To Mom, who filled our home with love – and with cats.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
Carl Sagan
1
Humans have it all wrong about aliens. Sometimes I see images of us on television – with enormous eyes, with skin the colour of spring leaves – and I wonder, Who thought of this? What reason could they have? Olive always tells me not to watch those shows. “You’ll just give yourself bad dreams,” she says. So we switch off the TV and curl up by the window, listening to the gentle hush of waves.
But the truth is, I really don’t belong here – not permanently, not forever. That’s why we’re travelling in this camper, zooming down dark roads at midnight. Olive is wearing her frayed overalls, and she’s cradling me in her arms.
I don’t squirm. I don’t scratch. I am not that type of cat.
“You won’t forget me,” she says, pressing her forehead to mine. “Please promise you won’t.”
She smells of cinnamon toast and raspberry shampoo. There are daisy barrettes in her hair. And for a second, I consider lying to her – out of love. The words are right there: I will always remember. I could never forget. But I’ve been honest with her this whole time, and the rules of intergalactic travel are clear.
Tomorrow I will forget everything I’ve ever felt.
In my mind, Olive will exist only as data, as pure information. I’ll remember her daisy barrettes, our Saturday afternoons by Wrigley Pier – but not how it felt to share a beach towel, or read books together, or fall asleep under the late-June sun. And Olive doesn’t deserve that. She is so much more than a collection of facts.
Half-heartedly, I summon a purr. It rattles weakly in my chest.
“You get to go home,” Olive says, the ghost of a smile on her face. “Home.”
The camper speeds faster, then faster still. Outside, the sky is full of stars. And I want to communicate that I will miss this – feeling so small, so earthly. Am I ready to go back? Half of me is. And yet, when I close my eyes, I picture myself clinging to the walls of this camper.
Olive sets me down on the countertop, the plastic cool under my paws. Opening her laptop, she angles the keyboard towards me, a gesture that says, Type, will you? But I shake my head, fur shivering.
“You don’t want to talk?” she asks.
What can I say? I owe it to Olive, not to make this any harder. So I won’t use the computer. I won’t tell her that I’ve been hoping to maybe carry one thing. Maybe if I concentrate hard enough, a part of Olive will imprint on a part of me, and I will remember how it felt. How it felt to know a girl once.
“OK,” she says, shutting her laptop with a sigh. “At least eat your crunchies.”
So I eat my crunchies. They’re trout-flavoured and tangy on my tongue. I chew slowly, savouring the morsels. This is one of my last meals as a cat.
I haven’t always lived in this body. Leonard wasn’t always my name.
Olive pats my head as I lick the bowl clean. “I know you didn’t want to be a cat,” she says quietly, so quiet that my ears prick to hear her, “but you are a very, very good cat.”
I want the computer now. My paws are itching to type: You are a very, very good human. Because she is. And she will be, long after I’m gone.
If you allow yourself, you might like our story. It’s about cheese sandwiches, and an aquarium, and a family. It has laughter and sadness and me, learning what it means to be human.
On my journey to Earth, I was supposed to be human.
That is where I’ll begin.
2
For almost three hundred years, I had wished for hands. Every once in a while, I pictured myself holding an object in my own palm, with my own fingers. An apple, a book, an umbrella. I’d heard the most wonderful rumours about umbrellas – and rain, how it dotted your skin. Humans might take these things for granted (standing in the street, half shielded by an umbrella in a summer rainstorm), but I promised myself, centuries ago, that I would not.
It was all just so tremendously exciting, as I hitched a ride on that beam of light.
This trip to Earth was about discovery, about glimpsing another way of life.
And I was ready.
On the eve of our three-hundredth birthdays, all members of our species have the opportunity to spend a month as an Earth creature – to expand our minds, gather data, and keep an eye on the neighbours. I could’ve been a penguin in Antarctica, or a wild beast roaming the plains of the Serengeti; I could’ve been a Beluga whale, or a wolf, or a goose. Instead, I chose the most magnificent creature on Earth: the common human.
Perhaps you find my decision laughable. I feel the need to defend it. So please think about penguins, who refuse to play the violin. About wolves, who have no use for umbrellas. Even geese take little joy in the arts. But humans? Humans write books, and share thoughts over coffee, and make things for absolutely zero reason. Swimming pools, doorbells, elevators – I was dying to discover the delight of it all.
Still, it was a terrifically difficult choice, narrowing it down. Because there are so many different types of humans. Did I want to wear shorts and deliver mail? Would a hair-net look flattering on me? Could I convincingly become a television star? After nearly fifty years of thought, I decided on something humbler. More suited to my interests.
A national park ranger. A Yellowstone ranger. Wasn’t it perfect? I’d give myself a moustache and boots, with a dazzling twinkle in my left eye. In my mind, I’d practised the way I’d flick my wrists – I’d have wrists, you see – towards the natural exhibits. In front of a crowd of human tourists, I’d walk with an exaggerated swing of my hips, and carry many useful things in my pockets: a Swiss army knife, a butterfly net, a variety of pens for writing. Humour is a valued trait among humans, so for an entire year, I prepared jokes exclusively.
How many park rangers does it take to change a light bulb? Twenty-two. Do you get it? Twenty-two! (I wasn’t entirely sure that I understood humour; my species is pure energy, and can’t exactly feel in our natural state. But wasn’t there something inherently funny about the curve of a two?)
Setting off from my home planet, I imagined the feeling of laughter, how it might rattle my belly. It was a nice distraction, considering the strangeness of it all. My species is a hive mind, meaning we think and exist as one, like drops in the ocean of Earth – and I wasn’t prepared for the sensation of leaving them. There was a quiet pop as we separated. Then I was alone, for the first time in three hundred years.
Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with myself. In the distance were the crystallised mountains of my planet, rivers of helium gleaming under stars, and all I could summon was a single thought: For now, goodbye.
The beam of light hummed as I latched on.
To kill time on the journey, I practised more jokes. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he was genetically hard-wired as an Earth creature to do so. Knock-knock? Who’s there? No one. Doors are a human construction and do not exist on other planets. (Ha!)
It’s unclear when things started to go wrong.
Perhaps it was when I began to sprout a tail.
I was seven thousand kilometres above Earth’s atmosphere, and there it was – crooked, with jet-black fur. I didn’t have the ability to gasp; otherwise, I would have done so. A tail? Unless I was missing something dramatic about humans, that was incorrect. Quickly, I took in my surroundings, awareness hitting me with slow, terrible force: this wasn’t the right route to Earth. In my eagerness to perfect the knock-knock joke, I’d strayed off course, interacting with the wrong elements along the way. Those elements, mixed with Earth’s atmosphere, would turn me into—
A cat.
I was
a cat, crashing into North America. Faster, faster, landing paws first in a tree. My claws dug into the branch beneath me, and immediately I coiled around, observing the zigzagged tail attached to my backside. It twitched – almost on its own – as if speaking to me. I could feel my paws tensing, the wind sifting through a large chip in my ear.
And what a sensation: to feel. To feel, finally. To have a body, even if it wasn’t the one I’d expected. Yet my heart scrambled. Nothing in my studies had prepared me for this. Apart from a few anecdotes, I knew exceptionally little about cats. How could I live for a month as one?
On Earth, I had been very much looking forward to speaking words. I already knew what my favourite ones would be. Tangerine: so festive, rolling from the mouth. Yellowstone: a park home to bison and bears, forests and canyons. Soul: the beating in your body. Now I tested them with my throat – with my prickly tongue, horrible fangs poking into my lips – and only gurgling emerged.
The whole thing was entirely my fault. I knew this. Never get distracted is the first rule of space travel. But that didn’t make it any less terrifying: to be alone in a tree, on a new planet, without knowing the language of cats. Was it even possible to communicate with humans this way? Did cats “moo,” or was that birds? There were all these new sensations, too – things I didn’t expect to feel. The desire to spring from tree branch to tree branch, testing my balance. The way my ears were swivelling, already listening for cats in the area. The realisation that if I saw an umbrella now (canopy flying open, springs springing), I might actually be afraid of it.
Suddenly, the tree began to shiver with bursts of wind, and I arched my spine on instinct. I have a spine, I thought. A part of me was thrilled, while a bigger part yelled, Storm! A storm was coming. I contemplated lurching from the tree, but the ground looked soggy, like it would squelch beneath my toes. As a ranger, I would’ve worn boots, so I vowed to find some later, in whatever size was suitable for cats. Preferably leather boots. With some nice, streaming ribbons, and—
Oh! Scents began arriving from all directions: bitter smells, sweet smells. My nose sniffed the air, and I started peering around. The clouds were turning an alarming shade of plum. In my field of vision, I could see only sky, bushes, and a few tall grasses, swaying violently in the breeze.
My tail puffed with fear. Which startled me even more. I didn’t know that tails could puff. It seemed to say, Where are we, exactly? And what happens now?
Within fifteen minutes, rain began and refused to stop. Flicking water off my ears did little good; the storm poured sideways, flattening my entire coat. Could cats swim? It was a pressing question, one I asked my tail. But my tail was ignoring me, hiding behind the curve of my legs. Something told me I might not like the answer anyway.
Around the base of the tree, dark water was rising.
And rising.
And—
I saw it in the distance then. The speck of a rowboat bobbing towards me. Through the thunderous rain, closer and closer she came: a tiny figure dressed in overalls, a yellow slicker, and boots three sizes too big. Her boat careened wildly in the floodwaters as she yelled words in my direction. They sounded like: “I’VE COME TO SHAVE YOU!”
Could this possibly be right? I wasn’t immediately fond of my fur, but would baldness improve my look? The idea alarmed me. More alarming was the wind, which was picking up speed. Imagine you are on a new planet, experiencing gravity for the first time. Now imagine that hurricane-force winds are threatening to lift you into the sky. Balancing on that branch was almost impossible. I managed to steady myself just in time. Only seconds later, the tip of the human’s boat slammed into the tree trunk. Everything shook. Bark split with a menacing crack, and the girl snapped her head up, eyes wide.
Despite the circumstances, I tried to savour this moment. It was my first time meeting a human; I didn’t want to get it wrong. Hello there was the greeting I’d memorised – simple yet elegant – and I attempted this with a string of long, eager meows. It couldn’t have gone worse. I sounded like a garbage disposal. (We will get to the evil of garbage disposals later. And seagulls! I must tell you about the seagulls.)
But now the girl was ordering me to jump.
“It’s OK!” she shouted into the tree, her voice cutting through the wind. “I’m a Girl Scout, and I’m here to save you!”
Well, I’ll admit that I was more than a little relieved. Save me, not shave me! Nevertheless, I squirmed. This small human was going to rescue me? She was maybe four and a half feet tall, and no more than eleven years old.
I hesitated, skidding back and forth on the branch, torn between options. Stay in this tree, alone in a storm, or jump – with legs I barely trusted.
Stay or jump.
Stay or jump.
Stay or—
A sharp gust of wind decided for me, cracking the tree branch above my head. Instinct took over as my body pitched forward, away from the terrible snap.
I felt myself falling.
Then I felt myself questioning if I should have remained in the tree.
Because I’d misjudged the jump. The water was already swallowing me whole.
3
Here is an interesting fact. Being underwater is a little like floating in space. Except for the dull roar in my ears, there was barely any sound. Everything was dark, glittering, and lonely.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t panicking.
I was panicking very much.
My legs flailed. My paws thrashed in front of me. Bubbles rose and popped in my throat.
You’re immortal, I thought, trying to calm myself. You cannot die, so this water won’t harm you. In a way, I was untouchable: my species has always existed in the universe and always will. But I’d never felt stress before – never understood the power of it. And embarrassment. I was ashamed to fail this spectacularly, after I’d longed for decades to be human.
Every traveller to Earth keeps a record: a series of images captured, then shared with the rest of the hive. Over the years, I’d filtered through pictures of family Christmases, of dinners on New Year’s Eve, of human birthday parties and picnics in parks filled with green. I had called up those images again and again – learning the humans’ traditions, the lines of their faces. I wanted to try a cheese sandwich, too. I wanted to go to the movies. I wanted to walk with someone by a river on a blistering summer day.
All of this required being above water.
Luckily, the girl was already grabbing the scruff of my neck, yanking me from the deep. The air was a shock, maybe more so than the water, and I shook vigorously as she plopped me down. It was surprising, really. I found that I liked shaking, the way my body moved everywhere all at once. The boat shimmied beneath my paws.
“Oh my goodness!” the girl said, still shouting over the wind. “Are you OK?”
I thought very seriously about this question. Obviously, I was not. Cats and water don’t mix (I couldn’t recall a great deal about cats, but I suspected this right away). I liked that she asked, though, even if all I could answer was mrrr.
Here is something else: my chest crunched as I looked at her. (Humans like the word “crunch”, and I believe I am using it properly here. You may correct me if I’m wrong.) Either way, glimpsing a human up close was something like a miracle. I was bowled over, entranced by the girl’s tiny nose, her cheekbones so smooth under her beige skin. Yes, skin! With pores and everything.
I tried to memorise her at once, in case someone on my home planet wanted to know. Smallish ears. Roundish chin. Dimples.
Gripping the oars with white knuckles, the girl pushed hard against the rippling water, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly powerless, tail curling around me in the frigid boat. My own skin pricked as objects floated by, trapped in the flood’s current: a plastic hula hoop, a deckchair, two inflatable lawn ornaments that looked suspiciously like gnomes.
It was all starting to hit me now – really hit me. The distance I’d travelled, the predicament I was in, the f
act that I was breathing and couldn’t quite figure out how. I inhaled harshly, too fast and too sharp; my lungs fluttered, causing me to wheeze, just as the boat careened dangerously to the left.
“I’m not really a Girl Scout!” the human said suddenly, like she was purging a hairball. “I never made it past Brownies.”
We will get to a discussion of hairballs. Oh, will we ever. But right then I just stared at her, unable to unravel how baked goods played into this. Many areas of human life were still a mystery to me. I thought it best to give her a wise nod, like those that I’d witnessed on captured images of I Love Lucy, a human TV series that I especially enjoy. I tipped my head up and down.
The girl seemed mildly puzzled by this, her eyelashes fluttering. But she rowed on.
Through the rain, I was beginning to see the shadowy outline of a house – a human house on stilts, with a wrap-around porch. The lawn was fully submerged under a thick sheet of water. I sincerely hoped there was a plastic flamingo somewhere beneath the waves, to really give it that human touch.
As the boat shuddered, jerking us from side to side, a white-haired woman came into vision. She stood rigidly on the porch, a beach towel draped around her shoulders. Stocky and tough-looking, she was perhaps seventy in Earth years, and seemed – in a human word – furious. I wondered if she could see me in the boat. Perhaps she was more of a dog lover. A bandana was trembling around her neck, her light brown skin glistening in the moonlight, and she was shouting something.
I’d worried about this, before my journey – how to follow human speech on Earth. Our species is so advanced, we have no use for words. We pass information telepathically; images float, are consumed, and that’s it. Forget about chit-chat. Forget about how was your day? (How I wanted someone to ask – to care – about my day!) So I’d studied whenever I could, revisiting scenes from I Love Lucy and picking up languages from previous travellers to Earth.
My Life as a Cat Page 1