Feeling such emotions, it was impossible not to elevate the stream and hose down, as they say, a few literary masterpieces.
I may as well point out that I was able to hit titles all the way up on the third and fourth shelves. When you get into your middle years, as I have, these things matter.
I shook and put it away. Since I’m being frank, I ought to say that I went through the mature man’s generic process of shaking: several rapid shakes followed by a brief rest followed by more jiggling, and the whole ordeal repeated until everything feels comfortably dry and secure. As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think. We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act — it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art — and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly and, as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some horrible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business. It was precisely this kind of dispirited self-loathing that led me to give myself only a few cursory shakes, so that when I replaced myself in my trousers, I felt urine dribbling down my leg. As always when this happens, I became enraged. I became angry and irrational. The night was cold, and I struggled against despair.
The struggle, however, was unavailing.
I wept.
At first I wept for myself — for my incontinence, obviously — and then for my entire, ridiculous existence, and for the loneliness I felt, not only there in the literature section in the late hours on that snowy night, but all the time, constantly, ever since I could remember feeling anything at all. As I wept, I felt lonelier and lonelier and lonelier. I envisioned, one after another, my brothers, the bloated, red faces of my brothers, all my beloved brothers but in particular Hiram and Virgil and Maxwell. These three I loved best. And also George. Would we ever see George again? After a while I was weeping for the rose garden and the former grandeur of our trees and lawns, those green fields where we played as children. We had always hurt one another in our games; hurting was the object of our games; and this made me cry more, and I held the blue pillow to my breast. I wrapped my arms around the blue pillow, hugged it to me, and let the tears come. I was standing in water up to my ankles, and this for some reason became another pressing sadness. I suppose it was because the water was rising that I felt so affected. Before long I was crying for, it seemed, everything. Everything in the red library was deserving of tears. Those eyeless, emaciated, deaf and dead animals on their barren squares of wall always reminded me of past Dougs, the Dougs who perished as youths; and, as I wept, they reminded me, the animals, of myself and of what would surely become of me one day, maybe soon. I was nothing but another Doug. Hiram was the oldest. Father I know, really, only from his occasional, shadowy appearances above the lights, his intermittent manifestations as a damp stain. Actually, this is not, strictly speaking, the whole truth. It is true in the sense that it describes the way I have felt for as long as I have known my feelings. I remember, I think, our father’s face and his voice. I remember his mustache. I remember our father in his underwear at night. I remember the hair on his legs. I remember the smell in the bathroom after he left it. I remember his unhappiness and his dread of our happiness, and I remember him saying, “How’s my Doug?” I remember his body’s smells, his smells of tobacco, of course, and of alcohol and cologne, a cologne like lavender you never smell anymore. I remember the pleasure of seeing him enter the room. I remember certain stories and jokes. Actually, I forget the stories and the jokes, though I remember that these existed. I remember his conviction that he was hated, and I remember the thunder his footsteps made crossing the floor. Time after time my brothers and I have joined together to eat, drink, and bury that man. All we ever did was eat, drink, and injure each other. The sadness of our cruelty was more than I could bear. Tears rose in waves that washed up from the center of my body. The muscles in my sides felt as if they would tear from the strain of that sobbing. The water around my feet was steadily rising. I knew it was prideful to overinterpret broken pipes and a leaking roof, but on the other hand it did seem that I was not completely alone in my crying, that the red library was dripping and pouring out its own tears, its own remorse.
I thought these things because I had failed to shake off after urinating. What a degenerate I was. What sadness, to come to such a point in life, this point at which the simplest acts, acts that promise pleasure, give access only to terrors and an overriding impression of loss.
I sniffled and wiped my nose on the blue pillow. I had the feeling that someone was near me, that I was being watched. Had a stealthy brother seen me pissing on Hazlitt? I glanced around and saw, a few feet away, standing in a puddle, Gunner. It was only the dog. Gunner held, in his mouth, between his sharp teeth, a shoe.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. The dog padded forward. He lowered his head and dropped the shoe in a puddle.
I knelt. The shoe was a white canvas slip-on. It was not new. It might’ve belonged to anyone. Gunner’s teeth had punctured it.
I placed my hands firmly on either side of Gunner’s head. I cradled, in my hands, the dog’s skull. I addressed this creature: “Listen to me. I do not want a smelly boating shoe. I want a mask. Do you remember what I told you about the Corn King? I understand that it may not make perfect sense for the Corn King to wear an African mask, but we don’t have any other masks in our collection. This isn’t the Natural History Museum, Gunner. I want you to go back and bring me a mask from the wall. They’re hanging all over the wall and you’ll be able to get one without much trouble. Do you think you can manage?”