But when he had this dream, when he first saw the animal, he was terrified, and he apologized profusely. It was one of those dreams where you feel like you’re actually talking out loud, in real life, so he kept his voice down, knowing that he shared his place with someone else, a roommate, someone mysterious who we haven’t yet talked about.
Subconsciously, while having the dream, he knew this, knew his roommate was next door, and he kept his voice down. He kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But what he saw next really surprised him, and that is that the animal started talking back to him. Or it was the illusion of talking. When he tries remembering the dream, he can’t remember how it is that he knew what the dog was saying to him, but he did know—he knew for a fact—that the dog had said or expressed the following sentiment: “Thank you.”
The dog thanked him, and the dog was at peace. It was as if the dog were smiling. “Thank you.”
This dream was one from which Andy awoke and did not know what to make of it. He had no idea. Why would the animal thank him after he had borne witness to its getting killed in such a shoddy and haphazard way? What could there possibly be to thank him for?
This question haunted Andy for quite some time, and he kept kicking it around in his head. When he went back to work, he began to watch the killings with a special kind of attention. He noted their frequency (about one per day) and their duration (about eight minutes, all told). He tried to get into the minds of the animals through empathy, and he tried to see if they might be wanting to thank him for the killing.
It wasn’t until he investigated the relationships between dogs and owners that he started to realize what might be going on.
To make a long story short, Andy determined that the dogs’ relationships with their owners was fraught. He noticed that the owners sometimes came on too strong, thinking that their animal was the best one ever placed on god’s green earth, and then there were owners who seemed to love the animal but were perfectly fine and even relieved at the suggestion from the vet that they should be put down, and then there were others who really just clearly did not give a fuck about the animals (a dog who had been hit by a car, and it was their car, in their own driveway, and they brought the animal in with a kind of indifference, a little shade of guilt maybe, but mostly just indifference).
In all of these relationships, he never saw one that was fully equal. In every single one, the dogs themselves had no agency. They were all owned by humans. They were all owned by humans. No matter how different their stories, how different their breeds, the one thing they had in common is they were under the domain of humans.
And this got Andy thinking. He started thinking about rebirth and the cyclic nature of it all, and how humans are the ideal rebirth according to the teachings from when he was a kid. And then he started thinking about how ideal a dog rebirth might be. And he placed himself into a meditation.
He started meditating, and he set the intention to access a past rebirth as a dog. He tried so hard to imagine it. Who’s to say if he was ever able to fully tap into his past dog life, but somewhere inside of the meditation he unearthed an insight, through deep introspection, that the dog rebirth is one in which there is no or very little opportunity for upward mobility. Or, rather, it’s okay for upward mobility, as in, likely that the next rebirth will be into a human body. And this is when he discovers that, actually, there is a significant pipeline between dog rebirth and human rebirth, and it is very often the case that dogs are reborn as humans, and they are likely to be reborn as a human much like their owner.
He finds himself thinking that he is now in the state of one of his dog patients as they are about to die, and he imagines what they must be thinking about at the moment of death, and indeed, he manages to convince himself that he has tapped into one of his own past lives, perhaps the one previous to this one, and he finds himself at the end of the dog-life grasping for coherence, begging to understand this human world—his owner’s world—in which he has spent his entire life. And that is when it occurs to him that he is being reborn as a human.
It is in this moment that things start to shift for Andy. He realizes that the dogs are basically okay when they die because it’s not the end for them, and it’s okay to kill them because you’re sort of just setting them free to be born into a life that has more potential for transcendence, enlightenment, which is the very thing that he himself is trying to achieve.
And he finds a new kind of peace with the work that he does. He finds peace with the work of sitting idly by while the vet kills these animals, even in the cases when the anesthesia doesn’t take and the dog seems to feel every bit of that poison going through their veins. He begins to see the value in it, not from an alleviation of suffering standpoint, which seems to be the one that allows a practice like this to even happen, but from a “We need to set these animals free from the chains of being owned by humans” one.
Yes, in addition to his learning that the animals get reborn as humans, or at least his deep intuition that this is true, he also begins to recognize how not-ideal the dog rebirth is. They are owned by humans who know not what they do, and there is far too much variation in how humans treat their dogs for these lives to be worthwhile. Especially when they are at the end of their lives, living with humans who are totally unequipped to handle the death process.
He sees that there is a role for someone like him in all of this. He sees that he can set these animals free of the chains of their humans, and he can be there for the last moments of their lives, and he can instill in them some kind of spiritual observation, some kind of something, some kind of dramatic empathy in their final moments, and some kind of peace and calmness in just sitting there with them, that might ensure a smoother transition to the other side.
This is when he starts to get obsessed with the practice. He starts asking Shelby if he can be the one to administer the anesthesia, and he starts to get a good hang of it, and he even begins suggesting little tweaks that she might make to the anesthesia cocktail, which takes Shelby by surprise, as this person has had no training in the veterinary sciences, but the cocktails work, and the animals seem to be increasingly at peace when Andy is behind the killing.
After a few months of this, Andy realizes that he can no longer tolerate all the other work that goes into this job. He finds himself going to work and praying that they will get a euthanasia case, and on the days when there are none, he goes home with blue balls.
He decides right then and there to do something dramatic. He suggests the idea to Shelby: he would go to people’s houses to kill their animals for them. He pitches it to Shelby, saying “Don’t you see how distressed these people are when they have to bring their animals to the vet? Don’t you see how these animals just don’t really like coming to the vet? What if you let me go to these people’s houses and you let me do it in the comfort of their own homes?”
Shelby is immediately on board, as she happens to not particularly love the concept of killing the animals. She got into this career more for keeping the animals healthy—she has that real passion for keeping them healthy—and she is slightly more disinterested in this thing of animal death and ushering it in. Not into that idea as much. So she’s okay with it. It honestly feels like a relief when Andy suggests it.
“So,” she says, “it’s settled then. I’ll start referring families to you, and then you can go over to their house and go do it. I can give you some of my supplies, and I’ll give you these syringes, and if you’re able to do this—I’ll let you do this for, like, a week. I’ll refer people to you for a week, and if it goes well, then I’ll start this business partnership with you. How does that sound?”
It sounded good, and of course Andy takes to it like moth to flame, like a natural to anything that a natural is able to do well. He does it so well. He is a therapeutic presence for the families, and they really enjoy having him come to their house to help their animals die.
This is the new life direction for Andy. He begins to take the job very seriously, and he finds a certain passion in it. He still has a certain interest in learning about what his friends are doing in college, but quickly he starts to realize this is his calling. This is what he was put here to do, and he stops going to the library. He starts putting all of his energy and time into his spiritual practice and trying to meditate on his past lives and seeing if there are any insights there. And he just does this.
Over time, his roommate gets involved. That’s right, Chekhov’s roommate. If a roommate is introduced in act one, the roommate will join the executioner on their business venture in act two. And that’s where we’re at now.
His roommate’s name is Rosalia. That’s his roommate’s name: Rosalia. And she is somewhat interested in death as well. She is very interested in it, actually. She is interested in it, and she happens to be a very extraordinarily nonviolent person. She met Andy in high school. They were best friends. Rosalia also didn’t go to college. She had to find her own way in the world. She took the same waiter gig as Andy, but while Andy hated it Rosalia really liked it. So she’s been doing that in the couple years since Andy’s been in this veterinary world.
But Andy would come home and share stories about the workday, and each time he said something about killing the animals, Rosalia would get a chill down her spine and say, “Oh, that’s just so fucked up. I hate that they are doing that. I hate that you are doing that. And how could you do that, Andy, being the Buddhist that you are? Isn’t the first precept that you’re not supposed to kill anything?”
And Andy took this to heart; he really did. He took it to heart, and he meditated on it, and he really did think that maybe she made some points.
But, of course, he kept going. The alliance between his burgeoning execution company and the veterinary clinic was making him a fortune. He had so many customers now. He found them all over the county. He was just constantly traveling now. He was driving from house to house, and he had his bag of tricks that included all kinds of different anesthetics and all kinds of poison that people could use. He would literally pick their poison and kill their animals for them. But Rosalia telling him thou shall not kill; this gave him pause.
This is when he decided to seek out a partnership between himself and Rosalia. He said to her, “Oh, I wish you would just come with me one time so you could see it’s not all bad. I’m not just killing these animals, Rosalia, I swear. Just come with me, and you’ll see that these animals are really suffering, and you’ll see also that they’ve been suffering in a more subtle way for a very long time, just by dint of being owned by humans and unable to go out into the world and experience all that there is, the kind of transcendence that even dogs can experience. It hasn’t happened in their whole lives, and it certainly isn’t happening when they’re just sitting around dying. So what I do is an act of mercy, just a brief acceleration of the dog into their next life—likely as a human.”
And Rosalia says nothing to this, for inside she knows that the bottom line is that killing is wrong. She doesn’t know how to explain it, isn’t sure how to verbalize it, but she knows it to be true. But she loves Andy, and this is why she joins Andy on his next trip. And it is, you guessed it, to this house at the end of the very long and very winding road.
The vet calls Andy, Shelby calls him, and after the years of his business being in motion, he’s used to the protocol by now: she gives him the address, and he goes to the address. But he brings Rosalia with him this time.
So now we have Rosalia in the passenger’s seat and Andy driving the car. They’re listening to whatever’s on the radio, mostly static, and it gets even more staticky as they traverse this very long, very winding, and very dirt-filled road.
The conversation in the car is nonexistent. Both have the silent weight of their expectations preventing their voice boxes from getting any activity to course through them. A lump in each of their throats, originating from different sources. For Rosalia, the lump is coming from the fact that she is about to witness her good friend commit the extraordinary sin of killing something, and she really wants to support him, but it’s hard for her to do that, knowing what she knows, and being sensitive to these layers of experience and killing. The lump in Andy’s throat is coming from something similar: a love and respect for Rosalia, and a secret, gnawing suspicion that what he’s doing actually is wrong, but also a desire for Rosalia to see things his way so that he can continue with this lucrative lifestyle that he’s created for himself as the executioner.
And I do mean lucrative. He gets paid so very much, and he gets a really solid commission from the vet, and also some of these families are so moved by his approach to killing their animals that they tip him very, very well. He never thought he would be able to have this kind of life after not going to college, but he found it, and he’s in his mid-twenties, and he feels like he’s figured out his whole life, and there’s so much riding on this.
At the same time, he can’t imagine what he would do if he found that he really was doing something wrong. He imagined what would happen as he drove down the long and winding road in silence. He imagined all of the months and maybe years of penance he would have to do if he were determined to be acting wrongfully here. He thought of Milarepa, who laid waste to an entire village and killed dozens of family members using black magic and then had to spend years toiling away building and destroying towers and doing serious harm to his body along the way to recompense for the harm that he had done to the world.
The thought is not going well, and that is when they arrive at the palatial home of Cynthia and her dog Jiminy. Andy engages in the same protocol as usual, but this time it feels quite defamiliarized, since Rosalia is along for the ride.
Andy goes into this trunk, and he takes the briefcase full of anesthetic and the other, smaller briefcase full of poison, and he tremblingly walks up to the front door, up the very long pathway through the lawn, and he rings the bell, and Cynthia comes ot the door, and she has a tissue poking out of her nose, and her face is red, and she has matted hair, and it is clear that she has not been doing well, and she, upon opening the door, has on her face a look of both relief and intensified grief. This is a look that Andy knows well by now, but with Rosalia in tow, he notices that it stings him. He feels a certain sting in his chest when he sees Cynthia, and a voice inside of him says that maybe this is not right, that we shouldn’t be doing this, that this is not a good idea.
When he enters the house, he sees Jiminy laying outside. He sees her through the backdoor, which is a screen door. She is laying on the porch, and the sun is hitting her, and she is reflecting the light like the mirror ball painted by god. But her hair has a tint to it that suggests she is no longer so full of vitality. It is a tint of death, and despite her beauty, Andy is able to see right away, in an instant, after all his months and years of doing this job, that this is a dog at the end of her rope, at the end of her life.
He looks at her, the dog still not having noticed him yet. She looks off into the distance, toward the trees, into the big and beautiful backyard of the palatial home where she has spent her entire dog life. He stands there for a moment as Cynthia and Rosalia have some kind of conversation.
He’s glad he’s brought Rosalia this time, even though her presence is the source of his inability to do anything other than just stand and think about things and think about whether this is right. But he’s grateful that Rosalia is able to talk to Cynthia and soothe her and even hug her, treating Cynthia as if she’s known her all her life.
“That’s her superpower,” Andy thinks, and he starts to walk toward the porch where Jiminy is sitting.
“I don’t want to be a part of this,” says Cynthia. “I can’t do it. I’ve already said goodbye to Jiminy. I already told her what is going to happen. I already told her. I already told her. Just go do it and come get me when it’s done. Matter of fact, take the dog with you. I can’t bear to see her dead. I only want to see her alive.”
Andy and Rosalia look at each other, and Andy feels some kind of shift in the air. He says, “Okay, ma’am. I’m so sorry for your loss. Thank you very much. We will take care of it all. We will take care of it, and we will bring Jiminy out to our car, and we will let you know when the job is done.”
This is when Cynthia goes upstairs, and she is in hysterics up there. They can hear her sobs through the ceiling. This is when Rosalia starts talking to Andy in hushed but very fast tones.
She says, “Andy, this is our chance. This is not something we can do. I don’t think it’s right. I’m getting a real feeling of, like… I can’t watch you do this. I can’t do this. We can’t do this.”
And Andy says, “Well, we’ve already been paid for the job, so we need to do the job, Rosalia, and we can’t just leave this poor woman hanging; we can’t do it.”
And Rosalia says, “Okay, well, what if we just take the dog with us? What if we just sedate the dog but don’t do the poison?”
Andy looks to the briefcase of anesthesia, then to the briefcase of poison, and he considers it. It feels like an option. It feels like a glowing path in his mind, a glowing path telling him that it is correct. All of a sudden, in that moment, he looks to the briefcase of poison again and sees that there is something evil and very dark-sided about it. He sees it for the first time, and he knows what to do.
He gives the dog a cocktail of sedatives, and the dog lowers her head to the porch, and she is asleep. He says to Rosalia, “Go to the car and get the stretcher. We’re going to take her with us.” Rosalia’s eyes widen as she looks at him. She goes and gets the stretcher.
Now Andy has this private moment with Jiminy, who is asleep. He says to Jiminy, “We are still going to get you out of here, my friend. We’re going to set you free of this rebirth. We’re going to do it, just you wait for it. Just wait.”
Rosalia brings back the stretcher. Jiminy is still asleep. Cynthia is still sobbing upstairs. Her sobs have taken on a repetitive and seal-like quality, as if there is a record machine playing seal sound effects and is stalling on one particular moment. A broken record.
They put Jiminy on the stretcher, and they carefully carry her back to the car. Andy is grateful once again to have Rosalia here, as he usually has to carry these animals all by himself, throwing them over his shoulder and bearing down under their weight, some of them much heavier than others.
They put a still-alive Jiminy into the back of the car, and they go back and tell Cynthia it’s done, she’s gone now, she’s at peace now, thank you for using our services, and Cynthia is now in even more hysterics. She is sobbing, but in between her sobs she hands Andy a wad of cash that is bigger than any wad he’s ever seen, and he looks at it briefly, then looks right back up at Cynthia, taking care to ensure he doesn’t celebrate in front of her.
He says, “Thank you so much, ma’am. Thank you very much, and I’m so very sorry for your loss. Jiminy is a beautiful dog.”
“Was,” says Cynthia, and then sobs even harder before saying goodbye and shutting the front door.
Now it is Rosalia and Andy alone on the porch, and they look at each other, and they share this look of knowing, of peaceful understanding.
They get back into the car, and they turn on the car, and it plays the radio station from before, all staticky, and they bump their heads together looking into the backseat at Jiminy, who is still asleep, breathing quite slowly, and they see just how sick she really is. She has bumps all over her belly, and when they listen closely they hear a little wheeze at the very end of her exhales.
“She’s not even that bad,” says Rosalia. “I can’t believe you were supposed to kill her.”
“I know,” says Andy, though he had never really thought about this before. He had never thought about whether these animals were ripe for killing or not. He always just did the killing and moved on, having found peace and satisfaction in the knowledge that the animals would no longer have to live under the thumb of their owners. He was always satisfied enough with their being free.
“Can we go to the woods?” says Rosalia.
And Andy starts driving.
They drive back down that very long and very winding road, in silence once again, but a different kind of silence, different because there is now a third participant in it. Silence, save for the wheeze at the end of the exhale and the static of the radio. Now they are parked on the side of road with no houses in sight, and now the day is coming to an end. The day is coming to an end, and it’s time for whatever is about to happen next.
They open the backdoor and carry Jiminy out of the car. Jiminy is still asleep but perhaps starting to wake up a little bit as the anesthesia has worn off. They carry her into the woods. They follow a little path that seems to have been made by hikers. They follow it deep into the woods, saying nothing to each other. They walk up some hills and eventually find what they are looking for: a big beautiful field in a clearing. They see that the field seems to stretch on and on in all directions for longer than they’ve ever known fields to stretch. It looks impossibly large, impossibly far away. The trees at the far edge seem to be as tiny as ants.
They set the animal down in the field, and they look at each other, and they look at the animal.
The animal, finally, is awake from the sedation. The animal looks around. The animal looks up to Andy, and then up to Rosalia, and then behind them, as if looking for Cynthia, and she doesn’t see her. She doesn’t see anyone. She only sees these two strangers. It seems she is a bit at a loss, a bit stressed out by it all.
Rosalia sits down next to the dog, and Rosalia hugs the dog and pets it and whispers sweet nothings into her ear. Andy looks on, totally at a loss himself. He looks on, and he considers the fact that this animal would be dead right now if he had gone by himself. That animal is supposed to be dead, but here, right now, in this moment, the animal is alive, and the animal is experiencing life itself, in the most beautiful place imaginable. He didn’t know places like this were possible. Places this beautiful. In this moment, at the end of Jiminy’s life, Andy feels like he would be okay if he were to die, too.
That is when Rosalia stands up, nods to Andy, and starts walking back from whence they came, not looking back to take another look at Jiminy.
Andy looks at Jiminy, who is slowly taking in her surroundings, and the sun is setting, but the sun illuminates Jiminy’s fur in that special way that had once made Andy think he was looking at god’s most beautiful creation. He forgets about all of the signs of death he has seen, and now it is just an animal, made by god or whoever, sitting there, laying in this field, and that is where she will stay for the rest of her life.
Andy takes one last look at Jiminy and the impossibly vast field where they have brought her. He looks back at Rosalia, who is watching him from the edge of the woods. He smiles, then frowns.
They walk through the woods in silence.
another one