If you were still around, this dog would be named Kokoschka. I have very little doubt of this. You would have wanted a name that reflected your education (Dalton, Brown), your sense of irony (a dog named Kokoschka!), and, secretly, your ambitions (the sheath of drawings under your bed when I first met you, the unfinished play on your laptop camouflaged with the filename “inventory_mtg_03”). But I named him. He is medium-sized and brown, an honest terrier mix. I feed him liver treats from a resealable pouch that I don’t trust. I worry that air is getting into the pouch and contaminating the treats. Sniffing them is no way to judge whether damage has been done, because they don’t smell very good to begin with. The dog turns out to have epilepsy. This would have fit the name Kokoschka but it does not really work with the name I’ve given him. There’s something artsy about epilepsy—the wild electrical impulses of the brain. The first time I saw him squirming on the floor, his eyeballs aimed at nothing, I assumed he was going to die right there. I had never witnessed a seizure before and thought it was a series of death throes. Do I sound detached about this? I clenched my fists so hard I cut my palms with my fingernails. I caught myself praying inside my head. I said your name out loud. That night, after it was through, after I got home from the animal emergency room, him pumped full of phenobarbital, me pumped full of lukewarm, sorry blood, I dipped and redipped my finger in a tub of melting ice cream and let the dog lick it off. Where, exactly, did we go wrong, you and I? I keep remembering the night you taped a white paper moustache under your nose and read from Huckleberry Finn. I always meant to read the actual book, but never did. Naming the dog, if you were still around, would have involved a long list and a painstaking process of elimination—weighing the strengths of Barolo over Cleveland; Raymond over Eero. I feel fairly certain that, in the end, Kokoschka would have won out. Me, I didn’t let my mind wander. I named him after myself.
