“Who’s next?” Milton called out.
“A boxer with a cough in room four,” Charlotte said. “And after that, a Chihuahua euthanasia.”
At some point watching animals let out their final breaths under fluorescent lights had become his whole life. Years of veterinary school—performing necropsies and rectal examinations, taking X-rays and identifying parasites, memorizing respiratory and reproductive systems—and here he was, day after day, the last call. All of Southern California seemed burgeoning with animals suffering from chronic pain, loss of bodily functions, and terminal disease. Then there was the unpleasantness of counseling the grieved: men, women, and children with quivering chins and stupid questions like, “Could we have done anything more?” Or “Is it silly that I feel this sad?” Why hadn’t Cornell prepared him for this?
Still, in those instances when he held an old Doberman or a tail-twitching Labrador at the end, he envisioned booking a hotel near the ocean, preferably the Westin overlooking the bay, where he used to take his kids to watch the Christmas-lighted yachts bobbing in the harbor during the holidays. He imagined freeing his feet from compression stockings and lying on the bed starfished with the sliding-glass door open. He’d inject the syringe of pentobarbital into his arm, cephalic vein. The breeze would stir the palm trees and carry the chlorine from the swimming pool into his room. He’d drift out of himself, away from distemper, heartworms, and parvovirus, and surrender to the release of enzymes, the precursors of decomposition, putrefaction. He’d contribute to the fertility of the great earthly garden.
