Short Story: "Cow"

“Cow”

Marvin was a cosmopolitan bull, a bovine of refinement. Colloquially, most would call him a “cow.” He was born and raised outside of Muncie, Indiana, where his father instilled in him a farmer’s work ethic and an obligatory love for basketball. His mother was gentle and nurturing. She gave Marvin an appreciation of good literature and showed him that the world is full of culture and beauty. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Cow was surprised when Marvin left for Indiana University at Bloomington. 

After three years Marvin had received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature, with a minor in philosophy, and founded the IU chapter of the Bovine Student’s Union. He worked for about a year with a Washington think tank dedicated to researching the literacy concerns facing so many struggling farm animals—mostly goats, chickens, and occasionally pigs—and then was accepted to graduate school at Columbia University. Marvin excelled, made many friends, and was noted for being a very agreeable bull. While he was working on his Ph.D. in Eastern Philosophy, he began teaching some literature courses. His dissertation about interspecies metempsychosis, castes, and superstructures was published to great acclaim, and after graduating Magna Cum Laude, the first hoofed animal at Columbia to do so, he was offered an adjunct faculty position with the Philosophy Department. 

For the past fifteen years he had worked tirelessly—researching, writing, researching, speaking, researching, publishing, researching, and lecturing. At times he felt incarcerated behind a wall of the bricks so familiar to professors: a laptop, row after row of obscure books, stacks of papers, and lines of whining students asking if pictures and tables could count against a thirty-page requirement. (They couldn’t.) Day after day Marvin Cow paid his dues and never shrugged his Muncie work ethic. Now, at age forty-three, he was tenured, living comfortably in New York, the author of many books, a frequently cited authority, a widely sought after lecturer, a patron of the arts, an aficionado of fine vegetarian cuisine, and, finally, a Knicks season ticket holder.

He often took sabbaticals to China, India, the Vietnam Peninsula, and throughout the Far and Middle East. During his travels and studies, he had experienced life’s rich palette, and as an academic observer with a clinical mind he had learned to take nearly everything in stride. This self-perception of scholarly detachment only caused him to be more surprised when he found himself angry about something mentioned on Science Friday while he was listening to NPR in his office:

“And, as it happens, the cow can walk up stairs, but cannot walk down the stairs …”

Marvin turned off the radio. He was outraged, “Why I’ve never heard such an idiotic, narrow-minded, ignorant, bald-faced lie! That’s ridiculous. Why couldn’t a cow walk down the stairs? People never bother to meet a real cow or talk to a real cow before they go off and make their own half-baked…” He stoked the fire within until he had no choice but to draft up an angry email to the NPR ombudsperson. 

Dear Sir:

I was listening to Science Friday this afternoon when I heard a most unfortunate, uninformed, ridiculous remark. It was mistakenly reported that cows are somehow incapable of climbing down stairs. I can assure you that I myself am a bovine and every single day I descend no less than …

No that wasn’t right. 

… I myself am a bovine and go down a flight of stairs nearly every …

No, that wasn’t quite right either.

… I myself am a bovine and I will sometimes go down …

Nope. 

… I myself am a bovine and I once descended …

Delete, delete, delete.

Marvin was stunned. As he thought back upon his life, it suddenly occurred to him that he could not remember walking down stairs. He turned off his computer, grabbed his coat, took the elevator to the lobby, and dolefully walked home. 

But at home he found no comfort. He barely touched his eggplant pasta, or spinach and dandelion side salad. Though he had five healthy stomachs, he somehow had no appetite—not even for lunchtime’s cud. He threw back two glasses of wine, and went to bed. All night long he tossed and turned. “Have I really never gone down stairs in my life?” he wondered. One by one he thought of all the places he had lived and worked. In this modern, ADA-compliant world, there was almost always a ramp or an elevator. As the night restlessly crept along, he argued his thoughts. “Of course I take the stairs up to my office in the morning—it’s the healthy thing to do,” he reasoned with himself. “But in the evening I feel worn out from all the troubles of the day, and going down the stairs isn’t as much exercise as it is merely hard on knees. It’s not that I can’t go down the stairs, it’s only that I prefer to not.”

He tossed to his other side: “And the only reason I take the elevator down from my apartment every single morning is because I’m always running late, and I don’t have the time to trudge down five flights of stairs! I probably would go down the stairs if there was time…” But the debate wasn’t moving toward any resolution and another question materialized from within, pushing against his security: if he was too tired to take the stairs down from his office, then why did he often take the stairs up to his apartment when returning from work? 

“Because the walk home rejuvenates me, and I’m not in as much of a rush to get home as I am to simply get out of the office!”

As Marvin’s mind went back and forth, it also went farther into the past. He thought back to the time when his Boy Scout troop was going to the Statue of Liberty. He was so excited and sold so many jamboree tickets to earn the trip. And yet when it came time to hike up to the crown, Marvin had a ready excuse. “It’s too hot to hike up all those stairs and it must be 100 degrees in that stuffy old statue,” he had conveniently thought, “I’d rather hang around here in visitor’s center.” The scoutmaster encouraged him. The other boys urged him. But Marvin didn’t budge, though it nearly broke his heart. For reasons he could not explain, he felt utterly incapable of going along with the troop. 

This memory was too much to bear. 

Sleep was no longer an option, so he got out of bed, put on his robe and slippers, and walked out into the hall with a bull’s full resolve. With no thought for the hour, he threw open the stairwell door. For minutes he stared at the stairs, nostrils flaring, and eyes narrowing. He stared. He stared. He stared and stared …

-  -  -

The next afternoon Marvin was sitting in his therapist’s office. “I stood there looking down the stairwell until I heard the old bird-from-across-the-hall’s alarm clock go off,” he told Dr. Feinstein. “Then I felt so ashamed and scared that someone would come into the hall and start asking about what I was doing, I ran back inside, and locked the door, and wept for the first time in years.” (He was exaggerating, but felt like he was also being completely honest.)

“And what would you have said if one of the neighbors had asked what you were doing out there?” she gently asked. Dr. Feinstein waited patiently while Marvin looked despondently at the floor, trying build up his thoughts and courage. 

“I don’t know. I guess I would’ve had to lie. How could I tell anyone that …” He stopped cold. There was a long pause. 

“Go on, Marvin …” she kindly coaxed. 

“How could I tell anyone that … that I …” Marvin started to break down. The doctor waited before offering more encouragement.

“Go ahead, Marvin. Don’t be afraid.”

“That I … that “Dr. Marvin Cow” … I can’t even go down simple flight of stairs. A grown bovine and I can’t even do what a two-year-old-human child can do.”

And with this admission, his nerve and gumption spent, Marvin’s buried his head into his hoofs to hide his failure and the emotions he barely holding at bay. 

“Marvin?”

He did not answer. 

“Marvin? Are you ok to go on?”

He barely nodded.

“Marvin, what are you feeling?”

He was trying to hold back all his emotions. In a muffled voice and staccato gasps, he put together his answer. “I feel so terrible … so inadequate … I can graduate Columbia … with honors … and I can write books … be interviewed on CNN … go to banquets with the mayor … and people think … they think I’m great … but I can’t even … I can’t even go down the stairs! I just feel like such a … I feel so foolish and inadequate … and I feel such self … self-loathing…”

Dr. Feinstein was quick to reassure him. “Well, I’ve known you for sometime now. Over the past few years I’ve had many opportunities to talk to you. Do you think that’s how I see you? As foolish and inadequate?”

Marvin was reluctant to answer. He knew what the therapist was getting at, but he felt too awful about himself to concede her point so easily.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. 

“I see a smart, articulate, driven, hard working bovine, who is accomplished, refined, well-liked, respected, and well-rounded.” She waited for him to respond. She waited in vain.

“I’m proud of you, Marvin,” she stole a glance at the clock on the wall. Fifty-two minutes had gone by, which was close enough. “I think it was really brave of you to be so forthright and honest with yourself today. I think we’re off to a good start and have a lot to work with.”

At the doctor’s suggestion, he scheduled an appointment for the same time next week with the happy old woman at the front desk. As he left the office, Marvin couldn’t shake the feeling she was staring at him through the glass office door, silently judging him as he walked to the elevator and hit the “down” call button. He had always heard admitting the problem was the hardest part—and it certainly wasn’t easy—but enduring the constant shame, the specter of embarrassment, and torturing himself wondering what mean thoughts were behind seemingly innocent faces, were already proving to be trials not any easier to bear. 

-  -  -

For the next several weeks Marvin fell into a foggy cycle of lecturing, grading, researching, writing, and feeling as though he was wearing his inabilities like spots on his hide. He never consciously chose to avoid company, but, except for his weekly visits to Dr. Feinstein, work, and the coworkers he simply could not evade, he started staying at home and keeping to himself more and more. With an excuse here, closing his office door there, and ignoring phone calls and emails everywhere, the retreat into seclusion wasn’t drastic; rather it was effortless, gentle, and easy. Marvin didn’t notice the effects, how drop by drop he was feeling more disabled and despondent, but his mother would’ve been shocked to the limits of matronly concern if she had learned her son, born and raised a Hoosier, was giving away his Knicks tickets to friends. 

His seat at the Garden wasn’t really a seat at all. Marvin stood in a little nook right off the upper concourse where wheelchairs were typically parked. For years he didn’t think much about watching the game next to the fans that had no use of their legs. “The handicap accessible spaces are more suited for a bovine,” he had once explained to a friend. “We’re so much bigger than most of the other animals and it gives me room to stand—sitting is more for dogs, humans, cats, and the like.” And though his tickets had brought him nothing but joy and pride for years, the thought of going to a game now, of accepting his place with the other disabled fans, was too much to bear.

He was nearly enticed out of his apartment when the Pacers were in town, if for no other reason than that the idea of not going to a Knicks-Pacers’ game would have never occurred to him. The idea couldn’t have even been expressed to him as a cogent thought. But that all changed when he left his apartment, went into the hall, and hit the downward call button at the elevator bank. He thought of walking up to his “seat” in the Garden and taking the elevator back down. He wondered if anyone would judge him—easily ambling about and up the staircase, and then taking his advantageous handicap accessible spot right on the aisle, by all appearances a faker. He wondered about those who might see him avoiding stairs, and what mean-spirited things they might say about “cows” to their drunk and rowdy friends once the elevator doors closed.

-  -  -

“Thinking about it all made me feel so terrible … sick to my stomachs. Before the elevator could even come up to my floor I had trotted back to my apartment and locked myself in.” Dr. Feinstein calmly and sympathetically listened as he explained all of this. “I didn’t know what else I could possibly do, so I texted the secretary over at the philosophy department and told her if anyone was still in the office and wanted the ticket, it was theirs.” When Marvin stopped talking he braced himself. His divulgences were always countered with a bit of silence followed by a distressing question that would hit him like a soft jab. 

“You said thinking about going to that game and wondering about what the other animals might think about you made you feel sick?”

Marvin, looking sidelong down at the floor, slowly nodded while the doctor continued. 

“Well, how did staying at home make you feel?”

-  -  -

Marvin was lying in bed, but the longer he lied there the less tired he became. He was absorbed in one of his new favorite pastimes, different in form, but not in nature, from the avoiding and self-loathing: arguing with others in his head. Friends and coworkers were becoming less content with being ignored, and their voice messages and emails were growing more pointed. Marvin, who never meant any harm and sincerely cared for others, felt bad every time he screened a call, pretended he wasn’t home, or otherwise let someone down. Initially his guilt caused only apologetic emotions and sincere regret that he wasn’t acting like the kind of bull he had hoped he was, but as time passed the guilt mounted and was soon unbearable. He was desperate to shovel it off, and once his peers started showing their impatience with terse words and curt tones, the already well-meaning and hurting bovine finally had the excuse he needed to become defensive. These new resentful feelings were carried around during the day, but could largely be suppressed with distractions. It was typically at nighttime, when the bull lie in the dark alone, that his bitter self found a voice and a captive audience. 

One message from earlier in the day had been particularly blunt and raised the usually passive bull’s ire. Stan Hollings, the department dean, had called. It seemed like he was always calling. Every time Marvin’s iPhone shook he tensed up and became nauseous. When he saw Stan’s name on the caller ID, he turned positively bilious. Though he didn’t want to check the voice mail, curiosity compelled him. 

“Next unheard message:” 

“Marvin, it’s Stan. Listen, I’ve called you eight or nine times in the past month and left just as many messages. Debra told me you’ve been sneaking in and out of the office. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s unacceptable. I need you to call me back. Immediately. ‘Tenured’ doesn’t mean ‘untouchable.’ There are no sacred cows in our department.”

Unpleasant feelings had stewed all day long and now Marvin was worked up. “It’s not like you always return my messages,” he countered the Stan in his head. “How about the time you were supposed to co-present the Cartesian dualisms and the Avesta paper with me at the Zoroastrian conference? I covered for you and you didn’t even have the decency to thank me!” 

No, he could do better: “… and you never even had the decency or the professional courtesy to thank me!” Yes, that was better. 

Unfortunately he was all too aware of the potential weaknesses with this response. First of all, he had been more than happy to present the paper alone, and he knew that Stan knew it. The fact that Marvin had been so open about feeling comfortable going solo on the presentation might have even been the reason the Stan had abandoned him. Second, although Stan didn’t specifically “thank” Marvin, he had been extremely apologetic and complimentary. Dean Hollings might not have handled the matter perfectly, but he had certainly not been derelict. Neither was Stan dumb nor inarticulate, and Marvin knew the man would be able to come up with a good response. The restless and bothered bull rolled over to his other side and started forming the next volley of blows in his mind when he was suddenly shaken by a sound as jarring as the Dean’s “sacred cow” barb had been. 

It was the fire alarm. 

Absorbed as he had been, Marvin’s thoughts were immediately pushed out by new concerns. “Is this real?” he wondered. In all the previous years every time the alarm had been tested there had been warnings and notices taped to the doors and left in the mailboxes ad nauseam, and there had never been a test during the night. His heart started beating faster and his wide bull-eyes sharpened. “These things are almost always false alarms,” he calmed himself. “There is no need to panic. I’ll put on my robe and slippers, go out into the hall, see what’s really going on.”

He could hear some stirring and commotion out in the hall. “Nothing unusually about that,” he reassured himself, but his pace subconsciously quickened a little when the mumbles seeping through the walls did not seem calm or dismissive. Once he entered into his foyer he distinctly heard a few screams, but he could not understand the word the being cried out. No longer willing to sooth himself, almost breaking into a run, he moved toward his door. As it swung open something foreign, virulent oozed into the apartment, and was drawn in by the bull’s dilating nostrils. He suddenly realized the word he had heard others shouting through the walls: “Smoke!”

The bull charged out of the apartment and into the hall, throwing his head from side to side, taking in the surreal scene around him, and reflexively snorting. Most tenants were streaming out of their apartments. A few others were pushing against the stream, calling out the names of mementos they could not leave behind, or asking about friends and neighbors they had not seen and could not account for. Whether pushing or flowing, as the crowd eddied and swirled, every passerby eventually drained at the stairwell. Panicked, desperate, and then forlorn and resigned, Marvin looked to elevators and saw what he could already feel.

It was terrible scene. A stray member of the crowd would pass, poke and re-poke the call button, but the light behind the button would not remain on. Some passerby in the stream would shout out something like, “Fire! The elevators are off! Use the stairs!” Then the stray would turn from the wall, face the crowd, and be washed from the elevator bank into the current with the rest. Marvin, glassy eyed and tuned-out, the panic almost still and muffled around him, watched the elevator episode happen three times—each time the flow of tenants diminishing, the stream becoming smaller, but with more coughing, and the air growing translucent. Finally, two simultaneous things broke his daze. 

Just as the sprinklers on the fifth floor came on, spraying the bovine with water, a familiar voice called out, “Come on Marvin, ve’re getting out! Sniff! Sniff! It müst be getting closer.” It was Karl, a recently retired chemical engineer and German German Shepherd who had never lost his accent, and was perhaps Marvin’s best friend in the building. “Zhere isn’t müch time.” 

The bull stammered, “Yes, I know that, but first I have … There is … the manuscript I’ve been working on. I must go back in and get it.” Marvin began to turn himself, but he was stopped by Karl who had gripped one of the cow’s pajama pant legs in his powerful jaws, and was pulling toward the stairwell. In a smothered mumble, he almost angrily repeated himself, “No! Ve have to go!” 

“But my manu…”

“To zhe devil with your silly manuscript! A dead bull collects no royalties! Let’s go!”

Marvin, exasperated, tense, and wanting nothing more than to heroically bear his own disability and death alone and in peace, snapped. He stomped at Karl, batted him aside with his horns, pulled back with his full strength—a vast network of beautifully flowing, twitching muscles—and bellowed in a terrible sonorous roar, “I can’t! I can’t!”

He slammed the door behind him, locked it, and placed the chain, blocking out Karl, fire, disability, and hope. He heard his friend scratch on the door and fiercely bark, “Marvin! Marvin!” for a few moments before the barking was broken, stifled by coughs, then the scratching stopped and Marvin heard the scamper of paws down the hall. Left to himself he sat down on the floor, his back against the door, and started to passively whimper. For some reason the alarm stopped as suddenly as it had begun. There was a small stretch of calm, of deep breaths and the patter of sprinkler drops hitting the floor, the walls, the tables, chairs, bedspreads, books, and appliances. The sounds of fire truck sirens were swelling in the streets below, but it seemed like they were a million miles away. Marvin felt like he was marooned on an island, where nothing but the falling water and smoke, and eventually flames, could reach him. 

He sat for a moment in the eye of the storm, the commotion of the evacuation over, the flames and torrents of smoke temporarily at bay, and fully experienced the last moments of his life. He was glad his affairs were in order, that he had made a will and had life insurance to cover all trouble and expenses. He thought of the work he had done, the people he had loved, the service he had given. He thought of the books, the conferences, the speeches, the lectures, the students. He remembered beautiful, clean air outside of Muncie, green meadows, rows of corn, and red pole barns. He hoped the afterlife, the next life, or whatever was about to happen, would only be as pleasant as what he had already known. Yet he also hoped he would be able to improve, to have a second chance at things, try to be a little nicer, show more affection and gratitude toward the special people in his life, and (with thoughts of kind Karl still fresh on his mind) to never lose his patience, snap, or treat anyone cruelly again.

It was getting harder to breath. 

Marvin began to feel groggy, and his mind was getting fuzzy. There was a temptation pulling him, a sensation like falling asleep, and he wondered whether or not he should give in. It didn’t matter what he thought, which way he decide—the pull was too strong. The large bull, the professor, son, friend, neighbor, colleague, example, writer, expert, lover of vegetarian cuisine, and Knicks season ticket holder, was succumbing to the poison air, and would’ve been overtaken if a sharp cackle hadn’t broken the trance. 

“Help!”

Marvin straightened a bit, slowly blinked, and wondered if he was hallucinating. 

“Goodness! Great galloping gargoyles!” 

There was only one person in the building who spoke like that. It had to be Henrietta, the old turkey who lived across the hall—that same bird who’s alarm clock had scared the stair-daunted Marvin back into his room in the sub-early hours of the morning all those weeks ago when he first faced his limitations. 

“Goodness, help!” the woman gobbled out, followed by a terrible string of avian squawks and coughs. 

The waning bull scrambled up to his feet and moved, almost sleep walked, over to his window, putting his fore-hoof through the glass. Cool fresh air rushed past, oxygen and new life swirled around Marvin like a baptism. He leaned forward, nose out into the sky, coughed a bit, then drank deeply from the atmosphere. 

“Marvin! Marvin!” 

Marvin opened his eyes wide and looked down to the street. Karl was uneasily dancing side-to-side, concerned and loyal, and barking up to his neighbor and friend. 

“Marvin! I told zhe men you vere in zhere Marvin! I told zhem you vere trapped!”

“The old turkey woman from across the hall is up here too,” Marvin interrupted and yelled down over the sirens, crackle, and ruckus from the crowd of excited onlookers. 

“Zhe men are setting üp a big, inflatable cushion,” Karl went on. “It vill be ready in a minüte or two. You vill have to jump from your vindow!” 

For the first time Marvin looked at all the firefighters scurrying around his friend, and particularly noticed four or five who were working underneath the window—tugging at ropes and adjusting the edges of a large vinyl rectangle, mostly white with a smaller red rectangle in the middle. It was a landing pad, slowly inflating, bit-by-bit coming to life in waves and slack bulges. The bull stared down to the street sixty feet below, and an uncomfortable lump welled up in his throat. His stomachs began to feel uneasy, the pad—even while rising up—seemed to be zooming farther and farther away, looking tinier on the pavement, and he felt a little dizzy. With the residue of smoke still heavy in his lungs and the dilemma of death by suffocation or death by blunt force trauma ahead of him, he wanted to vomit. He might have even done it, but yet another noise interrupted his fear. 

“Goodness! Goodness!” Henrietta gobbled. “Golly gosh… Giving up the ghost!” followed by more squawks and wattle-rattling coughs.  

Marvin drew in one more deep, long, and oxygen-rich breath from the oasis outside, and then, over the barking objections of Karl, charged back into the center of the building. When he reached the main hall a thick wave of heat and smoke washed against him. He hung his head as low to the floor has he could, like he was skimming over grass, and struggled for good air while taking in the scene. 

Henrietta was at the elevator bank, flapping out her wings and compulsively picking at the call button with her beak, stopping only here and there to gobble out panicked gibberish, squawk, and cough. It only took a moment to realize she was losing steam. Every second her picking was less precise, her wings flapped less vigorously, and her gobbles were more muffled. Marvin knew what she was going through, because he felt the same way. 

Over the ever-increasing noise, he lowed out to her, “You’ll have to use the stairs! The elevators are not working!” 

Henrietta’s long neck and nearly bald head snapped up a bit. “Great goodness golly gosh almighty! Marvin, is that you?”

“Yes. You have to go down the stairs! Hurry, I think we’re running out of air!” The bull snorted loudly and stamped his front hoof into the hardwood floors. “Go! Get!” Marvin never had much patience for Henrietta, and with the impending danger saw no reason to hide his brusqueness.

The turkey’s wings stopped flapping, the wattle fell limp, and her head sank slightly. “Marvin, goodness Marvin, I can’t go; I can’t get down the stairs.” 

The bull felt less impatient, but, with a new motive, was no less brusque. “Come on! Now!” he thundered, as he charged into the hall, grabbed the sad and gasping bird by the neck, and stormed back into the far end of his apartment by the open window. 

Henrietta was immediately revived by the night air rushing past the two animals to feed the hungry fire in the halls and floors beyond, and Marvin was relieved to see the landing pad was now full, looking much stouter. As the bird’s senses slowly returned, so did her more vigorous panic. “Oh, goodness golly gracious! Great, giant…”

Marvin cut her off. “Henrietta! You and I will have to escape out the window.”

“Goodness, no! Goodness, no!”

“There isn’t any other way,” and the bull gestured down to the clamoring rescue workers below. “We’ll go together. You can fly out and I’ll jump down to the pad. I’ll be right behind you.” 

“Great galloping geese, are you goofing?”

The bull remembered why he generally tried to avoid conversations with gallinaceous birds. “I assuring you I’m not ‘goofing.’ If you don’t fly out of here, you will die. Now let’s go!” and he made another gesture to the window. 

“Goodness, you block-headed old bull, Turkeys can’t fly!” She was more matter of fact than Marvin had ever seen her before, and though he was being called “block-headed” he found the tone refreshing. “Are all birds alike to you?” she went on with her head craned to the side and her wings indignantly folded across her chest. 

It had been so long since he had been on a farm. He couldn’t believe he had forgotten. But there was no time to marvel or think back through the years to Indiana fields and pastures—the room was getting hotter, the flames louder, the air worse, and the yelling firefighters more upset. Over the din he could hear Karl barking, “Marvin! Marvin! Now! You have to jump now!” The bull’s animal intuition, his keen survival instinct, told him there really wasn’t more than a minute or so left before the smoke and fire would claim them. One last surge of adrenalin coursed through his veins, and everything around him seemed to slow down. 

He looked down at Henrietta. The easily agitated and flustered bird was standing so resolutely and proud, with her useless feathers puffed out. “Never mind about flying then,” he told her. “You’ll just have to jump out like me.” And he smiled to reassure her. 

“Goodness no! Goodness no! There’s got to be some other way to get out?!” 

Marvin stomped his hoof again for show, and bellowed out, “Henrietta! There is no other way! NOW LET’S GO!”

The bird fell into a hysterical fit of helpless bawling, and cried out to Marvin through her sobs. “Goodness, I can’t … Gosh, I’m sorry … I know it’s silly … Goodness, I just … I just can’t …”

The whole world around them was furnace-hot. The bull’s eyes and lungs were stinging—it felt like they were bleeding. There was no time to be quiet, calm, or sympathetic like Dr. Feinstein. “Henrietta, do you want to live or die?”

“Goodness, of course I want to live! Goodness gracious of course … of course I want to live,” she spit out in burst. “But Marvin … I can’t.” Her head fell down, and coughs and sobs took over. She had come to her emotional and physical limit. There was nothing she could do but cry and wait and wish things had been different—wish she had been different. 

The cosmopolitan bull was also at his limits. There were no words left for Henrietta Turkey Bird. She was stuck in herself and frozen to the floor. 

“I understand,” the bull told the hopeless bird, and for the second time in as many minutes he swiped her up by the neck. In one motion he placed his other hoof under Henrietta’s body, and over objecting squawks and gobbles, gently tossed her into the night sky. For five stories there was fluttering and the fading gobbling of alliterated “G” expletives, curses, and nonsense moving toward the cushiony pad below. Henrietta landed with more fussing than damage. For years to come and with relish she would tell friends, family, and anyone who would listen about the time she was so uncivilly thrown out the window, or about the night when she learned the Dr. Marvin Cow didn’t even have sense enough to know turkeys couldn’t fly. 

But Marvin did have sense enough to survive. Immediately after Henrietta had cleared out of the way, he took his last deep breath from the night air rushing through the window, closed his eyes with a silent prayer for help, and then jumped clear of the burning building. He landed with a considerably louder thud than Ms. Bird had, but he was really no worse for the wear. As soon as he settled on the bag, Karl and two paramedics were racing to him. The German danced side-to-side while Marvin was examined. Once the EMTs determined it was all right for the bull to move, he was led to the back of an ambulance, given wonderful oxygen, and further poked and prodded. Karl continued to dance, but was less nervous and more excited as time went by, and before long was so happy that (without realizing it) he licked his old friend clear across the side of the head. This celebratory lick, along with Marvin’s temporary breakdown inside the building, was never again mentioned between the good friends. 

In fact, quite unlike Ms. Bird, Marvin didn’t often share his memories of that night. Out of his coworkers, students, friends, and family, only the avid newspaper readers ever knew what had happened. He might have been tempted to speak up during those times when he could overhear Henrietta retelling the story with many unflattering embellishments, but he had a cherished turkey-scratched thank-you letter sitting in the top drawer of his desk at work, and that letter gave him the confidence to resist defending himself. And yet any confidence gained from the letter was negligible compared to the poise that came through some unrecognized process. 

The night of the fire Marvin was surrounded by flames, smoke, sirens, panic, and a dozen other dramatic elements, but those forces acting alone would have still left him helpless, leaning against a locked apartment door, waiting for smoke and flames to overtake him. Whatever changed him was more powerful than fire. Whatever happened to the bull occurred only after seeing Henrietta crying out for help, and he resolved to act—to do something, anything. Though he never thought much about the change that had taken place, he felt its effects immediately. 

Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour or the ordeal he had just passed through, as soon as the paramedics cleared Marvin, he reached for the iPhone in his robe pocket, and called Dean Hollings’ office line. He knew Stan wouldn’t be there, but he wanted to leave a message before any more time passed. “Hi, Stan. It’s me, Marvin. I owe you an apology. You’re right; I have been acting inexcusably lately. I won’t go into details right now, but it’s been a rough couple of weeks. I’ll explain it to you next time we talk. I’ll be in my office around ten tomorrow morning. Again, I’m very sorry.”

Before checking into a nearby hotel to salvage what rest he could for the remainder of the eventful night, the bull made one more call and left one more message: “Hello, Dr. Feinstein. This is Marvin Cow. I’m calling to cancel my appointment for this week. You’ve been great and I really appreciate the work you’ve done, but … I feel fine. In fact, I feel great. Let me know if you ever want to meet up at a Knicks’ game. Thanks again.”

In a Days Inn on the upper west side, his home still smoldering a few blocks away, Marvin slept soundly, blissfully from 2:52 A.M. until his alarm went off at 8:45. And he never again descended in an elevator in shame.