A Cat Named Darwin (19 page)

Darwin lay without moving the entire time. He never seemed to mind the occasional interludes when I left the earth through music. I looked down at his small form while Bach soared in his heavenly bliss, and a sense of kinship spread over me in goose bumps of revelation. The music of the spheres, the music of the cat—same ancestral soul. These things astonished me beyond words.

The music was very loud, and so far as I could tell, Darwin took no pleasure in it. Besides, I was a writer, not a composer, and the matter of word and sound had dimensions beyond music. Clearly, Darwin was speaking in a syntax of tone, pitch, volume, and rhythm, but how much did human speech owe to the primal language spoken by our animal kin? The old language had not been discarded. It had been built over, like an earlier level of some ancient city, and its meaning thrived beneath verbal syntax in the inflections, lilts, rhythms, stresses, and other elements of spoken sound.

Poetry comes as close to the elements of music and animal cries as the spoken word can and still be speech. So essential to poetry are rhythm, tone, and inflection that its attributes have been given formal names like meter, foot, accent, stress, rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, and so on. Poetry is the form of language nearest to music, yet poetry is not music. It omits melody, possibly because melody wields such emotional force that it tends to overwhelm the rational mind and set its foot a-tappin'. This breaks rational focus and relinquishes the mind's attention to the musical muse. Still, in emphasizing rhythm, tone, and inflection, poetry retains the elements of music that bring emotional truth and diverts the energy that would have become music into the realm of concept and thought and meaning.

Consider a poem by William Butler Yeats.

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood....

Wander and wail ... Wander and wail as he would ... Language, distilled to its essence, is the music of thought.

Exhausted, purged, I looked down at Darwin with a new awareness of him and of me, and understood in the deepest sense that communication is communion. The music of the souls flows back and forth with equal grace. From that point on I spoke to Darwin—to all animals—with a new reverence, for if he did not understand English in syntax, grammar, and meaning, he did understand the tone and the inflection of my speech. I tried to caress him with sound, using words in gentle, lilting strokes to express the joy and gratitude from which the words themselves arose. I was, in other words, speaking the old tongue—the language we use with our infants before they acquire speech and still communicate as pure creatures.

The consequence of this communion was an ever-increasing vulnerability to Darwin's feelings and moods. I had vowed to enter his mind on that dark nighttime walk, but now I found that the process of entry worked in both directions. In boring deeper into Darwin's mind, Darwin penetrated deeper into mine, planting his perceived pain and depression in the center of my being.

This vulnerability came to a climax one afternoon as I sat at my desk, and heightened awareness gradually turned to self-pity. A sense of sorrow spread over my mood and turned to remorse for my sins against animals as a hunter, a scientist, even as a boy. This turned to pity for Darwin, blended with a feeling of victimization: Why him? Why me? Which metamorphosed into the bleakest, most barren loneliness.

The crisis hit without warning. It came at me silently from below, and before I could fend it off, my lips drew back in a silent grin, tears welled from my eyes, and a high, keening whine squealed from my throat. I was crying. A middle-aged man, and I was crying like death in the forest at night. I cringed, hunched over, tried to dampen this primitive call that cut through walls and windows like the moans of love or the shrieks of murder, but the cry continued. I tried to shut my mouth and bite the sound off, but the grief was as thick and tough as a rubber puck and my jaws could not bite through it. The sound issued from my nose, and possibly my ears, and if I had managed to block all openings, it would have squeezed from my pores.

I felt my grip weaken. Not even the embarrassment and chagrin of neighborhood gossip could stanch this force. It was not meant to be resisted. I just let go, let the pain and anguish of Darwin's impending death wash over me.

As always in moments of deepest stress, my rational mind rose from my body to watch my emotions writhe. What a weird, thin, unholy sound, thought the rational mind. What a bizarre sound ... and it is coming from me. Very interesting.

My nose stopped up, my chest convulsed, and I cried with an abandon I had not felt since I was an infant. But no infant ever cried like this. No infant could comprehend the chest pains of life with its tragic losses. No infant could comprehend the pain of others. None could imagine the terrifying concept of death. This was a cry for all of that; but pain, tragedy, empathy were superficial to this strange, thin keening. This was the cry of natural history, the cry of an animal, the limbic brain writhing in torment; it was the inner lizard pinned to the ground by the noggingod and forced for the first time to face the truth squarely. Its mate, its comrade in pure existence was leaving. The inner creature could not comprehend. The pain was blind, dumb, without meaning. And so it cried out in pure anguish. There was no Bach in this cry, no Yeats, no poetry, no music. Just the ceaseless call of grief from a thousand eons before, when evolution first made sound from pain.

The episode lasted for several minutes. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. The sun came out. Except for limpness in every limb, it was as if the incident had never happened. Once more I shouldered our world and trudged slowly along with my friend.

***

Time for another epiphany, which occurred in two parts, the second so there could be no mistaking the first.

One afternoon Darwin was lying on the landing just outside the front door. He no longer had the strength or the will to go downstairs and patrol his kingdom, so he would meow to go outside and merely lie at the head of the stairs, where he could gaze down like the Sphinx at the small section of the parking area framed in the stairway entrance.

I opened the door to make sure all was well. Darwin did not look up to acknowledge me, even when I called his name, and I knew his misery was building. The question always close to the surface came up yet again. How much longer would he want to go on? When will it be time? How will I know?

I closed my eyes and focused the entire apparatus of my intellect, senses, empathy, compassion, sorrow, incipient grief, love on his forlorn being, at the same time keeping a tight grip on my feelings; I had no desire to break down again, especially in the common space between the two flats.

It was a warm afternoon in late fall, and several green bottle flies hovered and swooped in the air above us, passing the time in the antics of courtship or searching the air for the scent of death and foul food. I paid them no heed. Darwin drew all my attention, and I fought to stifle the sadness of watching him sink.

At which point, without the slightest forewarning, Darwin leaped three feet in the air and plucked a fly from midflight between his paws. This was impossible, of course. With my hyper-sensitized perceptions and focused intellect I had found entry to his mind and felt his misery. Speaking for Darwin, I could safely say there must be some rational explanation for his incongruous behavior. I went back inside to leave him in peace.

An hour later I looked out again and found him lying just as before. I beamed some more sensitivity, empathy, compassion, et cetera, in his direction.

"Oh, Darwin—. My poor little Dar—"

His ears jerked forward, his body tensed, and he peered intently down the stairs. There was nothing there ... except for a faint tinkling sound, like tiny bells ... which was growing louder ... with a hint of manic energy ... not so much a tinkle as a rattle ... And the source then appeared in the door frame below us. A small poodle-ish thing.

Clearly lost, it had good reason to be manic. One of those poor fairies bred to indulge the bonbon affections of the over-civilized, it was a creature whose chances of survival on its own were so minuscule they could not be calculated. Rhinestones sparkled on its encrusted collar. Little bells dangled from the rhinestones, jiggling and tinkling. Little red ribbons clung to its tightly curled topknot. Then this specimen, no larger than a small cat, trotted to the base of the stairs, stopped, and turned its big, brown, trusting eyes heavenward, appealing to Darwin.

Darwin stared intently back. Through the surgical slits in his metallic eyes glared twenty million years of feline malevolence. In one quick movement he stood, arched his back, and expanded to about three times his normal size. There he stood like an electric bottle brush, each hair shorting out and spitting sparks.

Selective breeding had not left the poor bonbon with many useful genes, but it had enough left to realize that something was not quite right with Darwin's picture. It started to whimper and cast bewildered looks from side to side.

I could not reconcile the scene before me with the traditional roles of cats and dogs and watched incredulously as the scene played out. Glaring intently at the poodle, Darwin pitched himself over the edge of the landing and bounded down the steps to do battle. Its one good gene still in operation, the poodle screamed like a dying hare and scampered back from whence it came. (As I suspected, it belonged to a friend of the neighbor next door and lived many happy years, consuming hors d'oeuvres.)

Having routed the civilized offshoot of wolves, Darwin trudged wearily up the stairs and flopped on his side. I sat down to face the failings of reason, particularly the notion of empathic reason as the guide to mercy. Darwin had blasted all that. I was not, despite my best efforts, entering his mind and becoming one with him. There was no question that he was sick and slipping steadily downward, but just as clearly, I was projecting my own angst from what I
thought he
felt.

And that exposed the flaw in my resolution to discard my agendas and merge as pure spirit with Darwin's mind. The truth was, I was not merging with anyone's mind but my own. Finally I saw the ageless circularity: the brain receives input from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin; it processes the input, applying its agendas; then it conjures an illusion of reality, projects this illusion back on the world, sees what it has contrived, and takes the illusion for reality itself. This is the legacy of the biological mind, and there is no transcending it.

The best I could do was what I had always done, and that was to make steely-eyed observations. They were the key. I had to assess these perceptions against the most stringent standards of logic and not go beyond what the observations supported. To do so—to exceed the data—was to project my agenda as truth. In other words, I had come full circle, back to the fundamental task of science: to create an accurate illusion of reality without the distortions of the human agenda. My arrogance laid bare, my conceits stripped away, I looked at Darwin once again with humbled eyes. Communion with another soul could not be manipulated at the whims of human will. Communion required that all agendas be laid aside, all schemes left at the door. It required a blank mind and an open soul that responded in this direction or that, whichever way the truth chose to go.

T
HERE IS NO POINT
in describing the following months in graphic detail. They stay with me as a blur of hospice chores and anguished endurance, with particular incidents going in and out of focus. The endless skirmishes among reason, hope, and emotional communion grew more intense with Darwin's worsening condition, and I came to view the deepening shadows as a choice between the diabolical mercies of humanity and the brutal mercies of nature.

In my rational moments, when I looked down upon the world, impervious to the corrupting force of hope and emotion, I knew that I had transgressed the natural order of things and was committing my friend to a misery that no living thing deserved. Darwin had progressed so far past the point of natural survival that I had to help him eat. In nature he would long ago have been taken by some larger predator, or died of starvation and his corpse been eaten by scavengers. To our civilized sensibilities that might seem a barbaric and unacceptable line of thought. But had a coyote or a puma brought him home to the earth, death would have been as swift and merciful as any dispensed by medicine.

Even starvation would have been quick in comparison with the medical ordeal he suffered now. Why do we humans pull and nudge and drag our creature companions so far beyond the point of natural and dignified survival? Why do sweet, decent, compassionate, loving people refuse to observe the natural order and consequently raise Hell to the surface for their beloved friends? Finally, I faced the truth because I could find no way to avoid it. The truth was, I helped my fading friend because I could not help myself. Nor could I bring myself to put him down. I just could not bear to do it.

Oh, I still tried to commune with Darwin's feelings, groping to understand his needs and pain, but I no longer had faith in my intuitions. Since I could not trust my feelings and would not follow my reason, I became vulnerable to the doctors and the Hippocratic spirit to which they are sworn. Each time I brought Darwin to the hospital, expecting the doctor to say "It is time," he would say instead, "Well ... there
is
something else we could try..." and I could never say "No," because the treatment might work. We might be able to squeeze a bit more time.

Inevitably, in tiny increments masked by hope and denial, the day arrived when the illusion collapsed and the rational and emotive minds joined as one to accept reality. Darwin was losing much of his food; his abdomen was so tender it could not be touched for examination, probably owing to cancer. His bowels reacted accordingly. Antibiotics no longer had any effect. Nothing had any effect. Christmas was two days away, my birthday three. The days were short, the nights long, darkness and gloom pervaded everything. My humanity then rose to the occasion. If I could not yet do that which must be done, I could at least salvage a small illusion of control and plan the event.