A Cat Named Darwin (8 page)

I got up, gave him some more pâté, and went back to bed. My lights were out before I hit the mattress and sank down, down into the comatose depths of the fossil record.

ROCKSSHITOHCODBREAKWATERCRASH

KICKOUT STOPROCKS
(convulsion kick).

Find night light Gropewhack Unnhh!!! Nolamp ... Wrong-side...

Ohjezus—on bed!!...Something on bed! Mattress sinks underit. Toward me!...Thinkthink.
THE CAT!!!

Cat has jumped on bed....At me. Scalp crawls. Mind coming online. Cat Jump—Cat Thump: Circuit shock ... Not in boat, inebriated, not drifting at rocks...

Cat coming closer. Something presses on right thigh ... a paw. Two paws. Fifteen pounds on two small feet. Like high-heeled shoes, pressing sharply into flesh. Climbing onto both thighs, circles around, plops heavily on side atop me.

I roll abruptly to the right under the sheets. Cat slides from my legs and lodges inertly against me. Am now groggily awake. We lie motionless for several moments, while I consider what to do.

Here I am, flat on my back. I have broken through the barriers of my culture and my private feelings and accepted an animal into my circle of loved ones. I am jet-lagged. I am almost delirious with fatigue. Yes, I feel true affection for this little creature. No, I do not want to sleep with him.

I reach out wearily and begin to stroke the furry lump, feeling very gingerly for the head and mouth. No reaction. No purring. The ball is in my court and Darwin, apparently, has every intention of keeping it there. I nudge him gently toward the edge of the bed. He relaxes and lies limp, letting his body bend to absorb my efforts without moving. I reach out with both hands and try to scoot him along. This works for about a foot and a half, when Darwin suddenly seems to gain about fifty pounds and cannot be budged. I push harder. No movement. What the...?

I turn on the light and there he lies, ears laid back, claws hooked deep into the mattress with knuckles arched. He has no intention of abandoning our bed. What to do? I am in no shape to do anything, so I do the inevitable and doze off.

Some time later, I think, a dream turns bad, I think. I lie on a Caribbean beach with marimba music and the scent of tropical flowers wafting on the breeze. The sun soaks into my skin and I savor the feel of the hot sand on my palms ... but the hot sand grows hotter ... hotter ... and becomes a stabbing pain in my left hand. At which point I wake up to find my hand clamped firmly in Darwin's mouth; I cannot
see
my hand—the lights are off—but I don't need lights. In my mind's eye I clearly see a hand sandwich.

Yeow! I try to pull back, but Darwin won't let me off so easily. I jerk back with a terrified reflex and finally extract myself from his jaws. He must have moved while I slept and bedded down opposite my chest. In the course of dreaming, I laid my hand on Darwin's head, oblivious to the sin I was committing, and he is letting me know it was a mortal one.

With expletives resonating through the flat, I run to the kitchen to check my hand for puncture wounds. I find only white marks, Darwin's way of reminding me it could have been much worse. Again I go back to bed and fall directly into a coma.

The next morning I regain consciousness around nine o'clock. I lie on my back for a while, assembling the various pieces of my mind, and look over at Darwin, who lies next to me, stretched out full length. How relaxed he looks, how innocent in the privacy of sleep. My eyes run over his body, feeling his rich colors and lingering on his elegant markings, and I am struck by his size. From nose to tip of tail he looks about four feet long. He lies on his side with his legs reaching toward me as if wanting to embrace, and something in the curve of his wrists and the innocence in his slumbering sprawl summons up the fairer sex and memories of a few with whom I have shared intimacies. The thought occurs that these young women, too, have memories of the fouler sex, of which I am a shining example, in similar postures of affection and trust. At which point my inner voice roars out, "My God!!—you're in a relationship with a cat!!"

Ah yes, the morning after. There I lie in the sinful aftermath of having slept with a beast, and I feel not a twinge of guilt. On the contrary, I am glowing with the warmth of a first-time husband, for my soul has been liberated and I have no more reservations. I intend to throw myself into this relationship. Not even the eggs and castings of all the fleas who have shared our bed can dampen my spirit.

Thus Darwin and I became man and cat.

I
N THE FOLLOWING WEEKS
I bought Darwin expensive specialty foods—nothing but the best for my small friend. He responded by getting fat, eventually compressing the scales at nearly fifteen and a half pounds. In an age when leanness has become something of a medical religion, I felt some concern over this gain in weight, but it gave me such pleasure to watch him revel in his meals that I could not resist giving him large helpings. This in turn allowed me to enter the mindset of Peter Paul Rubens and other Baroque painters: for the first time I understood their tastes in hefty women. A person of weight was a prosperous person, a symbol of power, particularly in an age when good food was a privilege, and Rubens, consummate politician of the royal courts, understood perfectly how to butter his bread.

Nevertheless, it seemed wise, given my newfound responsibilities, to see what the medical experts said about weight gain and other matters of health, so I bought a veterinary handbook for reference. What I found on its cold white pages was a gallery of horrors, illustrated with weeping wounds and bulging tumors and pus-rimmed eyes. There were failing hearts and damaged kidneys and inflamed bowels and allergic seizures. There were fleas and ticks and mange mites and tapeworms and hookworms and liver flukes. Then of course there were the microbes, including a funereal list of viruses with names like FIP, FPV, FIV, and FeLV (the only omission was RIP). These abbreviations were derived from the medical names: feline infectious peritonitis, feline panleukopenia virus, feline immunodeficiency virus, and feline leukemia virus—a list of doom revealing a dark world of feline pathology that ran exactly parallel to our own, including two retroviruses, FIV and FeLV, that acted much like the retrovirus we humans know as HIV. I didn't dwell on the details, but according to the book, both viruses attacked the white blood cells, particularly the T-cells essential to the immune system; both caused the victim to lose weight and waste away; and both led to all sorts of secondary diseases, including cancers like lymphoma and leukemia.

I shelved that book, hoping never again to read such a horrible tract and thinking that if cats had nine lives, they had got the short end of the stick. Nine were not nearly enough. Nine lives, however, was a value judgment made by those who have no particular love of cats or who downright dislike them. To those of this persuasion, the cat is a tough, resilient survivor, whose ancestry goes back sixty million years. But when you fall in love with a cat, you take away eight of those lives, leaving it with only one and creating a small, frail creature with little chance of living out a long, healthy life.

What could I possibly conclude after reading this veterinary tract but that Darwin had to be vaccinated? He also had to have his teeth cleaned. The substance caking his teeth was tartar, and the red line that ran along the base of his teeth was gingivitis, an infection of the gums brought on by tartar buildup. The infection would spread to the jawbone, eventually loosen his teeth, and cause their loss.

We had returned to the matter of finding a good veterinarian. This time there was no turning back and no time to wait. As Darwin's guardian it was my duty and my loving compulsion to guard his health. But in order to find this ideal veterinarian, Fate would have to intervene.

About a week later, I conducted a telephone interview with a woman named Bonnie Mader for a column I was writing on the human-animal bond. Bonnie was a professional grief counselor and had founded the first pet-loss hotline at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine. The service had proven so popular that it could not attend to all the requests, and as I worked into the interview I learned from Bonnie that some people, on losing their animal companions, commit suicide or seriously contemplate it. I felt a strong connection with Darwin, but this seemed a bit much. What else could you conclude but that these poor souls were emotional misfits, citizens of the psychological fringe?

Even so, you could not so easily dismiss the enormous number of people, cloaked in the anonymity of a telephone conversation, who called for help during their moments of deepest grief. Bonnie Mader had struck a nerve; out there in the vast closet of American society lived multitudes who suffered in silence, fearing ridicule and derision, ashamed to admit they had developed deep bonds with simple creatures.

We talked for an hour that day, and as we were about to hang up, I happened to mention where I lived.

"Oh," said Bonnie, "my brother just bought a veterinary practice in Long Beach."

"You're kidding me. I live in Long Beach—whereabouts is it?"

Bonnie went on to explain that her brother now owned the Long Beach Animal Hospital—apparently, when a newly emerged veterinarian looks to buy a practice, he chooses what the market has to offer, wherever that may be. So Dr. Doug Mader had recently moved to this city of 450, 000 citizens just south of Los Angeles, a city that used to be called Iowa by the Sea in honor of the immigrants who came during the Depression. Sometimes it was called the Home of the Newly Wed and the Nearly Dead, with reference to the young families just starting out and the large number of old folks awaiting their ultimate destinations. If this were not reason enough to settle in Long Beach, there was also the
Queen Mary,
permanently docked and rusting in the harbor, and next to her, beneath an enormous geodesic dome, the
Spruce Goose,
built by Howard Hughes at the end of World War II. Long Beach boasted the narrowest house in the nation as well as the largest United States flag. If Doug Mader needed any further inducement, Long Beach was the home of Darwin.

***

The next day I took Darwin, howling and urinating in his new transport box, to meet Bonnie's brother.

Dr. Mader was an intense, lean, dark-haired man in his early thirties who had been nicknamed "Worker Bee" in vet school for his implacable energy. According to Bonnie, his primary motivation was actually to help animals, and he sponsored a pro bono program to save and rehabilitate injured wildlife. He had even set up a student intern program with U.C. Davis; consequently, he had close ties to the university and access to the latest in veterinary research and medicine. Darwin, his eyes dilated black, did not appreciate the significance of this, but he was soon to be in the best hands that medicine could hold forth.

Dr. Mader laid those hands on Darwin and lifted him deftly from his box. He laid him gently on the examination table. Darwin seemed submissive, as if acknowledging the hands of a higher power, and lay dutifully on his side while the doctor pressed a stethoscope to his ribs and listened to his heart. He complied without resistance as the doctor prodded and massaged his abdomen for tumors and other telltale symptoms listed in the book of veterinary horrors. Then, declaring that Darwin's teeth needed cleaning, Dr. Mader explained that this required a blood test.

Everything leaves evidence in the blood, a fact that I, as a lapsed biologist, understood. If Darwin's kidneys were damaged, that would alter the nitrogen profile. If he had parasites or any number of diseases, they would activate the immune system and induce changes in the blood cells; if liver disease, enzyme changes; and so on. The first order of business on starting a cat on regular medical care was to test its blood. This would establish a record against which future tests could be compared.

Finally the exam ended. The results would come back the next day, and then we would schedule the cleaning. Dr. Mader had mentioned nothing about a heart murmur, which corroborated my suspicions about Dr. Grog.

At eight
A.M
. the phone rang, waking me from the sleep of the late-rising writer. "This is Dr. Mader" said a flat, matter-of-fact voice. "We got Darwin's blood work back. We have good news and we have bad news. I'll give you the bad news first. Darwin has the feline leukemia virus."

My mind ceased to think. I sat there on the side of the bed and my eyes cast about aimlessly, noticing the wrinkles and folds in the bedspread, the bumps on the stucco wall. A sensation similar to chills spread over my shoulders, bringing back that summer night so many years before when I had just come home from visiting a friend. As I parked the car, my mother ran from the house to greet me with a look I had never seen before. "Something terrible's happened," she said with a strange, hoarse severity in her voice. "There's been an accident. Your grandfather was killed. Your grandmother is critical..."

That same feeling of horror and shock swept over me as I gazed blindly at the walls, my mind frozen in its frame, suspended in the nothingness of loss. All the neurons, all the synapses, all the enzymes and ions and other chemicals of the brain devoted to the memories and thoughts of Darwin would soon have no further use. At that existential instant I somehow knew that Darwin would not have much time but that it was going to be intense time. It was going to burn.

The doctor continued to talk, his words bleeding together in a background mumble while my self blundered aimlessly this way and that. Then the words began to break free of the mumble and enter my mind.

"...the good news is that we don't know how fast the disease will move. In fact, some cats seem to live with the virus and never come down with symptoms. With others it goes so slowly that you can enjoy them for months, even years. We have to make a decision, though."

I tried to ask what sort of decision, but tears welled up and my throat wouldn't work. I paused, forced composure on myself, and managed a steady, low voice.