by Bob Tarte
Dr. Bhattacharya had prescribed a popular corticosteroid tablet to help relieve the pain and prevent long-term nerve damage from my shingles. The steroid had a wonderful side effect. In addition to giving me super strength, which I could take or leave because I wasn’t any less lazy than before, the pharmaceutical improved my frame of mind. It somehow located the “mute” button inside my skull and by thirty or so decibels toned down the endless stream of internal chatter that second-guessed every move I made no matter how infinitesimally inconsequential. Free from obsessive mental noise at last, I was no longer congenitally alienated from my surroundings. I had ceased to be “the coach” in the nylon high school jacket.
I shared my good news with Linda. “This must be what it feels like to be a normal person,” I told her. I couldn’t wait to crawl into bed that night and attempt a Vulcan mind meld with Frannie. I smelled a psychic breakthrough.
I DECIDED NOT to add Vicodin to my overnight cocktail, saving it for a special treat in case I awoke in head-throbbing misery in the wee hours of the morning. I thought about Frannie after snapping off the light. She had been more attentive lately, rubbing against my leg and fixing me with her ferret-faced stare as I sat reading a Bill Bryson book in the living room. So as I located my comfortable spot in the bed, I tried connecting with her past and tuning into something other than an episode of Charlene and the Coach. Instead I received an image of her trotting up to me as I took my afternoon nap, hopping onto my chest, and curling up for a snooze.
I rated this scene as even less believable than the previous flashbacks. Although she had graduated from her apprenticeship on the bedroom floor, whenever she joined me at mattress level she always kept her distance. The thing she hated most in life was being picked up, and she had never climbed up on my lap or so much as draped a paw across my ankle. Even petting her with two hands was taboo.
Having struck out at Kathleen’s communication exercise, I paged through my field guide to birds and tried to learn the sparrows until my sleeping pill kicked in. When I turned on the light, I was shocked to discover Frannie camped out in the doorway to my room. She never slept upstairs and went out of her way to avoid tussling with the other cats. Agnes had parked herself on my desk chair pretending that nothing extraordinary had taken place. But it had. I experienced a non-shingles-related tingling as I realized that Frannie was worried about me. She was showing me the same devotion that we had shown her after her accident. Although I might have expected this kind of loyalty from a dog, I never imagined that a cat would be motivated by concern for me.
She still hadn’t stirred from her post a few hours later when I got up to gulp down some water. I needed to refill my glass for next time but I’d inadvertently emptied the doorway as I headed out of the bedroom; I had lurched forward too quickly, startling Frannie and sending her fleeing downstairs into the gloom. Later, though, a soft form rubbing against my side awakened me. I barely moved, not wanting to scare her. My arms were already raised to keep the covers from rubbing up against my face, so I slowly turned one wrist toward the cat. I pressed the stem of my watch with my other hand to plunge the room into a faint green light. The cat whose eyes shone back at me was Agnes. Since I had moved upstairs, she couldn’t get enough petting.
I directed the watch-light toward the doorway. Frannie was nowhere to be seen.
I HAULED MYSELF out of bed the following morning feeling miserable and sorry for myself. I had missed an entire week of work, and although lying around all day should have been a dream come true, the bed rest was tiring me out and making me even crabbier than usual. The previous night’s exhilaration over Frannie’s concern for me had dried up. The way I saw it, she offered me devotion without a lot of trust to back it up. All it took to shake her faithfulness was a footstep in her direction. She was in love with the idea of love but skedaddled from its clunky reality.
When I groused to Linda about my interrupted night and added that my shingles didn’t seem to be getting any better, she tilted my face toward the window, and pronounced a definite improvement. “I’m going to end up with all kinds of scars,” I told her. “I’ll go through life looking like an asteroid.”
“I thought you said your steroid had given you a positive outlook.”
“She cancelled it out,” I said, pointing to Tina. My current mood didn’t welcome the antics of an overgrown kitten. Linda had discovered that the orange-and-white cat was shredding a section of the bathroom wallpaper, and her handiwork appealed so much to Frannie, that she had started using the spot as her scratching post, too. As I sat on the edge of the bed searching for an AM radio station that wasn’t spewing out political talk, Tina shot into the room using vertical surfaces as her horizontal raceway and never touching foot to floor.
She mistook me for a playmate. Linda had given Tina a taste of the squid I’d purchased long ago for Lucy, and now she craved it all day long. She glared at me with double searchlights, using not-so-psychic communication techniques as I fiddled with my radio. Unable to locate anything worth listening to, I set the Grundig back on top of Linda’s dresser and made the mistake of resting my hand on the front of the top drawer in which “squiddy” lived. Tina pogoed up to meet my fingers and connected claw with flesh.
Kicking the door shut as I booted her out, I tuned in a Contemporary Hit Radio station that I loathed and turned up the volume to sustain my bad mood. As I slid under the covers and revved up for a hearty session of feeling sorry for myself, Frannie tiptoed out from behind the headboard. She didn’t hesitate. She skipped up to the mattress, climbed onto my chest, and eased herself down on my ribs as if she had been planning to do this for days.
Had she put this image in my mind, or had she gotten the idea from me? I lifted an arm and started to pet her. As she began to purr and as her body radiated warmth into mine, I felt just then that my illness had begun to loosen its hold. In some sense Frannie was making me aware of the healing process just as I had been helping her to heal herself from whatever had happened to her in the past. Our mutual anxiety melted away. She didn’t flinch when I raised my other arm to stroke her with both hands at once. Our relaxation deepened as Lady Gaga gained intensity in the background. My fingers knitted together over her spine. Ever so gently I pressed her against me.
I murmured just one word. I said, “Charlene.”
LATER IN THE day I e-mailed Kathleen to tell her what had happened. I was so excited that I peppered my message with more than the usual helping of misspellings and deleted words. “Keep trying with Frannie. I think she wants you to know her story from the very beginning,” Kathleen wrote. “I’m getting some previous connection between the two of you, but I don’t know what it is. She certainly went to a lot of trouble to find you.”
I thought I’d test my talents with another member of the house. Bella had bitten my sister Bett when she visited us from Indiana recently. I had been rubbing the parrot’s neck by sticking my finger through the bars and invited my sister to do the same. “She absolutely, positively, one hundred percent will not bite you,” I assured her. The next thing I knew, Bett was blotting her bloody finger on a paper towel.
I knew Bella’s history and simply wanted to get inside her head. And so I sat with her, waiting to hear her story. But Bella just stared back at me. Instead I drifted back to Frannie and suddenly understood how she felt inside the house. Whenever I approached her wanting to pet her—and even just talking to her at times—I was emanating these waves of human energy at her. I could almost see a series of ripples shooting from my hands as if I were Mandrake the Magician casting a spell, and I understood why she retreated into the basement.
The next morning I awoke encased in a deeper level of calm than I had experienced in years. I felt connected to our birds as I diced up their fruit. Out in the barn I suddenly understood that if I moved too quickly among the ducks and hens, they interpreted my haste as pursuit or flight. Either made them nervous, so I resolved to slow down.
“Thanks so much for t
eaching me these animal communication techniques,” I told Kathleen. “It’s making a huge change in my life.”
BUT MY BRIEF career as a psychic soon came to a screeching halt, if it had ever actually existed. Over the next few days I began to wonder if the whole thing hadn’t been a hallucination brought on by prescription drugs and a level of boredom verging on sensory deprivation. Once I returned to my job, popped my final corticosteroid tablet, and subsequently got gonged by an uptick in shingles pain, my astral body turned back into a homebody that said phooey to straying from my frame. That old familiar gang of mental noise, impatience, and darting movements had revisited and retrenched. When I lay in the dark upstairs and tried to let my mind drift purposefully toward Frannie, I started obsessing instead about the drab brown warbler I had seen in our pine tree and combed through the twists and turns of my brain to identify it.
Yet Frannie and I had suddenly become more finely attuned to each other, as if we were both monitoring the same CB channel. I instantly understood the glance from her that said, “I’ll eat that canned cat food product if you stop presenting it to me on a china saucer and put it in my bowl where it belongs.” For her part, although she didn’t take a snooze on my bony chest again, she would plop down beside me with her front paws curled over my arm—as long as there were no other cats in the room.
In the long run, I didn’t feel overly deprived by not being able to hear the voices of animals the way that Kathleen could. I realized that every pet owner was already essentially a mind reader. You had to be one to keep up with your critters. And anyway, the occasional psychic blip still kept me going.
Not long after my psychic phase, Claire, a Facebook friend from South Africa, shared the sad news that her elderly cat, Coco, had passed away. She sent me a photo of the cat. I found myself e-mailing her. “I have a weird question to ask about Coco,” I wrote. “Do you have a patio with potted plants where Coco liked to sleep? I just had an impression of that while studying her picture. I felt a lot of leafy green around her. Also, was there something with her and a wooden gate, maybe in the front yard?” Coco’s photo had given me an itch that I couldn’t stop myself from scratching.
I was shocked when she replied, “You are amazingly accurate in your intuition. Coco enjoyed a balcony with potted plants where she would sunbathe. Also you asked about a wooden gate. When we lived in Durban we were in an old Cape Dutch house that had a wooden front door like you might find on a stable. When Coco went out at night she would come back at some ungodly hour and knock on the bottom of the door with her paw. The door, being a little loose, would make a hell of a bang!”
Claire wondered how I had known about the potted plants and the old rustic door. To my mind the critical question wasn’t how? but why? With six cats crowded under one small roof, why was I poking my nose into the afterlife of a seventh kitty on the other side of the globe?
I should have pointed my eyeballs at a group photo of our gang and tried to intuit what was to come. But it would have taken Carnac the Magnificent to predict the sudden added complexity that lurked just around the corner.
Chapter 13
Living in a Walled City
Why is Tina’s chin so dirty all the time?” Linda asked.
This didn’t seem like a question that would end up plunging us into so much chaos that I’d forget about my obsession with Frannie. It wasn’t as if Linda had asked me, “Did I mention that I bought a pair of emus yesterday?” Or “Say, have you happened to notice the termite swarm in the living room?” She had simply called attention to the apparent lack of cleanliness of Tina’s chin, though it would turn out to be horrendously more complicated than that.
Although it didn’t seem connected to Tina’s chin, we also had an ongoing problem with our kitchen door that wasn’t a kitchen door. When we jammed open the basement door to seal off the passageway, any cat in the basement could race up the stairs and end up shut inside with our parakeets, parrots, doves, and rabbits. Keeping track of the cats was easy when we had two or three. But now, six meant that we often slipped up and encountered Tina, Maynard, Lucy, or even Agnes wandering around in the bird room.
I thought that we had solved the door dilemma with a product called the SeeNoScreen, but the solution depended to a large extent upon an illusion. Designed for outside doors, the SeeNoScreen pulled down in window-shade fashion from a spring-loaded ceiling-mounted roll. The jaunty gray-and-white-striped transparent appearance made me feel like I was stepping into a beach cabana whenever I raised the screen and passed from living room to kitchen. Although the bottom of the screen latched to the floor, the sides hung in space flapping against the passageway walls. Fortunately the tightly stretched mesh appeared solid enough that our cats treated the insubstantial material as if it were made of brick.
It even fooled Tina, whose desire to make a plaything out of anything should have revealed the secret of the permeable barrier. My sister Joan watched in amazement as I pulled down the screen to prevent Tina from joining us in the dining room. I plucked Bella out of her cage, plunked her down on the countertop, and repeatedly handed her a paper cup, which she repeatedly tossed to the floor. Tina whined on the other side of the screen.
“I can’t believe that thing works,” Joan said. “Our cats would walk right through it. Or they’d shred it first.”
I tut-tutted about the naughtiness of Joan’s kitties. But the damage had already been done. Tina had overheard her.
“WHAT’S THAT SORE on your chin?” Linda asked Tina. “It doesn’t look like dirt. It looks like acne. How can a cat get acne?”
Drawn to bad information on the Web like a graham cracker to staleness, I convinced myself that Tina had a feline version of the common skin disorder seborrhea. Following the advice from my online source, I bought a bottle of antidandruff scalp medication and rubbed it into Tina’s chin. It smelled like facial cleanser I had used in my pimply past and it triggered a wave of nostalgia that sent me spinning back to my high school days—and to my college days, graduate school days, and fifty-fifth birthday. The stuff didn’t work any better on Tina than it had worked on me. A few days later when we found an ugly bump on her gums, I raced her to the vet.
Dr. Post told me that she probably had a food allergy. “Some cats develop a sensitivity to specific proteins, or they’re allergic to dyes and additives.”
“The very things that make life worth living.”
“Well, I don’t think she’ll miss those as much as you might if we switch her to a limited-ingredient diet,” she said. “Something that doesn’t contain chicken, beef, or seafood.”
When Dr. Post told me which particular animal protein Tina’s food would include, I changed the subject. “I read online that cats usually grow out of food allergies,” I said.
“They usually don’t. She’ll have to stay on a special diet for the rest of her life.”
At the front desk I picked up the antibiotic to treat the abscess in Tina’s mouth and filled out loan papers for a few ounces of her special kibbles. But I wasn’t thinking about the cost as I pulled into the driveway. Another matter weighed upon my mind.
Just before dinner, I strolled out to close up the barn and was delighted to discover a dead mouse near one of the feed bins. Our Muscovy duck Victor didn’t suffer from any allergies. His fondness for rodent protein had shocked me the first time that I saw him eat a mouse, but now I indulged him whenever I had the chance. I picked up lifeless Mickey by the tail and flipped him toward our Donald. The ex-mouse barely struck the floor before Victor recognized him as a delicacy. He snatched him in his beak, threw back his head, swallowed, and panted with pleasure, wagging his massive tail in celebration.
“Sorry, buddy,” I told Victor before I clicked off the lights. “We just have to chalk up the matter as part of the big circle of life.” I wasn’t talking about the mouse.
Some people called me the duck man. Some people called me the gangster of love—mistakenly so, in my opinion. But loving ducks is what I
was known for. So as I trudged back into the house and was met by a searchlight-eyed Tina on the porch, I was nagged by guilt as I heaped green-pea-and-duck-formula kibbles into her dish.
DUCKS AROUND THE world quacked in celebration when I decided that we could only afford to feed Tina the kibbled gold even though our other cats would have benefited from the healthy ingredients. All that I needed to do was shut her inside Linda’s study at mealtime. What could be easier!
Except that our kitties didn’t have a mealtime hour. We filled their bowls and let them graze as their stomachs moved them, and I knew they wouldn’t like conforming to a schedule. Once we started moving their dishes out of Tina’s reach, Lucy engaged in retaliatory litter box overshoots and increased biting. Agnes showed up downstairs to hiss at the other cats. Maynard wailed more than ever. Only Moobie showed no reaction to the change, because nothing much changed for her. In deference to her age and decrepitude, I fed her a dollop of meat and meat by-product whenever I found her camped alongside the SeeNoScreen, which interrupted her pilgrimage to the refrigerator.
I hadn’t realized how many food dishes were scattered throughout the house until I had to raise and lower them at feeding time. Lucy had a dish in the front hallway. Maynard and Tina each had one in Linda’s study. Frannie had one on the front porch and another in the basement for nights on mouse patrol. Agnes somehow ended up with a pair in different rooms upstairs. And Moobie’s dish might be anywhere. It followed her around, at the ready whenever she was willing to eat, and it even had its own zip code. Remembering to collect all of the dishes after the cats had finished eating wasn’t easy considering that my brain was already overloaded with details of caring for our fifty-some animals. I didn’t need yet another problem, but Frannie gave me one.