A Cat Named Darwin

by William Jordan

  The receptionist was expecting us. I reached across the counter and placed Darwin in her hands. I took one last yearning, lingering look at my friend, then the receptionist turned and carried Darwin through the stainless steel doors. And ... I could not bear to accompany him, an act of weakness for which I will never forgive myself. I had never imagined a debacle like this and had not prepared for it. Even with all the preparation I wished, I would have found the choice agonizing at best. Forced to make a sudden decision, and knowing I would not be able to hide my grief, I took the easy way out and ran away. Besides, I told myself, Darwin was beyond recognizing me or anyone and it would make no difference to him whether I was present or not.

  Somehow I managed to sign one release form authorizing euthanasia and another specifying the kind of cremation. By law I was not allowed to bury Darwin at home, which left cremation as the only choice, but I had to choose between mass cremation, in which the bodies of several pets were burned together, or individual cremation, which was, naturally, more expensive but guaranteed that the remains would be only those of Darwin. I could not afford the more expensive, solitary incineration, but I could not accept the thought of Darwin's ashes mixed with the remains of strangers in a common pot. I chose the individual option and would pay for it later.

  Then I walked blindly from the office, hiding my face, got into my car, and, with eyelids flapping like windshield wipers, I drove and drove, into a vast emptiness, alone.

  14. Missa Felina

  THE NEXT NIGHT I was invited to dinner by a friend and his wife. They were intelligent, thoughtful people who understood animals, and I knew I'd feel comfortable in their presence, able to withstand the waves of grief that washed over me from time to time. A dinner among friends offered the prospect of relief from my flat, which now throbbed with silence. Hoover's presence did help, but he was not Darwin. No one was Darwin. Late in the afternoon I drove up the highway to the town of Calabassas, letting my eyes wander over the green foothills that turned, as the sun set and the miles passed, into black mountains.

  It was a good meal, generously flushed with good wine and marked by the appearance of an opossum and later a raccoon in the kitchen. A good meal that soothed the aching in my chest. On the long drive home, Darwin materialized in the car with me, first on the dashboard, then on the passenger seat, and when I arrived at the flat, there he was, walking out the driveway to greet me. I walked through him—he was only a specter—but as I came to the foot of the stairwell and looked up, my scalp began to crawl, for there, looking down at me, was a pale orange, living cat.

  He was a young male, not past his first year, and something in his quick, sensitive movement marked him as feral. Probably born under a porch, behind a trash bin, or in some other urban nest. With the hairs on my neck bristling, I spoke to him the way I would have spoken to Darwin.

  "Well, who are you? What a handsome boy," and slowly approached the stairs. He looked down at me, warily. I took a slow step. He disappeared down the back stairway.

  Generally speaking, I am not inclined to entertain the supernatural, and the creature who had just vanished was clearly of the real world, but his pastel paleness was so ghostlike, and to encounter him at the head of the stairs the night after Darwin's death just as I returned from an outing to avoid his ghost—that was almost too much to dismiss as random chance.

  The incident made the real specter all but palpable, for I saw him everywhere. He slept on my leather recliner. He waited before the front door to be let out. He waited in the bathroom while I showered, peering at my dancing image through the shower curtain, met me on the driveway, walking smoothly and intently toward me, looking into my eyes. It was hard to consider him gone.

  I desperately missed the feel of his warm, soft, furry body, for touch has memories too. I had always looked with condescension on those who kept lockets of hair or other physical mementos of the dearly departed—how corny could you get?—and I could never comprehend those who stuffed their pets or interred them in little mausoleums. Now I understood. I yearned for some small physical thing that could be grasped and cherished. Then I remembered the glass tube in which I kept the whiskers Darwin had shed around the flat. Words cannot describe the loving touch I laid on that makeshift locket.

  I had a week to contemplate life, death, eternity while waiting for Darwin's ashes, and the matter of his apparitions began to interest me. Clearly they were generated by the brain, thus implicating some cerebral mechanism, some internal structure, and probably it was the mechanism of memory.

  To process the present instant, the mind needs a record of the recent past. Otherwise it would know only what it saw in the present. Nothing else would exist. To notice change, the mind requires memory. For instance, without a record of the recent past, I could not have perceived that Darwin had been injured, when he returned one night with his right foreleg swollen from a nasty puncture wound. The brain must keep a detailed record to compare against the present, and this implies a complex physiology dedicated to memory, a memory machine.

  How would the memory mechanism work? Perhaps by reproducing images as a series of snapshots or a film clip while we were in the presence of the friend, relationship, or whatever. We would not be aware of these images, for attention would be focused on present perceptions, but when the friend, person, or object was no longer there, the images would come forward as memories. In my case, as apparitions of Darwin.

  As for the machinery itself, what happens in the brain when a loved one is taken away? Assuming that the brain creates memories by forming or changing molecules, reconnecting nerve terminals, or some combination of these—assuming that something physical happens to record a memory, and assuming further that as time goes on, these changes accumulate, then the process of laying down memories must reflect the creation of structure within the brain.

  When a loved one is taken from us, the physiological structure that stores and sorts those memories would no longer have much use. The brain would then dismantle the machinery dedicated to that relationship, altering molecules, severing neurons, connecting them anew, covering old pathways, clearing away the old to make way for the new. Maybe that process causes the pain and sadness we know as grief, for something physical has been amputated without anesthesia.

  Thus enlightened, I went back to the hospital at the end of the week to pick up Darwin's ashes. The question of earthly remains had perplexed me for some time. Not knowing it was illegal to bury pets on one's property, I had assumed I would inter Darwin in the small garden plot behind the flat. That, however, had confronted me with a dilemma, because I knew that I would not live forever in this very small unit suited more to religious introspection than to a life in its full, sensual arc, and the thought of leaving Darwin's remains there bothered me. It produced visions of some future tenant preparing the garden, exhuming the bones, and discarding them as mere detritus. Suddenly I respected graveyards, vaults, tombstones, coffins, for human nature wants to preserve memories, and to know that the bones of those we love are safe and protected—to know this sets the mind at rest and tethers the departed souls to the massive crypts and heavy stones where we can always find them.

  When I arrived at the hospital, Darwin's file lay on the counter, open to the last page:

  E/D

  Private cremation

  Metal container

  Sympathy card

  E/D—Euthanasia/Disposal. The final victory of reason over hope. Pain, suffering, joy, love, life itself, reduced to medical statistics. Reduced also to a metal container of ashes, which I held in my hands. Transformed to pure spirit, which I held in my mind.

  It rained that night and continued until noon the next day, one of those strong, cold winter storms that make southern California glorious for a few days following, and I used the time to organize Darwin's medical records, from the first to the last appointment. The first was dated 01/10/90; the last, 01/10/91. Darwin died exactly one year to the day of being diagnosed with the feline leukemi
a virus. Finally, I saw the truth: Darwin had come to me because he was sick and needed help. Right from the beginning there had been little signs—in particular a little cough—but they had seemed so trivial that I dismissed them as harmless.

  ***

  The wind came up in the early afternoon, and by three o'clock God could not have made a more splendid day. The great, towering cumulonimbus moved overhead in stately procession, like the siege engines of the apocalypse, throwing shadows over the ground and scattering raindrops as they went. Cold and clean, the wind thudded in gusts against the buildings and trees. It stung the skin, numbed the nose. Rays of light pierced the atmosphere on their laser flight from the sun and shattered into the dewdrop diamonds clustered everywhere on the leaves and blades of grass. And Darwin and I walked forth to make things right with the great, blue planet on which we live and die, live and die.

  Holding the tin in my hands, I decided to walk around the building and scatter half of the ashes in small portions here and there on Darwin's favorite haunts. That, at least, is what I thought I'd want if I were a cat. The rest I would keep with me as I continued through life. I descended the stairs, and as my foot touched the ground I looked at the canister and saw that I was holding not the ashes but Darwin.

  He looked up at me, a strong, healthy cat in the prime of life, the way he was shortly after we met. Fully aware that the mind, in its grief, was playing tricks on me, I decided not to resist the moment, but to let the mind have its way and go with Darwin whither it would. Time to dwell with ghosts. Time to shine the cold blue light into the white heat and fuse reason with feeling, mind with soul, infinity with eternity—to commune with life and earth and Darwin's soul in a dimension where I was a simple living thing, no more and no less than any other.

  Darwin gazed quietly up at me, for he was never given to idle chatter. He looked so handsome, so vital, so ... wonderful ... and I had abandoned him in his final moments.

  "I am so sorry, Darwin. I am so, so sorry. I just couldn't..."

  "Sorrow is for the self," replied Darwin. Or perhaps it was my inner voice speaking to itself in a kind of split personality. Whatever the truth, it seemed that he was using my mind to speak to me as a species with an intellect equal to my own but with the values of a different world.

  "I need no pity," continued the voice. "We all die alone."

  He gazed directly into my eyes without any sign of emotion or mouthing of words.

  "You saved me from the streets. You gave me shelter, and you gave me time. Time is the measure of life. I have nothing but gratitude."

  "Oh, my God..."I choked.

  "My friend, control yourself," said Darwin. "Tears mean nothing to the world."

  "My friend?" I said, presuming that nothing had changed between us. "Darwin...? It's me—"

  "I am not as I appear," replied Darwin.

  I didn't want to ask who or what he was, but Darwin replied anyway.

  "I am the molecules of memory deep in the brain where spirit and flesh become one. I am you."

  He continued to gaze, mesmerizing me with those metallic orange eyes, drawing me through the vertical slits into him.

  "Come," he said. "It is time."

  I carried him along the north side of the building to the small Japanese garden in the backyard. Ferns grew along the fence, and behind them lay one of Darwin's favorite beds, a shaft of light beaming through the canopy high overhead and lighting the spot like a miniature stage. This would be the first place to leave his substance. I pried the lid from the canister and removed the twist tie from the plastic bag containing the ashes. I peered closely at the stuff and noticed that the ashes were not the black, powdery substance I had imagined. It appeared instead like coarse sand consisting of crushed bone, and, like sand, it was dense and heavy.

  I reached in with fingers and thumb to extract a pinch, and the instant I touched the ashes, Darwin spoke.

  "Life is Light."

  I had no idea what he meant, but since Darwin was emanating from my mind in the first place, he answered my blank questions by reviewing biology—knowledge I had learned but had never applied to the emotions and feelings of my own life.

  All animal forms of life have to eat other forms of life, lectured my inner voice at Darwin's request. Only the plant manufactures itself from the unliving substance of water and carbon dioxide. As we break bread, so the plant breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen, and the dioxide of carbon into carbon and oxygen. Breaking molecules is hard work, which the plant performs by taking energy from the sun. From oxygen and hydrogen and carbon, the plant makes the molecule of sugar, and in the bonds among the carbons and oxygens and hydrogens it stores the energy that once was light. Each molecule is therefore a minuscule jar of light. When animal life eats plant life, digestion frees this energy, which drives the chemical reactions known as life—reactions that construct living bodies, bodies that go forth and multiply, eating and fighting and loving and multiplying, but always tracing their existence back to the energy from the sun. Life literally is light.

  With new reverence I placed several pinches of ashes on my palm, and as I did, Darwin began to chant:

  To the Light, which is Life...

  On cue I scattered the substance onto the patch of sunlit grass. Then I carried Darwin into the adjacent garden plot, where the moist, brown soil basked in the sun, loosely covered with a scattering of leaves. During the summer Darwin had loved to roll in the dust between the tomato plants, and here too seemed a proper place to consecrate. The storm clouds were still moving out, ponderous and stately before the atmospheric wind, and as I reached in for another portion of ashes, a cloud passed before the sun, the garden grew dark, and a sprinkling of rain began to fall.

  "Toss me in the air," said Darwin.

  I lowered my hand, preparing to fling the ashes upward, and again Darwin began to chant.

  To the air, which is the breath,

  To the rain, which is the blood,

  I give my substance back.

  Truly, the earth may be a living thing. Just as the individual cells of the human brain cannot comprehend the larger mind to which they give rise, so we cannot grasp the notion that we could be but cells in a larger planetary organism, living widgets in a life far vaster than the capacity of a three-pound brain to comprehend. What to us is ecology is physiology to the earth, with water and air transporting nutrients and minerals in rivers and streams, just as blood flows through arteries and veins, transporting nutrients and removing wastes. What to us is evolution is but a single lifetime to the planet, which is born, grows up, grows old, and eventually dies, the lives of us and our kin being transient stops in the endless cycles of energy and substance.

  I flung the ashes into the air and watched them fall with the rain back to the earth.

  "Mix me with the soil," said Darwin.

  I pinched a small pile of ashes from the bag, and with Darwin's mind infusing my own, poured it on the ground.

  And to the earth, the body, the flesh,

  My life returns.

  I knelt and kneaded the ashes into the soft, wet earth. As I finished, the cloud, moving fast, passed on and the sun blazed forth in jubilant celebration. I picked up the canister and headed with Darwin to the bougainvillea bush, where we had met, and where now, finally, our journey would end.

  The bush was immense, with an arched canopy at least fifteen feet in diameter. The foliage had grown over the past year and now drooped nearly to the earth. I parted it like a curtain and forced my way slowly and very carefully through the tangled mass, showing great respect to the thorns, and stood in a secret chamber of filtered light. The undersurface of the canopy formed a vault eight feet overhead, which glowed translucent green beneath the afternoon sun. Wet leaves covered the ground in a thick, soft carpet, and sunlight, forcing its way through tiny holes in the canopy, cast spots of light that burned on the dark brown leaves. I stood there in this magic grotto, holding Darwin ever so tenderly, and simply existed, without spea
king or thinking, for we had entered a chapel of life.

  The time had come to say goodbye, and I didn't know how, could not express the ecstasy, the tears of loss and the tears of joy at this communion with existence. I wanted to tell him I loved him but felt the need for something more profound. Darwin said nothing. He lay in my arms and gazed into me.

  Soon I felt the answer. It lay in prayer, a skill I had never practiced; my knees were clean.

  "Here—put me down," said Darwin, looking at the spot where his bed had been the day we met. With the utmost tenderness I lowered him to the leaves and laid him on his side. He immediately rolled onto his belly, stretched his forepaws out in front, raised his head, and stared straight ahead like the Sphinx, his favorite pose.

  "Let the prayer be simple thought,"'said Darwin.

  As if to lead by example, he slowly closed his eyes. Then his head began to nod and gradually drooped toward his paws. I looked down, closed my eyes, and examined my gratitude.

  Here I was, a middle-aged man, and I had come to depend for companionship on a cat. The outside world would see my life as a dead end, a transgression of the natural order, a social failure, and strongly suggest that I get a life, meaning a human companion. Mine was also a life to be shunned subconsciously, because to see a fellow human treat an animal with love and respect undercuts the sense of moral decency with which most people seem innately imbued, a decency that, if neglected, erodes one's self-respect.

  Civilizations, however, can survive only by exploiting the natural world. In order for economic systems to work, animals and plants—nature itself—must be seen as commodities and never as citizens, because citizenship implies rights. To withhold rights implies wrongs, and wrongs must be denied.