Except then, on the other hand, and by much the same token, maybe the green nasal discharge etc. was far worse than I thought. The manual didn’t say that a Curio with psittacosis would necessarily suffer all the symptoms listed (i.e. scaly skin, misshapen ejections, and loss of pluck), just that the Curio might suffer any of those symptoms, and perhaps—if Blank had, in fact, been suffering “a loss of pluck” for as long as it had been pratfalling/brow-wiping/refusing to play our more physical games—perhaps it was in a very late stage of its illness; a late stage of its illness marked by green nasal discharge; so late a stage that the authors of the manual didn’t even bother to mention the green nasal discharge because anyone who was paying attention to his Curio would have long since recognized one of the other symptoms (“a loss of pluck,” in Blank’s case) preceding the green nasal discharge stage and so taken their Curio in to the vet long before the green nasal discharge would have manifested—and maybe the manifestation of green nasal discharge meant that the psittacotically infected cure had reached so late a stage in its illness that it wouldn’t ever fully recover, or maybe never even recover at all; a stage at which even antibiotics would be less effective, or even ineffective, and here came the guilt.
Not only was it my fault my Curio had gotten ill—and it’s not that I hadn’t tried to make sure, every time I removed it from its sleeve outdoors, that the area on which I set it was clear of pigeon droppings (I’d always made sure), but that I’d ever trusted my stupid eyes, that I’d ever thought my “making sure” would be sufficient—but that I had let it suffer for weeks before ever realizing it was ill, before ever taking any measures to heal it.
And my guilt, which might have, on a better day, somewhat mercifully swallowed or overtaken my panic, grew with my panic, symbiotically, instead; entered into a kind of shouting contest with it. According to my guilt, my cure was ill because I’d been careless, and to sit around panicking was a way to avoid accepting responsibility for my carelessness. According to my panic, my cure was ill because the world was random and randomly brutal, and thinking in terms of responsibility was just a way to avoid facing the fearsome truth: that, as always, and like everyone else, I lacked control over just about everything, my death was encroaching, as was the death of anyone else I cared about, the death of everyone I didn’t care about, eventually the death of all living things, thus the death of memory, and so the end of meaning, of the illusion of meaning.
And so there I sat, in my friendly orange truck, feeling guilty for not feeling guilty enough; feeling cowardly for failing to panic enough; guilty for panicking; cowardly for panicking instead of feeling more guilty; guilty for feeling cowardly about feeling guilty instead of panicking more when I should have been feeling guilty about what I’d been panicking to avoid feeling guilty for…
At last, I short-circuited. My guilt and panic gave way to hope, to reason, to reasonable hope or hopeful reasoning—who could tell the difference?—but…Maybe it wasn’t late-stage psittacosis. What did I know about it? I wasn’t a vet. Maybe it was just an early, curable stage of infection. All signs pointed to maybe, for sure. And if that’s all it was, an early stage, then there wouldn’t be anything to fear at all, and the only thing that might be my fault was my having unintentionally, i.e. despite my very best efforts, exposed my cure to some pigeon droppings, which: sorry about that, tough break there, Kablankey, but that’s what the antibiotics are for; sometimes shit, as it were, happens. I’d done everything I could have. Had I not done everything that I could have? “Yes,” I thought. “Mostly. Almost everything.” Instead of smoking three Quills in a row in the lot, I could have gone inside the hospital as soon as I’d arrived, and seen if, perhaps, the vet would see us early. That would have been better; I could have done that, and I hadn’t done that, but that would have been everything. So I tossed the fourth Quill I’d chain-lit on the pavement, stomped it out, and entered Paws & Wings, ten minutes early.
* * *
There was nowhere to sit in the Paws & Wings waiting room. Nowhere for me at least. A man who had thighs the width of bullet-bike gas tanks was planted in the middle of the mauve vinyl loveseat, cooing to a ferret that was sniffing his ear, while atop the matching couch that was facing the loveseat, an elderly woman with a pair of leashed Savannah cats nuzzling at her feet sat over the crack between two of the cushions, of which there were three (i.e. cushions, not cracks), a little too attentively flipping through a copy of the Cats’n’Jamming Monthly spread open on the coffee table before her, as an elderly man who I took to be her husband (he didn’t appear to have an animal with him) sat over the other crack, studying his nail beds with no less focus than the woman did her magazine.
So I filled out my paperwork standing at the counter, and a quarter hour later, a kid with a macaw in a carrier cage came out of the door that led to the offices, trailed by a vet tech who picked up a clipboard and said, “Ms. Magnet?”
I raised my hand.
“We’re next,” the old woman on the couch pronounced.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the vet tech said to me. “I thought the name Bela was a woman’s name—sorry.”
“It’s Belt,” I said. “Weird, I know. You know, actually, I think the name Bela, at least sometimes—”
“Belt?” he said, showing me the clipboard. “That’s a t right there?” he said. “That’s a t?”
“My handwriting’s not—”
“Your t looks like an a!” he said.
“T’n’A, T’n’A, T’n’A, T’n’A,” the fat man baby-voiced at his ferret.
“Does this,” the vet tech asked the receptionist, “look like a t to you? Or an a?”
“I don’t exactly mean to interrupt you, sir, but we are next,” said the woman on the couch.
“Hmm,” said the vet tech. “Are those your kitties?”
“Cadman and Uk,” she said.
“Well, I think you must be here to see Dr. Mills.”
“I don’t remember his name,” she said.
“Dr. Mills works with our more conventionally pawed patients. This man’s here to see Dr. Kleinstadt. Dr. Kleinstadt treats our exotics.”
“Well the Savannah cat breed,” the woman whined, “originally comes from the continent of Africa.”
“Yes?” said the vet tech.
“That’s why I called them Cadman and Uk.”
“I see,” said the vet tech.
“If that’s not exotic…” replied the woman, ducking her lips out and widening her eyes.
“Oh, goddamnit,” snapped the man beside her. “That’s not what he means by exotic, goddamnit. You know very well that’s not what he goddamn means. Would you stop being pushy and shut your fucking mouth and quit embarrassing yourself for just ten goddamn minutes. You look like a goddamn fool. A fool.”