A Cat Named Darwin (20 page)

Plans—
realistic
plans—require a grasp of details, for they aim to manipulate reality. The first step was to cast my mind ahead and imagine the scene. It was a medical procedure, which would take place in the hospital, in the room where so many months before I had watched the two young assistants so gently send that big, handsome cat to his fate. I saw myself holding Darwin while the assistants administered their potions. I saw Darwin grow limp, and I could not bear to look. Something was very wrong with the image. This most intimate moment of our life together, this final farewell—and it was to occur in that bunker of veterinary terror?

But where else? At home, in the flat? Why not have Dr. Mader come to our home and administer mercy there, in our sanctuary? The burst of inspiration, however, flashed back to darkness. The event would have to be scheduled at least several days after the day of decision, and Darwin would be forced to wait and suffer during the interim. More than that, even the doctor's presence struck a dissonant chord. I realized then that during the course of our journey, Darwin and I had made another covenant, an unspoken one, for it was I, and I alone, who should perform the final act. Only I was sanctioned; only I had the sacred right to end our journey.

***

Now, to modern sensibilities this may seem an unsettling thought. By convention we agree that ending a pet's life is a job for the veterinary doctor, who performs his work with professional skill. I, however, was an experienced hunter and a scientist trained in the methods of animal experimentation. I knew how to kill, I knew how death played out, and I knew I could bring it home with more reverence, love, and intimacy than any doctor.

A friend had mentioned a special pill, a sedative that would knock the pet out. I needed nothing more. Once Darwin was asleep, I would nudge his spirit across the infinite divide with chloroform, applied with the gentlest, dearest love.

Dr. Mader recognized the drug as acepromazine, 25 mg. One pill should be enough, but he would give me two, if, for some unforeseen circumstance, an extra would be needed. He agreed that chloroform should finish the task quickly and humanely. All that remained was the decision, and since I seemed incapable of making it myself, the final call would have to be Darwin's. Finally, a week later, he surrendered to the inevitable.

He had been unable to eat for several days. He could no longer keep water down. For his final stand he had chosen my kitchen table, where I had constructed a thick, padded nest of bath towels, with the edges rolled under to form a ridge around the perimeter. There he had lain day and night, using the ridge as a pillow, staring without expression at some vast, inner vista.

That evening, after the news, I went into the kitchen to comfort him however I could, reassuring him that I would always be there, whatever his needs. But all I could do was gaze with utter despair as he lay on his side, his right paw extended forward, as if reaching out to me. I looked into his eyes and saw two silver-green orbs staring back with an eerie, blank glow. There was no expression, no hint of emotion, feeling, pain. Then, without so much as a facial twitch, Darwin spoke to me.

"It is time," he said.

It was not the childish voice of some animatronic movie creature. The voice was my own—the unmouthed speech of inner monologue that we use in conversation with ourselves.

Darwin had entered my mind on his terms, as an equal, as a friend, and used my own machinery to address me.

I sat down at the table and picked him up, hugged him, held him tight, stroked him gently, and sat for a long time rocking slowly back and forth, my left cheek pressed against his head while a soft, almost imperceptible purr seemed to whisper in the distance.

The next morning I arose as late as I could to prepare the rites. I laid one pill on the kitchen counter and tore off several large pieces of cotton for the chloroform. I dawdled, prepared things several times, tried to stretch time as far as time would stretch. "It is time" ran through my mind as I picked Darwin up, hugged him, set him on the floor. He sat quietly, too weak and miserable to move. I picked up the big red jellybean of a pill with my right hand and tilted his head back with my left. He offered no resistance. I wanted to stop, to put it off just a little longer, but there was no stopping now, no going back. I laid my right middle finger on his lower lip, and he opened his mouth as he had done so many times before. I placed the pill on the back of his tongue and gave it a gentle nudge. It disappeared down his throat and his mouth closed.

Facing directly away from the aching pain of anguish, I reached down, picked him up ever so tenderly, carried him down the stairs in my arms, and laid him at the foot of the staircase so he could lie in the sun while the pill brought sleep. I went back upstairs to busy myself with mindless chores and allow him the final dignity of his own company.

I waited about twenty minutes and readied the chloroform. Then I went down to carry him back upstairs, sleeping peacefully. To my surprise, Darwin appeared fully alert, although he lay in an odd position on his side with his back arched against the bottom step and his head raised to look around.

Perhaps the pill needed more time to work. I walked upstairs again and waited another fifteen minutes. As before, Darwin showed no signs of sleepiness. I waited a half hour more, and this time, as I reached the bottom steps, Darwin began to meow loudly, with a tone in his voice I had never heard but recognized instantly as primal fear. He had moved about ten feet away and was propped against the north wall of the yard in a contorted pretzel of a shape. He tried to move but couldn't. He looked into my eyes and meowed again and again, and finally I realized that the pill was not working as it was intended. Instead of bringing sleep, the pill had somehow blocked his brain from motor control and locked his body in this bizarre posture.

Yet his spirit fought. I could see it in his eyes, in his body as he strained to move. Here he was, contorted in agony and fear, ravaged by a bacterium that destroyed his blood, a virus that destroyed his internal organs, unable to eat or drink, with death from natural collapse a few days off at most ... and still his body fought to live. It humbled me. I beheld nothing less and nothing more than the force of life. It rose up like a genie from every cell in the body, and it had nothing to do with reason or the power of will. It was more profound than that. I stood before the First Commandment of DNA: Thou Shalt Survive, and for the first time I understood as a visceral feeling beyond intellect, down to the remotest pits of my marrow, that the purpose of life is simply to go on living.

***

My carefully constructed scenario had collapsed in rubble. So long as Darwin was conscious and mentally alert I could not use chloroform to snuff his life. His trauma would be inconceivable. I rushed upstairs and called Dr. Mader.

"The pill is not working!" I snapped.

"Give him the other pill!" said Dr. Mader.

I stood in a brief trance, holding the phone, while reason and feeling came to terms.

"To hell with that!" I said, struggling to restrain the curses I wanted to scream, and hung up.

I scooped Darwin up in my arms and peered into his eyes. He was not there. What I saw was a creature whose eyes showed not a glint of recognition. The creature wailed in fear and desperation. I rushed around the building, jumped into my car, and sped off to the hospital with Darwin on my lap. Fate was forcing us back to the house of alien odors, cries, pain, and fear, but that no longer mattered. We needed help, and because I had watched the two young assistants send that beautiful cat to eternity, I knew they would do their work with reverence and skill.

The receptionist was expecting us. I reached across the counter and placed Darwin in her hands. I took one last yearning, lingering look at my friend, then the receptionist turned and carried Darwin through the stainless steel doors. And ... I could not bear to accompany him, an act of weakness for which I will never forgive myself. I had never imagined a debacle like this and had not prepared for it. Even with all the preparation I wished, I would have found the choice agonizing at best. Forced to make a sudden decision, and knowing I would not be able to hide my grief, I took the easy way out and ran away. Besides, I told myself, Darwin was beyond recognizing me or anyone and it would make no difference to him whether I was present or not.

Somehow I managed to sign one release form authorizing euthanasia and another specifying the kind of cremation. By law I was not allowed to bury Darwin at home, which left cremation as the only choice, but I had to choose between mass cremation, in which the bodies of several pets were burned together, or individual cremation, which was, naturally, more expensive but guaranteed that the remains would be only those of Darwin. I could not afford the more expensive, solitary incineration, but I could not accept the thought of Darwin's ashes mixed with the remains of strangers in a common pot. I chose the individual option and would pay for it later.

Then I walked blindly from the office, hiding my face, got into my car, and, with eyelids flapping like windshield wipers, I drove and drove, into a vast emptiness, alone.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
I was invited to dinner by a friend and his wife. They were intelligent, thoughtful people who understood animals, and I knew I'd feel comfortable in their presence, able to withstand the waves of grief that washed over me from time to time. A dinner among friends offered the prospect of relief from my flat, which now throbbed with silence. Hoover's presence did help, but he was not Darwin. No one was Darwin. Late in the afternoon I drove up the highway to the town of Calabassas, letting my eyes wander over the green foothills that turned, as the sun set and the miles passed, into black mountains.

It was a good meal, generously flushed with good wine and marked by the appearance of an opossum and later a raccoon in the kitchen. A good meal that soothed the aching in my chest. On the long drive home, Darwin materialized in the car with me, first on the dashboard, then on the passenger seat, and when I arrived at the flat, there he was, walking out the driveway to greet me. I walked through him—he was only a specter—but as I came to the foot of the stairwell and looked up, my scalp began to crawl, for there, looking down at me, was a pale orange, living cat.

He was a young male, not past his first year, and something in his quick, sensitive movement marked him as feral. Probably born under a porch, behind a trash bin, or in some other urban nest. With the hairs on my neck bristling, I spoke to him the way I would have spoken to Darwin.

"Well, who are
you
? What a handsome boy," and slowly approached the stairs. He looked down at me, warily. I took a slow step. He disappeared down the back stairway.

Generally speaking, I am not inclined to entertain the supernatural, and the creature who had just vanished was clearly of the real world, but his pastel paleness was so ghostlike, and to encounter him at the head of the stairs the night after Darwin's death just as I returned from an outing to avoid his ghost—that was almost too much to dismiss as random chance.

The incident made the real specter all but palpable, for I saw him everywhere. He slept on my leather recliner. He waited before the front door to be let out. He waited in the bathroom while I showered, peering at my dancing image through the shower curtain, met me on the driveway, walking smoothly and intently toward me, looking into my eyes. It was hard to consider him gone.

I desperately missed the feel of his warm, soft, furry body, for touch has memories too. I had always looked with condescension on those who kept lockets of hair or other physical mementos of the dearly departed—how corny could you get?—and I could never comprehend those who stuffed their pets or interred them in little mausoleums. Now I understood. I yearned for some small physical thing that could be grasped and cherished. Then I remembered the glass tube in which I kept the whiskers Darwin had shed around the flat. Words cannot describe the loving touch I laid on that makeshift locket.

I had a week to contemplate life, death, eternity while waiting for Darwin's ashes, and the matter of his apparitions began to interest me. Clearly they were generated by the brain, thus implicating some cerebral mechanism, some internal structure, and probably it was the mechanism of memory.

To process the present instant, the mind needs a record of the recent past. Otherwise it would know only what it saw in the present. Nothing else would exist. To notice change, the mind requires memory. For instance, without a record of the recent past, I could not have perceived that Darwin had been injured, when he returned one night with his right foreleg swollen from a nasty puncture wound. The brain must keep a detailed record to compare against the present, and this implies a complex physiology dedicated to memory, a memory machine.

How would the memory mechanism work? Perhaps by reproducing images as a series of snapshots or a film clip while we were in the presence of the friend, relationship, or whatever. We would not be aware of these images, for attention would be focused on present perceptions, but when the friend, person, or object was no longer there, the images would come forward as memories. In my case, as apparitions of Darwin.

As for the machinery itself, what happens in the brain when a loved one is taken away? Assuming that the brain creates memories by forming or changing molecules, reconnecting nerve terminals, or some combination of these—assuming that something physical happens to record a memory, and assuming further that as time goes on, these changes accumulate, then the process of laying down memories must reflect the creation of structure within the brain.

When a loved one is taken from us, the physiological structure that stores and sorts those memories would no longer have much use. The brain would then dismantle the machinery dedicated to that relationship, altering molecules, severing neurons, connecting them anew, covering old pathways, clearing away the old to make way for the new. Maybe that process causes the pain and sadness we know as grief, for something physical has been amputated without anesthesia.