A Cat Named Darwin (22 page)

Ah, but the attempt is the reason for being. Darwin showed me that the mind is meant to embrace others. It happens naturally, without trying: while the brain makes memories by altering molecules and neurons, the mind grows around those with whom it lives like roots around a rock. Nothing is more natural than this process. So I grew around Darwin and Darwin grew around me, and with this small epiphany the Mass continued.

"Enough," said Darwin. "My work is done."

He curled up, resting his head on his paws, and looked up at me impatiently from beneath his brow, just as he had on that fateful day a year and a half earlier, when our lives converged. Now our time had come to an end.

"Oh, Darwin, I'm going to miss you so much."

"You have much to learn," said Darwin testily. "But you will. Go with Hoover—you could have done better, but he is adequate—and with the others you will meet on the way. They will guide you."

The ineluctable tears, the struggle in the throat, the internal pressure of exploding grief.

"I will be here so long as you live," said Darwin matter-of-factly, "here, in the roots of your brain, to visit whenever you wish. And someday, when your time comes, the molecules of my memory and your spirit will blend together in the earth. Go now. I will rest awhile."

He raised his head, stood up, arched his back, and walked toward me. I dropped to hands and knees and lowered my face to his. He raised his head and extended his neck in one last gesture of love, and slowly, gently our noses came together. As they touched, Darwin vanished, and I found myself staring at a small pile of ashes on the leaves. I stayed there for a few moments, unable to move, feeling the leaves and the damp earth.

I got to my feet, pushed through the wall of foliage, and emerged into the ecstatic beauty of late afternoon. The light slanted into the clouds from the west, exposing caves and crevices and great, soft outcroppings of puffy white. Gulls soared in circles, slicing in white crescents across the towering structures and exulting with wild, cackling yelps in the sheer joy of being gulls.

The air stung my face and I breathed the clear, cold atmosphere, savoring the molecules of oxygen which soon would flow with my blood into my metabolism. Emerging as carbon dioxide, the molecules would rise into the air when I breathed out. I was not standing in the environment; I
was
the environment. I was the substance I breathed and ate and channeled through this earthly form in a promiscuous stream of plasma. I was part of a larger existence that extended forth from the first living things in an unbroken line to Darwin and to me, a live, organic cloth of ever-changing forms that clings to the ever-changing world and will endure till the day the sun goes out. It struck me then that evolution is about kinship and kinship is about love and love is the essence of light.

I raised my face to the sun, drank deep of the sweet living air, and thanked Darwin for giving me Life.

In the end,
because I became a cat,
I became a human being.