Giving Up (12 page)

feel
it. What I felt was that after a shitty day, which was part of a series of shitty days making up a parade of shitty months (maybe even
years
), when I could've really used some sort of sign that things were going to get better and that life wasn't going to turn out to be a random series of disappointments, was the precise moment that capital-L Life decided to send me a sign. A scary one. I started going at the cat pretty hard. Up until that point I'd been trying to
reason
with her – mind you I was reasoning with a broom, but still I was trying more to coax her out rather than to force her. All of that changed. I could feel myself giving in, or letting go. I was giving in to the disgust I felt for the cat. A powerful revulsion had been rising within me the moment I set eyes on the thing but I'd been fighting to keep it down. I knew that if I gave in to this feeling I would go berserk and trash my apartment, or something even worse. Once I let go of my fear over what I might do to my apartment, or myself, or the cat, then it was easy, a relief even, to give in to the overpowering disgust that was coursing through my veins. If you've ever seen a child who's been bullied finally snap and turn on her tormenters then you'll have a pretty good idea of what I looked like – screaming over and over again, something along the lines of ‘Get out! Get the fuck out! Get out!' while I chopped and sliced with the broom in a total frenzy. I'm only exaggerating slightly when I say that, for a moment, I lost my mind. But it worked. The cat crawled out from under the couch. She was making that sucking noise again, except now it was louder and she was wheezing as well, or at least I think that's what it was, since it was faint and disembodied, as if the wheezing was coming from another cat hiding in my bedroom (and even though I knew that this was ridiculous I definitely considered it for a second, which should give you some idea of how messed up my thinking was by that point). I was standing between her and the kitchen. I smacked the broom down in front of her a few times and when she froze I swung as hard as I could. She literally flew through the air. This took me a bit by surprise, even though what happened was more or less what I'd intended (except it's not accurate to say that I
intended
anything at all – I just swept the cat towards the kitchen with everything I had, and I don't remember thinking of what the result would be). I watched with a sort of creeping awareness as the cat sailed through the air and slammed into the kitchen table. It had splayed out while it was flying through the air, so it hit the table and then crumpled to the floor. I thought of a Frisbee, when it wobbles through the air before bouncing off a tree and spinning into the ground. The cat smacked into the table leg and I remember thinking to myself, ‘You killed her.' I'd been lying to myself about why the cat was acting so weird, and what it was that was hanging from its mouth. I'd been so freaked out and scared that it wasn't until I watched the cat spasm in pain when it struck the table leg that I became aware of what I'd actually known since it crawled under the couch. And it wasn't until I said to myself, ‘You killed her,' that I knew that I knew. The cat was obviously severely injured, most likely because it'd been hit by a car. I stood there with the broom in my hands. She scrambled to her feet and then ran out the kitchen door as fast as her little broken body could move. I ran to the door but she was already down the stairs, though I seriously doubt that I would've gone after her, since, now that I knew the shiny mass dangling from her mouth wasn't a little dead mouse but most likely the cat's brains or guts, and that the reason she had such a weird shape to her head was that her skull had been crushed, I was even more horrified, and just the thought of what I might see if I got close enough to pick the thing up actually made me nauseous. As I was standing there at the kitchen door the whole incident started flashing through my mind. Now that I knew the cat was seriously injured it seemed almost insane that I could've mistaken the stuff pouring out of its mouth for a dead mouse. I flicked the kitchen light on and at the spot by the table where she had landed there was a splatter of blood that trailed to the kitchen door, and when I went back to the TV room and turned on the lights I saw a trail of blood from the hallway that led to the couch where it turned into a smear (which must have been where I hit her with the broom). I followed the blood down the hall and, while I'd been right – James
had
left the window open – I saw that the screen had been shut, and the cat had torn through it. She had been hit by a car and then ran to the first open window she could find, and even when the screen was closed, she had torn though it. She had been looking for somewhere safe where she could hide and instead she was beat up by a crazy woman with a broom. The poor little thing was terrified and no doubt in a lot of pain and I had turned it back out into the street. ‘And the worst thing is,' I thought, ‘I knew what I was doing the entire time.'

JAMES AND MARY

The only light in the apartment is the bluish illumination coming from the computer screen at the end of the hall.
He doesn't turn the lights on because he doesn't want Mary to know that he's home, at least not until he has had time to
compose himself
, but after taking off his shoes he ends up tripping over the broom. The broom is totally unexpected and completely invisible to him, something about its place in the hallway is incongruous and even disturbing. Still, his reaction as it clatters to the floor is a bit over the top, as if he's been surprised by something much more perilous. ‘Motherfuck!' he says. ‘Jesus motherfucking Christ on the fucking cross. I'm going to have a fucking aneurysm. What is this?' he picks up the broom. ‘A fucking broom?' Mary, sitting at the computer, waits for his little fit to pass. As it happens, by not saying anything to him she actually hastens the process. He eventually calms down, takes a seat on the couch, places the broom across his lap, and asks in his best imitation of a casual tone whether she was doing some light cleaning while he was out. But she doesn't respond and he wonders if maybe she's looking at something disturbing or reading an email with some bad news about a close friend or family member, her parents even. A look at the screen confirms that she's just doing what she usually does when she's bored or tired, which is look at her friends' profiles on Facebook. She asks him if he had a nice break and he says that he did and that he's feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work. Sometimes that's all he needs, just to get away for a bit and clear his head, because when he's down there for too long it's like he gets too close to what he's working on and he can't see it anymore, like his face is pressed up to the TV screen, or to the pages of a book, so just by getting out and seeing other people he is able to get a little distance and put ‘the work' back in the right perspective. She wants to know if other people were out walking around at midnight on a Tuesday. She wonders why it takes two hours to get some distance and regain his perspective. When he had said ‘seeing other people,' he explains, it didn't mean that he'd been walking around and staring at strangers, it was a figure of speech, and he doesn't normally go for two-hour walks, but it's a nice night and he was feeling cramped down there in the basement so he ended up staying out longer than usual. ‘Well,' she says, ‘a cat came into the apartment while you were gone.' He asks her what she means when she says that a cat came into the apartment. The look that she gives him before he's even done asking this question shows that while this is exactly what she's been expecting him to ask, she is still disappointed to hear him say it, since she thinks that this sort of thing is beneath him. Why, she wonders, does he pretend that he doesn't understand what she meant when she said that a cat came into the apartment, when he actually knows exactly what she is talking about? Why does he act like he's not intensely aware of everything that's going on around him when she knows for a fact that he is extremely sensitive and notices the most insignificant details and is basically the most perceptive person she's ever met? What is the point of making her explain herself when he already knows what she is going to say? But he insists that he honestly doesn't know what she's talking about, and even if he is as perceptive as she says, which he doesn't think is the case, then all this means is that he'd noticed she is obviously upset about something (a complete stranger would've picked up on it), and that when she said that a cat came into the apartment he could tell she was holding something back, something much worse than a cat coming into the apartment. There's literally no way he could know what she had meant because no matter how observant he might be or how well they know each other after all these years, he isn't Sherlock fucking Holmes, not even close, so at the end of the day the only way he could know was if she told him, which she hadn't, not yet. She gives him the same look as before and says that he's still pretending to misunderstand her, which at this point is just kind of mean. She knows that it is impossible for him to know
exactly
what happened. But he knew that
something
had happened, so why did she feel like if she hadn't said anything that he would've never asked her what was wrong? Why does he make her feel like he is doing her a favour by listening to her? And why does he ask her what she means when she tells him that a cat came into the apartment, when he should really be asking her if she was all right? Had Mary chased it out, or had she run into their bedroom and waited for it to leave on its own? This is, of course, what he'd meant by his question, he explains. It's a figure of speech. ‘Everything that comes out of your mouth is a figure of speech,' she says. It seems to him more than a little ironic that at the same time as she's accusing him of playing dumb this is more or less exactly what she's doing. ‘Anyway,' he says, ‘I'm sorry about the way I phrased my question. What I meant to say was how did the cat get in, and were you able to chase it out, and, if not, where is it now?' ‘Well,' she says, ‘he came in through the front window.' ‘How?' he wonders. ‘Wasn't the screen closed?' ‘It was, but she pushed through it.' Now it is his turn to get frustrated. Something had obviously happened while he'd been on his break and he doesn't understand why she won't just tell him. In response to this little outburst she stands up and turns on the lights so he can see the blood that is smeared all over the floor. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,' he says. ‘What the hell happened in here?' She starts to explain what had happened and he tries to listen to her patiently but she is very upset, the sight of the blood is disturbing and she keeps checking behind her as if she's worried the cat is going to come back somehow, and instead of just starting her story at the moment the cat came through the window, she begins at the moment he left for his break, so he has to listen as she describes how she wasted two hours fucking around on Facebook. She has a hard time getting her story out because she keeps on interrupting herself in order to insert completely extraneous details that mean absolutely nothing to him, but that are clearly very significant to her. It never occurs to her that what she is saying is irrelevant and even distracting because for her these details are crucial to understanding what happened. If she had just said, ‘A cat broke through the screen in the front window and, before I realized that what I thought was a mouse hanging out of her mouth was probably blood and maybe even its brains, I had already chased her out the kitchen door with the broom,' then he wouldn't have been able to appreciate her experience of the cat incident. He understands that the experience isn't confined to the time the cat was actually in the apartment, that it extends to what was going on before, and what came afterwards, but all he wants to hear about right now is the cat. ‘I can tell you're upset, and I know it must've been crazy to turn around and see something like that in the apartment,' he says, after he's interrupted her in the midst of describing her best friend's Facebook photos, ‘and I don't want you to think that I'm cutting you off. I want to hear everything. But it's just that you are so clearly shaken up, and there's blood all over the place. I need to know what happened. Can we please just skip to the part about the cat, and then you can go back and fill everything else in?' She's irritated and embarrassed by his interruption. He said that she was upset, but what he means is that she is
losing control
. She's rambling. She's hysterical. She can't see that what is important right now is to tell him about the cat incident so he can make a calm, rational decision about what they should do next. Her experience of the cat incident – how she felt and what she was thinking at the time – is not important. At least not now. Not yet. It is of secondary importance. But since she is so upset she is confusing these secondary issues with the primary ones, which were, in order of importance – did something happen to her? to the apartment? and, finally, to the cat? Once the primary issues were out of the way, he meant to say, they could focus on the lesser issues (i.e. her experience of the cat incident). And she's embarrassed because she suspects that he's right, that she should just get to the point, and that including all the extraneous detail about wasting her night on Facebook is betraying all sorts of things that really have nothing to do with the cat incident. So she pauses for a second, and then starts again at the moment that she saw the cat in the hallway. But now she's having a hard time getting through her story because James keeps interrupting her with questions that seem to her to be completely beside the point. He wants to know the colour of the cat and its size, whether it hissed at her or if the hair on its back was sticking up. This is extremely irritating, and with each interruption she tells him that if he will just let her finish then he can ask her anything afterwards, but he explains that he can't help himself. He starts asking the question before he can remember that she had already asked him to ‘save his questions to the end.' ‘Besides,' he continues, ‘they just occur to me, and if I didn't ask then I'd probably forget what they were.' She suggests that if he forgets what they were then they probably weren't worth asking in the first place. He replies that he didn't think it works that way. ‘Just because a question isn't asked, doesn't mean it shouldn't be answered,' he says. And because she finds this sort of sententious horseshit even more irritating than having to answer his irritating questions, she tries to keep her temper in check and refrain from arguing the point any further, and instead just answers with as few words as possible. She had heard the cat before she saw it but she didn't know what it was at first. She noticed the thing hanging from its mouth right away. She had thought it was a mouse, but knew that it wasn't, if that makes any sense. It hit the kitchen table with its side, not its head. ‘It must've only been grazed if it still had the strength to tear through the screen,' he says. She isn't stupid. She knows what he is implying – that maybe the cat wasn't seriously injured when it came into the apartment and that she'd only messed it up more with the broom. ‘I can't believe you're doing this,' she says. ‘The
whole point
to my story was that I should've noticed that the cat was all messed up the moment I saw it, but since I was still in a fucking Facebook trance I didn't realize what I was seeing.' She went on to say that he habitually misses the point of everything she tries to tell him, and on top of that he typically doubts her version of events. He always suspects that she is keeping something from him, or even more often that she simply doesn't know what the fuck is going on. ‘You must have a pretty low opinion of me,' she says, ‘if you think that I'm that stupid or delusional.' He says that she's exaggerating when she says that he
always
doubts what she tells him, and it isn't true that he thinks she is stupid or delusional, but under the circumstances it would've been perfectly understandable if she didn't remember things exactly the way they happened. ‘With all the lights off it's pretty dark in here,' he says, ‘especially if you've been staring at a computer screen. Your vision is going to be pretty fucked,' he lowers his voice, ‘and you may not realize it but I don't think I've ever seen you this worked up before.' He realizes that he is standing up while she is still sitting at the computer desk, so he's literally talking down to her. He takes a seat on the couch. ‘I'm not saying you're delusional, but you even said that you were freaked out and weren't really thinking straight. I'm just trying to think things through and consider all the possibilities.' He pauses, and then they both stand and walk slowly to the kitchen door. She stays inside while he goes onto the patio and checks out the alley. ‘Nothing,' he says, and comes back inside. ‘Listen,' she says, ‘you're not making sense. There's no way a healthy cat tore through our screen and injured itself in the process. And that doesn't matter anyway because I
did
see it, I just didn't know what I was looking at until it was too late.' She sits at the kitchen table and starts reciting the events of the cat incident as though she is working out a difficult problem in front of an audience – an audience that she's not really aware of anymore because she's so involved in what she's trying to figure out, but then she loses her focus and can feel herself being watched and falters and gives up. ‘This is ridiculous,' she says, ‘I don't even know why I'm even considering this for a second. I know what I saw. I know what happened. I was there. And I don't know why this is so important to you anyway. Why does it matter that it got hit by a car or tore itself open on our screen? Which, by the way, doesn't even seem possible – to cut itself up on a screen so badly that it pours blood all over the floor? But who cares? What does it matter what caused it to bleed all over the place?' She keeps looking out the window, and so does James, who is leaning against the door and basically staring outside while Mary asks him these questions in a genuinely bewildered tone of voice. ‘Well,' he says, ‘I guess if he just cut himself on our screen then he probably isn't seriously injured. But if he got hit by a car, that would probably mean that he's really fucked up.' She seems to consider one last time whether there might be something to what he is saying and then answers, ‘No, there was definitely something wrong with it. Its head was a weird shape and its fucking brain was coming out of its mouth.' He turns off the outdoor light but continues to stare out the window. ‘It
is
possible he's down in the alley,' he says. ‘I should maybe go check.' This is unquestionably the right thing to do, but she almost tells him not to go. It probably
is
out there, curled up under the patio, trying to breathe, maybe drowning in its own blood, but if James finds it what is he going to do? Bring it inside? Take it to a vet? Save its life? ‘What's the point?' she thinks, but immediately regrets it and feels ashamed because she knows that finding the cat is the right thing to do. ‘James always does the right thing,' she says to herself. ‘That's his thing. More than anything else, he's obsessed with doing the right thing,' she thinks. Or maybe it isn't that he always does the right thing, but that he never willingly does the wrong thing. If he suspects there is even a slight chance of doing the wrong thing then he can't go through with it. So since it's a compulsive form of behaviour, and he's helpless to do anything other than the right thing, it's pretty hard to give him full credit for it. If anything, it's a deficiency. Like the time they found a wallet on the beach and it felt like it would've been fun to take the cash since they were still young and broke, but not only would he have nothing to do with her suggestion, he wouldn't simply leave it where it was so that its owner, once he realized he'd lost it, could return to retrieve it, or, what was more likely, so that someone else less obsessed with doing the right thing could find it and steal it. Instead he literally combed the beach in search of the owner. They could never just drive by a car if it looked like it was stranded on the highway. He always pulled over to