The Best American Essays 2015 (26 page)

When I left for a long weekend for a wedding in another state, my friend Gabe explained to me that the cat clearly belonged to me now. I protested. This was a strictly temporary situation until I could locate a new home for the cat, I explained. I was not going to turn into some Cat Guy.

“How would you feel,” he asked me, “if you were to get home from this weekend and that cat was gone?”

I moaned and writhed in the passenger seat.

“You're Cat Guy,” he said in disgust.

It's amusing now to remember the strict limits I'd originally intended to place on the cat. One of the boundaries I meant to set was that the cat would not be allowed upstairs, where I slept. That edict was short-lived. It was not long before I became wounded when the cat declined to sleep with me.

“You're in
love
with that cat!” my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat. People would comment on it. My friend Ken described her as “a supermodel cat,” with green eyes dramatically outlined in what he called “cat mascara” and bright pink “nose leather.” Her fur, even at age nineteen, was rich and soft and pleasant to touch.

Biologists call cats “exploitive captives,” an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on, of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when I woke up—by meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging me insistently with her face, or placing a single claw on my lip. She refused to drink water from a bowl, coveting what she believed was the superior-quality water I drank from a glass. I attempted to demonstrate to the cat that the water we drank was the very same water by pouring it from my glass into her bowl right in front of her, but she was utterly unmoved, like a birther being shown Obama's long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. In the end I gave in and began serving her water in a glass tumbler, which she had to stick her whole face into to drink from.

Sometimes it would strike me that
an animal was living in my house
, and it seemed as surreal as if I had a raccoon or a kinkajou running loose in my house. Yet that animal and I learned, on some level, to understand each other. Although I loved to bury my nose in her fur when she came in from a winter day and inhale deeply of the Coldcat Smell, the cat did not like this one bit, and fled. For a while I would chase her around the house, yelling, “Gimme a little whiff!” and she would hide behind the couch from my hateful touch. Eventually I realized that this was wrong of me. I would instead let her in and pretend to have no interest whatsoever in smelling her, and after not more than a minute or so the cat would approach me and deign to be smelled. I should really be no less impressed by this accord than if I'd successfully communicated with a Papuan tribesman or decoded a message from the stars.

Whenever I felt embarrassed about factoring a house pet's desires into major life decisions, some grown-up-sounding part of me told myself,
It's just a cat.
It's generally believed that animals lack what we call consciousness, although we can't quite agree on what exactly this is, and how we can pretend to any certainty about what goes on in an animal's head has never been made clear to me. To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people.

Another part of me, perhaps more sentimental but also more truthful, had to acknowledge that the cat was undeniably another being in the world, experiencing her one chance at being alive, as I was. It always amused me to hit or elongate the word
you
in speaking to the cat, as in, “
Yooouu
would probably
like
that!” because it was funny—and funny often means disquieting and true—to remind myself that there really was another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes and idiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions about whose water is better. It did not seem to me like an insoluble epistemological mystery to divine what the cat would like when I woke up and saw her face two inches from mine and the Tentative Paw slowly withdrawing from my lip.

I admit that loving a cat is a lot less complicated than loving a human being. Because animals can't ruin our fantasies about them by talking, they're even more helplessly susceptible to our projections than other humans. Though of course there's a good deal of naked projection and self-delusion involved in loving other human beings, too.

I once read in a book about feng shui that keeping a pet can maintain the chi of your house or apartment when you're not there; the very presence of an animal enlivens and charges the space. Although I suspect feng shui is high-end hooey, I learned when my cat was temporarily put up elsewhere that a house without a cat in it feels very different from a house with one. It feels truly empty, dead. Those moments gave me some foreboding of how my life would feel after she was gone.

We don't know what goes on inside an animal's head; we may doubt whether they have anything we'd call consciousness, and we can't know how much they understand or what their emotions feel like. I will never know what, if anything, the cat thought of me. But I can tell you this: a man who is in a room with a cat—whatever else we might say about that man—is not alone.

KATE LEBO

FROM
New England Review

An Earmoir

I
WAS BORN
with a strawberry hemangioma splashed over the bottom half of my right ear and two inches down my neck. The sort of red that has purple trapped inside it. A swollen, shocking hue. For the first year, I had no hair to disguise it. The sight of me made strangers uncomfortable.

My birthmark was so red and angry and I cried so murderously when my parents bathed it that it became, as I grew, the explanation for a lot of things. Why I was teased in school, why I cried easily. Why I couldn't hear conversational tones out of my right ear.

By the time I was ten the skin faded to a mottle of mostly normal-looking tissue. It looks enough like a burn scar that no one asks what happened. Mostly I forget it's there. When a new friend asks me, “What's up with your ear?” I need a second to remember what she's talking about. My father and I were in a motorcycle accident when I was five, I say. It tore my ear half off. When she looks sorry for asking, I tell her I was born this way. Which isn't exactly the truth. If it was, I'd still have a stoplight for an ear.

Until my family began to comment on how deaf I was—when my back was to them I didn't respond to direct questions, didn't know they were being asked—I didn't know my hearing was going. I'd gotten so used to having a half-deaf ear that it didn't occur to me the aural slips I'd been experiencing might be the fault of the other ear, the good one going bad. I booked an appointment in the otolaryngology department at the city's biggest hospital. The nurse who took my vitals said “You're the youngest person I've talked to all day” in a way that was supposed to make me feel better but didn't.

Dehiscence
is a word botanists use to describe a flower bud that's about to burst into bloom.

Otolaryngologists use
dehiscence
to describe two spots in my skull, one over each superior canal of my hearing organs, that have thinned to two tiny gaps. The gaps leak sound waves into my body and allow body noises to echo too loudly in my ears. To diagnose me, the doctor asked if I could hear myself blink. Yes, I said. Can you hear your heels when you walk? Yes. He rapped a tuning fork on my ankle. Can you hear that? No. That's a good thing, he said.

My pulse, my flexing knees, my neck bones as I turn my head on the pillow, my teeth as they crunch into chips—all these sounds are louder than the conversation of the person sitting next to me. Now I understood why I could sing on key but never hold a tune: when I make a melody with my body, it mutes the music that's outside my skull.

The doctor said my superior-canal dehiscence could be cured with minor surgery that involved a night in the ICU. That doesn't sound like minor surgery, I said. Nothing to worry about, he said. When would you like to schedule your pre-op? I wouldn't, I said.

The next doctor I visited was the teacher of the first doctor. He was cautious, patient, uneager to cut me open. I liked him immediately. He said my condition represented “multiple pathologies”—a stiff stapes bone, a collapsed eardrum, dehiscence, possibly something else. My symptoms muddle the identity of each individual malady. What mattered, what wasn't a mystery: I had significant hearing loss in both ears. We decided to try hearing aids first. If they worked, I would wear them the rest of my life.

I preferred this decision. It is reversible. You see, half sensibility has benefits. Not knowing what I'm missing can be a different kind of knowing.

Open the Window

My friend, I'll call him Carl, was born with one ear. Once, while sleeping with his hearing side buried in the pillow, he slept through the burglary of his home. Just woke up the next day to find his guitar, stereo, and TV missing from the living room.

Hearing aids augment hearing organs, they don't replace them, so they can't help Carl's condition. When we talk about this, we have to face each other and position ourselves a bit to the right so we can speak into each other's left ears.

I have another friend whose son is functionally deaf. When he doesn't wear hearing aids he retreats into his own world, she says. Though he's fluent with sign language—communication isn't the issue—he's distant, hard to reach in a way that he isn't when the world can get at him through an amplifier.

In my semi-sentient state I'm a champion sleeper, a binge reader. The world is easy to tune out when its volume is low to begin with. What I miss in overheard bons mots I make up for in dreams, I tell myself. I'm sincere, but I'm lying. It's a pain in the ass to ask
What?
all the time. Often I only pretend to know what people are saying. This feels easier than repetition.

Nearly as often, a few beats after nodding my assent, I figure out what the hell it is I've just agreed to.

When I used a hearing aid for the first time, I finally understood what my friend meant: it's like someone has taken the wrapping off the world, and I'm in it, closer and more profoundly immersed than I thought possible. What I hear is so mundane: footsteps, conversations at reception, an intercom, air conditioning. It feels like I've dipped my head into a public pool—I'm in this water, making these noises, soft within a busyness. This is beyond healing.

My audiologist says that when people go too long without hearing a certain frequency, the ear can forget how to hear it, that mechanical augmentation can't navigate that “dead zone.” She uses the word
forget
, implying that cochlea have memories, that those memories are refreshed by the nerve signals a sound wave sets off in the hair cells. I imagine there's a more specific, scientific word to describe what's actually happening, but after panicking over the other doctor's medical jargon, I think the precise word will obscure the diagnosis. When my new otolaryngologist says everyone's ear has three windows and that at least one of those windows must be closed to maintain balance and prevent vertigo, he turns my eardrum into a breezy little house. I'm grateful to him for speaking my language.

The Skin of the Line

Difficulty creates sensitivity. If a hearing test asks me to listen and repeat words, I will score higher than a person with normal hearing.

In conversation, this sensitivity is an inept but beautiful translator. “Messing with my students” becomes “wisteria in tents.” A “reef of dead metaphors” becomes a raft of them. “
The Skin of a Lion
” (an Ondaatje novel) is “the skin of the line” and “a silk lawn.” I hear them almost simultaneously, the fantastic phrase bursting through the door just ahead of the intended one. These interpretations don't decode the meaning of the intended phrase, but they do create new phrases whose strangeness invites me to interpret them figuratively. When the misheard accompanies the heard, a conversation about classroom manners can shelter an encampment of flowering vines.

Through poetry writing, I attuned my eye and ear to these mishearings and came to love how the actual phrase, which is often prosaic but easy to interpret, echoes under the figurative magic of the misheard phrase. In other words, the poet gives us a surprising turn of phrase whose resemblance to cliché helps us interpret it. I might write “I pay my hills” instead of “I pay my bills” because the word
bills
is expected. With “pay my hills,” I have the figurative riches of what paying a hill might mean while the reader and I hear “pay my bills” underneath. If the phrase were to go the other way around, I would hear
bills
but never think of
hills.
In a way, it's the best of both worlds—surprising language that echoes on multiple levels and is coupled to an interpretive strategy. The sense within nonsense that keeps a line lively.

A Private Volume

Hearing aids are just amplifiers. After a year of wearing one, I think of mine as a jealous speaker. It doesn't like talking to other speakers. It needs distance from sound makers to maintain a clear, intelligible tone.

In the car with my music turned up, the hearing aid crackles, a delicate plasticky sound that wraps the beat in subtle static. On long drives I store my hearing aid in the center console and
always
forget it there. Panic when I touch my empty right ear. The aid is dime-sized. It costs more than my car.