A Cat Named Darwin (9 page)

"A decision? What kind of decision?"

"Do you want to go ahead with the teeth, or put him down?" said Mader's flat, dispassionate voice.

"Put him
downir
I was incredulous.

"Yes—many people decide to do that when FeLV is diagnosed."

"But...
Why?
Don't a lot of cats survive it? Why give up without seeing what happens?"

"Some owners would rather end it now on a positive note and save their pets from illness."

I had to decide, and I had to decide now ... but we were talking about Darwin's
life.
At times like this, when profound denials collide like tectonic plates deep in the guts, my mind sometimes separates into pure reason and pure hysteria. The rational self rises into the air and peers down with detached fascination as my emotions writhe on the hook of life.

"Why spend $160 we can't afford to clean the teeth of a dying cat?" said my rational side. These were quicksilver thoughts, almost instantaneous, more feeling than conscious, but there was no denying the calculations. I knew from the veterinary book that roughly 70 percent of infected cats die in a relatively short time after being diagnosed with the feline leukemia virus, and seven in ten was poor odds for investing money on clean teeth.

Hope, however, was as tough and strong as it was illogical. Odds are a measure of group history and could not reveal the course of Darwin's individual fate. Viewed with hope, 30 percent of FeLV positive cats seemed to tolerate the microbe—and three chances in ten became fabulous odds. My mouth opened, and off in the distance I heard my voice say, "Yes ... Yes—let's go ahead with the cleaning."

T
HE HOSPITAL
called around three o'clock, and I brought Darwin home with clean teeth and a hangover. Still affected by the anesthetic, he wobbled about when I lifted him from his transport box and placed him on the floor, then sat down to get his bearings, while I stood, looking down at him.
He would not always be there.
My rational mind grasped the notion without blinking, but only now were my deeper feelings beginning to comprehend. I reached down, picked Darwin up, clutched him to my chest, pressed my cheek to the side of his head, closed my eyes, and stood there rocking back and forth while his body warmth flowed into me.

A collage of images passed before my eyes, creatures I had killed as a young hunter and later as a scientist. A mallard drake: I spread his limp wings to admire the shimmering blues and greens of his speculum, stroked the iridescent green of his limp neck, looked into the clear blankness of eyes whose soul I had just snuffed out. A laboratory rat sacrificed on the altar of teaching, its skull bashed against the sink; I cut through the stomach skin to extract its liver, noting the elegant packing of stomach, spleen, kidney, intestines, feeling the wet warmth. A pheasant, a sunfish, a jackrabbit, a gopher snake—on and on in a progression of death.

I thought of how the intellect had reduced these creatures to nothing more than teaching devices, divine perhaps, sublime in form and function, inspired in the aesthetics of color, texture, shape, miraculous in the chemistry and physiology of living substance, but devices nonetheless. Some sort of denial had, apparently, prevented the emotions of empathy and compassion from burning through. I recalled how it felt to regard these lifeless remains with the cold blue flame of intellectual curiosity, and I shuddered.

Again I pressed Darwin's furry softness against my skin, clutching this warm, supple miracle of existence, and rocked back and forth in a rhythm of gratitude and grief for whatever time we might have left.

As for Darwin himself, after a few minutes of my maudlin reveries he began to struggle and squirm, wanting only to be set down. He doddered around from the fading spell of anesthesia, found a private place beneath the couch, curled up, and went to sleep. A few hours later he was meowing loudly at the door, demanding unsuccessfully to go outside. So far as he was concerned, it was back to the business of life with its ceaseless vigilance and metronomic border patrols.

***

For me, however, this was not the Darwin I had taken to the vet. This was the Darwin that medical opinion said was dying; I could no longer gaze upon him in innocence, but found myself looking for indications that the dreadful progression had begun. The virus had infected my mind just as surely as it had infected Darwin's body. Medical knowledge does that. It sets the mind against itself in a self-generating cycle of paranoia, each fear fueling the next. It takes bliss and makes despair. I had assumed we had all the time in the world, years and years, before death parted our ways, and to realize we had little time left is the kind of revelation that seeps slowly into the molecules and neurons of the brain. It made a miser of me. It transformed time into a necklace of precious minutes, hours, days, and I was going to hoard them like diamonds.

But above all, this awareness of Darwin's doom started a war of mental attrition that would carry on to the end. On one side was the cold blue reason that measures reality and calculates odds, that weighs value and worth—the computer mind that had voted to end Darwin's life instead of cleaning his teeth. On the other side was the mind of hope, which twists, bends, deletes, and otherwise alters reality to contrive happy endings and is by its very nature incompatible with truth.

***

The days passed with no signs of disease, and hope grew stronger. I felt more and more relieved because we had, apparently, ducked the executioner's ax. We had beaten the 70 percent odds that favored the progression of the virus. The calculating mind pointed out that it was too soon to draw such conclusions, that the game was not over, but hope would have none of it and flooded my spirits with the prospect of Darwin's recovery.

And so, driven by love and gratitude for the good fortune of having Darwin in my home, I observed him with the magnified resolution of a microscope. Each motion, each gesture, each step, each grooming lick, for anxiety, it seems, raises awareness, sharpens the eyes, nose, and ears, sensitizes the tactile skin. I noticed things that scientific-intellectual curiosity overlooked completely, and I began to see how much larger and more complex Darwin's mind was than I had ever suspected.

We evolved a new routine in which Darwin spent the nights indoors. In fact, he had a curfew: no dinner until the door had closed behind him. In the morning, following breakfast, he would walk over and rub against my legs, looking up to catch my eye. When our eyes locked, he would turn and trot purposefully toward the door with his ears swiveled back to hear if I was following. Then he would stop and stare at the door in an unmistakable gesture that he wanted out. If I ignored him, an expanding yowl rose into the air like escaping steam and continued, rising and falling, until I obeyed his command.

His activity pattern, on the other hand, was continuously changing. Most creatures fall, like humans, into variations of the morning and evening commute. When I was a boy, the big event of dusk was watching the quail fly to roost in the cypress and the eucalyptus trees. The event of the dawn, at least in the spring, was the red-shafted flicker hammering his challenge to the world on our rain gutters, transforming the house into a snare drum. You could set your clocks by these events; they illustrate the circadian rhythms in which most living things play out their lives.

Darwin, though not exempt from daily rhythms, did not express such tightly wound patterns. This was most evident in his daily patrols, which I could never predict. He never walked his paths at the same time or on consecutive days. So with his sleeping places. Every week or so, he would choose a new place to bed down. Sometimes he would prowl the flat off and on during the entire night, pleading to go outside. The next night he would sink into a comatose sleep and would not beg to go outdoors until I arose the next morning.

With observations like these I reverted to the thinking of biology and contemplated the causes that lie beneath personal experience—causes beneath conscious control—that make us what we are. Because I had seen a similar randomness in the activities of all the cats I had watched from my second-floor vantage point, I concluded that it was probably the innate trait of a predator, an adaptation to keep the prey guessing, unable to predict where the next attack will occur. Darwin made evolutionary sense.

I also began to recognize the signature of neoteny on Darwin's habits. Neoteny denotes the retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, and whereas many of us have been accused of this condition in our personal behavior, as a species we humans are said to be neotenic apes because in our adult form we exhibit physical traits found in juvenile apes. A case in point is the thinness of the human skull and its delicate construction, which resembles that of a young chimpanzee. In contrast to this stand the massive cranial ridges and crests and thick plates of the adult ape.

Neoteny also applies to behavior and implies a genetic foundation. As Darwin and I became more intimate, I began to recognize that much of his behavior was that of a kitten. When his back was stroked he would reach out and knead the rug with his toes and claws, just as a kitten kneads its mother's breast when nursing. In fact, many of the postures and gestures I found so appealing were the behavior of a kitten manipulating its mother. After a while I saw these signs everywhere, in the way he begged for food, trying to lock eyes and penetrate my soul, in the way he rubbed against my legs when wanting something, in the mewling and crying that sounded so similar to that of the human infant.

A wild cat, on the other hand, would behave very differently. Had Darwin been born of wild parents, the ancestral
Felis sylvestris,
he would have become much more skittish and high-strung. His spirit would stand aloof, unto itself, there would be no begging for favors and no asking for quarter, and when provoked he would lash out ferociously in self-defense. In other words, he would have grown up to become a true adult. He would have acquired the toughness and aggressiveness to survive on his own, keep a territory, win access to females in heat, and he would be very difficult, if not impossible, to control. By the genetics of a wild nature, he would be ill suited for human companionship, even dangerous.

For a pet, the average person needs an animal that remains a child. Children, raised with traditional discipline, can be made to submit—humor me on this—forced to take direction and accept training, molded to the will of the adult. Is that not the essence of rearing children, to produce a fine, god-fearing adult with good values and good character, in the parent's image? So nature gives us a window of opportunity to shape and mold, before the child becomes a large, hairy adult with nose rings, full-body tattoos, and the defiance, strength, and obstinacy to resist domination. Oh, the neoteny of it all. Just as wild kittens grow up to become wild cats, so children grow up to become human beings. Perhaps the fundamental goal of all domestication is to draw this genetic compliance of childhood forward and fix it in the adult animal, creating a creature that we can bend to our will and our emotional needs.

***

One day I walked into the living room and saw Darwin sitting on the floor with his back toward me, a furry little pear of a figure, with ears laid back to monitor my movement and this fuzzy, animated snake of a tail protruding from his rump and twitching each time I said "Darwin." Affection and sadness mixed with gratitude for his presence, and without warning, "Darwin ... Little Gumbie" came from my mouth. When his tail twitched again, out came "Little Bumbie Buddy," followed by "Muffin Buffin."

Muffin Buffin? I had always regarded little old ladies who baby-babbled at their Poopy-Doo Poodles and Itty Bitty Kitties through a youthful lens of pity and condescension, incapable of grasping how it would feel to join their company. Now that I had, it bothered me not one whit. All conceit had been stripped away, and I leaned into Darwin's affection the way a cat leans into a stroke. Reduced to little more than my most private intimacy, I realized with something akin to shock that my spirit was neither different from nor superior to the spirit of my small companion. Our souls stood together in absolute equality. Equality implies identity. A feeling of camaraderie arose from the deep regions of my brain and spread over my skin like a blush.

It triggered a creativity that would best be mentioned with a blush. "Teapot," "Teacup," "Darwin Rex," "Little Furball," "Pumpkin"—over the following weeks the variations came in infinite profusion, and Darwin's tail kept twitching, probably more from irritation than from any recognition of his name.

And what followed from intimacy? One night a lady of my friendly acquaintance dropped by, and, having enjoyed a fine meal, we turned to intimate talk and good wine. The candles flickering with warmth, we sipped and gazed with anticipation into each other's eyes. Suddenly, with shattering glasses and falling bottles, Darwin exploded onto the table, squarely between us. He sat down, folded his tail around his forepaws, calmly placed first the right then the left on top of it, and stared inscrutably with those orange stiletto eyes.

Jealousy followed from intimacy. Did Darwin want exclusive rights to my innermost privacy? That was difficult to know, but I could not deny the possibility. Some odd incidents over the past few weeks then began to make sense, and I understood why he had been jumping onto the leather armchair, the forbidden land, when he knew full well that a stream of water would soon shoot from the heavens and nail him. Invariably he challenged me while I talked on the telephone, and I had assumed he was calculating that I could not drop the receiver and reach the spray bottle in time to enforce the law. I had also assumed that he did this for the sheer pleasure of getting his way and defying my authority. Now I realized that it was a matter of feeling neglected, hence a matter of jealousy, for the telephone was consuming my attention and shutting him out.

***

With weeks having passed and Darwin still showing no signs of illness, hope was strutting its stuff and life had pretty much returned to normal. Therefore he could use some training, I decided. It seemed only natural to teach him some culture, some manners, demand a little self-restraint.