I am, she knows this, a cat.
At the end of her body a tail twitches. Experimentally, she jumps.
In her mouth are fangs. Recessed in her feet are claws. She shivers. She smells the air.
She knows that she must not begin to think of hunger. There will be nothing for her if she begins to think of hunger now. Now instead she is, must be, guided by a strange intellect of a kind. There are bodies elsewhere. These teem. These vibrate with their little portion of blood. They are hot. They’re live and quick.
She travels along the base of the building, rejoicing in her slightness and the richness of perception, the ease of her reaction, the pleasure of knowing exactly what she will find. She knows their place, can hear them in a kind of crowd in one place in her ear, like little sacks crawling over one another. She knows their warmth. She travels. She moves between and under and behind. She inhales the faintness of their blood, still enclosed. She inhales the scent of their minuscule excrement, the oil of their skin, their gathered bodies. They huddle and squirm. They are lax, delayed, incipient. She finds.
And what an orgy of blood spilled as claws slice and mouth bites and seeks and burrows and tears. The mouth throws aside bodies, and a paw slaps, and claws quarter. And she eats and feasts and drinks, her eyes like two pebbles in her head, two bits of gravel, useless to her joy. She is death and fills with life and praises herself, is a falling sword; she is the perfect eye of the rose, the outline of the moon’s horn against the blue midst of day; she is sated.
She walks. She traces the edges of buildings with new weight in her stomach. Her ears buzz softly. The interior of her mouth tingles.
She begins to hear the humans, in their work, around her. She is now not afraid, as she was before. To be what she is is to be of the world of men but to have no meaning for them, in their work. She is of their world but means nothing to their efforts, and so they wish nothing of her. She pauses in her path to fool with a twist of plastic twine. The twine trembles antagonistically, appears insouciant. She bites it, and the biting irritates her mouth, and she bites further. She pounces and bites and leaps in the air, flinging the twine aside.
When last she knew something of what she was she was mortal. And this is not so now. It is not that the cat will not die, but that the cat has not yet begun to conceive of her death. The cat makes nothing of her death, while living. In this sense, a cat has never been mortal. A human, meanwhile, makes many things of its death. The hands of a human are never still.
The cat sniffs at a trapezoid of sun descending through an awning of smoked glass. The temperature of the light pleases the cat. The cat lowers her body to warm tarmac. She extends her legs and rolls onto her spine, blinking.
The theory of life to a human … it is a wonder that the human can find food or remembers to sleep. The human’s theory of life blankets all things in the world, making them useless to the human, except as names. The cat thinks of herself when she was human. The cat’s mind is a comfortable place. As a human, the cat had loved. The cat had been a human who had loved and the human had so frequently lost its way among objects in the world. The human liked objects so much! The human had had a home and would leave this home during the day and return at night, dragging bags of items. The human contemplated another person or persons, and the human struggled with its own inability to grasp another, the human always lingering between forms of transport in the city, asking itself why it was unable to possess some other human like the objects with which the human inexplicably filled its home. The human was always hovering between one location and another, asking itself what it had just done, what it planned to do. Similarly, other humans to some extent relied on this human or perhaps desired to possess this human. And yet this human could not give itself, or could not give itself correctly, as the human sometimes thought to itself while it was lingering, suffering in some space in which it did not fully belong.
The cat separates the toes of her paws, forcing out claws, feeling the long stretch, tips her head back so the mouth opens in a wide yawn, the pink interior of her throat exposed to air. She snaps her mouth shut and becomes loose and pants briefly, eyes closed. She slackens, lets her head droop, chin against the ground, slips into a kind of dream.
In the dream, the cat watches a human. The cat is perched above the human. Perhaps the cat is sitting on the top of a bookshelf; it is not entirely clear to the cat. The cat’s body, at any rate, is always a source of comfort to the cat. It matters little to the cat where the cat is.
The human, the cat observes, is seated. The human is seated at a desk and the cat is able to perceive only the back of the human’s head. The human is doing almost nothing. The human is doing so little in this moment that the cat feels a kind of glee. The human’s behavior is strange, a spectacle. The human shakes slightly where it is. The human brings its hands to its face. The human has been sitting in this position for nearly an hour and will go on sitting in this position. The human brings its hands to its face and lowers them again. The human touches the surface of the desk.
In the dream, the cat’s tail twitches. If the cat could laugh, now she would laugh. The cat’s love of existence is simple. A cat cannot be betrayed nor can a cat experience disappointment. Things in the world hide from the cat, but the cat will seek them. The cat loves to find and then to lose again and then to seek. The cat’s tail twitches. It pops against tarmac.
In the dream, perhaps the human is poor. Perhaps the human has another problem with its possessions. The cat waits to see if the human will lift its hands again or leave them where they are, resting on the surface of the desk. After a while, the human lifts its hands again and recommences shaking.
The cat’s tail twitches.
A sound.
The cat is awake. A man is standing beside the cat, under the awning. The man is looking at something in his hands, looking into it carefully. The man grunts softly to himself.
Now the man retires the thing to a pocket in his garment.
The cat sniffs the air. Her head comes quickly off the ground and she rights her body. She perches on her haunches, staring out into the street, watching the man with the edges of her eyes.
“What are you doing here?” the man says now, for some reason. He is speaking to a cat.
The cat stands. She dislikes the man’s directness.
The cat considers the contents of her stomach. Certainly, she is thicker here, heavier, than she might wish. However, her body is no longer dangerously sluggish.
The man rotates so that he faces the cat. He does not quite trap her against the building with the front of his body in this way, but it is possible that he may wish to do so.
The cat dances back.
“Hey,” the man says.
“Erk,” the cat pronounces, in annoyance. “Roawmm.”
“What a pretty little cat,” the man is saying. “Are you a friendly little pretty cat?”
The cat’s tail switches.
The man takes a step toward the cat. “Never saw you before.”
The cat skitters back. Her body bunches up against itself, accordion-like. There is tension here. The cat’s face retreats back as far as it can retreat back from the front of her face. The cat’s ears flatten. The cat seems to hang in place: her terror thick, dimensional, a rod that passes through her meager body. Then, as abruptly and as simply as hair lifts in the breeze, the cat’s head sinks, swings left, the torso following. Electrically, she removes herself from the vicinity of the man. The cat bounds. She pursues the side of a building, seeking concealment.
When the cat was dreaming, she had seen a person there. The person in the dream was not aware of the presence of the cat. The person in the dream appeared lost somehow, although how a person appearing in the dream of a cat could be “lost” to a cat, the cat does not know. She is a cat. The person brings its hands to its face. These events seem to have occurred not long ago.
A person wishes for something. A person is seized by a fantasy, cannot look away.
A cat already is whatever she might be. A human will never know the change that it desires. A human thinks to change, all the while changing. A human complains of a lack it has never had.
The cat is standing now in a field, an empty lot where no buildings are. There are chunks of brick and other remains, powdered glass and screws and metal scraps, the carcass of a refrigerator, a strip of tire. The cat has found a small hill. The cat sits at the top of the hill.
The cat is very still. She has stopped attempting to move and here at the center of this field it is no longer necessary that she move. She surveys this place, sinking into a kind of lethargy whose result will not be sleep. She is still. And in this stillness she no longer contemplates the difference between cat and person. She feels being condense. It is not the hot, steady sun that causes this reduction of sense. It is not an effect of what the animal beholds. The cat blinks and closes her eyes. She descends, swims away from the realm of perception. Time reorients, swinging up and then down. Time is no longer before her. Or: Time is no longer behind her. She has no front or back.
And she is by far littler now—reduced, as I have said.
It is a mark of the nature of this change that here someone else must begin to speak. I have to begin talking.
At the center of the field, in an empty lot where no buildings are, there is a small hill, and in the sand that makes up this hill, there is a narrow green stem, from which several fringed leaves extend. The stem has no bud, though perhaps in time a bud may form. The stem anchors itself in the earth by means of shallow roots. Air currents tousle it slightly, from side to side.
What is the difference between then and now, someone might ask. In human memory it is always easy to recall a certain scene. One remembers the particulars of space, for distance occurs in different ways, no matter where a person is. One recalls movement and the look of other faces around one. One hears the sound of a voice or voices. Perhaps one knows what one thought at this time.
And yet, it always seems possible that the particulars of memory compete. How is it, I might ask, that I am here but not there, where I was—that my being here, in this place and time, precludes my being there, where once I was. Is it not possible that I am still there, that those sensations that were mine then are also mine now, in this present. I could, for example, not be certain, then. I could not know the ways in which those things I saw and felt would come to mean, and yet now, now that I know what those things mean, I cannot cease sensing them. I know their meaning, as I did not when I experienced them, and yet I experience them still, though I no longer have power to change their course. I can no longer reply to your words, yet here I am.
III.
Human memory exists somewhere in this landscape. However, no one here is living—at least, not in the human sense. There is a plant in a small hill of refuse.
Minutes pass. Within the plant, there is the slow tug of liquid. Wind moves it. Light moves it. A sentence is a peculiar vehicle for the sentience of a plant. An English sentence begins in one place and ends in another; an English sentence proposes a high point and then guides the mind into a flat expanse of deliberation, shifts and drives forward like a century. All the language available to me is so deliberate. My language is the language of a being in possession of legs, a head, and face. There is a front of my body, whenever I speak.
It isn’t that the plant can’t think, of course. A substance seeps into its cells; the plant learns. The sun ticks across the sky and the plant knows seconds. Minuscule parts of the earth are incorporated.
All the same, human memory exists somewhere in this landscape. I am not sure where to locate it.
I yawn. I get up and walk away from the keyboard, move around the house.
I return to the keyboard, consider the document. In the time that I have been away, something has changed in the landscape. Where previously there had been a small plant, a weed, really, if we are honest, now there is an object, something not even alive. I lean in to get a better look. It is a pencil, a yellow pencil.
I sit back in my chair. I am unsure what to do. My protagonist is becoming increasingly difficult to work with. I don’t know how to navigate this latest change, what to say.
The pencil lies in the sand and dirt and refuse. The sun beats down. Time is rounding into late afternoon, and so perhaps it is better to say that the sun “glares.” The sun enters the scene from the edge of the sky.
Here there’s not much for me to say. I simply have to wait this phase out. The metal band around the pencil’s pink eraser glints significantly, but really it doesn’t mean anything.
I am thinking, now, about how years ago, many years, I made a discovery. I, and now this is Lucy speaking, was eleven or twelve years old, I guess, when I first started to have what I’ll call bad feelings. I would think about life, how it is limited and nothing ever happens, and I would, though I was only a child, feel ground down by boredom and hopelessness and could not understand why anyone believed that what they were doing was really living; and for many years I could not stop being bored and simultaneously horrified by my strange, anomalous boredom, since it was so different from what was portrayed to me as true boredom, until one day when I was sixteen I was on a bus and I was watching shadows on the sides of buildings and something was happening with the sounds of voices and the weird movement of shadows, the flickering and extension and diminution, and I felt somehow raised out of my body, pressed closer to thought, and I felt my thoughts, felt the abstract pleasure of thinking, felt time as something different.
I’ve often practiced this experiment since. It is why I write. All the same, many kinds of experience become soft or abstract for me of late. There is now for me a singular kind of space related to writing, into which I am either tending or to which I am somehow always referring, when I speak to others. Time is flaccid, heavy of late. However, it is even beautiful like this. This can be like the discovery of my own personality, accomplished by me. I become aware of the one person that I am only or as soon as I understand that it is a matter of attending to this particular space of concentration. Anything may be within this space. Anyone may be within it. Perhaps only I know for sure how to define or know it. And it is not changeful, though it may change, has changed, may be changing.
Sometimes I think that I should admit that I have made a serious error in my life. At a moment like this, I will ask myself if I regret not my error but instead only its consequences, is it an error, exactly. And what is the name for such a misstep? Is it a misstep that is in part desirable because it casts light on a part of living not yet known or experienced by me?
At other times I will have a good or fairly good night of work and feel calm again in certain moments, satisfied. This calm, a sort of drinking in of random visual fields (whatever is outside my window) plus a certain quality of time, is the only thing that comforts me. Yet it is difficult to obtain such equanimity in writing without a horrifying everyday life. The writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose work I don’t always admire, asks, “Une interrogation persiste: Est-il possible d’échapper à la tragédie?” (A question persists: Is it possible to evade tragedy?)
Someone calls me a “romantic.” But why is it so strange to wish to be loved unconditionally? What if I decide that it is unacceptable that I not be loved in this sense? What if for this reason I simply stop and end and so on; if I don’t survive. What if I simply decide to waste everything—because it is within my power to do so. What if I am too ill to move, too ill to wish. I still cannot decide if something terrible is happening to me already, like I am in an airplane all the time and never touch the earth again for the rest of my life—or, if it is I who have in fact made a terrible error, I who am at present electing to board an airplane that never touches the earth again. There is no clear difference for me between boarding an airplane (an act)
and something that befalls a person (tragedy). Either I pity myself too much and blindly enter such a plot or am already living inside tragedy, previous to my own actions. And maybe “or” is not the correct term.
Human memory exists somewhere in this landscape.
I am stubborn and don’t want to admit that I have anything to do with the protagonist.
Anyhow, it is evening.
IV.
The sun is blue. Now there is really nothing here. Which is to say: A human eye cannot look closely enough to see her.
Where there has been a pencil, now there is a fleck of dust, a mote, a microbe. It is not even heavy enough to avoid being carried off by breeze. It has already risen up, is circling the abandoned lot. It lofts up, further up, and begins to traverse great quantities of space. It flies, climbing and sinking, over the industrial zone, over the many regular warehouses. It streaks above the highway that rings the city. A miracle of some kind that such motion can be contained in an entity so small.
It seems possible to say that the mote is blind, because it does not see. Because it moves, I can speak for it. I can say that it is traveling through early night.
I can also tell you that it is returning to its point of origin. I have come very close to losing my protagonist, you see. As if it were not enough to have allowed her to relinquish her human form: I just now have recast her as entities that have no life, properly speaking. I did this, perhaps, in order to discover something that I already knew. I wanted to look at this thing I already knew, this thought, this fact, again—to see it as another life that was not my own.
The mote has retraced the path of the cat and it has retraced the path of the donkey. It is now following a route that the protagonist must have taken at some point, though this is not something that I have written of, properly speaking. The mote is wafted along a street in a residential neighborhood. It ascends a hill. The dwellings become smaller and farther set apart. The mote enters at a window of one small home. It enters a room containing a bed and a chair and a dresser with a round mirror. In the bed someone is sleeping. The sleeping person is a man. The mote alights on the bed.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 7