A Cat Named Darwin (13 page)

***

Now, finally, I had to face the challenge of forcing pills down the armed throat of a cat. It was a task I had been dreading since I first read the handbook of veterinary medicine.

When you open a cat's mouth, what you see are thirty polished, razor-sharp teeth. There are fourteen molars and premolars that form blades for slicing cartilage and gristle and bone, which is why they are called carnassials. There are four fangs at the corners, which function as picks for stabbing prey and keeping it pinned. There are twelve tiny incisors arrayed across the front, six in the upper jaw and six in the lower, which have evolved to destroy fleas; they function as a comb. Everything about this device is designed for carnage, and as you hold those jaws apart, the racial memories and primal fears of our simian forebears—the ones who survived, that is—waft up on the cat's fetid breath. This cat, too, had ancestors, and many of them were very, very large.

Clearly, to administer Darwin's pills I would need some instruction, so I turned to the bible of veterinary medicine. The first step, according to the good book, was to recruit an able-bodied assistant and, at the first signs of resistance, to roll the cat up in a towel like a burrito. I decided to call Robyn, my angel of mercy, who rescued animals as a daily matter of course and was fearless in nursing them. She halted traffic on four-lane streets to protect bewildered dogs and cats, stopped on freeways to pick them up, saved them from the pound, placed them in homes. She had a feeling for small creatures, and small creatures for her, that I had always trivialized as saccharine sentimentality, but desperation had completely reversed my judgment and now I found myself in supplication before her. Robyn would show me how to navigate Darwin's gauntlet. At a glance from Robyn, small animals rolled on their backs, opened wide their mouths, and
begged
for pills.

As I expected, Darwin submitted to her graces without the slightest hesitation, and before I could blink she had opened his mouth and poked the pill down his gullet in a motion so swift, so sure and flowing, that I could not revisualize it and certainly not repeat it.

Since we could not give another pill until the next dose fell due, Robyn coached me, demonstrating how to place the left; hand over Darwin's head, how to place the right index finger on his lower lip and slowly pry open his mouth; she showed me how to grip his head in my left hand and press the index finger and thumb from opposite sides behind his molars, wedging his jaws apart. And with her right hand, she performed the
coup de grâce
—placing the pill as far back as possible and poking it down the gullet. Finally, she demonstrated the endgame, gently holding Darwin's mouth shut and stroking his throat to activate a swallow reflex and conduct the pill to its gastrointestinal destiny.

***

The next morning the time came to put theory into practice. I set Darwin between my knees, so he could neither pull back nor bolt to either side, and set the pill next to him on the floor. Very gently I gripped his head with my left hand as Robyn had showed me, pried his jaws open until his mouth was gaping wide and I was peering into an abyss of wet, pink, glistening flesh studded with teeth, teeth, teeth.

Then Darwin began to panic. He tried to twist his head from my grasp. Instinctively my eyes zoomed into a macro view of the writhing tongue and the huge, straining masseter muscles that made the jaws clamp down. All subsequent memories are blurred, but I vaguely recall my index finger and thumb pole-vaulting over the middle finger and shoving the pill into the abyss. The tongue heaved and the pill disappeared. I jerked my hand away and fell back, thinking a prayer. Darwin, however, just sat there without moving, ears laid back, and slowly licked his lips.

Right from the beginning he seemed to regard these proceedings with a certain detached nonchalance and took pills easily. He never lost control, never reverted to the lethal stabbing and slashing and gouging machine that a mature cat can, under stress, become. Whatever the reason, I thanked the fates for small mercies and apologized to any I might have overlooked.

***

The next morning I went to the kitchen and tried again to interest Darwin in food. I pulled open the utensil drawer, removed the can opener, clamped it onto a can of tuna, and cranked it around the perimeter with an exaggerated commentary on the odor of cat food. "Oh, boy!!! Your favorite treat," and so on. Darwin, lying on the bed, opened his eyes. A few seconds later, his ears swiveled sluggishly in my direction. But he made no attempt to move, and my heart sank. A few weeks earlier he would have read my movements even before I entered the kitchen, and come trotting to my side. He would have sat down at my feet and stared up at me, focusing a beam of pure, animal hunger on the god of food.

The cool blue mind understood this. It knew with quiet desperation that Darwin could not be expected to eat.

"Oh,
boy!!!
" I implored. "Your favorite
food!!!
Here it
is...
" but the words sounded empty, phony, and trailed off into elliptical dots.

His eyes closed, and slowly he laid his head on his forepaws.

I held the food under his nose. He turned away. I followed with the bowl and again placed the food beneath his nose. He turned back the other way. I was about to continue my efforts when the thought occurred that maybe he really didn't want to eat and I should respect his refusal. Reluctantly, I controlled myself and took the food back to the kitchen.

Over the next two days, Darwin showed little interest in his food, pecking listlessly while I stood by and pleaded that he eat. Clearly, his intake would not sustain him in the long run, and his weight would soon begin to drop. On the third day, I took him back to the hospital for another checkup. Three days later, still another checkup, this time with another blood test, which came back negative for
Haemobartonella,
meaning that the results were positive. Dr. Mader concluded that Darwin was continuing to recover.

***

In the following weeks Darwin's appetite gradually increased and slowly his health improved. It was now well into spring, and the average temperature was rising by the day. He began to resume his territorial patrols. In the afternoons he took to his hammock in the billowing folds of the Volkswagen cover, his plump little form merging into the sensual, breathing shapes of the wind-inflated cloth. Given such progress it was easy to abandon oneself to hope.

Then one day at the end of April Darwin began to droop again. He came down with diarrhea. He vomited. A grim, quiet hysteria rose up from the blackness beneath my mind, for the most dreaded of all chores was surely at hand. I would have to put Darwin down.

No. No. Not without a fight. I would take him to the hospital. But if he was dying I wanted to hold him in my arms, wanted to savor the warmth of his body one last time. I needed someone to drive us.

Who to ask on a weekday afternoon, when decent people are at work? I ran down my list of friends again and again. Then I remembered Suzanne. I had met her only once, after she had written a passionate letter to the local newspaper advocating a ban on the hunting of mountain lions. It had so affected me that I looked her up in the white pages and telephoned her the next day.

She was a true lover of animals, cats in particular, and as soon as we met, I sensed she was a person of integrity, someone to cultivate as a friend (not, unfortunately, as a lover; she was living with her fiancé), someone I could call upon for help with a dying companion. She was a student and she happened to be home.

Suzanne arrived within ten minutes and suggested we take her car, an old rusting Volkswagen with springs coiling up from the seats and rusty metal floorboards where carpeting once lay.

Clutching Darwin, I sat down on steel coils as the air-cooled engine roared into life, choking and coughing, with a backfire thrown in for celebration. Darwin responded with a stream of urine, which, because it was hidden beneath his body, came to my attention as a warm rivulet running down my leg and a pool of yellow liquid spreading across the rusty metal floor.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry, Suzanne. We should have taken my car. I'm sorry."

"Please," said Suzanne. "That's what this car is for."

We found parking directly in front of the hospital, and with wet blotches covering my lap like camouflage, with yellow liquid dripping from my cuffs, I carried Darwin in one continuous hug into the office. Dr. Mader soon emerged from his medical sanctum. I managed to choke out my grief.

"I think ... it's time..."

He took Darwin from my arms, weighed him, laid him on the stainless steel table, looked in his mouth, checked the whites of his eyes, palpated his abdomen, took his temperature.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked, with a concerned frown. "I think we can fight it."

I had spent the morning in premature grief, facing the worst, and it took a few seconds to register the shock of possibility. Of course I wanted to fight the dying of the light; I'd do anything to save the creature I loved. A needle penetrated Darwin's skin to inject antibiotics, another needle entered a vein to draw blood.

The next day the results showed no evidence of
Haemobartonella felis,
only a strong positive for the feline leukemia virus. On the second day Darwin reentered the hospital with vomiting and diarrhea, diagnosed with "nonspecific enteritis." This, apparently, was the path we would travel from now on: driving to and from the hospital as the leukemia virus gnawed slowly away on Darwin's life and forced him time and again into these episodes.

That night, with Darwin in the hospital, the rooms seemed so empty, the walls so bare, and the truth pressed in from all sides with a black, suffocating weight like deep water. I realized then that sooner or later Darwin would have to be euthanized for the sake of mercy. It was the truth I dreaded above all others.

S
LEEP WAS OUT
of the question. I was reaching the limits of emotional endurance and could no longer face the acrophobic peaks and pathetic depths of hope and reason. The time had come for a summit meeting of the minds. The heart would have to be reconciled with the head, the feelings and urges of the limbic brain reconciled with the calculations of the rational cortex. It was, in other words, time to set standards by which to make that final decision.

It had rained off and on during the day, but the rain had fallen off about a half hour earlier, and I decided to take a walk. There is something in the striding of the legs, the pumping of the chest, the beating of the heart, the buildings and trees passing before the eyes, the mood of the light, the temperature, the humidity—something in the rhythm and the physical exertion of simple walking that clears the mind and, at its most productive, makes for revelations. Zipping my jacket and raising my hood, I walked down the stairs and headed into the night, toward the sea.

The air was cold and damp, with sprays of light rain now and then tingling against the skin. The blue light of the mercury-vapor streetlights glinted off the wet asphalt and glared from the sidewalk puddles, and yet, despite the reflections, the streets felt much blacker than usual. It was as if the rain, which lay in a film of molecules over the world, was absorbing more light than it reflected back. Rainy nights always seem so dark, dry nights so much lighter.

For ten years I had lived in this conservative, unpretentious neighborhood of Craftsman cottages known as Belmont Heights, a half mile from the long, wide beach that gave the city its name, and I walked with memories playing simultaneously with the present reality. At the corner of Loma and Third I came to Temple Beth Israel, a Jewish atoll in a sea of Christian bungalows. I thought of the morning several months before when the groundskeeper appeared at my door and handed me Darwin's address collar, which he had found on the lawn. A fight had probably occurred, the collar had been lost in the scuffle, and the groundskeeper had taken the time to return it.

I continued toward the sea and turned right on Broadway. I passed the pet shop with its bins of puppies displayed in the window, produced, probably, in some midwestern puppy mill, pedigreed with genetic flaws, and cunningly placed to manipulate the heartstrings of children and kindly people. I passed a pub, now having some Irish name, but seeing the faded sign
KARL'S LITTLE BAVARIA
over the door in honor of its original owner and founder, Karl Kohlbrecher.

Herr Kohlbrecher had survived World War II as a professional wrestler and boxer in the personal employ of one Adolph Hitler, who retained him to perform for small, private audiences that appreciated his skill in braining his opponents. Following the war, he immigrated to Long Beach and opened this dingy little window on the Reich one block south of Temple Beth Israel.

I had entered it once—Karl was long dead of a heart attack behind his beloved bar—to buy potato salad, for it was widely rumored to be the best in town. But the potato salad was only a ruse. I entered Karl's Little Bavaria with the German half of my ancestry peering through slots between fingers, dreading what I might see, or feel, yet drawn like a moth to black light. I vaguely recalled pictures on the wall of Karl with members of der führer's peers, although I may have been fabricating memories, and though I could not remember which peers they were, I did remember how dreary and dark and reeking of stale beer the place was, an apt monument for the men it conjured up.

I walked on and Walt Whitman came to mind. "I am large. I contain multitudes," exulted the poet of the people, praising the human condition in its vast, incomprehensible sweep. Did he write that immortal line before or after his service as a wartime nurse, tending the maimed and dying on the slaughter fields of the Civil War? What song would Old Walt have sung had he known the miracles of modern biology? The line kept repeating: "I am large, I contain..." I thought of intestinal bacteria, the true guardians of the natural world. Yes, indeed, I contain multitudes, and I walked along, contemplating the matter of one small human clutching the life of one small cat, wondering wide-eyed at the insignificance of individual life. For hatred, for love—what difference does the taking of life make to the molecules, of which we all consist?