The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage

want. Desistance. Aboulia. Ataraxia. No flutter of eyelids. No twitches.
    The aim is not a definition of stopping, but a definition of going on. Begin with a definition of going on. Or a definition of beginning. Work toward a theorem of happiness, for example. The pursuit of a loved object, for example. Life in that perspective. The loved object: a stick, a ball, or even a sock. Roy was never a fetcher. He could not understand the obsessive-compulsive behavior of retrievers. If I threw him a stick he would amble after it, then just go off into the bushes and chew on it. I imagine he was happy doing that.
    I obsessively take my pulse.
    She has brought two of her kitchen guests in to look at the paintings: an archetypal neighborhood couple, indifferently dressed in the thoroughly false manner that has become compulsive among people of their sort, a mandatory casualness that is at bottom a new formality, as oppressive and obligatory as the old. In just the same way, it occurs to me when she brings them over to my chair to greet me, that their obligatory friendliness is, at bottom, a distancing mechanism whose real aim is to make serious talk impossible. They stroll around the room looking at the paintings. The woman says “expressive” or “impressive” a dozen times, the man puts on a show of authority, pegging the paintings with art-critical jargon, then glancing at me in search of my approval, as the owner of the paintings, and as a fellow man.
    When they have left I feel, if possible, more depressed than ever.
    Unable to pick up the pill I sweep it off the tabletop into my palm.
    Walking down to the park, I cross Professor Diamond coming up from there on the opposite sidewalk, walking briskly with long strides, a folded deck chair under one arm. That way of walking was considered “mannish” when I was young. She doesn’t turn her head in my direction, and I don’t look in hers, hobbling downhill, using my stick. I watch her from the corner of my eye. From across the street I can’t make out her eyes, can’t quite see if she has sent a reciprocal glance in my direction, but I feel her gaze on me, brushing my face, fly-like. I am the only other person on the street. I am, with my halting gait, my stick, impossible to overlook. In order not to turn her head in my direction she is obliged to actively avoid turning her head in my direction. This active and conscious avoidance is in essence a form of staring , I am thinking. It is staring in a deficient mode, just as her active avoidance is a deficient mode of actual contact and for that reason all the more striking to us both. From now on she will think of me as someone to be avoided, and I will think of her as someone avoiding. In the smooth course of her daily life I stand out as an obstacle.
    She would prefer that I not make a statement, I am sure.
    Moll in brand-new overalls, on her knees in the narrow band of vegetation between the house and the sidewalk, resting her weight on one hand, pulling at weeds. She knocks the dirt from the roots and tosses them on the pavement. I rap on the pane. She looks up, red-faced and sweaty, and I shake my head violently. She shrugs and goes back to weeding. Half an hour later she is humming in the kitchen.
    Scarcely a garden, that weed-infested band of unruly vegetation, but I contemplate it with perverse satisfaction, with what feels to me like satisfaction—a seamless blend of petulance and spite. Though it happens on a regular basis, I am amazed every time I look out and see one of my neighbors in front of his house hacking away at the grass shoots that poke up through cracks in the sidewalk, pulling and hacking at them with small-minded viciousness. I feel completely estranged from people who want to pull grass from cracks in the sidewalk—so estranged that it strikes me as odd I can understand them when they speak.
    The other foot is dragging. Two sticks now.
    I remember striding, the physical feel of it, the sensation of