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Sit, Stay, Heal: One Dog’s Response to 9/11 NOTE: This essay first appeared in the Bark magazine in
November, 2001 It was then published in the best-selling anthology: Dog is My Co-Pilot (Crown: 2003) It will appear as a chapter in Rex and the City, Volume II © Lee Harrington Sit, Stay, Heal: One Dog’s Response to 9/11 Although my husband Ted and I lived only a few miles from the Now, the
television in our apartment is positioned such that if you’re lying on the sofa
with your head on a decorative pillow, the screen is at eye level. This is also
the level of my dog Rex’s head. All that morning, as I lay before the news
paralyzed with feelings of uselessness and horror, Rex kept inserting his face
between me and the television, plying me with a variety of facial expressions
as if to get a response. We have a system of communication, Rex and I that
involves eye movements and a diverse range of barks. If he’s hungry he looks
pointedly from me to his food dish. He barks at his leash if he wants to go for
a walk. But by the seventh hour of my non-stop, no-commercial-break, planes-crashing-into-towers
paralysis, he simply stared straight at me, head cocked, with his mouth
slightly open, as if he were trying to find the right thing to say. And what can
one say that hasn’t been said already? What can one write that hasn’t already been
writ? I kept hearing during this
catastrophe that the role of the media was to “create a narrative;” to keep
people informed. But I was having a hard time believing that anyone who wasn’t
a firefighter, a police officer, a nurse, doctor or
rescue worker truly had a role. I mean, who
needs another writer when the city is on fire? What could I do? Again and again, the first plane
would hit the But I couldn't give blood because
I'd recently had Lyme disease. And the
three places I'd approached to volunteer were already, overnight,
overstaffed. Sorry, they told me. Try us again in a few weeks. And so, hanging up the phone, I would go to
the windows perhaps, and open them for a few minutes to smell the smoke and
gaze in disbelief toward the non-towers, and then I would pace, and Rex—never a
great heeler on leash—would follow me
like, well, like a puppy, and match my every stride. He'd follow me into the bedroom, and watch me
with his confused, head-cocked look as I rifled through my chest of drawers
looking for donatable T-shirts (There's no leash in there, he was probably thinking). And he would follow me yet again into the
kitchen, and sit with just the tip of his tail wagging while I gazed
trance-like into our one food cabinet and debated the global usefulness of one
can of French onion soup. And always,
always, I would shuffle back to the couch and the television set, determined, needing for some reason to see the first
plane hit the By Tuesday, Rex
had begun to increase his efforts to try to distract me. He pawed at me,
crawled on top of me, licked my mouth. During Father Mychal Judge’s televised funeral he sat on my rib cage and
wouldn’t budge. During the prayer service at National Cathedral he spread his
body in front of the cable box and let out a deep, slow, you-forgot-to-feed-me
moan. I simply cried and clicked from ABC to CBS to CNN. For seventeen timeless
hours, while I watched that endless black smoke swallow all that hope, Rex
brought me toys and tuggy-ropes, and held them before
me with his tail a-wagging and a big dog-smile on his face. But it was no use.
I just couldn’t see how Rex’s stuffed-animal cuteness, or the goofy way in
which his lips stretched around the tennis ball, had a place in a world in
which severed limbs could smash into a window at Starbucks; in which a human
jaw could get lodged into concrete. Rex, however,
was undeterred. He began to nudge my hand that held the remote, and nudge and
nudge until that hand would rest on his head. Then we would sit like that, my
hand holding the remote on top of his head. Giuliani was
everywhere on that television set—at funerals, delivering press conferences,
walking a fireman's daughter down the aisle.
And seeing him gave me comfort. And made me weep. Here was a great leader, who until five days
ago had been almost unanimously reviled.
And now this hated person would go down in history as a Great Man. Oh, how I cried and cried. For him. For everyone. For me. I
had never done anything great in my life.
At this, Rex would make a
rumbling noise at the back of his throat that would roll into a full-fledged
Spaniel a-woo-woo-WOO. I'd look at him with surprise, having
forgotten that I had a dog almost; having forgotten the hand that held the
remote was on top of his head. I thought
of that crude joke about the ideal woman being one who is three feet tall with
a flat head, so that a man could rest his beer on top of her head while she
sucked him off. I thought of this while
watching human beings leap from the burning towers. Next Rex would
try to flip my hand off his head into a new position—onto his belly, if he got
it right. But I was too catatonic to scratch dog bellies. I’d tell Rex,
sharply, to cut it out! and shove him off the
sofa with my foot. Poor Rex at this point would recoil. We’d adopted him four
years earlier. Whoever had him before us had been cruel. Sometimes, still, a
sudden lift of a hand from a stranger could send Rex into a torrent of fear
aggression and/or yelps. He now crept into a corner, sighed the sigh of a
defeated person, and placed his head between his paws. Suddenly I felt
guilty. I finally realized if I really wanted to be useful I should start by
being kind to my own dog. Here Rex was trying to protect me from the evil
things that seemed to be coming from the television set. From
the evil things that seemed to fill the air of “Do you want to
go for a walk?” I asked him. “A real walk?” Up until then I had merely sent him into our
concrete courtyard to pee. Rex barked and
spun in circles, thrilled to hear that things might finally (to paraphrase
Giuliani) be getting “back to normal.” I, too, felt a sense of purpose as I clipped
on his leash. I was performing a great civic duty. Lost, shell-shocked people
would pass by in taxis and on buses and say: “Look, there’s a woman walking her
dog.” So off we went,
down the few steps of my apartment building, and out into the day—a day so
incongruously beautiful and autumnal I had to shield my eyes with my forearm
like a vampire unused to the sun. Before me, Rex trotted: tail up, nose down,
pulling forward, always forward, toward Our usual
mid-day route takes us past a fire station, and I have to confess that before
September 11th I had barely even noticed it before. It was there, it was an
architecturally significant neighborhood landmark, but the giant garage door
was usually closed and I had given no thought to the people behind it, the men
whose job it is to save and to serve. Once, on a rainy, busy day, I had even
gotten miffed because a fire truck blocked the sidewalk, and Rex and I had to
wait like two minutes to get across. Two
minutes I could not give these men. And now the firehouse had become a
shrine to their missing Twelve. I’d already
seen it on television, of course—the candles, the flowers—but walking past the
shrine was like entering a vacuum of sorrow and silence. No one spoke. The
street—for reasons unrelated to the disaster—had been shut down to traffic.
Nothing could be heard except a crying woman’s sniffles and the slight
wind-tossed rustling of dried-up flowers. Rex tugged, to keep us moving, to get
to where he’d spotted a cat the week before. “Wait,” I whispered. "Show
some respect." Next to me, two teenage boys in Limp Bizkit
get-ups leaned against one another, as if each were the other’s supporting
beam. One openly wept. In the summers I teach creative writing to boys like
this—boys who’d bring in Eminem lyrics during poetry
week and convincingly compare him to Frost. Now, they faced the final
photographs of their dads. It was all too
much. Away from the news, I felt untethered, and I gave
Rex the okay command to lead us home. Back at my
apartment, Ted was finally able to get through to me on the telephone. And as
he told me about his day—how he had had to interview the last surviving member
of a Chinatown firehouse; how thrice they had to stop the taping so that he,
then the cameraman, then the fireman, could collect themselves after breaking
down—his voice was pinched and barely audible. And I realized that this was how
everyone talked in “How are you?”
Ted asked. “What are you doing with yourself?” “Nothing,” I
told him. “I mean I’m doing nothing. I can’t write, I can’t read, I can’t eat. None of that seems important anymore. All I can
do is cry.” Ted offered
some words of comfort, then asked about Rex. “He’s sulking
in a corner because I’m not paying enough attention to him.” “Put him on the
phone,” Ted said. I placed the
receiver underneath the flap of Rex’s left ear. “Who’s a good boy?” Ted began
to say. “Who’s my little boy?” And as he went on, saying how much he missed
Rex, and how sorry he was that he couldn’t be there with us, I stared at the
television set. I’d put it on mute, but
there were still text banners you could read non-stop. america under attack, it had said the first day. Now it said,
america rising. “You take care of
your mother now,” Ted was saying. “You hear?” And Rex must have heard, because
after Ted hung up the dog had a look on his face like that of Colin Powell at a
White House briefing: confident, capable, in charge. That night, I
fell asleep on the sofa, and when I came to it was about four in the morning
and MSNBC was airing an amateur videotape of the second tower’s collapse. It
showed a neighborhood so choked with dust and debris there was no daylight. And no color. In the background was a horrible noise—shrill
beeping, like tiny sirens. I would later learn that the noise came from dozens
of personal alarms of firefighters, but in my half-awake state that noise
became the very sound of terror. Plus, there was a horrible weight on my chest
that had no explanation, until I regained full consciousness and realized that
the weight was of course Rex. He had positioned himself like a Sphinx on top of
my torso and his elbows had managed to wedge their way between my ribs. Now, all Bark readers know
that a sleeping dog gets heavier with each sleeping hour that passes, so I felt
like the dog on top of me weighed three hundred pounds. But still, I let him stay. I'd heard about a woman who’d
survived getting pierced by shrapnel because a police officer had covered her
body with his. In the morning,
I vowed to get out and do something. To avoid repetitive viewing of the
terrible images. To volunteer. After several false starts, with Rex at my heel
as I shuffled from the window to the bedroom to the kitchen cabinet and back to
the TV, I finally made it out the door at My first charge
was a dog named Amy. “She just came in today,” the volunteer coordinator told
me. “Owner surrendered. He’s been calling us for months asking us to take her,
and suddenly we had a space. So he dumped her off and left her. She’s really
freaked.” They brought
out a delicate, small, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Shepherd mix who looked upset. She didn’t acknowledge me or any of the other
humans; she simply pulled me, the keeper of the leash, toward the door. We
hurried out, down the sidewalk, heading west. Amy rushed up to sniff every
doorway, alley and parked car. She pulled me across the street toward strange
men, only to veer away in a new direction once she got too close. Close enough
to know she had to keep looking. Nearby was a
tiny, pock-marked park on the Meanwhile, Amy
kept pulling. And I know—we all know—she
was looking for her Person, but what could I do? Across the river, thousands of
people were checking lists outside the Armory, looking for their Persons, too. At the next
intersection, Amy walked in circles, as if trying to get her bearings, as if
trying to figure out where she last saw Him. I tried to comfort her, to
sweet-talk her: I stroked her flank and said her name. But Amy didn’t want my
love. She wanted the person she had been assigned to. The person with whom she
had an agreement: to love and to serve. Frantically, Amy dragged me in the direction of the
shelter again—the point at which all things in her life started going wrong. In
a last-ditch effort, she jumped onto a windowsill and peered into someone’s
apartment. Inside, a woman was watching television. Bernadine Healy was
probably telling that woman to get out and do something: to give precious
blood, or volunteer. Get outside, I wanted to tell her. The real emotions are
out here. I walked other
dogs that evening but I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy. I wondered how long
it would take Amy to “accept” that her Person was gone. How long it would take
her to become like other dogs at the shelter—a little less determined, a little
more resigned. And then I wondered how long would it take those who cannot
recover the bodies of their loved ones to accept that those loved ones are truly
gone. I mean, how do you mourn someone
who has vanished, as it were, into thin air? How can you accept what you don’t
understand? Back at the
apartment, Rex gave me a hesitant wag with just the tip of his tail, as if he
was no longer sure he was supposed to show he was happy or not. I knelt down
and gave him a good belly rub, and promised him a big turkey dinner with boiled
potatoes and carrots and a gingersnap for dessert. When we first took Rex home
from the shelter he hated us. He was a
violent, mistrustful dog and he tried to run away all the time. It had never
occurred to me until now that Rex may have been looking for his Person back
then. Perhaps, after four years, part of him still was. Friday night,
Ted finally came home from his non-stop work at the newsroom. The greeting Rex gave him was riotous—a full
body tackle, followed by tongue kisses, and then a loud crashing of canine and
human skulls. “Are you all right?” I
said. We were both laughing. Then we looked at each other and hugged and
cried. The three of
us, happily reunited, went to a local, dog-friendly bar for a beer and some
food. Ted and I sat at our usual table in the corner and let Rex do his thing,
which is to tool around the bar and sniff under all the tables in search of French
fries. People can pet him if they’re quick enough, but Rex usually scurries
from table to table like a greased pig. Tonight, however, Rex could not move
about so quickly, for the place was crowded and the air was thick with
disbelief and concern. Our beers came, and Ted and I lifted our glasses and
acknowledged how lucky we were that no one we knew directly was killed, and how
guilty we felt to feel lucky at all, and how strange it was to mourn something
so large and abstract, and when I looked around to check on Rex I saw that he
was sitting at the feet of a stranger. The man—young, handsome, in his
twenties—sat alone, and his eyes moved robotically from the television to his
glass. Rex just sat there, waiting for something from him it seemed, that Colin
Powell look on his face. I tried not to stare; I tried to pay attention to what
Ted was telling me about his day and his job, but each time I looked toward
their corner, Rex and his friend were getting more intimate. First the man was
stroking Rex’s flanks and talking to him. Then he was scratching Rex behind the
ears. He looked like he could have worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. He looked like one of those hundreds of young
white men shown in “Portraits of Grief.” He could have been anybody, but when
he bent over and brought his face very close to Rex’s and spoke to him, I began
to get worried. Rex still had a tendency, once in a while, to lunge at
strangers if they set something off in him that reminded him of his past abuse.
But now the man was on his knees, hugging Rex and crying into his fur. Ted and I used to joke that Rex
would never make it as a therapy dog. He would vivisect the stuffed animals at
Children’s Hospital and try to play tug with a cancer patient’s IV. But
tonight, tonight, I realized that
by depriving Rex of his need to comfort me, he had brought his comfort
elsewhere—to a needy stranger. I
realized that he would never stop giving and loving, because, in Rex’s dog
mind, that was his job. As Ted and Rex
and I walked home that night, we passed an ash-covered car that glowed a
ghostly white in the light of the street lamp.
It seemed frozen in space and time, like something from Perhaps if I see that young man at
the bar again I should tell him about Amy. Perhaps that was my role. |