Another Insane Devotion (6 page)

Earlier in the day, she'd sent me an e-mail that ended with a question about the financial tidal wave that had begun sweeping the world a few weeks before, snatching up trillions of dollars in its rush. She wanted to know if we were going to lose our retirement savings. “Possibly yes,” I wrote back now. “I'll tell you more yesterday. Bruno told me that Biscuit's been gone for 2 days, and I'm sick with worry. I'm waiting to hear more from him—Sherri's been helping him look for her—but I may fly up there this weekend to see if I have better luck.” I was already thinking of going up to New York to look for Biscuit myself.

It's only on rereading this message that I realize I typed “yesterday” when I meant “tomorrow.”

A while after we had Biscuit spayed, I became conscious of a high-pitched whine that seemed to be coming from just outside my office. I thought it might be somebody doing construction
down the block or a disturbance in the phone lines. But I couldn't figure out what kind of power tool would make a sound like that, steadily, for hours on end, and when I called the phone company, I was assured that their lines had never been known to whine. F. came into the room, listened quizzically in that way she has, standing very still with her small, dear head cocked to one side, and then said she thought the sound was coming from inside the house. “You're crazy,” I told her. Then I put my ear against the wall. I recoiled as if it were on fire. Up close, the sound was enveloping. It wasn't a whine; it was a drone, shrill enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end and at the same time inward, meditative, monastic.

The wall was infested with bees. F. worried about being stung, but I thought it more likely we'd be driven mad, or I would be; I was the one who worked in that room. Now that I knew what was making it, the hum, which before had been merely puzzling, gave me the creeps. I asked the landlord for advice on driving out an infestation of bees. “Drive them out? Jesus, you don't ‘drive them out.'” He was large and red faced, and his politics were to the right of the emperor Nero's, but I respected his industry and lack of bullshit, and I think it amused him to see somebody who worked with his mind proposing to drive out vermin. He came over, drilled a hole in the Sheetrock, sprayed in some industrial-grade bug killer, then capped the hole with a butterfly screw. We waited for the humming to stop. It didn't. Outside the window I saw a dark plume of bees issue from the side of the house like smoke and hang in the air, but it was just a detachment from the main colony. We pulled out the screw and quickly jammed the bug spray can's
nozzle into the hole before bees could pour out of it and added a few more lethal squirts. This time, the humming seemed to get louder. It sounded angry. I told my wife, “We'd better not go outside.” Biscuit had jumped up on a chair and was staring with interest at the screw in the wall. F. picked her up. “And keep the cats in.”

The killing took almost three days. When it became clear that spraying inside the house was only displacing small numbers of insects, the landlord sent over some workmen to drill holes in the outer wall, especially in the insulation around the chimney. Then they tore off a soffit and sprayed there. Even with the windows shut, the house stank. We worried about our central nervous systems, and about the cats', which were more sensitive. Every time Biscuit raced across the floor for no reason or rolled onto her side and tried to disembowel a table leg with her hind feet, we thought the worst. The humming mounted; the bees stormed out in greater numbers, like cavalry making sorties from a besieged fortress. The workmen sweltered beneath the July sun in padded jackets and canvas gloves. The cats clamored to go out. At some point the extermination began to take effect. Soon there were no bees by the back door. Then, in a coordinated assault, the landlord drilled a second hole in the office wall, and the two of us sprayed in more bug killer in unison. Along with the cans of Bee Gone, he'd brought along a sprayer, the kind with a pump that you see in old cartoons, with no markings on it, but he didn't use that yet.

The buzzing surged, and for a moment it was as if we were inside a huge electrical transformer. A curtain of insects blackened the air from above the window almost to the ground. The
landlord threw the window open and worked the pump of his archaic sprayer. The curtain fell. It fell all at once, as if cut loose from an invisible rod, with a soft patter. Afterward the yard was crunchy with tiny, desiccated corpses. I worried that Biscuit would eat them and be poisoned, but she steered clear of them. She may have been repelled by the stench of whatever it was that had come out of that unmarked canister or simply been uninterested in something that was already dead. Unlike dogs, cats have no taste for carrion.

 

I have stated my problem with the term “forbidden fruit”—I mean its association with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, which probably wasn't an apple at all. Adam and Eve may have eaten that fruit in spite of God's injunction, but they didn't eat
because
of it. The true forbidden fruit may be the pears Augustine writes about in the
Confessions.
He was sixteen. They grew on a tree close to his family's vineyard in Thagaste, and neither their color nor their flavor was special:

Augustine, by the way, believed that before the Fall, sex was a purely voluntary act and not the tortured impulse it has been
ever since. Adam willed his erections the way somebody wills a handshake. When he did, however, he was probably being more than just friendly.

This is a Gnostic legend from the early Christian era. Because God created Adam and Eve as vegetarians (“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food”), they really had no need of the animals over which they had been given dominion, not even the beasts of burden, for they could get all the food they wanted without plowing, and they had no possessions that had to be carried. Nor did the animals need people, and so in those first days they kept mostly to themselves. The only exceptions were the dog and the cat. The dog already liked humans—Adam, especially, who threw him sticks—and the cat was curious about them. They were so outlandish. Of all the creatures in the Garden, they alone had no fur and walked upright on their hind legs, and whenever they saw the cat, they made a sound that in time he understood was meant to make him come to them. Sometimes he did.

And so on the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the dog and the cat were nearby. When Adam took a bite of the fruit Eve had given him, the dog came closer, wagging his tail and grinning as if to ask, “Maybe something for me?” And Adam tore off some of the fruit and gave it to him. It was the first time a human had fed an animal by hand or, indeed, fed one at all. Now the cat came up to them. He
did it only out of curiosity, but the woman thought he was hungry, so she took a piece of the fruit, a small piece because it was so sweet and so nice and already she was inflamed by a feeling no one had ever felt before—greed—and held it out in her hand as the man had done with the dog. The cat approached and sniffed the fruit, his tail flicking, but he wouldn't eat it. No one thought to lay the fruit on the ground—where the cat still might not have eaten it—and in the next moment the woman gave in to her greed and ate the fruit herself, sucking the pulp from her fingers and sighing because she wished there were more. The cat watched her.

Then God came, and they knew what they had done. He sentenced the people to unceasing toil and the pangs of childbirth and, saving the worst for last, death. Then he looked at the dog and the cat. What was he going to do with them? The dog, sensing trouble, hung his head and began to whimper. The cat looked up at God. I don't know if it was the dog's crying or the cat's unblinking gaze that softened him. “Well, I only warned those two,” God said to himself. “Those
people
.” It was the first time that anyone had ever spoken in a voice filled with disgust. He looked at the animals. “How were these ones supposed to know? The poor, dumb creatures.” And so they were spared everything except death. That was nonnegotiable.

But from then on, the Lord added, the animals' fate would be tied up with that of the humans, for if they hadn't taken part in the humans' sin, they had still been its witnesses. He asked them what they wanted to do. The dog said, “Let me go with the people, even out of Paradise, and wander with them over the earth. I'll help them get their food, and I'll sleep with them
by their fires, and when the woman has babies, I'll stand guard over them, for they are weak creatures.” And God said, “Good dog! Go with my blessing.”

But the cat didn't want to go with the people. He liked them well enough, but it was the Garden he was attached to, its high, soft grasses, its encyclopedia of smells. “Let me stay in this place and be its familiar spirit until you see fit to let the man and the woman back in. When you do, I'll be there to welcome them.” And God said, “Good cat! Abide here with my blessing.”

This is why dogs stay close to people and travel at their side, following the example of their first ancestor. And this is why cats stay in the house, or nearby, in emulation of the one cat who dwells in Paradise, waiting for the people to return. On that day, he will greet the man and the woman at the gate and braid himself about their ankles, gazing up at them and purring. In the meantime, he keeps the mice down.

E
ARLY ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 30, UNABLE TO sleep, I began researching airfares to New York. I had classes till Thursday, so I couldn't leave before October 2, and of course flying on that short notice would cost more than I could afford. Really, anything would. Every month my salary from the university was instantly siphoned off by two rents and two sets of utility bills, along with payments to the banks I was into for some $60,000. When I wasn't teaching, I cowered inside the house, afraid the last bills would fly from my pockets the moment I stepped outside. But what was I supposed to do? I thought of our poor Gattino, who'd vanished from the yard the year before and had probably died alone, thousands of miles from where he'd been born. I thought of Biscuit wandering through the lank fall undergrowth, hungry and dazed. I thought of college kids racing down the back roads in fast cars bought for them by enabling parents. I thought of coyotes. I don't have any special powers where cats are concerned—
where anything is concerned. But at least Biscuit usually came when I called her. Maybe she'd come for Sherri; she liked Sherri, or she liked the food Sherri poured into her dish almost as dependably as F. and I did, and I'm sure more dependably than Bruno, who couldn't be trusted to return a phone call and, if you want to know the truth, seemed a little afraid of cats. And so I told myself that Biscuit would come when she heard Sherri's voice. That is,
if
she heard it. She might not be able to.

After going through a bunch of travel websites, I opted for the discount airline that flew out of Myrtle Beach, an hour and a half away. A round-trip flight to La Guardia would cost me $302.50 plus $63 in fees. It was still too much. I let the cursor hover over the “Buy Now” button; I may have clicked on it a couple times and then canceled. I cursed Bruno and F. and even Biscuit and then prayed that God or whatever not take those curses seriously—I was just joking. Finally, I sent Bruno an e-mail telling him I'd be coming up on October 2 to look for Biscuit unless he or Sherri found her first. He should let me know by the end of the day. I hoped it didn't read like an ultimatum, but of course that's what it was.