Free The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater Page A

sleep.
    The next morning, in school, our teacher told us that a fire had taken the Callahans’ house and everyone in it as well. Only the mother, not home that night, had survived. Later, over days, the story seeped out. The children’s bodies had been found by the windows, which were not double hung, but crank operated, the aluminum handles too hot to touch, melted beyond shape or function.
    All gone. Every single child, plus their father, gone. Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph. I was ten years old, in the third grade, my mind too small for these six singular facts, and yet not so small that I could slam shut some door, or window. Their names. Mary’s sneer. The pond-warm pee of a boy next to me. Gone now. And worse than gone, the going. How they must have clawed at the glass, flame-licked. The depth of human terror. Its persistent possibility.
    For years after that I walked, once a month or so, by the site where their house had been, and, in my mind, a window all wrong, a man in black billows, a bird blowing by, my name not called, not called, not called. If every childhood has its defining event, this perhaps was mine, not the fire, not the enormity of the loss, although those figure in, believe me, they do. But the defining event, in the end, is not what happened, but rather what did not, and how close it came to being otherwise. My name not called. Myself, and yours, just a few little letters away from going Pegasus, who began as flesh but ended up astral. I was ten but also ten no longer.
    I’m sure there are a thousand reasons for the fears that came to define me as definitively as my skin or my signature. I came of age in the 1970s and am old enough to recall the ending of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the nuclear era, missiles lining the banks of Europe, the threats, the button, a world emptied of people, a war where no one touches yet everyone dies.
    Yes, a thousand reasons for the fears that waxed and waned but never left and instead, in their perpetual presence, became the beat by which I marched my way through life. For me, starting at the age of ten, life was about a
not
, a near miss, and thus I ricocheted between dodging dangers real and imagined while concomitantly clutching at whatever I believed could keep me safe. By the age of twelve I could list every elevator crash since 1923. I knew the date on which Charles Manson had become eligible for parole. I walked in fear and yet knew enough to mock myself, and thus my peers thought me quirky enough to be
almost
(but not quite) cool. In junior high’s homeroom, during attendance time, when we were all sitting in rows, I would not infrequently whip out a thermometer and take my temperature just to get the giggles, making comedy out of neuroses too severe to stuff down.
    Two years after the Callahan fire, my father received his inheritance, and we moved from the Golden Ghetto to a much plusher place, 219 Chestnut Street. There, we had a butler and a burglar alarm that included what were called panic buttons positioned at calculated intervals along the corridors. The panic buttons glowed at night, mandarin bars of light we were told to never, ever push unless there was an emergency. The panic buttons presented me with a continuous unsolvable philosophical quandary that to this day I have not solved:
unless there is an emergency.
The panic button presumes that there is life on the one hand, crisis on the other. I had a more integrated approach. Panic did not exist apart from life. It
was
life, and to this day I swear I’m right. The sheer
number
of ways things can go wrong in a trillion-celled human body held together by gossamer threads of good luck confirm for me my stance. There are no freak accidents in life, and how could there be if the entirety of life is
itself
the most outrageous incredible freak event we will all never truly understand, even as we stumble through it, doing our best to dodge the dangers. And in my mind there is always a