A Cat Named Darwin

by William Jordan

  The cat quickly recovered from the trauma, and that night, with a full belly, he curled up at my feet while I read the paper and watched TV. His warm, clean fur felt so comforting against my ankles. Later, when I put him out, he didn't cry and he didn't pummel and scratch the door. As I look back it is patently obvious that my life had taken a fundamental turn, and I hadn't a clue. The cat had abandoned his crusade for reasons known only to him, comprehending somehow that he had breached the walls to my soul, knowing in the reptilian roots of his brain that he had passed his trial by fire and found a home. The last person to understand this was me, of course, because as a human being I had the capacity—the glorious, essential capacity—to deny, without which life as we know it would cease to exist.

  Over the next several weeks a pattern of existence began to emerge. Every morning I would open the door and find the cat sitting there, awaiting his food. I would feed him on the landing just outside my front door and, after eating, the cat would spend the day patrolling his territory and enjoying the rights of ownership, primarily sleeping in the sun or the shade and absorbing bliss. In the evening I would call him to dinner and feed him in the kitchen, after which he would walk into the living room and curl up at my feet or jump onto the couch and sleep next to me while I read or watched TV. When I went to bed, he went outside to enjoy the night.

  I began to notice details of his appearance and behavior. His facial markings, for instance, led the eye on endless excursions through a labyrinth of fine markings. A line ran back from the outside corner of his eye and met another line running up from below to trace the outline of a mask. Five lines proceeded back from his forehead and converged in a cap of orange. They emerged from the cap and continued down to the base of his neck, where they coalesced into a single wide band that extended to the base of his tail. The tail, too, had its visual fascination, not for subtle complexity in its markings, but for the regular, half-inch spacing between the eight orange rings. But always my gaze returned to those thick circles of dark orange on each side that led the eye around and around, into a hypnotic trance.

  I could not help but notice that the cat spent much time staring back at me, appearing to seek out my eyes or my face. I would walk away and sneak a backward glance and find him staring at me from behind. What this meant I had no idea, but the staring became a constant habit.

  Then, of course, there were the fleas. They arrived in my flat like Ulysses' crew clinging to Cyclops' sheep, and the crew was impressive. Wherever the cat chose to sleep he left behind hundreds of tiny white eggs that seemed to glow against the black leather of the couch. There was no choice but to comb him as often as needed to remove these parasites—as much for my sake as for the cat's. I did not want to share my flat with vermin. I began to groom him every day and soon discovered that his reaction appeared to be hard-wired. In other words, he was incorrigible.

  He tolerated, even appreciated, the combing of his head, neck, shoulders, and flanks, but any attempt to do his tail or hind legs provoked the most bloodcurdling threats of violence. This placed us in a dilemma. As a human being, I concluded that his legs MUST be combed. Fleas were having their way, and that could not be tolerated. Even though the cat objected, my superior overview of life trumped his right to dignity and he would have to endure a brief grooming each day.

  So I called upon my superior human intellect to devise a scheme. I would wait until he was ravenous, and while he ate I would attempt to comb his hindquarters. This revealed that cats are able to yowl while frantically gulping food. They are also able to turn with blinding speed and rake their claws across the hand that feeds them.

  Over the course of the next week I tried wearing leather gloves. The cat tried waiting before he ate until my hand came within range. I discovered that leather gloves were not the best protection against the cat's armament. Finally, having exhausted all options, I was forced to concede that there was no alternative but to call off my campaign against the fleas thriving in the dense cover of the hindquarters. And so the cat gave me a lesson in respect, revealing the fundamental truth that when push comes to shove, respect is a subcase of fear, that reprisal and respect cannot be separated.

  Meanwhile, despite my cavalier presumption that cats meant nothing to me, this cat drew my attention compulsively. I could not be in the same room without glancing repeatedly at him, just as he gazed back at me, sometimes for hours. The thought never occurred that the more attention I devoted to his presence, the more memories my brain would store away.

  One day, not more than two weeks after our meeting, I found myself thinking offhandedly about names. The cat needed a name. This had nothing to do with how long I intended to keep the creature or how highly I regarded him. My mind simply wanted something more specific to grasp than "that cat." To name, to name—yet another compulsion embedded in the human genome?

  Now a name is a sacred thing. Just as a bad name is a curse that clings to one for life, a good name is a prayer, evoking the essence of the being, the creature, the genius thingi. A good name inspires its owner, often alluding to the traits of mythical figures, even gods, and if the name is truly sublime, it brings harmony and rhythm, poetry and music.

  The cat's name came without conscious effort; a few moments later he was Darwin.

  Dar-win. The word has an almost Celtic grace to it, with an apical d that bumps against the eardrum, then soothes the sensibilities with a gentle, rhotic ar that opens the soul to the wistful win, with its hints of gentle breeze and clean air. It also alludes to the gods, because those who study biology in any depth find themselves at the feet of a colossus upon whose work the conceptual integrity of biology rests, a man who has, with the passage of time, risen above the mortal world. "They look for the second coming," I once heard a biologist say. "They expect Him to come back on a cross. They blew it. He already came and went again. He called himself Darwin."

  Perhaps. But such observations lie beyond my expertise. For me, the name paid affectionate homage to the Founder with the sort of gentle humor that Darwin the Charles would appreciate, coming back as a cat.

  Having settled on a name, we began the task of getting comfortable with it. "Darwin" leapt easily from the tongue and I enjoyed saying it. Nonetheless, the name seemed a bit cumbersome at first, self-conscious, and it took several weeks for the image of an old, bald, bearded, thick-featured, white European male to merge into the image of a big, orange, white-bibbed, bull's-eye tabby. At the same time, Darwin the cat seemed to have learned his name; or at least he gave signs of recognition. I had merely to open my mouth and breathe "Darwin," and the sleeping cat would open his eyes, raise his head, and look at me.

  I did, however, wonder about the cat's comprehension, considering that when I talked on the phone and mentioned his name, he gave not the slightest indication that he recognized or even heard his name. This may seem a quibble, but it has enormous implications in understanding the animal mind. In the theories of conscious awareness, one must be aware of one's self in order to recognize one's name; the self is widely thought to be the province of the human mind, as well as the mind of the great apes. Theoretically, cats, dogs, and all other creatures should not be able to "know" their names because they do not comprehend their selves.

  In the case of Darwin, the evidence was inconclusive. He certainly seemed to know his name and reacted immediately when addressed. However, one night we watched a documentary on Darwin the Charles, and Cat Darwin lay there in slumbering bliss without so much as a flick of the ears while the narrator bandied his name about. "Darwin" meant nothing, apparently, when issued from the television. Did he respond mainly to the tone of my voice or to my inflections, or did he truly comprehend that his self had been tagged with a word, with a name?

  On the other hand, what difference did it make in the quotidian course of life whether the cat responded to "Darwin" because he understood it was his name or because he recognized the peculiar timbre of my voice speaking a sound he had come to associate with good thi
ngs?

  As the days accumulated into a few weeks, the cat continued to surprise me by revealing a complicated personality. One of his more curious traits was to use his tail as a foot cushion. Whenever he sat he curled his tail forward and wrapped it around his forepaws. Then he carefully placed both paws on top of the tail, as if to insulate his feet from the floor.

  Darwin's most distinguishing trait, however, was so odd that it took me several weeks to recognize. He usually expressed it as he waited impatiently at my feet while I prepared his meals. The ritual of preparation has a certain therapy in it, the clinking of spoon against bowl freeing the mind to wander while the faucet runs. In such a state of suspended intellect, one is unconsciously aware of neighborhood sounds. Somewhere children play and shriek and somewhere dogs bark and car alarms warble, and it was against this backdrop of domestic ennui that the barking of dogs began to rise on the horizon of my awareness. One voice in particular stood out with a gentle, sporadic bark that sounded oddly nearby. One day I happened to glance down just as Darwin opened his mouth and barked! I looked again to see if what I saw matched what I heard. Again his mouth opened and a small, high-pitched bark emerged.

  How can a cat bark? This bore closer observation, and bending down I noticed that he was not actually barking, at least not in the way we humans expect a bark to occur. When we think of barking, we think in terms of human language and presume that a bark begins with a hard consonant like b or p— what the linguists call a "plosive"—in which the lips suddenly release the built-up pressure from the lungs in a pulse of sound.

  But Darwin did not use his lips in sounding his bark. From what I could see, he formed the sound by suddenly compressing his ribs and (probably) his diaphragm, and this caused a burst of sound from the larynx. He merely opened his mouth to let the sound out and what emerged was a rather soft "Whu—, whu—, whu"—with a very short u that simply ended in midair. The plosive consonant, b, was not necessary because the sound began at maximum volume—a small shock wave—and that is what a bark is.

  To verify this conclusion with a recognized master, I went downstairs to provoke the neighbor's dog—any pedestrian offended this creature—and observe the manufacture of a real bark. Sure enough, the dog used the same technique as the cat, opening its mouth just as the lungs and diaphragm forced an explosion of air through the larynx.

  The implication was intriguing. The bark was not a bark at all; it was an ark. Actually, it wasn't even an ark because it had no terminal k. The ar sound simply ended abruptly in midair, which made the "bark" nothing more than a hard-headed, flat-rumped vowel. Another way of seeing it is to regard the bark as a compressed meow; the meow, on the other hand, is a drawn-out bark that starts low, rises gradually in volume, then tapers off to nothing.

  Now if these notions and observations seem counterintuitive, it is probably because I was educated as a biologist, and biologists, like all scientists, assume that things are not as they appear. This is not taught to us as a conscious principle; rather we learn by example that if you stare long enough and hard enough at reality you will start to find all sorts of exceptions to what our culture has taught us to believe. The consequence is that science is fundamentally perverse; as a general rule, scientists find real pleasure in pointing out that traditional perceptions are wrong. There is much to be gained, because if people accept our claims, we gain guru power as keepers of the truth.

  I had been well trained at the University of California during the late 1960s and early '70s, where I found refuge until the age of thirty, when I received a Ph.D. in entomology and my funding ran out. With no options left, I had to enter the real world and face the task of becoming a writer, which had been my dream since the age of thirteen (in part because I could work alone, at home, and not deal with the politics of a job). The process of literary metamorphosis took another fifteen years or so, because I had to throw my education away in order to woo the readership of good, mainstream people upon whom a writer's livelihood depends.

  Or at least I had to throw much of it away—not all, however. Skepticism I decided to keep; perverse or not, it was the key to intelligence, and eventually, to wisdom, and I had grown to enjoy it. What better subject on which to focus my skeptical skills than a barking cat which revealed that dogs do not bark? I thought I'd let the mind out for a run, let it sniff around in our cultural illusions and flush out a few more contradictions.

  It seemed that dogs and cats, and probably all our mammalian kin, did not generate consonants by using the tongue, lips, teeth. I could not think offhand of any that did—not mammals, not birds, not reptiles, not even our close kin the chimpanzees and the other great apes. They raged and sang at life using the open throat, and though they were able to produce abrupt sounds that seemed to start with consonants, these consonants were pretenders generated by the diaphragm, the larynx, and the lungs. Humans seem to be the only mammals that use lips, tongue, teeth, gums, glottis to produce consonants. All the others depend on the vowel alone.

  These were restless thoughts and they arrived inevitably at the physical process of speaking, for the consonant has liberated speech from the bark, the meow, the howl, the ululation, and so on. If, for instance, we produced our speech as animals produce their calls, we would have to form each syllable with a separate pulse from the lungs. Speech would resemble a panting dog: Speech (lung pulse) would (l.p.) re (l.p.) sem (l.p.) ble (l.p.) a (l.p.) pan (l.p.) ring (l.p.) dog{l.p.).

  The consonant revolutionizes all that. Instead of wheezing away in a breathless pant, we squeeze out long, resounding breaths to produce a continual flow of sound, much like a bagpipe, which we chop into sections with lips and tongue and teeth like some sort of verbal sausage machine, to produce syllables and words and phrases and sentences.

  These observations ramified beyond language to the kinship of human and ape, the human and the chimpanzee sharing about 99 percent of their genes, which shines through in the family resemblance of arms, hands, digits, and general body form.

  Then I thought of the chimpanzees I had seen, folding their lips back against the face, opening the mouth and howling, shrieking, hooting without the benefit of consonants, and I found myself seeing time from the opposite point of view and appreciating how far back we humans must have parted ways from our simian cousins. The anatomical machinery needed to produce this phonetic mastery must have taken evolution a long, long time, in particular the dexterity of the tongue and lips, the neural rewiring, and of course, the brain modifications needed to drive the anatomy of the mouth. The pharyngeal cavity, the sinuses, the epiglottis—a long list of alterations—and such alterations take eons, even epochs to accomplish.

  ***

  I stared down as this big, orange, bull's-eye tabby sat at my feet, barking, and I thought idle thoughts. Provocative little creature ... Already upsetting my Western view of life. Not what I expected ... After all, this is a cat. What have I got myself into?

  All that remained was to put this barking cat to some use. The next night I recorded his comments and spliced them into the outgoing message on my telephone answering machine: "This is Bill Jordan (pause). And this is Darwin" (the cat barks) "—my barking cat. Please leave calls and catcalls posterior to the beep (pause). Beep"

  3. Breaking Up

  OVER THE PAST thirty years or so, the younger generations have paired off in ever-growing numbers without the sanctity of marriage. To the young and callow it seems obvious that the ritual of yoking oneself to another human being in marital bliss is to accept arbitrary and antiquated values which lead not to marital, but to martial bliss. Why not simply live together and partake of the sexual and spiritual benefits without the embrace of responsibility? Sweet denial. The thought never occurs that maybe the burdens of commitment are the same, whether or not one has been formally bound by a priest, imam, Supreme Court justice, mayor, sea captain, or anyone else authorized to declare marraige.

  I was enjoying the cat's presence more than I could admit without feeling burde
ned, and this pleasure made me aware of things that needed fixing. His teeth, for instance, were encrusted with tartar, and this got my conscience on edge: those teeth had to be cleaned. On the other hand, the job was probably going to cost more than I could afford and I had to keep my values straight. How much would it cost to get the cat's teeth cleaned? Anything more than about twenty or thirty dollars was overly expensive, and if veterinarians were anything like other doctors, the cost could be considerably more. First, though, I would have to find a good vet, one whose office was nearby.

  I called a friend who loved animals, worked at the local university, and, because of her formal education, devoted much of her life to lamenting the uneducated state of the popular culture. She recommended a vet whose office was only two blocks away. Two blocks were two blocks, however, and required that I insert Darwin into a pillowcase again. Maybe the time had come to invest in some sort of transport cage. I went to a pet store and found just the thing: a cardboard box with foldup handles and designed with cats in mind. Five dollars. Sold.

  The good doctor turned out to be a tall, dark-haired man of about thirty-five and so exceedingly handsome as to seem at odds with the stolid, selfless, practical spirit one would expect in the givers of medical care, people who cannot worry about personal appearance when the job calls for rolling up sleeves and plunging the hands into open wounds, open bowels. I didn't dwell on the man's appearance, presuming that he must have proven his mettle during the course of a medical education, but I did laugh inwardly at his name, which happened to coincide with the name of an alcoholic drink.