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legs twitched brokenly.
    “Easy,” I said.
    The dog whimpered, working his jaws. He didn’t snap again, not even when I hunkered close and laid my hand between his ears. The short hairs bristled against my palm.
    His chest heaved. He made a grunting, coughing sound. Blood spattered the road. I looked on, dispassionate. Already, I was losing my sense of emotional connection. I had deliberately neglected to take my pill that morning.
    Then the woman showed up.
    I heard her trampling through the underbrush. She called out, “Buddy! Buddy!”
    “Here,” I said.
    She came out of the woods, holding a red nylon leash, a woman maybe thirty-five years old, with short blond hair, wearing a sleeveless blouse, khaki shorts, and ankle boots. She hesitated. Shock crossed her face. Then she ran to us.
    “Buddy, oh Buddy.”
    She knelt by the dog, tears spilling from her blue eyes. My chest tightened. I wanted to cherish the emotion. But was it genuine, or a residual effect of the drug?
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “He was in the road.”
    “I took him off leash,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
    She kept stroking the dog’s side, saying his name. Buddy laid his head in her lap as if he was going to sleep. He coughed again, choking up blood. She stroked him and cried.
    “Is there a vet?” I asked.
    She didn’t answer.
    Buddy shuddered violently and ceased breathing; that was the end. “We’d better move him out of the road,” I said.
    She looked at me and there was something fierce in her eyes. “I’m taking him home,” she said.
    She struggled to pick the big shepherd up in her arms. The dog was almost as long as she was tall.
    “Let me help you. We can put him in the car.”
    “I can manage.”
    She staggered with Buddy, feet scuffing, the dog’s hind legs limp, like weird dance partners. She found her balance, back swayed, and carried the dead dog into the woods.
    I went to the car, grabbed the keys. My hand reached for the glove box, but I drew it back. I was gradually becoming an Eye again, a thing of the Tank. But no matter what, I was through with pills. I wanted to know if there was anything real left in me.
    I locked the car and followed the woman into the woods.
    She hadn’t gotten far. I found her sitting on the ground crying, hugging the dog. She looked up.
    “Help me,” she said. “Please.”
    I carried the dog to her house, about a hundred yards. The body seemed to get heavier in direct relation to the number of steps I took.
    It was a modern house, octagonal, lots of glass, standing on a green expanse of recently cut lawn. We approached it from the back. She opened a gate in the wooden fence, and I stepped through with the dog. That was about as far as I could go. I was feeling it in my arms, my back. The woman touched my shoulder.
    “Please,” she said. “Just a little farther.”
    I nodded, clenched my teeth, and hefted the dead weight. She led me to a tool shed. Finally, I laid the dog down. She covered it with a green tarp and then pulled the door shut.
    “I’ll call somebody to come out. I didn’t want Buddy to lie out by the road or in the woods where the other animals might get at him.”
    “I understand,” I said, but I was drifting, beginning to detach from human sensibilities.
    “You better come inside and wash,” she said.
    I looked at my hands. “Yeah.”
    I washed in her bathroom. There was blood on my shirt and she insisted I allow her to launder it. When I came out of the bathroom in my T-shirt, she had already thrown my outer shirt, along with her own soiled clothes, into the washer, and called the animal control people, too. Now wearing a blue shift, she offered me ice tea, and we sat together in the big, sunny kitchen, drinking from tall glasses. I noted the flavor of lemon, the feel of the icy liquid sluicing over my tongue. Sensation without complication.
    “Did you have the dog a long time?”
    “About eight years,” she said. “He was my husband’s,