by Lena Divani
The most interesting thing, though, was that the next morning when the Damsel was fishing for ideas in the Alpha level, the phrase that kept surfacing was “He’s just like my ex.” A cat like a human. The next association was The Planet of the Apes, a film where apes are like humans and humans are like apes. Well, after that, reversals of all kinds started occurring to her at lightning speed. And, reversal upon reversal, the Damsel’s mind fished up her next book, where boys behave like girls and girls behave like boys! (Zach, my boy, you are evolving into a mega-muse!)
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
Time went by and a year arrived so strange that its summer looked worryingly like wintertime. The housemates were as usual making ready to leave, and go write on an island somewhere. But nothing was normal. I felt this even if I couldn’t understand it, and it was getting on my nerves. I don’t mean the nerves I got into as soon as I saw suitcases getting lugged down from the loft. This time it was different. I was finding fault with everything. I was scratching the walls purposelessly. I haunted one room after the next like a ghost, didn’t eat, didn’t drink and was constantly chasing my tail like an imbecile. But they were in a similarly sorry state themselves. They barely spoke, whereas normally they had volumes to say (and now I understand why: the things you cannot speak about, you must pass over in silence); they were given to small nervous gestures, they banged the doors without realizing it . . . It was a very weird thing, like war disguised as peace.
The icing on the cake came on the day before departure; Ziggy again proposed the inimitable idea of moving me to Sweetie’s for the whole of August! I was outraged. I wove in and out of the Damsel’s legs meowing beseechingly, on the off chance she might extend me some protection. But her mind was elsewhere, my anxiety was the least of her concerns. So, for the second time, I found myself in the familiar carry basket in the familiar car, that deposited me in the familiar house of Sweetie in a state of acute mourning. This time, however, they didn’t spend any time monitoring my adjustment. They got back in their car and they disappeared from the face of the earth.
That August was as dark as December. I was floundering in bad feelings. Our forefathers of old were known for their prophetic insight, which is why humans worshipped them as deities—and then burned them in pyres alongside witches. (Because that is how humans are in the face of remarkable creatures, my dears. Undecided about whether to hate them or worship them. Meow No. 984.) I personally only once delivered an unforgettable prophecy, in which I predicted a disaster. It was a September night, in 1999, when I felt danger approach. The housemates had retired to their chambers (with the door shut, of course) and I was looking for a way to notify them. Thus, I initiated a nocturnal concert of disturbances: Howling, door scratching, thumps and thuds, I used everything at my disposal. After much ado and once they’d made up their minds that I wasn’t going to allow them to lie peacefully in the arms of Morpheus, the Damsel got up, came into the living room and picked me up in her arms, in the hope that this might shut me up. I, however, was determined to keep up the racket until she realized that I wasn’t being perverse, I was a bearer of ill omens. Finally, I concentrated and, with a leap, I got into the Damsel’s mind, which was no mean feat. I made it because: a) she kept looking into my eyes trying to figure out what was wrong with me; and, b) our bodies were in close contact. I knew it had happened because she immediately stood up and said to herself, “Hey, you don’t say, there might be an earthquake?” Then she ran to her desk and saved a disc copy of the book she was writing at the time. After she had the copy safely in her bag, she lay on the couch and we slept in each other’s arms.
The next day she was recounting my behavior to a group of friends at her office. The foolish folk were hooting with laughter as she held up the disc when, lo and behold, the building started shaking and books started to rain down from the bookshelves. “Zach was right!” one of the girlfriends exclaimed. “Not even a seismologist could make such a prediction!” The outcome was twofold; the circle of friends started calling me by the surname of one of the celebrated seismologists of the day and they pleaded with the Damsel to let them know in case of a repeat demonstration of my oracular powers!
The next earthquake, unfortunately, was in my lifestyle. I was on Sweetie’s kitchen floor trying to fathom the origin of my feelings of foreboding when I heard, to my horror, that I would be migrating for a second time that week. Jean wanted us all to go to his village! I shall be brief. I went catatonic until we arrived. The village turned out to be terminally rustic. All in all, five houses, all in bad taste, inhabited by sixteen individuals with bad taste. I was abandoned in the yard. In villages rife with poor taste, as is common knowledge, cats avoid houses that evidence poor taste and busy themselves hunting mice and snakes. In short, my dears, I was forced to abide by the ancient customs of the countryside just like my not so very ancient forefathers. I took up a corner and was masochistically chewing my fur which, in any event, was severely affected by summer molting. I knew from experience (cf. chapter on riding beggars) that any moment now, the local village cats would turn up to make mincemeat of me.
Well and truly, within half an hour on the outside, they ferreted me out from the corner of the shed where I had slunk, and tore me to shreds as if I were a red armchair. My heavenward cries at last alerted Madam Sweetie who came outside and collected me. The doctor diagnosed a large puncture on my left foot, disinfected it, sprayed it with liquid gauze, and ordered them to look out for me. Now, madam, is that something you need the doctor to tell you? How can you abandon such a high-class cat (or such a wuss, whatever) in that stable? Don’t you see all the cats in the area look like Rambo, only worse off for all the mauling?
After all that, I spent my time in a corner, attracting as little attention as possible, until I had healed. I was counting the days. I was naïve enough to believe that the end of August would spell the end of my trials. Naturally, that isn’t how things turned out. (Naturally, things hardly ever turn out the way we expect. Naturally, we pick quarrels with the things that will not bend to our will. And, naturally, things continue as they will, notoriously indifferent to our wants and wishes. I don’t know why I am going on about it, it just never fails to make an impression.) Anyway, when the housemates turned up to pick me up from Sweetie, I got scared. Yes, alright, the atmosphere had been somewhat tense before. Only now it was funereal. How on earth did such a thing happen? What killed off my favorite duet? Why did they ever suddenly start performing solo, and so pitifully? (Because everything is in flow, Heraclitus would answer. Because the universe is expanding, Woody Allen would answer. Just because, the ignorant hoi polloi would answer.)
In the days that followed, our warm little home turned into Alaska, my dears. They had each occupied a wing—the Damsel to the east of her office, Ziggy to the west of the living room. The empty bedroom in the middle, a neutral zone. I was sure they had come to some kind of agreement and were stoically counting days before breaking up for good. I didn’t know exactly what that deal might be, nor why they went about as silently as ghosts. Not a sound, my dears. I’d never found myself in a worse position. First of all, I was accustomed to a diet of hugs and kisses, naturally. I’d much rather they hurl slippers and swear at me for leaving hairs everywhere, anything but this creepy silence. The fact that I did look a fair bit like an Eskimo notwithstanding, Alaska, to me, was a hostile, unfamiliar country. I couldn’t take it. By the ocean shrimp, I wished with all my heart I was the Cheshire Cat who disappeared whenever he fancied, leaving behind only a smile. I was getting dizzy from all the pressure. I was coming and going ceaselessly between the two camps like a United Nations blue beret, in a state of extreme anxiety, trying my best to come up with a solution. Some idea that would open up their hearts and mouths. Something to glue back together the broken pieces. I’ve said it before, my dears, and I’ll say it again: Cats can’t stand changes. If we lose someone important, we are likely to sicken and die ourselves. Wh
at did I just say? Sicken? Eureka! Well done, my boy. You are to get urgently and critically sick. I’ve read my share of novels, I know what I’m talking about. Death doth not part, it unites.
The “moribund project” went into immediate effect and was diabolically simple. I sat ostentatiously in the neutral zone and started being sorrowful. I slowly let the world go heavy inside of me. Despair, as you know, only requires the slightest opening to infiltrate your entire space in no time, like the tide. I’d read some findings in my sixth life proving that our immune system’s T-cells are literally decimated by despair and that’s how we get sick. (Come on, then, sorrow, do your thing and turn me into a quivering mess because I’m telling you, I can’t handle it anymore!)
And so it happened. Within two days, the wound in my left foot became infected and a pustule was growing invisibly on the inside. OMG, I am a living metaphor, I thought. Something was secretly rotting away in our kingdom and now it would manifest on me. I am the screen on which their drama will be projected. Indeed, on the morning of the third day, as the Damsel was stroking me, she passed her hand over the afflicted area. The allegedly healed wound opened and copious quantities of pus started to run out. The Damsel, who was receptive to living metaphors, got the message straight away and started to cry—supposedly for me. (This business with you humans is starting to get on my nerves. Why can’t you for once directly and honestly admit what is happening inside of you? Why, for instance, do you always say that you are not divorcing for the sake of the kids? Whom are you kidding? The plain truth is that you are scared witless to make the change; which, from experience, I do have a certain amount of sympathy with.)
So I made it. Out of necessity, the silence was lifted. The Damsel ran over to the Western Zone and announced to Ziggy that Zach (I) was very sick. She was talking to him and the tears were streaming down her face. Suddenly they were an item again. They leafed through agendas, made desperate phone calls, turned the world upside down and came up with one clinic that was open at night, somewhere near the northern suburbs. The put me in the car and drove me over, silent again. Once we arrived, I was hurriedly ushered into surgery and they were left waiting. When I got out I was wearing a despicable Elizabethan collar meant to stop me from messing with my wound. My wound is internal, you idiots, I felt like screaming at the doctors. And there’s no collar that can stop me messing with it.
As they were driving me back to the house, I was peeking desperately behind the damned collar trying to figure out if my trick had worked. It hadn’t. The Alaskan cold froze up every word before it came out of their mouths. You failed, my boy, I told myself. They had been one, but were back to being two again. The law of entropy had claimed us.
That night I didn’t sleep. I knew the time I feared had come: the time to say the great yes or the great no. After banging for hours with my collar against all the doors and walls of the house, I collapsed in the neutral zone in a heap. Why were they doing this to me? Whom would I choose now? Who would I part with? I would have a better life with him. He always paid more attention to me, he loved me and he accepted me. My meals came at the proper time, my litter was cleaned out with the greatest punctuality. He was a regular daddy. He fully took me on under his care with no complaint, although he saw me begging for her company. She, on the contrary, wasn’t willing to shoulder any responsibility. The slightest grumpiness on my part annoyed her. She called me “double trouble.” It was inconceivable to her that I should demand anything. She saw me as a kind of pal that she had accepted to put up for a while. “Relax, buddy, and make do as best you can,” she told me once when I was complaining because she served me plain milk, having forgotten to get me a can. And then she ended up with the same offensive refrain: “Don’t be a glutton, fatso!” (I’m not being a glutton, ma’am. Did you ever try to fill up on plain milk?)
Anyway, I knew the score. It would be rough but it was with her I had to go. First of all, to teach her to love a being from head to paw, all of it. Secondly, so that I could grow up as well. People who understand their cats too well, keep them at an infantile level. Do you want some treats, my Zach? There you go! Do you want some cuddling? There you go! But when the Damsel said, “There you go!” she usually meant “get thee gone from my sight.” That hurt my feelings but it kept me in fighting form. Besides, there were the literary considerations: I’d gone through so much trouble to start getting into her books, I would hate to see it wasted. So, it was decided—she was my karma.
A little before dawn I went to check up on him. He was sleeping, curled up on the sofa. I said goodbye inwardly, sending him a trillion love molecules, and went over to her office where she was temporarily spending the nights, in a sleeping bag. The doors weren’t closed anymore—the divide that had gone up between the office and the living room was so impenetrable that doors were redundant. I crawled butt first into the sleeping bag and tried to make myself comfortable. Without properly waking up she said, “It’s you, fatso?” and moved over a bit to make some space for me. I never slept better. I was sad but calm. I had made my choice.
In the morning I woke her up by massaging her neck. She opened her eyes with difficulty. “Morning, baby bear,” she said and kissed my ear. The book she started to write straight after that was called In the Singular. The main character, named Aris, was a real sweetheart and his friend Hera always called him “fatso” and “baby bear.” Now, does that remind you of anything?
HER EGO AND ME
This was the beginning of the new era. I must confess that the Damsel proved a natural when it came to new beginnings—it was with denouements that she was at a loose end. They quite plainly didn’t suit her, they paralyzed her, cancelled her out. She therefore tended to constantly accelerate them. Let a soul whose time has come, go, she used to say. We will stand and take the blow but no need to drag on the tear ’n’ wear, the ambivalence, the misery. Let’s move forward, already.
The truth be known, I, too, disdained the fallen who will not get up so as not to risk falling again. Still, I thought there was something suspect about her preoccupation with new beginnings, her impatience to build up from the ground something sparklingly new, unblemished and perfect, untouched by decay, something bearing the promise of all good things. What is life, madam? Do you perchance think it’s a Hollywood movie where you can edit out the scenes that get the public down? Say you do move on, what do you expect you’ll come across? Your familiar self smiling sardonically, that’s what. Anyway. I didn’t oppose her. It wasn’t the time. We were getting ready to live through a difficult but interesting phase. Besides, we are all a little bit boring at our happiest. Like advertisements of ourselves.
The first thing the Damsel did with the dawn of the first day of the new era was buy paints and rollers and start maniacally painting the house. As I watched her feverishly coat with color every available surface, I got disquieted. What would Ziggy say if he could see her? That guy had fought long and hard to restrain her unbridled worship of Technicolor. And behold, he’d barely turned the corner and the faucets of color were turned on to the max. The house was flooded. (I know that when the cat’s away, the mice will play, but beware, Damsel, the cat is still here.) Eventually, her office turned out peach-pink, the bedroom deep green with red poppies, evidently symbolizing the spring that was so keenly anticipated in the middle of autumn, the hall was turquoise, the house heaters red, green and violet, the living room table pale blue, the chairs, dead red. Shall I go on? By the end of the day it looked as if a rainbow had exploded inside our house!
That, naturally, wasn’t the only thing that changed. Everything was stood on its head from the moment we became two. The item is now made up of us two, was the first thing I thought, feeling moved. We’ll be as tight as the shoe and the sock. Now, I have more rights—and more obligations, too, of course. I urgently need to become less of a cat. I need to let the dog in me out so that she’ll love me like I was human.
There was, neverth
eless, a tiny bit of an issue. In all honesty and though it’s not in my favor, I have to say, my dears, that in general, I was contemptuous of dogs. I’m no speciesist, but let’s be frank, they simply don’t have our classiness. First of all, they constantly want your attention, they demand long walks twice daily or they bring the house down with barking or they crap in the middle of the living room and, worst of all, with this tendency of theirs to want to be as thick as thieves, they show no respect for anybody’s private space. (By the ocean shrimp! While writing this, I’m getting increasingly worried. All this does ring a bell somehow. But it’s impossible to figure out what about . . . ) The thing, though, that always annoyed me was the brainwashing the average human has been subjected to in favor of dogs and, consequently, against us cats. Because the average human in question is hopelessly insecure and flattered by the pathetic doggedness (if you’ll allow the term) of dogs, our autonomy has been misconstrued as insensitivity. Thousands of stories have sung the praises of (i.e. advertised) the dog’s loyalty to its (sic) master. How many of you, however, know of the proverbial devotion of the giant white cat of Koumoundouros (Greek nineteenth century politician for those wondering—there’s a square named after him, already!), who not only never left his friend’s side while he was breathing his last, but himself retired and died immediately afterwards? His pack of dogs, on the contrary, went on with business as usual and as for his political allies, they did a bold turnabout and joined the ranks of his opponent Trikoupis. This is the basic truth, my dears—and do, please, spare me the postmodernist crap about the subjective perception of historical reality.