A Cat Named Darwin (18 page)

T
HE OUTBURST
left me staring at the wreckage of my illusions in a vacuum of silence, and I realized I had made a serious mistake in taking on another cat. There would be no happy family in my household. There would be no affection between Hoover and Darwin. Maybe, had Darwin been young and healthy, with life before him, a cease-fire and eventually even a peace could have been worked out, but that was fantasy. My first priority was Darwin's care. Hoover would simply have to endure his confinement, however long that might be.

Darwin never forgave me.

Oh, he didn't reject me on moral grounds, for he had no morality. He rejected me on the practical grounds of survival. Whenever he came in for food, the scent of Hoover must have burned his nose, taunting him with the presence of his archenemy. He had grown too weak to fight this younger rival, and the deep logic of instinct declared that my flat had become a dangerous place for a sick old cat to be.

He began to stay outside and would not come in, even for food. Baffled, I would pick him up and carry him inside; one night, when I attempted this breach of sovereignty, he bit me as I lifted him from the ground. It hurt my feelings more than my flesh, but it pierced my agendas and made me realize the issue was nonnegotiable. Left with no leverage, I placed his food outside the door.

Dwelling next to the earth, Darwin became prey to fleas, which multiplied in his coat as another symptom of feline leukemia viremia, since the victim loses strength and gradually ceases to groom. Consequently, the fleas prospered beneath the fur and there was little I could do, for even though Darwin had little energy to combat fleas, he still had enough to combat me and refused to allow combing.

In desperation I considered flea powders. These, however, contained pesticide, and in Darwin's weakened condition, that seemed a dangerous and foolish solution. This left no alternative but the occasional flea bath, still with pesticidal ingredients but only in light and occasional doses.

Since I had never bathed a cat before, my friend Robyn of the mystical persuasions came over one afternoon to help. We plugged Darwin's ears with cotton, rubbed a thin layer of petroleum jelly around his eyes to protect the membranes from soap burn, lifted him into the bathtub, wetted him down, and while Robyn gently soaped and lathered him with shampoo, I wrestled and struggled against his stiffly splayed legs and arched claws to keep him in the tub. His struggles, though, seemed halfhearted, almost feeble, compared to what they would have been a few months earlier. I would gladly have traded the extra scratches and puncture wounds for a healthier Darwin. With his fur matted to his skin, his legs looked so thin and so very fragile.

***

With Darwin refusing to accept my help, guilt dampened any pleasure I might have had in Hoover's presence. Hoover, sitting calmly, innocently on my desk as I wrote, Hoover with his elegant, sophisticated markings, gazing with motionless eyes into my soul, was the incarnation of my betrayal. I had violated a trust, I had made a double commitment I could not honor; I was a bigamist, and payment was now falling due.

I refused to give up the cause, however, and waited and hoped for Darwin to have a change of heart. It seemed inevitable that sooner or later he would want to live inside because fall had arrived, and cold, rainy weather would magnify the stresses of life on the street, outweighing the repugnance of Hoover's presence. I knew that he
wanted
to be indoors somewhere, and if not with me, then with anyone who would take him in. The landlord's soon-to-be-ex wife, now living in the flat downstairs, confided that Darwin was trying to ingratiate himself with her. His efforts fell like rain on a stone, however, for she had larger worries and cares to address on her own family front.

Then one morning in early October I opened the front door and found Darwin huddled before it. He did not look up. He just lay there, a small, orange orphan huddled on the scab-red carpeting, and I knew without any medical tests that feline infectious anemia had returned for a third attempt on his life. Using the criteria I had formulated on my dark walk to the beach, I attempted to enter his mind by attuning myself to his posture, movements, cries, and divining his wants and needs; my decision on medical care would be his decision as well.

How clearly I felt his mind. Darwin wanted to fight the virus. Of course he did, of course he did. He would certainly consent to the relentless inflictions of medicine and hope in order to live.

Once again I administered pills four times daily. But Darwin's health had lost ground since the last episode, and he could no longer keep the antibiotics down. He refused his food. His weight began to drop.

I responded with a holy neurosis of guilt, love, and grief and watched over him with the focused zeal of a two-eyed Argus in my efforts to divine his needs, know his wants. Wherever he lay I built a bed of towels. Whenever he cried I leaped from my desk and went to his side. I fussed and doted and tried to get him to eat by gently stroking his back. His appetite continued to wane, so I went to the market and bought ever more exotic and expensive morsels to stimulate his interest—shrimp, lox, fresh sole, lobster tail. I tried them all, but nothing brought Darwin's appetite back for more than a few mouthfuls. Dr. Mader suggested baby food, particularly ham, and when Darwin refused even that, I had nothing else to offer.

His weight now dropped steadily, going in two weeks from fourteen to twelve pounds. It was devastating to stand by helplessly, and even though I dreaded the implications, I was finally driven to intercede. If Darwin needed to eat, then I would
make
him eat.

Using a blender I frapp^ed his food, poured it into a large, 35-cc needle-free syringe, and squirted the liquid down Darwin's throat. The feeding sessions proved to be easier than I had feared, in large part because we had arrived in our relationship at a covenant of familiarity and trust: paws, head, body held firmly, gently from behind, jaws wedged open, food injected slowly, gradually, throat allowed its natural contractions, and always a monologue of singsong sounds to soothe and caress.

We settled into the trials of hospice care, and the conflict between hope and reason continued without respite. The rational eye of reality saw precisely what it gazed upon. It went first to the large, round, black pupil of Darwin's right eye and compared it to the pinched slit of his left eye. It traveled then to the left ear with its strange forward set contrasting with the right ear, standing straight and alert the way the ear of the cat was intended to stand. Finally the eye of reason ran along the ragged coat now beginning to sag over the emerging bones of an ever-thinning body.

With recovery clearly impossible, hope responded by retreating and retrenching. If it could not convince the mind of a full recovery, it could at least soften the unavoidable. It could seize on something attainable and use it like a carrot on a stick to keep us trudging forward. A few days of remission. A normal body temperature. Enough appetite to eat a full meal without assistance. Pathetic hopes, but Darwin's life rested squarely upon them, and as his reality became dimmer and smaller, hope became larger and, eventually, became all.

The pace, however, was not unremittingly gray and dreary, for life became more intense and far more valuable. The sweet sorrow of self-denial assumed its proper role at the center of existence, and I focused all my senses on Darwin's physical appearance. This brought me to a level of communication I could never have imagined.

One day as I scooped him into my arms it struck me that for a cat—perhaps for any animal—the deepest expression of trust was tactile. Being touched often signifies aggression and danger, particularly among wild animals or among strange animals and people. To grow beyond this innate wariness signifies much familiarity.

Darwin's trust had nothing to do with reason, of course, because cats cannot reason in the human sense; it had everything to do with the deepest level of his being and could not be contrived. His trust lay in the deep pleasure of feeling my hand run over his fur, of feeling my finger and thumb rub along his jaw and up behind his ears, of abandoning his posture in the cradling of my lap, and in savoring the sensation of having his belly rubbed without the reflexive impulse to seize my hand and bite it. As for me, trust lay in the deep pleasure of simply knowing that the pleasure passed back and forth between two living things, through fur and flesh, with each intimating his love to the other. The proof was in the purr. The purr, the touch, and the trust were one.

Sounds had their own communion, and as time went on I became preternaturally attuned to Darwin's cries in the night, which sometimes horrified me in their similarity to the wails of a baby. I reacted like a baby's mother. Sleeping soundly, I would suddenly be sitting up, fully awake, hair on end, heart pounding, skin oozing sweat—a long, razor-edged meow having sliced cleanly through a dream and left my nerves bleeding.

I wondered about that. Why did Darwin's voice affect me so deeply? Like any good biologist, I dissected my reaction with a sharp question. Was my reaction accurate? Was Darwin's voice expressing his feelings and moods? Or was I projecting my human presumptions?

Right from the beginning I'd had the impression Darwin was usually irritated when he talked to me. To be blunt, he sounded pissed off. His voice resonated with what seemed to be urgency, frustration, impatience, and eventually I concluded that it must be my own peculiar interpretation. Or perhaps cat and man were wired differently, so that what seemed like irritation to me was nothing more than ordinary ennui to the cat. Why should Darwin live in a constant state of irritation when I pandered to his every need? It made no sense.

But in Darwin's mind it did make sense, because he really
was
pissed off. This became clear one afternoon as he slept before my giant old Bozak speakers. I was gazing absent-mindedly at my friend, so haggard and compromised, when he raised his head and stared quietly straight ahead. Seeing no particular significance in this gesture, I continued to watch, and after a few minutes, Darwin glanced over at me, then toward the kitchen. Still blinded by the obvious, I kept watching as he began to fidget, looking back and forth several times between kitchen and me. Finally, provoking no response, he opened his mouth and produced the most caustic, sarcastic yowl I had heard in some time.

At last my light turned on and I grasped this simple fact: Darwin's first line of communication was to gesture and assume a particular posture. He expected me to understand what the gestures meant. Only when I ignored his silent signals did he appeal to the powers of darkness and come forth with an ungodly wail, particularly at night.

But the cry itself ... what gave it such emotional force? First, each cry had pitch. With a cat the pitch is high, a soprano voice compared to the basso of, say, a Cape buffalo. Each cry also had a tonal value, like notes from a musical instrument. The oboe with its melancholy wail, the bassoon with its bucolic flatulence, the flute with its soaring, piercing spirituality, the cat with its eerie similarity to the cry of the human infant and its soaring, piercing lack of spirituality.

In addition to pitch, the cry had inflection. Darwin's voice lilted up or down when he talked, often up
and
down, down and up, in the spirit of an ululation. The cries had volume. When Darwin turned the volume up he added urgency to my reaction.

There was more, much more. If Darwin called two or more times in succession, he added the element of rhythm to the mix. Tonality, pitch, volume, rhythm—what was this but the rudiments of music? The only element missing was melody. Of course, much of modern classical composition also has no melody, yet somehow it passes for music.

And how does music affect us but by moving the emotions? So Darwin was speaking emotions, not concepts, not words, not schemes. He was using a syntax and grammar of tone, volume, pitch, and rhythm to express his desires, his needs, his moods, and he was conversing in a language akin to modern music. Much of the time he had no choice but to complain because I wasn't reading his silent expressions of posture, gesture, and pose. Since my ignorance struck him as rude, it made for a noisy relationship.

***

The kinship of cry and music intrigued me, my intellect having become a sanctuary from sorrow and pain. Intellect, however, was not enough, so I appealed straight to heaven and decided to listen to the B Minor Mass by Johann Sebastian Bach. I pulled a record at random from the three-disk album, placed it on my old Thorens TD 125 turntable, and by sheer chance set the tone arm down on
Osanna in excelsis
from the
Sanctus,
not realizing that in the
Osanna,
Bach had turned to six-part polyphony with an eight-voice double chorus to celebrate his insignificance before God, creating the most complex polyphonic music of the entire Mass. I turned the volume to spiritual levels and stood before a torrent of ecstasy that soared from my speakers and rose to the skies like the aurora borealis.

Had it been my intention I could not have selected a more sublime passage. The significance of
Osanrta in excelsis—
"Hosannah in the highest"—was not lost on Johann Sebastian Bach. It was as if he set out to demonstrate for all time the relationship of spoken language to the primal language of sound that lies beneath words. The score provided three words, and Bach played with them for almost three glorious minutes. He drew the vowels out into long, dancing lines of melody, he drew one melody from another and played them side by side. He gave the different melodies to the various voices of the chorus and sent them circling and pirouetting among the gorgeously machined orchestral parts, particularly the piccolo trumpets, which soared above the voices and other instruments like shafts of holy light. My emotions cannot be described. Those three simple words served to announce the topic, the ecstasy of religious epiphany, but the ecstasy itself came directly from the music. Music is the language of feeling and mood.