Inferior Animals
James Mathews
Before my one and only trip to Denver, Colorado, I was a whiney, needy, self-absorbed basket case. I was a rescue dog long past the point of rescue, whimpering and shivering in some urine-soaked chain-linked cage at the pound. That was my about-to-be ex-girlfriend’s assessment anyway. In fact, she offered the assessment – unsolicited and with all the metaphorical flair of the English professor she was -- as she walked out the front door of our Kansas City apartment carrying two enormous suitcases. She was so upset and in such a hurry to get away from me that she managed to get wedged in the doorway and had to waddle from side to side in an effort to free herself until she finally shot forward onto the landing. Then she spun around with a look of naked accusation as if I had been the one holding her back. “Grappling hook,” she sneered at me, her face drenched in disgust.
“What?” I said, desperate not to repeat the awful begging I had been doing all the while she packed.
She blew a strand of hair from her eyes. “You’re not really a rescue dog. I take that back. You’re more like one of those grappling hooks that people throw over castle walls, the ones that get caught up on…on…oh fuck it!” Then she snatched up the suitcases and vanished into the grip of forever.
I sulked and roamed the apartment muttering “grappling hook” over and over again. Not in an exercise of self-reflection, mind you. More in irritation that she didn’t even realize the incongruity of the metaphor. Of course, it would have been pure synchronicity if Audrey Parsons had called me at that exact moment. I could have expressed surprise at not having heard from my old colleague in over a year and, in one fell swoop, cast upon her all my despair about relationships gone bad, the hollowness of the teaching profession, the senseless burden of bad metaphors.
But in truth it was several aimless and depressed days later that I received the frantic call – which was a good thing for both of us. Audrey, it turned out, needed my help, not my troubles. As I said, I hadn’t heard from her in over a year – since I transferred to be closer to my now decidedly ex-girlfriend -- but I still had a clear image in my mind of the woman who taught Advanced Physics and who I often gravitated to in the faculty lounge and other academic social functions. We had shared a passion for griping about the Dean’s latest missteps. She was also quite attractive and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit to daydreaming about the “what ifs.” In addition to being whip-smart – a member of Mensa and a recent inductee into the Missouri Physics Society – she was the picture of stability, full of life, long of leg, easy to talk to -- and even easier to look at with her dark, green eyes, and tanned face unencumbered by globs of make-up.
So why would a scientific genius and stunning beauty be calling me? A desperate, needy grappling hook of a man with whom she shared a laugh over a few coffees and bear claws? It turns out she was also at the business end of a break-up – in her case, a nasty divorce from her husband -- and was at the end of her “sanity rope.” She said she remembered our friendship and – music to my ears -- thought I could help.
I admit that I was leery at that first mention of help. More than leery. As I said, I had my own troubles. But everything about the moment felt destined to be. And the sound of her voice – forlorn and confident at once – cried out for intervention, for rescue. Perhaps this was finally the calling I’d been hoping for. To help a friend in need instead of being one. We talked for over an hour, her voice as gentle as a back rub. There was bitterness mixed into what she was telling me, but not the way I would have expressed it. There wasn’t an undertow of gripe that I know I would have brought to the conversation. It was during the course of our ramblings that the topic of Denver – a city recently clobbered by a blizzard -- came up and how it was one place she had always wanted to visit but never had. After telling her that I hadn’t either, I blurted out, “Why don’t we go?”
“Where? Denver?”
“Sure. It’s six hours away but a pretty straight shot on I-10. They’ve cleared most of the snow from what I hear. And I’d be happy to drive both ways – as long as you supply the wheels.”
She laughed and asked me how I knew she had just bought a new car and hated to drive.
“Seriously,” I said. “We’re still a couple weeks out from classes and I’ve got some vacay time. We’ll drive out and visit that strange and mysterious mile high city. Along the way, you can tell me your troubles and I’ll just listen. Just like you used to listen to me whine about the incoherence of Dean Mason’s commencement addresses.”
She laughed again and let her laughter trickle into a sigh. At that moment, I expected her to find an excuse to dismiss the idea, but she didn’t. Instead, she said that the suggestion sounded like it just might be the ticket. Then she added, “On one condition.”
“Shoot.”
“No strings attached,” she said. “A road trip among friends.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” I said. “Strictly friendship. With a little emotional and spiritual counseling on the side.”
And I truly meant it. But I’d be lying again if I said I didn’t think there might be more to the trip, not only for me and for her. But for me and her.
~ ~ ~
Two days later, I was sitting on the steps of my apartment building, scrolling through the mosh pit of email messages from my Department chair expressing anger at my last-minute leave request when Audrey pulled up in a lime green Chevy Spark that looked like a giant cough drop. I hitched my overnight bag onto my shoulder and strode out to greet her. I had taken only a few steps, but she was already out of the car and bouncing up the walk toward me. In a rush, she threw her arms around my neck and squeezed. I could feel the lightness and warmth of her body, which sent a quiver into the deepest regions of my reproductive nodes. When she pulled away, I got a good look at her.
I admit that I had been somewhat worried that the image I had of her would be jolted by the reality of a year spent apart. But she was, if anything, even prettier than I remembered. Her blonde hair was cut short and hung lank across her forehead. She had a molded face, almost doll-like, and was pale. But her green eyes were alive and bright and conveyed an intense happiness to see me that sent my heart and mind racing. Her face, in fact, was an event of excitement. She smelled faintly of lilac soap and something else, something a bit edgier that I couldn’t quite place.
She clasped her hands together in giddy excitement, “I can’t believe we’re doing this! You don’t know how badly Isaac and I needed to get away. You are absolutely our knight in shining armor.”
I leaned back, puzzled by the name “Isaac” but I shook it off as one might a playful yet unexpected slap across the face. I could see that there was no one else in the car so I chalked it up as not having heard her correctly. “Don’t go knighting me just yet,” I said. “We could get caught in another blizzard on the way to Denver and we’ll be drawing straws for who gets eaten first.”
“Friends don’t eat friends,” she said and we both laughed awkwardly until she held out a set of car keys with a large keychain emblazoned with ASPCA. “Now if I remember correctly, you did offer to drive, right?”
“Reporting for duty,” I said with a mock salute.
The smell hit me as soon as I pulled open the driver’s door. I pressed my fist instinctively up against my mouth and nose. By the time I sat down, one hand fumbling blindly for a lever to adjust the seat, I was nearly gagging. I tried holding back my shock with a bit of humor. “Sure didn’t take long to lose that new car smell, did it?”
“I know, I know,” she said, sliding in beside me. “Isaac had an accident on the way over. He hasn’t been feeling well.”
I coughed out, “Isaac?”
“My goodness, where are my manners?” She swiveled in the seat and pointed. “Let me introduce you to Isaac. Sir Isaac, to be exact.”
I craned my neck toward the back seat where she was gesturing and found myself looking down at the saddest excuse for a cat I think I’d ever seen. It looked right back at me, unblinking, sprawled across a dirty and threadbare blanket decorated with silhouettes of paws. The wedge of its head hung low and its tongue, like a strip of black rubber, peeked out from its whiskers. Audrey quickly explained that she had to bring the cat with us because in addition to the animal not feeling well, her husband had threatened to cat nap him – cat nap? -- and she didn’t trust her current roommate.
“You’re not allergic, are you?” she said.
Actually, I was allergic, but I lied and told her I didn’t think so.
She patted the purse on her lap. “I always bring along some allergy meds.” Then she winked at me. “Because you never know.”
After settling in, I engaged the GPS on my phone with the address of the Denver hotel that Audrey had reserved for our stay – a one bedroom suite with a kitchenette -- and we were soon on the move. According to the GPS, the time to target was 6 hours, 25 minutes. As I eased the car onto I-10 and into westbound traffic, I cracked the window in an attempt to cycle in some breathable air. Audrey ordered me to roll it back up. Isaac was very susceptible to cold air. Besides, I’d get used to the smell.
I didn’t care for her tone – a mix of schoolyard bully and maternal condescension – but I quickly reminded myself that I needed to stay focused. I had committed to being emotionless, to forgetting about my own break-up, the drama at work, the debt I had piled up. No, I was determined to be the sounding board for a change. To be the shoulder to cry on. This trip was going to be about someone else, someone not me.
As it happened, I doubt I would have gotten a chance to complain about anything anyway. After just a few minutes of small talk about endless reorganizing of college departments, Audrey began pummeling me with her problems. She unfurled them like unwashed laundry. She was, of course, most upset with her husband from whom she separated six months before and for whom she had retained one of the best lawyers in Kansas City. She relished the opportunity to get him into court because among his many faults, he was first-class cat abuser. She didn’t have any proof that he tortured Isaac – tortured? – but she was certain of it.
Then again – and this was the worst thing of all when it came to her life -- Isaac’s health was deteriorating rapidly. He was only 9 years-old but already had a case of the distemper, chronic diarrhea, renal failure, immunodeficiency virus and, although it had yet to be confirmed by blood tests, feline leukemia.
When I suggested that maybe she should have left him with some kind of cat-sitter, her tone turned dark and direct. “You don’t know the half of what those people do in those boarding houses. In some ways, they’re even worse than shelters.”
I feigned ignorance at the state of the animal boarding industry and listened to the tires sing on the metal grillwork of the bridge that separated Missouri from Kansas. I glanced down at the GPS. 6 hours, 12 minutes to destination.
~ ~ ~
Things began to go from bad to worse just west of Topeka. Audrey talked nonstop, casting aside punctuation and, it seemed, any intake of air to her lungs. Her husband was pretty bad, but it really all began with her father, a brilliant engineer who had invented a miniature coned explosive charge which helped propel satellites across space. The genius intellect belied a darker side. He was a ruthless disciplinarian and animal hater. When Audrey was ten, she had secretly taken in a pregnant stray cat that she named Sheba. Her father discovered the animal just before it was due to birth its litter and despite the girl’s anguished pleas, he scooped up the feline and drove outside the town limits, abandoning it in some alleyway in the dead of winter.
“Some genius,” she said and finally paused long enough to draw in and exhale a single deep breath. The silence didn’t last long because her husband apparently picked up where her father left off. He was a handsome physics professor and she his student and lover. In their courtship, he had expressed a love of animals great and small, but that all changed once they were married. It turned out that he was a secret cat hater too.
I listened and watched the road shimmer ahead. A flock of geese skirted across the gray sky above us, in perfect formation, leading us ever forward. It was then that I began to feel the weight of Audrey’s self-absorbed pain. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic. I never got the feeling she was even exaggerating. I just felt like I had overestimated my ability to help. I felt ill-equipped, a newly-minted priest thrust into a horde of sinners. When I did manage to get in a word edgewise, it was usually something feeble and predictable like, “Did you try marriage counseling?” But she quickly shot me down with a toss of her hands and a huff of disdain. “That’s a racket. Almost as bad as veterinarians.”
“Veterinarians?”
“Oh sure. Everyone makes a big deal about how long they go to school and how difficult it is to become a vet. Most of them are med school flunkies who barely made the grades. The rest don’t have the first clue about animals. Especially cats.”
I nodded knowingly as if what she was saying was common knowledge. What else could I do? I had no reference point with which to counter.
It was at that moment in the ride that Audrey launched into a blurry, two hour dissertation about – surprise, surprise -- cats. I don’t remember much because I blocked most of it out, but what I did hear was more information than I’d ever wanted to about the feline persuasion. When her monologue did pause, I tried my best to change the subject.
“Boy this car drives like a dream,” I managed which landed with a near-audible thud. She didn’t respond even as I tried to back-track. “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I think they’re fascinating. Cats, I mean.” The silence smothered the air between us as if the car was suddenly stuffed with cotton. Cotton soaked in cat urine. I could feel her eyes burning into me, doubting my sincerity. And she was right. I had grown up in a largely pet-free family in southeastern Missouri although there was a feral cat that used to visit our doorstep. My mother insisted I feed it a few times. Like Audrey, I applied a name to the cat. Chico. It was the color of rust and hissed whenever I tried to pet it. My older brother found it one morning flattened and frozen at the end of the driveway. My mother made me scrape it up with a flat-head shovel. Finally, I broke the silence with, “They can be a friend when no one else is around. And hey, they’re pretty nimble.”
This last declaration brightened her up. “They can rotate their ears 180 degrees, did you know that?” I didn’t. “It’s a good thing too because their hearing was five times more sensitive than an adult human.” You don’t say. “They don’t have any eye lashes either. And only four toes on each front paw although they do have five on the back. Some cats even have eight on each paw. Thirty-two total toes! Isn’t that something?” I’ll say.
It wasn’t long after the undulating road ahead began to give way to push and thrust of mountains in the distance. She was still talking when she was finally interrupted by her phone ringing which took several minutes to dig out of her purse. The call was someone named Wolfgang.
“Long time no hear, camper!” she said which was what she had said to me when I had answered the phone three days earlier. “I didn’t think you were ever going to call me back.” The conversation carried on for a good forty-five minutes. At no point did she offer slightest hint to the caller that she was with someone. I tried to ignore the rudeness of it all, hoping that Wolfgang was her brother or uncle. But it was clear he was another friend. I didn’t like the chirpy animation in her voice as she spoke to him – giving him the whole run-down of the marriage breakup that I had just endured. Wolfgang, I thought. What the fuck kind of name was that in this day and age? When she finally hung up – actually, I could tell he was the one to cut the call short – she resumed her monologue with nary an explanation.
And when I say monologue, I mean more cats. The ancient Egyptians, apparently, believed that every time you dreamt about a cat, your lifespan would be extended by a year. “Which is why they surrounded themselves with cats,” she said. Audrey turned and offered an air kiss to Isaac.
I adjusted myself and found the cat in the rear view mirror. It had not moved from when I had looked at him earlier. For all I know, he had never taken his mournful eyes off me. Save for the smell – to which I had begun to grow accustomed -- I forgot he was even there. “Doesn’t say much, does he?”
She smiled. “Oh, he’ll meow when he wants to say something, don’t you worry. In fact, meows are not innate cat language, did you know that? Cats developed the sound as a way of communicating exclusively with humans.”
That’s when she reached out and touched the back of my hand, which was resting on the gear shift. I looked over at her. Her green eyes shimmered back at me. She was smiling and I immediately resolved to stop my inner griping. As disinterested as I was in her recitations, I couldn’t deny that the sound of her voice – minus the content -- was soothing. The hum of the tires sucked up and obliterated any distinction of words she was saying. There was only a soft wake of her enunciations, like the ocean slapping the side of our boat. But it wasn’t long before she circled back to her troubles and the tone of her voice began to change. Resentful. Edgy. Grinding.
My hope began to diminish again. We were still a good 30 minutes from Denver and I was starving. But when I suggested we eat before checking in to the hotel, she removed her hand from mine, placing it back into her lap and slapping it lightly with the other as if it had been naughty. “Isaac can’t really be in the car for the time it takes for us to go in and eat,” she explained. “Besides, I brought along some groceries in the back.”
I barely heard the last part. Instead I was thinking: Why the fuck did you bring him on a six hour road trip? And what’s a little cold air compared to the rest of his ailments? And while we’re at it, who the fuck is Wolfgang?
When we arrived on the outskirts of Denver, I was certain the GPS had misdirected us. The off-ramp was pitted with potholes and we passed several shuttered businesses before a few sad-sack business establishments appeared like an army of ghosts. There was a McDonalds and a bus depot and a two-pump gas station that was unbranded save for a roadside sign that read GAS. Farther up the street looked like a mess of ill-lit, dreary housing projects and a strip mall with the usual fare of pawn shops, liquor stores, and an Asian market. By now, night had fallen and what street lamps were working gave the entire scene a blurry, congealed look.
Our home for the next four days – The Red Stag Inn – was just off this enticing thoroughfare. To say it was a dump was an insult to dumps the world over. It appeared to have evolved from military barracks of some kind. The building was narrow and long, made of cinder blocks painted white and sporting a peaked orange roof and orange doors. There were exactly two cars in the parking lot. A Chevy hatchback that looked like an abused older cousin of the car we were driving and a Mitsubishi pick-up. Both looked like they had been parked there forever.
After undoubtedly sensing my disappointment, Audrey explained that it was the only place she could book on such short notice and they took pets. But hey, we did get the suite with a kitchenette and bedroom. And she had already pre-paid so what was I complaining about.
Of course, outside of what I was thinking, I had not complained. But I was tired and after checking in, I decided to let it slide. It was a place to crash and lock up the cat. It’s not like we would be spending much time there.
This was a good thing, I decided, upon stepping inside the “suite.” The room smelled faintly of petroleum and sulfur. The carpet was threadbare and crackled under our feet. There were only three working lights in the small living room and that included the refrigerator light. I did a quick sweep of the bedroom and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was an inspector of condemned dwellings. As I made my way back to the front door, bolting and chaining it up tight, a siren wheezed in the distance and gradually grew closer until it burped once and stopped.
After washing up, I emerged from the bathroom to find Audrey in the kitchen, reading the back of a box of mac and cheese. “Whoa,” I said. “Before you break into our precious rations, what do you say I treat you to a nice dinner out?”
She started to answer but was cut short by a crash of something heavy in the bedroom. Isaac flew out of the room as I rushed in only to find the curtains pulled off the rod and in a heap like a giant crumpled flower. I went to the window and observed the sad rear of the motel – the remnants of snow mixed with twists of tree stumps and obscene tangles of machinery, abandoned and long past identification.
“Sir Isaac Newton!” Audrey shouted from the next room. “How many times have I told you about clawing at the curtains!”
It took me about a half hour to rig up the flimsy metal rods to reconnect the curtains. By that time, Audrey had finished setting the table with the mac and cheese and chopped up blackened sausage that she overcooked in butter and oil. She had also taken great care to prepare a meal for Isaac in the far corner of the room.
We ate mostly in silence, under a lone lamp that hung over the small round dining table. I flipped through an out-of-date local magazine I found in the bathroom called Mile High Happenings. The centerfold showed a map of Denver upon which one of the previous occupants had scrawled STINKIN SHITHOLE. I could hear Isaac prowling around behind me in the hush of darkness. From beyond, out in the doomed city, came the clack and pop of firecrackers or gunfire.
“Here’s an idea,” I said, referring to the guidebook. “We get an early start tomorrow, hit the Western Art museum before lunch. Says here it’s one of the best in the country. After that, maybe we can catch one of the Jazz acts downtown. Jack Kerouac raved about the Jazz in Denver, you know.”
Audrey forked more mac and cheese into her mouth and chewed grimly before finally looking up at me. Her eyes had turned glassy, giving her face a craggy and worn appearance. Isaac hissed at something in the corner of the room. I was about to speak again when Audrey dropped her fork onto her paper plate and began to cry.
I was suddenly disorientated, unable to move. I might as well have been grafted to the chair. I watched for a moment then finally reached for her hand. The grief that trembled in her tendons made feel hollow and useless, but I also felt the overwhelming need to ease her suffering. She took my hand and held it up to her wet cheek. I sensed that a moment of intimacy, even a kiss, was afoot, and I resolved to protest, to let her know that such was inappropriate in her current state and that we should both just go to sleep. That said, I couldn’t deny my attraction to her, despite the aggravation of the drive, her odd behavior, the comical depravity of the accommodations and inedibility of the food. But she beat me to it. “I hope,” she said, still caressing the back of my hand with her cheek, staring straight up into my eyes, “that you’re not expecting anything more.”
I offered a quizzical look and even glanced down at my half-eaten remnants of soggy, orange noodles. “What do you mean?” I said. “More of what?”
“I just don’t want to leave you with any false hope about…about us.”
“Hey,” I said, good-naturedly, retrieving my hand while feeling my chest clench in disappointment. “Road trip among friends, remember?”
To this she smiled, offered up the fakest yawn I’d ever seen and headed for the back bedroom, leaving the clean-up for me. As she glided away, she scooped up Isaac and placed him like a small sack of meal across her shoulder. Then she shut the door and I heard the ruthless, definitive click of a lock.
~ ~ ~
It was roughly twenty-four hours later that I found myself in an Uber, captained by a retired bus driver named Ralph Bruzinski who insisted I call him “Bud,” gliding through downtown Denver, a city I had never visited and never expected to be alone in. Why alone? Because by that time, it had become painfully obvious that Audrey wanted nothing to do with me – road trip among friends or not. I had spent the whole day prior trying to coax her out of the room. When she finally emerged, she looked like she’d been mugged. Gone were the bright smile, the delicate skim of make-up, the coiffed blond hair, the breezy travel wear. Her hair was now bedded to the side of her face, her skin greasy and unwashed. She wore a pair of dirty glasses askew on the end of her nose and a grubby t-shirt emblazoned with the words, Gravity? Never Heart of It!
She was also angry and appeared surprised to even find me there. After I gently reminded her that we had come together, she seemed to snap back to reality, long enough to insist that, by all means, I should go out and enjoy myself.
“Listen, I’ll stay with you,” I countered, although I didn’t really think I could stand another goddamned minute in that room.
She sighed in frustration. “You don’t understand. I want to be alone. And I can’t be. If you’re here. Alone, I mean.”
I fumbled for a response.
“I need you…” she started and paused.
My heart leapt and even though I knew I was hearing only what I wanted to hear, I said, “I know that and that’s why I want—“
“…to leave. I need you…to leave. Please.”
So I called Uber. And the aforementioned Bud. He was kind enough to drop me in what he described as a safe location downtown with easy access to bars and restaurants. I ended up wandering a few blocks before stepping into a bar from which thumped muffled, but lively music. The exterior was deceptive. On the inside, the bar was like a carcass rotting from within. There was a scent of spilled beer and incense and the music was decidedly neo-jazzy, which is to say off-key and out of tune, the way some Indian sitars sound. But I stayed anyway, hunched over a Jack and Coke at the bar– several Jack and Cokes, in fact. The TV was on above the mirrored bar back and there was some kind of film awards show playing. An actress – or singer – who looked vaguely familiar -- was on the screen holding up a silver statuette for all to see. I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the music, but it was clear she was complaining about her job, her life, and society in general. I tried to watch, along with two elderly men in Army field jackets beside me who started getting loud. They were arguing about what the actress was saying. I would have killed someone for some kind – any kind -- of sports, but didn’t say a word.
The bartender, a fresh-faced girl who looked too young to drink alcohol let alone serve it, asked me if I wanted another Jack and Coke. I asked her if that was a trick question. “Not really,” was her answer as she humorlessly fixed me another. I nodded with robotic appreciation. She positioned the drink in front of me and said, “Any interest in our smoking room?”
I didn’t think I heard her correctly.
She pointed behind me. “Our smoking room. It’s open for business. Only rule is, what you buy, you smoke. Oh, and you can only smoke it in there, not out here. Law of the land.” She shrugged as if to say, Whayda gonna do?
That’s when it struck me. The incense. The mellow, sitar-ish music. I slid off the stool and wandered back across the bar and through – of course – a doorway curtained with strings of beads and into a headshop.
A shaggy-haired man who looked like he might be the older brother of the bartender was arranging a colorful array of bongs on a nearby shelf. He greeted me with, “What can I get you, bro?”
“Whatever’s on tap,” I said and finally, I got a laugh.
I sat down with a fat, perfectly rolled joint in a corner club chair, surrounded by several other stoners who were way ahead of me. I only got through half of the joint when the weed – I hadn’t smoked since high school – hit me like a splash of warm water across the face. The THC conspired with the alcohol already in my system and immediately smoothed over my grouchy mood, giving the room and the whole wide world around it a calm, underwater glow.
That’s when I felt a muscle twitch in my elbow. I had my eyes closed, ignoring the twitching until it began to escalate. I finally glanced down at my arm to find a set of fingers with black nails prodding me.
A woman with dark hair and wild eyes was speaking to me. She was sitting deep in the club chair beside me and she was holding a book entitled, When You Have to Go, You Have to Go. “I said,” she said, “how’s the purple sinse?”
“Huh?” was all I could manage.
“The purple sinsemilla you just toked. Pretty good?”
Not wanting to give myself away, I shrugged and said, “I’ve had better.”
“Story of my fucking life,” she said and looked back down at the book.
I started at her, puzzling over the comment. That she’s had better was the story of her life? So I tried a follow-up. “Do you want to talk?”
“What?” she said.
“You nudged me,” I said, holding up my arm as if to prove it.
“You remind me of someone,” she said.
“Someone good or bad?”
She sighed, irritated. “I don’t really remember.”
I pointed toward the beaded curtain. “Do you want to get a drink?”
She looked at the doorway and then back at me, giving me the full bleary-eyed examination. “I don’t really drink,” she said. “Plus, I’m reading.” She held up her book as if to prove it.
“Is it good? The book?”
“It’s depressing. It’s about death.”
“Ah,” I said. With that, I was ready to let the conversation wither and, well, die. But she added, “It’s about accepting that death isn’t something that you do to yourself. It’s something you do for yourself.”
I nodded pointlessly, and said, “Did someone die?” I was starting to get unnerved, wanting only for the moment to end while also having lost control of my words before they tumbled out of my mouth.
“Someone’s always dying,” the girl said. “There’s no stopping death.”
I was about to agree to this universal truth when out of my mouth came, “Not if you dream about cats. According to the Egyptians anyway.”
The girl narrowed her eyes at me as if she understood me completely. But then shook her head, shuddering as if to clear out cobwebs."What?"
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve been high. In fact, I haven’t—“
Without warning, she broke into tears. She shielded her face and tears with the book. A young man in a Metallica T-shirt on the other side of the room hopped up and glided over to us. “What did you say?” he said to me. Not threatening, just a line of query.
“I don’t know.” I deepened my voice defensively, deciding that the kid looked like a ‘Wolfgang’ if anyone ever did. “In fact, I didn’t say a fucking thing, pal.”
“She’s not well,” he said.
“Don’t say that,” the girl said amid heaves, her words muffled by the book. “Don’t say that.”
I stood, wobbling in an attempt to steady myself. The young man obviously saw a threat in my movements and took a step back. “Be cool, man.”
Was I hallucinating it all? I thought. The need for another stiff drink to cut the high reached critical mass. I mumbled sorry again and pushed my way out through the bead curtain.
After bellying up to the bar for another Jack and Coke, I found myself staring at the mirror from which I could see the full expanse of the establishment. The place was more crowded now, with a few more people going in and out of the back room. Everyone looked down into their drinks. Into their empty palms. They were all miserable – just like me. I thought how much Audrey would be at home here. In fact, I resolved to mention to her that I had found the perfect dive for her. We were all inferior animals, noshing in a field of Jack and Coke and weed, contemplating the relief of death, as if in defiance of the hand life had dealt us.
Several more drinks later, I caught an Uber back to the Red Stag Inn, this time courtesy of a young Asian man named Pete. Pete was from New Jersey and loudly proclaimed his satisfaction at having broken every stereotype about Asian drivers. To prove it, he broke just about every speed limit by at least 20 mph, cutting off drivers as he went, one arm hanging limply over the steering wheel.
I didn’t care. I was thoroughly lit. I remember distinctly Pete asking me twice if I was going to throw up, each time after he’d swerved around a corner without so much as tapping the brakes. He even handed me an air sickness bag.
When we turned down the final street, he whistled and said, “You’re lucky. It’s pretty hard to get a ride to this part of town at this time of night. I figured you were okay though.”
“Really? I said. “How’d you figure that?”
“You look pretty stoned for one. You smell pretty stoned too. But seriously, this ain’t the place to be when the darkness falls, trust me.”
“I’m staying there with a friend.”
“Is he a crack dealer?”
I was ready to push back when Pete’s foot finally discovered the brake pedal and he said, “Whoa, horsey.” His face reflected back the bruised blue of police lights.
There in front of us was a cop car, lights tapping out its multicolored Morse code. A hulking figure of a cop stood in the doorway of the suite from which I had been banished earlier that day. After settling up with Pete, I hurried over. The cop had both hands on his hips and I could see Audrey’s sallow face framed by one of his arms, her teeth gritted against the cold. She pointed at me and the cop turned around and retreated away from the door, one hand slipping down atop his pistol butt and the other finding its way to his nightstick handle.
A thousand scenarios jumped through hoops in my drunken, stoned head. As I approached, the cop asked me to identify myself. When I did, he slapped the chest plate of Kevlar vest and snapped, “Motherfucker. Try to get this under control, please.”
Even sober, my brain probably wouldn’t have processed his vulgarity. So I started speaking, asking what was going on three times, slurring every word. He shook his head through it all and said, “What’s going on is your wife called 911 to report you missing.”
“I’m not missing,” I said, pointlessly. “I went downtown.” When he just stared back at me, I added, “And she’s not my wife. We’re just friends. That was the condition of our--”
“Whatever,” he snapped. “She said you didn’t know your way around.” At this point, he reached out and jabbed my shoulder with his gloved finger as if to test whether I would fall backwards. “That’s not what we do, buddy, understand? We’re not fucking babysitters.”
I opened my mouth, but the cop just kept shaking his head at me as if he’d heard it all before. “Just get her under control, please. I don’t want to have to come back here, understand? Believe me, you don’t want me to come back here.”
When the motel door shut behind me, I just stared at her, my eyes teared up from the sudden and intense warmth of the room. “Why did you --?” I started but she had already broken down and began to cry. She just stood in front of me, shaking and crying.
“I knew you weren’t missing,” she said through her tears. “I just didn’t know what else to do. And I didn’t want to tell the police the real reason I called.” Her chest heaved. “I knew they wouldn’t understand. I knew only you could understand.”
“Understand what, Audrey?” I said, trying hard to stifle the irritation. “Jesus, what the fuck?!”
She pitched suddenly forward as she had done the day before and threw herself into my arms. We both almost tumbled backward into the kitchenette. “It’s Isaac,” she said, her entire body shuddering as if she had just burst in from the cold. “He’s dying!”
~ ~ ~
The 24-hour emergency veterinary clinic, the closest we could find, was on the other side of town. It took us about 45 minutes to get there, even though we were driving through largely deserted streets. We probably could have arrived earlier, but Audrey was directing us with the GPS on her phone and she kept forgetting to tell me when to turn. Her attention was devoted to Isaac who lay across her lap, shrouded in a cheap white towel from the motel. Another contributing factor to our slow progress was that I was still pretty drunk and a probably still little stoned. It was all I could do to keep the car moving steadily forward into the gloom of the city streets. A thin sift of snow began to fall, hazing my vision, creating an illusion of calm beyond the throb of the wipers.
She had called ahead, of course, so the skeleton crew of exactly one vet and one assistant received and hustled Isaac and Audrey into one of the examination rooms in the back. I probably should have gone with her, but I remained in the waiting area and flipped through brochures with titles like Keeping Anxious Fido Calm and, amusingly enough, Don’t Let Kitty Come Between You and Your Love Life.
There was a covered bird cage in one corner that rattled every so often. After about half an hour, Audrey emerged with Isaac cradled in her arms, cooing at him like a mother released from the hospital with a newborn. The vet, an older man with a stark white goatee and kindly blue eyes, strode right over to me. Despite the kindness of his eyes, his shoulders were hunched and he looked frail and tired. I sympathized. He took a few moments to search out my full attention – he hadn’t missed the fact that I was intoxicated -- and then spoke slowly, offering a few questions which I deflected to Audrey. “It doesn’t belong to me,” I kept saying, like a witness invoking his right against self-incrimination. “You need to ask her.”
Undeterred by my absence of sympathy, the vet patted me gently on the shoulder. He whispered, “Take it easy now. We’ll get through this.”
I answered by looking down at my watch. “Soon?” I had clearly entered the drunk, exhausted, and sick-of-the-bullshit phase.
He sighed. “Look, as I explained to your wife—“
“Whoa – not my wife, pal,” I said, scoffing for emphasis. “We’re on a road trip among friends.”
“Yes, well, nevertheless, I can give him something for the pain, but that’s really it. In fact, I haven’t seen a cat in this bad of shape for quite a few years and I’ve seen a lot in that time period. The most humane option – really, the only option as far as treatment goes -- is to put the animal down.”
“I appreciate that, but what am I supposed to do? Like I said ten times, it’s her fucking cat.”
“Can you talk to her at least? She doesn’t even want to consider it and I think she needs to.”
I stared into his evenly spaced, appropriately furrowed eyes which I now began to see as less kind and more diabolical.
I swayed across the room and took a seat beside Audrey. She was rocking the cat back and forth. Somewhere in depth of the sterile facility, a dog yelped once and was silent. “Audrey,” I said as softly as I could manage.
“Yes?” she said, almost singing the word.
“Maybe we need to think about the, uh, humane option.”
“You mean the death option?”
“At a certain point,” I said, letting the words tumble from my mouth. “it stops being about Isaac. It starts being about what you’re doing to the cat, not for the cat. And that’s not fair to Isaac. Or you. Or anybody.”
Audrey kept rocking. Finally, she looked up, her face streaked with the faint remnants of her tears. A single tuft of cat hair was stuck to one of her cheeks. “So you agree with him?” she said. “With the so-called doctor?”
“Yes, Audrey,” I said. “I do agree.”
“Then all I need from you is for you to get me out of here. Now. As in, right. This. Minute.”
With that, we were back in the giant green cough drop. The cat was back on her lap, stretched across her thighs like a pelt. It groaned at the world with a sound like nothing I had ever heard from any animal, let alone a cat. It was a death moan, the wheeze of an old screen door about to topple from its hinges. I thought we would end up riding back to the motel in silence, but Audrey began talking, lecturing, as if in answer to a student’s question. She talked about the Middle Ages of all things and something she called Great Cat Holocaust of 1347. Cats all over Europe were systematically slaughtered, she explained. Gangs of cat killers roamed the cities, villages, and country farms, killing cats by smashing their skulls against trees and rocks, getting paid by the sack full. She waited for this grisly trivia to settle on me and then said, with intense earnest: “Do you know why they did it? Why they killed all those cats? And don’t say it was because they thought cats were inferior animals – although that was true. Seriously, do you know?”
I stared ahead and navigated the unfamiliar city streets with surprising ease. The sun was coming up, painting a sick yellow paste across the blight of our temporary neighborhood. My head was aching. I didn’t have the first fucking clue why long dead peasants killed their cats.
“Because they believed the Black Death was a result of witchcraft and cats were associated with witches. As a result, the flea-bitten rats – which we know now were the true source of the Plague—flourished.” Her hand began to smooth out Isaac’s ragged fur, and she said, in a voice soaked with sadness and regret, “Mankind was nearly wiped out.”
I felt a deep yawn coming on and did my best to stifle it. Once back in the motel room, Audrey hustled the shrouded, dying cat straight into the bedroom and shut the door behind her without so much as a good night. I waited a moment for the door lock to sound, but didn’t hear it.
The room was ice cold so I fiddled with the thermostat on the wall before giving up. I started for the couch, thinking briefly about whether or not to take my shoes off. Sleep must have been instantaneous because I don’t remember making the decision to leave them on (which, I discovered the next morning, turned out to be my decision).
I do remember the dream though – clearly prompted by Audrey’s historical recitations. It wasn’t a dream about Egyptians. I wasn’t lazing by the banks of the Nile, surrounded by frolicking felines lapping up goat’s milk from gold-plated saucers.
No, I dreamed I was sitting in a wooden cage, naked and freezing like a refugee, my cellmates scores of mangy, feral cats. The cage stood in the shadow of a castle wall, a castle under siege by a medieval army, complete with battering rams, catapults, and yes, grappling hooks tossed over the parapets. The din and iron clank of the battle all around was deafening, but the cats showed no fear. And every time I reached down to caress one of them, it craned its back and hissed at me.
These raspy hisses carried a message that was clear and cutting. Outside the cage was life, violent and unforgiving though it was. Inside was hopelessness and death. So who was I to complain or condemn? I – and they – were trapped in the smallest of worlds, the world of emotional pain and isolation. We were all just waiting. Waiting for our turn to be bashed against the killing tree.
~ ~ ~
I emerged from what felt like a coma about noon, my face pressed into the stained, sweat-dampened couch cushion that I had used as a pillow. There was a vague drift of sound that spiked suddenly when I opened my eyes, as if synchronized to the second my mind became aware I was still alive. It was the soft sound of a woman singing.
I forced myself into a sitting position. The relentless, nauseating smell of frying egg whites hit my nose like a punch. I fought off a gag reflex and managed a hollow groan. Turning left and then right, my eyes settled on the kitchen. Audrey was there, humming to the kiss of saucer and cup, the scrape of spatula and skillet. She did not appear aware of me until she stopped singing and I heard her say, “I can tell you want something, handsome. I sure can.”
I was about to say that it smelled good when she kept talking, “It won’t do any good to flash those big, beautiful eyes at me. You know the rules. No second helpings. Just like everyone else.”
That’s when an answer came in the form of a robust and healthy mew. Isaac. Sir Isaac to be exact.
I stood and stumbled forward. In just three steps, I managed to ram my shin into the glass coffee table and almost twist my ankle.
“Ah,” she said brightly at me. “I’d say, look what the cat dragged in, but that might not be too appropriate.”
I reached for and clasped the edge of the kitchen table like a blind man and settled heavily into one of the wicker chairs. Isaac was instantly at my feet, rubbing up against my shins. Audrey came around the counter and placed a cup of coffee in front of me even as I was shaking my head no. She sat down beside me and sighed through a bright smile that looked frozen on her face.
“How’re you feeling?” she said, her voice kind and curious.
I could only shake my head again. Had things really ended so disastrously the previous night? Had I imagined it all? The cat seemed not only alive and well, but fused with renewed energy. It circled my leg affectionately, a younger version of the hot mess it had been just hours before.
“Notice anything about Isaac?”
I sipped the coffee, burning my upper lip. “Much better,” I croaked.
She nodded and stirred her own coffee, peering as if searching for a sign of good fortune in the ink black of the cup.
“A miracle,” I said.
“Yes. A miracle.” She continued to stir the coffee and there was something about the way she kept doing it. The needless repetition, the uncompromising clink of steel on porcelain.
“I’m happy for him,” I said. “I’m happy for both of you.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said, finally looking up at me, her expression forming into a cruel, almost predatory stare. “Of course, if it were up to you,” and here she stopped stirring and allowed a beat of heavy quiet to settle between us, “Sir Isaac would be dead.”
The weight of everything – the trip, the night, the Jack, the weed, the cat – pressed onto my shoulders like a flak jacket. “Audrey, listen…”
“I want you out,” she said carefully in words that she had clearly rehearsed. “I don’t ever want to see you again. If I ever do see you again, I’ll call the cops.”
“You—“ I stopped myself, felling a rush of a hundred things to say, to hurl back at her. But I couldn’t spit them out. My mouth was too dry. Instead, I stood up and shuffled around like a hung-over zombie, gathering up and stuffing my meager belongings into my back-pack, taking a moment to look at Isaac who had stopped his strutting around the room to watch me with droopy-eyed feline curiosity.
I don’t recall much of the next hour. I do know that my sense of anger and frustration evaporated into a sense of thankfulness that the day, although somewhat brisk, was sunny, the air light and clean. I was determined to get home and to be home and I didn’t care about the obvious obstacles to making this happen. I had no car. My cell phone battery was dead. But I was only a five-minute walk from the bus station. The ticket cost me everything I had in my pockets.
I waited about an hour and was the first passenger to board the bus so I took a seat in the last row, wanting only to be left alone. I dozed while keeping one eye slightly open as the bus filled to near capacity. As we neared our departure time, I was still alone in my row and was relieved that it would stay that way until I noticed three Catholic nuns in full regalia floating down the aisle.
Two of them peeled off and sat with other passengers. The third, a short woman who looked about my age, continued down the aisle, her regal head turning fluidly from side to side, passing several open seats. I thought, No way. Please God, no. After all that’s happened, don’t do this to me. I briefly considered my four years of Catholic school, my abandonment of the faith, my ultimate conviction that religion was for suckers and drug-addicts.
The nun took a seat beside me. I shifted and continued to pretend I was sleeping. The driver announced last call and I heard the whoosh of hydraulic breaks releasing. All the while I kept thinking – no praying – that the nun beside me wouldn’t say a word to me all the way home to Kansas City. But she said, “Wow, you look wiped out.”
I shifted again, resigned now to my fate. “Thanks,” I said.
She leaned over without quite turning her head – as if her habit restricted her movement. “Sorry, I know you’re not supposed to talk on buses.”
“Really? I didn’t get that memo.” I made a show of looking at my ticket. When I realized how rude – and stupid - the joke was, I said. “Look, I’m just tired. And really, really…”
“Wiped out?”
I smiled. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
She sighed, smoothing out her smock. “Believe me, I know the feeling.” She must have sensed my skepticism because she added, “You’d be surprised how difficult this job is.”
“I thought that was part of the appeal. What makes it so tough?”
She smiled easily at me. “You first,” she said, and I thought, Jesus, am I really talking to her? Am I reallly about to engage in a potentially endless conversation?
I leaned back in the seat and looked heavenward. “Don’t get me started, Sister, or you’ll be Hail Marying for me to stop.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Makes the trip go faster. And I’m a great listener.”
I stared out the window. The bus lurched through the last city intersection and rumbled toward the freeway. A flock of geese – out of formation and flying toward the city – spirited across my line of sight before disappearing. “On one condition,” I finally said.
“Name it.”
“You tell me your problems after I tell you mine.”
“Deal.”
I took a deep breath. The now out-of-sight geese honked from somewhere in the distance and the sky was bare and blue. I don’t remember if I ever stopped talking before we arrived home. Maybe the nun did tell me her troubles in the end. If she did, they weren’t the least bit memorable. Or maybe her troubles and anxieties just weren’t that much different than mine. Besides, what difference did it really make who needed to be heard and who needed to listen? I was going home. I was going to live for myself. I was going to be who I was, who I always would be. And that was all that mattered.
“What?” I said, desperate not to repeat the awful begging I had been doing all the while she packed.
She blew a strand of hair from her eyes. “You’re not really a rescue dog. I take that back. You’re more like one of those grappling hooks that people throw over castle walls, the ones that get caught up on…on…oh fuck it!” Then she snatched up the suitcases and vanished into the grip of forever.
I sulked and roamed the apartment muttering “grappling hook” over and over again. Not in an exercise of self-reflection, mind you. More in irritation that she didn’t even realize the incongruity of the metaphor. Of course, it would have been pure synchronicity if Audrey Parsons had called me at that exact moment. I could have expressed surprise at not having heard from my old colleague in over a year and, in one fell swoop, cast upon her all my despair about relationships gone bad, the hollowness of the teaching profession, the senseless burden of bad metaphors.
But in truth it was several aimless and depressed days later that I received the frantic call – which was a good thing for both of us. Audrey, it turned out, needed my help, not my troubles. As I said, I hadn’t heard from her in over a year – since I transferred to be closer to my now decidedly ex-girlfriend -- but I still had a clear image in my mind of the woman who taught Advanced Physics and who I often gravitated to in the faculty lounge and other academic social functions. We had shared a passion for griping about the Dean’s latest missteps. She was also quite attractive and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit to daydreaming about the “what ifs.” In addition to being whip-smart – a member of Mensa and a recent inductee into the Missouri Physics Society – she was the picture of stability, full of life, long of leg, easy to talk to -- and even easier to look at with her dark, green eyes, and tanned face unencumbered by globs of make-up.
So why would a scientific genius and stunning beauty be calling me? A desperate, needy grappling hook of a man with whom she shared a laugh over a few coffees and bear claws? It turns out she was also at the business end of a break-up – in her case, a nasty divorce from her husband -- and was at the end of her “sanity rope.” She said she remembered our friendship and – music to my ears -- thought I could help.
I admit that I was leery at that first mention of help. More than leery. As I said, I had my own troubles. But everything about the moment felt destined to be. And the sound of her voice – forlorn and confident at once – cried out for intervention, for rescue. Perhaps this was finally the calling I’d been hoping for. To help a friend in need instead of being one. We talked for over an hour, her voice as gentle as a back rub. There was bitterness mixed into what she was telling me, but not the way I would have expressed it. There wasn’t an undertow of gripe that I know I would have brought to the conversation. It was during the course of our ramblings that the topic of Denver – a city recently clobbered by a blizzard -- came up and how it was one place she had always wanted to visit but never had. After telling her that I hadn’t either, I blurted out, “Why don’t we go?”
“Where? Denver?”
“Sure. It’s six hours away but a pretty straight shot on I-10. They’ve cleared most of the snow from what I hear. And I’d be happy to drive both ways – as long as you supply the wheels.”
She laughed and asked me how I knew she had just bought a new car and hated to drive.
“Seriously,” I said. “We’re still a couple weeks out from classes and I’ve got some vacay time. We’ll drive out and visit that strange and mysterious mile high city. Along the way, you can tell me your troubles and I’ll just listen. Just like you used to listen to me whine about the incoherence of Dean Mason’s commencement addresses.”
She laughed again and let her laughter trickle into a sigh. At that moment, I expected her to find an excuse to dismiss the idea, but she didn’t. Instead, she said that the suggestion sounded like it just might be the ticket. Then she added, “On one condition.”
“Shoot.”
“No strings attached,” she said. “A road trip among friends.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” I said. “Strictly friendship. With a little emotional and spiritual counseling on the side.”
And I truly meant it. But I’d be lying again if I said I didn’t think there might be more to the trip, not only for me and for her. But for me and her.
~ ~ ~
Two days later, I was sitting on the steps of my apartment building, scrolling through the mosh pit of email messages from my Department chair expressing anger at my last-minute leave request when Audrey pulled up in a lime green Chevy Spark that looked like a giant cough drop. I hitched my overnight bag onto my shoulder and strode out to greet her. I had taken only a few steps, but she was already out of the car and bouncing up the walk toward me. In a rush, she threw her arms around my neck and squeezed. I could feel the lightness and warmth of her body, which sent a quiver into the deepest regions of my reproductive nodes. When she pulled away, I got a good look at her.
I admit that I had been somewhat worried that the image I had of her would be jolted by the reality of a year spent apart. But she was, if anything, even prettier than I remembered. Her blonde hair was cut short and hung lank across her forehead. She had a molded face, almost doll-like, and was pale. But her green eyes were alive and bright and conveyed an intense happiness to see me that sent my heart and mind racing. Her face, in fact, was an event of excitement. She smelled faintly of lilac soap and something else, something a bit edgier that I couldn’t quite place.
She clasped her hands together in giddy excitement, “I can’t believe we’re doing this! You don’t know how badly Isaac and I needed to get away. You are absolutely our knight in shining armor.”
I leaned back, puzzled by the name “Isaac” but I shook it off as one might a playful yet unexpected slap across the face. I could see that there was no one else in the car so I chalked it up as not having heard her correctly. “Don’t go knighting me just yet,” I said. “We could get caught in another blizzard on the way to Denver and we’ll be drawing straws for who gets eaten first.”
“Friends don’t eat friends,” she said and we both laughed awkwardly until she held out a set of car keys with a large keychain emblazoned with ASPCA. “Now if I remember correctly, you did offer to drive, right?”
“Reporting for duty,” I said with a mock salute.
The smell hit me as soon as I pulled open the driver’s door. I pressed my fist instinctively up against my mouth and nose. By the time I sat down, one hand fumbling blindly for a lever to adjust the seat, I was nearly gagging. I tried holding back my shock with a bit of humor. “Sure didn’t take long to lose that new car smell, did it?”
“I know, I know,” she said, sliding in beside me. “Isaac had an accident on the way over. He hasn’t been feeling well.”
I coughed out, “Isaac?”
“My goodness, where are my manners?” She swiveled in the seat and pointed. “Let me introduce you to Isaac. Sir Isaac, to be exact.”
I craned my neck toward the back seat where she was gesturing and found myself looking down at the saddest excuse for a cat I think I’d ever seen. It looked right back at me, unblinking, sprawled across a dirty and threadbare blanket decorated with silhouettes of paws. The wedge of its head hung low and its tongue, like a strip of black rubber, peeked out from its whiskers. Audrey quickly explained that she had to bring the cat with us because in addition to the animal not feeling well, her husband had threatened to cat nap him – cat nap? -- and she didn’t trust her current roommate.
“You’re not allergic, are you?” she said.
Actually, I was allergic, but I lied and told her I didn’t think so.
She patted the purse on her lap. “I always bring along some allergy meds.” Then she winked at me. “Because you never know.”
After settling in, I engaged the GPS on my phone with the address of the Denver hotel that Audrey had reserved for our stay – a one bedroom suite with a kitchenette -- and we were soon on the move. According to the GPS, the time to target was 6 hours, 25 minutes. As I eased the car onto I-10 and into westbound traffic, I cracked the window in an attempt to cycle in some breathable air. Audrey ordered me to roll it back up. Isaac was very susceptible to cold air. Besides, I’d get used to the smell.
I didn’t care for her tone – a mix of schoolyard bully and maternal condescension – but I quickly reminded myself that I needed to stay focused. I had committed to being emotionless, to forgetting about my own break-up, the drama at work, the debt I had piled up. No, I was determined to be the sounding board for a change. To be the shoulder to cry on. This trip was going to be about someone else, someone not me.
As it happened, I doubt I would have gotten a chance to complain about anything anyway. After just a few minutes of small talk about endless reorganizing of college departments, Audrey began pummeling me with her problems. She unfurled them like unwashed laundry. She was, of course, most upset with her husband from whom she separated six months before and for whom she had retained one of the best lawyers in Kansas City. She relished the opportunity to get him into court because among his many faults, he was first-class cat abuser. She didn’t have any proof that he tortured Isaac – tortured? – but she was certain of it.
Then again – and this was the worst thing of all when it came to her life -- Isaac’s health was deteriorating rapidly. He was only 9 years-old but already had a case of the distemper, chronic diarrhea, renal failure, immunodeficiency virus and, although it had yet to be confirmed by blood tests, feline leukemia.
When I suggested that maybe she should have left him with some kind of cat-sitter, her tone turned dark and direct. “You don’t know the half of what those people do in those boarding houses. In some ways, they’re even worse than shelters.”
I feigned ignorance at the state of the animal boarding industry and listened to the tires sing on the metal grillwork of the bridge that separated Missouri from Kansas. I glanced down at the GPS. 6 hours, 12 minutes to destination.
~ ~ ~
Things began to go from bad to worse just west of Topeka. Audrey talked nonstop, casting aside punctuation and, it seemed, any intake of air to her lungs. Her husband was pretty bad, but it really all began with her father, a brilliant engineer who had invented a miniature coned explosive charge which helped propel satellites across space. The genius intellect belied a darker side. He was a ruthless disciplinarian and animal hater. When Audrey was ten, she had secretly taken in a pregnant stray cat that she named Sheba. Her father discovered the animal just before it was due to birth its litter and despite the girl’s anguished pleas, he scooped up the feline and drove outside the town limits, abandoning it in some alleyway in the dead of winter.
“Some genius,” she said and finally paused long enough to draw in and exhale a single deep breath. The silence didn’t last long because her husband apparently picked up where her father left off. He was a handsome physics professor and she his student and lover. In their courtship, he had expressed a love of animals great and small, but that all changed once they were married. It turned out that he was a secret cat hater too.
I listened and watched the road shimmer ahead. A flock of geese skirted across the gray sky above us, in perfect formation, leading us ever forward. It was then that I began to feel the weight of Audrey’s self-absorbed pain. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic. I never got the feeling she was even exaggerating. I just felt like I had overestimated my ability to help. I felt ill-equipped, a newly-minted priest thrust into a horde of sinners. When I did manage to get in a word edgewise, it was usually something feeble and predictable like, “Did you try marriage counseling?” But she quickly shot me down with a toss of her hands and a huff of disdain. “That’s a racket. Almost as bad as veterinarians.”
“Veterinarians?”
“Oh sure. Everyone makes a big deal about how long they go to school and how difficult it is to become a vet. Most of them are med school flunkies who barely made the grades. The rest don’t have the first clue about animals. Especially cats.”
I nodded knowingly as if what she was saying was common knowledge. What else could I do? I had no reference point with which to counter.
It was at that moment in the ride that Audrey launched into a blurry, two hour dissertation about – surprise, surprise -- cats. I don’t remember much because I blocked most of it out, but what I did hear was more information than I’d ever wanted to about the feline persuasion. When her monologue did pause, I tried my best to change the subject.
“Boy this car drives like a dream,” I managed which landed with a near-audible thud. She didn’t respond even as I tried to back-track. “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I think they’re fascinating. Cats, I mean.” The silence smothered the air between us as if the car was suddenly stuffed with cotton. Cotton soaked in cat urine. I could feel her eyes burning into me, doubting my sincerity. And she was right. I had grown up in a largely pet-free family in southeastern Missouri although there was a feral cat that used to visit our doorstep. My mother insisted I feed it a few times. Like Audrey, I applied a name to the cat. Chico. It was the color of rust and hissed whenever I tried to pet it. My older brother found it one morning flattened and frozen at the end of the driveway. My mother made me scrape it up with a flat-head shovel. Finally, I broke the silence with, “They can be a friend when no one else is around. And hey, they’re pretty nimble.”
This last declaration brightened her up. “They can rotate their ears 180 degrees, did you know that?” I didn’t. “It’s a good thing too because their hearing was five times more sensitive than an adult human.” You don’t say. “They don’t have any eye lashes either. And only four toes on each front paw although they do have five on the back. Some cats even have eight on each paw. Thirty-two total toes! Isn’t that something?” I’ll say.
It wasn’t long after the undulating road ahead began to give way to push and thrust of mountains in the distance. She was still talking when she was finally interrupted by her phone ringing which took several minutes to dig out of her purse. The call was someone named Wolfgang.
“Long time no hear, camper!” she said which was what she had said to me when I had answered the phone three days earlier. “I didn’t think you were ever going to call me back.” The conversation carried on for a good forty-five minutes. At no point did she offer slightest hint to the caller that she was with someone. I tried to ignore the rudeness of it all, hoping that Wolfgang was her brother or uncle. But it was clear he was another friend. I didn’t like the chirpy animation in her voice as she spoke to him – giving him the whole run-down of the marriage breakup that I had just endured. Wolfgang, I thought. What the fuck kind of name was that in this day and age? When she finally hung up – actually, I could tell he was the one to cut the call short – she resumed her monologue with nary an explanation.
And when I say monologue, I mean more cats. The ancient Egyptians, apparently, believed that every time you dreamt about a cat, your lifespan would be extended by a year. “Which is why they surrounded themselves with cats,” she said. Audrey turned and offered an air kiss to Isaac.
I adjusted myself and found the cat in the rear view mirror. It had not moved from when I had looked at him earlier. For all I know, he had never taken his mournful eyes off me. Save for the smell – to which I had begun to grow accustomed -- I forgot he was even there. “Doesn’t say much, does he?”
She smiled. “Oh, he’ll meow when he wants to say something, don’t you worry. In fact, meows are not innate cat language, did you know that? Cats developed the sound as a way of communicating exclusively with humans.”
That’s when she reached out and touched the back of my hand, which was resting on the gear shift. I looked over at her. Her green eyes shimmered back at me. She was smiling and I immediately resolved to stop my inner griping. As disinterested as I was in her recitations, I couldn’t deny that the sound of her voice – minus the content -- was soothing. The hum of the tires sucked up and obliterated any distinction of words she was saying. There was only a soft wake of her enunciations, like the ocean slapping the side of our boat. But it wasn’t long before she circled back to her troubles and the tone of her voice began to change. Resentful. Edgy. Grinding.
My hope began to diminish again. We were still a good 30 minutes from Denver and I was starving. But when I suggested we eat before checking in to the hotel, she removed her hand from mine, placing it back into her lap and slapping it lightly with the other as if it had been naughty. “Isaac can’t really be in the car for the time it takes for us to go in and eat,” she explained. “Besides, I brought along some groceries in the back.”
I barely heard the last part. Instead I was thinking: Why the fuck did you bring him on a six hour road trip? And what’s a little cold air compared to the rest of his ailments? And while we’re at it, who the fuck is Wolfgang?
When we arrived on the outskirts of Denver, I was certain the GPS had misdirected us. The off-ramp was pitted with potholes and we passed several shuttered businesses before a few sad-sack business establishments appeared like an army of ghosts. There was a McDonalds and a bus depot and a two-pump gas station that was unbranded save for a roadside sign that read GAS. Farther up the street looked like a mess of ill-lit, dreary housing projects and a strip mall with the usual fare of pawn shops, liquor stores, and an Asian market. By now, night had fallen and what street lamps were working gave the entire scene a blurry, congealed look.
Our home for the next four days – The Red Stag Inn – was just off this enticing thoroughfare. To say it was a dump was an insult to dumps the world over. It appeared to have evolved from military barracks of some kind. The building was narrow and long, made of cinder blocks painted white and sporting a peaked orange roof and orange doors. There were exactly two cars in the parking lot. A Chevy hatchback that looked like an abused older cousin of the car we were driving and a Mitsubishi pick-up. Both looked like they had been parked there forever.
After undoubtedly sensing my disappointment, Audrey explained that it was the only place she could book on such short notice and they took pets. But hey, we did get the suite with a kitchenette and bedroom. And she had already pre-paid so what was I complaining about.
Of course, outside of what I was thinking, I had not complained. But I was tired and after checking in, I decided to let it slide. It was a place to crash and lock up the cat. It’s not like we would be spending much time there.
This was a good thing, I decided, upon stepping inside the “suite.” The room smelled faintly of petroleum and sulfur. The carpet was threadbare and crackled under our feet. There were only three working lights in the small living room and that included the refrigerator light. I did a quick sweep of the bedroom and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was an inspector of condemned dwellings. As I made my way back to the front door, bolting and chaining it up tight, a siren wheezed in the distance and gradually grew closer until it burped once and stopped.
After washing up, I emerged from the bathroom to find Audrey in the kitchen, reading the back of a box of mac and cheese. “Whoa,” I said. “Before you break into our precious rations, what do you say I treat you to a nice dinner out?”
She started to answer but was cut short by a crash of something heavy in the bedroom. Isaac flew out of the room as I rushed in only to find the curtains pulled off the rod and in a heap like a giant crumpled flower. I went to the window and observed the sad rear of the motel – the remnants of snow mixed with twists of tree stumps and obscene tangles of machinery, abandoned and long past identification.
“Sir Isaac Newton!” Audrey shouted from the next room. “How many times have I told you about clawing at the curtains!”
It took me about a half hour to rig up the flimsy metal rods to reconnect the curtains. By that time, Audrey had finished setting the table with the mac and cheese and chopped up blackened sausage that she overcooked in butter and oil. She had also taken great care to prepare a meal for Isaac in the far corner of the room.
We ate mostly in silence, under a lone lamp that hung over the small round dining table. I flipped through an out-of-date local magazine I found in the bathroom called Mile High Happenings. The centerfold showed a map of Denver upon which one of the previous occupants had scrawled STINKIN SHITHOLE. I could hear Isaac prowling around behind me in the hush of darkness. From beyond, out in the doomed city, came the clack and pop of firecrackers or gunfire.
“Here’s an idea,” I said, referring to the guidebook. “We get an early start tomorrow, hit the Western Art museum before lunch. Says here it’s one of the best in the country. After that, maybe we can catch one of the Jazz acts downtown. Jack Kerouac raved about the Jazz in Denver, you know.”
Audrey forked more mac and cheese into her mouth and chewed grimly before finally looking up at me. Her eyes had turned glassy, giving her face a craggy and worn appearance. Isaac hissed at something in the corner of the room. I was about to speak again when Audrey dropped her fork onto her paper plate and began to cry.
I was suddenly disorientated, unable to move. I might as well have been grafted to the chair. I watched for a moment then finally reached for her hand. The grief that trembled in her tendons made feel hollow and useless, but I also felt the overwhelming need to ease her suffering. She took my hand and held it up to her wet cheek. I sensed that a moment of intimacy, even a kiss, was afoot, and I resolved to protest, to let her know that such was inappropriate in her current state and that we should both just go to sleep. That said, I couldn’t deny my attraction to her, despite the aggravation of the drive, her odd behavior, the comical depravity of the accommodations and inedibility of the food. But she beat me to it. “I hope,” she said, still caressing the back of my hand with her cheek, staring straight up into my eyes, “that you’re not expecting anything more.”
I offered a quizzical look and even glanced down at my half-eaten remnants of soggy, orange noodles. “What do you mean?” I said. “More of what?”
“I just don’t want to leave you with any false hope about…about us.”
“Hey,” I said, good-naturedly, retrieving my hand while feeling my chest clench in disappointment. “Road trip among friends, remember?”
To this she smiled, offered up the fakest yawn I’d ever seen and headed for the back bedroom, leaving the clean-up for me. As she glided away, she scooped up Isaac and placed him like a small sack of meal across her shoulder. Then she shut the door and I heard the ruthless, definitive click of a lock.
~ ~ ~
It was roughly twenty-four hours later that I found myself in an Uber, captained by a retired bus driver named Ralph Bruzinski who insisted I call him “Bud,” gliding through downtown Denver, a city I had never visited and never expected to be alone in. Why alone? Because by that time, it had become painfully obvious that Audrey wanted nothing to do with me – road trip among friends or not. I had spent the whole day prior trying to coax her out of the room. When she finally emerged, she looked like she’d been mugged. Gone were the bright smile, the delicate skim of make-up, the coiffed blond hair, the breezy travel wear. Her hair was now bedded to the side of her face, her skin greasy and unwashed. She wore a pair of dirty glasses askew on the end of her nose and a grubby t-shirt emblazoned with the words, Gravity? Never Heart of It!
She was also angry and appeared surprised to even find me there. After I gently reminded her that we had come together, she seemed to snap back to reality, long enough to insist that, by all means, I should go out and enjoy myself.
“Listen, I’ll stay with you,” I countered, although I didn’t really think I could stand another goddamned minute in that room.
She sighed in frustration. “You don’t understand. I want to be alone. And I can’t be. If you’re here. Alone, I mean.”
I fumbled for a response.
“I need you…” she started and paused.
My heart leapt and even though I knew I was hearing only what I wanted to hear, I said, “I know that and that’s why I want—“
“…to leave. I need you…to leave. Please.”
So I called Uber. And the aforementioned Bud. He was kind enough to drop me in what he described as a safe location downtown with easy access to bars and restaurants. I ended up wandering a few blocks before stepping into a bar from which thumped muffled, but lively music. The exterior was deceptive. On the inside, the bar was like a carcass rotting from within. There was a scent of spilled beer and incense and the music was decidedly neo-jazzy, which is to say off-key and out of tune, the way some Indian sitars sound. But I stayed anyway, hunched over a Jack and Coke at the bar– several Jack and Cokes, in fact. The TV was on above the mirrored bar back and there was some kind of film awards show playing. An actress – or singer – who looked vaguely familiar -- was on the screen holding up a silver statuette for all to see. I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the music, but it was clear she was complaining about her job, her life, and society in general. I tried to watch, along with two elderly men in Army field jackets beside me who started getting loud. They were arguing about what the actress was saying. I would have killed someone for some kind – any kind -- of sports, but didn’t say a word.
The bartender, a fresh-faced girl who looked too young to drink alcohol let alone serve it, asked me if I wanted another Jack and Coke. I asked her if that was a trick question. “Not really,” was her answer as she humorlessly fixed me another. I nodded with robotic appreciation. She positioned the drink in front of me and said, “Any interest in our smoking room?”
I didn’t think I heard her correctly.
She pointed behind me. “Our smoking room. It’s open for business. Only rule is, what you buy, you smoke. Oh, and you can only smoke it in there, not out here. Law of the land.” She shrugged as if to say, Whayda gonna do?
That’s when it struck me. The incense. The mellow, sitar-ish music. I slid off the stool and wandered back across the bar and through – of course – a doorway curtained with strings of beads and into a headshop.
A shaggy-haired man who looked like he might be the older brother of the bartender was arranging a colorful array of bongs on a nearby shelf. He greeted me with, “What can I get you, bro?”
“Whatever’s on tap,” I said and finally, I got a laugh.
I sat down with a fat, perfectly rolled joint in a corner club chair, surrounded by several other stoners who were way ahead of me. I only got through half of the joint when the weed – I hadn’t smoked since high school – hit me like a splash of warm water across the face. The THC conspired with the alcohol already in my system and immediately smoothed over my grouchy mood, giving the room and the whole wide world around it a calm, underwater glow.
That’s when I felt a muscle twitch in my elbow. I had my eyes closed, ignoring the twitching until it began to escalate. I finally glanced down at my arm to find a set of fingers with black nails prodding me.
A woman with dark hair and wild eyes was speaking to me. She was sitting deep in the club chair beside me and she was holding a book entitled, When You Have to Go, You Have to Go. “I said,” she said, “how’s the purple sinse?”
“Huh?” was all I could manage.
“The purple sinsemilla you just toked. Pretty good?”
Not wanting to give myself away, I shrugged and said, “I’ve had better.”
“Story of my fucking life,” she said and looked back down at the book.
I started at her, puzzling over the comment. That she’s had better was the story of her life? So I tried a follow-up. “Do you want to talk?”
“What?” she said.
“You nudged me,” I said, holding up my arm as if to prove it.
“You remind me of someone,” she said.
“Someone good or bad?”
She sighed, irritated. “I don’t really remember.”
I pointed toward the beaded curtain. “Do you want to get a drink?”
She looked at the doorway and then back at me, giving me the full bleary-eyed examination. “I don’t really drink,” she said. “Plus, I’m reading.” She held up her book as if to prove it.
“Is it good? The book?”
“It’s depressing. It’s about death.”
“Ah,” I said. With that, I was ready to let the conversation wither and, well, die. But she added, “It’s about accepting that death isn’t something that you do to yourself. It’s something you do for yourself.”
I nodded pointlessly, and said, “Did someone die?” I was starting to get unnerved, wanting only for the moment to end while also having lost control of my words before they tumbled out of my mouth.
“Someone’s always dying,” the girl said. “There’s no stopping death.”
I was about to agree to this universal truth when out of my mouth came, “Not if you dream about cats. According to the Egyptians anyway.”
The girl narrowed her eyes at me as if she understood me completely. But then shook her head, shuddering as if to clear out cobwebs."What?"
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve been high. In fact, I haven’t—“
Without warning, she broke into tears. She shielded her face and tears with the book. A young man in a Metallica T-shirt on the other side of the room hopped up and glided over to us. “What did you say?” he said to me. Not threatening, just a line of query.
“I don’t know.” I deepened my voice defensively, deciding that the kid looked like a ‘Wolfgang’ if anyone ever did. “In fact, I didn’t say a fucking thing, pal.”
“She’s not well,” he said.
“Don’t say that,” the girl said amid heaves, her words muffled by the book. “Don’t say that.”
I stood, wobbling in an attempt to steady myself. The young man obviously saw a threat in my movements and took a step back. “Be cool, man.”
Was I hallucinating it all? I thought. The need for another stiff drink to cut the high reached critical mass. I mumbled sorry again and pushed my way out through the bead curtain.
After bellying up to the bar for another Jack and Coke, I found myself staring at the mirror from which I could see the full expanse of the establishment. The place was more crowded now, with a few more people going in and out of the back room. Everyone looked down into their drinks. Into their empty palms. They were all miserable – just like me. I thought how much Audrey would be at home here. In fact, I resolved to mention to her that I had found the perfect dive for her. We were all inferior animals, noshing in a field of Jack and Coke and weed, contemplating the relief of death, as if in defiance of the hand life had dealt us.
Several more drinks later, I caught an Uber back to the Red Stag Inn, this time courtesy of a young Asian man named Pete. Pete was from New Jersey and loudly proclaimed his satisfaction at having broken every stereotype about Asian drivers. To prove it, he broke just about every speed limit by at least 20 mph, cutting off drivers as he went, one arm hanging limply over the steering wheel.
I didn’t care. I was thoroughly lit. I remember distinctly Pete asking me twice if I was going to throw up, each time after he’d swerved around a corner without so much as tapping the brakes. He even handed me an air sickness bag.
When we turned down the final street, he whistled and said, “You’re lucky. It’s pretty hard to get a ride to this part of town at this time of night. I figured you were okay though.”
“Really? I said. “How’d you figure that?”
“You look pretty stoned for one. You smell pretty stoned too. But seriously, this ain’t the place to be when the darkness falls, trust me.”
“I’m staying there with a friend.”
“Is he a crack dealer?”
I was ready to push back when Pete’s foot finally discovered the brake pedal and he said, “Whoa, horsey.” His face reflected back the bruised blue of police lights.
There in front of us was a cop car, lights tapping out its multicolored Morse code. A hulking figure of a cop stood in the doorway of the suite from which I had been banished earlier that day. After settling up with Pete, I hurried over. The cop had both hands on his hips and I could see Audrey’s sallow face framed by one of his arms, her teeth gritted against the cold. She pointed at me and the cop turned around and retreated away from the door, one hand slipping down atop his pistol butt and the other finding its way to his nightstick handle.
A thousand scenarios jumped through hoops in my drunken, stoned head. As I approached, the cop asked me to identify myself. When I did, he slapped the chest plate of Kevlar vest and snapped, “Motherfucker. Try to get this under control, please.”
Even sober, my brain probably wouldn’t have processed his vulgarity. So I started speaking, asking what was going on three times, slurring every word. He shook his head through it all and said, “What’s going on is your wife called 911 to report you missing.”
“I’m not missing,” I said, pointlessly. “I went downtown.” When he just stared back at me, I added, “And she’s not my wife. We’re just friends. That was the condition of our--”
“Whatever,” he snapped. “She said you didn’t know your way around.” At this point, he reached out and jabbed my shoulder with his gloved finger as if to test whether I would fall backwards. “That’s not what we do, buddy, understand? We’re not fucking babysitters.”
I opened my mouth, but the cop just kept shaking his head at me as if he’d heard it all before. “Just get her under control, please. I don’t want to have to come back here, understand? Believe me, you don’t want me to come back here.”
When the motel door shut behind me, I just stared at her, my eyes teared up from the sudden and intense warmth of the room. “Why did you --?” I started but she had already broken down and began to cry. She just stood in front of me, shaking and crying.
“I knew you weren’t missing,” she said through her tears. “I just didn’t know what else to do. And I didn’t want to tell the police the real reason I called.” Her chest heaved. “I knew they wouldn’t understand. I knew only you could understand.”
“Understand what, Audrey?” I said, trying hard to stifle the irritation. “Jesus, what the fuck?!”
She pitched suddenly forward as she had done the day before and threw herself into my arms. We both almost tumbled backward into the kitchenette. “It’s Isaac,” she said, her entire body shuddering as if she had just burst in from the cold. “He’s dying!”
~ ~ ~
The 24-hour emergency veterinary clinic, the closest we could find, was on the other side of town. It took us about 45 minutes to get there, even though we were driving through largely deserted streets. We probably could have arrived earlier, but Audrey was directing us with the GPS on her phone and she kept forgetting to tell me when to turn. Her attention was devoted to Isaac who lay across her lap, shrouded in a cheap white towel from the motel. Another contributing factor to our slow progress was that I was still pretty drunk and a probably still little stoned. It was all I could do to keep the car moving steadily forward into the gloom of the city streets. A thin sift of snow began to fall, hazing my vision, creating an illusion of calm beyond the throb of the wipers.
She had called ahead, of course, so the skeleton crew of exactly one vet and one assistant received and hustled Isaac and Audrey into one of the examination rooms in the back. I probably should have gone with her, but I remained in the waiting area and flipped through brochures with titles like Keeping Anxious Fido Calm and, amusingly enough, Don’t Let Kitty Come Between You and Your Love Life.
There was a covered bird cage in one corner that rattled every so often. After about half an hour, Audrey emerged with Isaac cradled in her arms, cooing at him like a mother released from the hospital with a newborn. The vet, an older man with a stark white goatee and kindly blue eyes, strode right over to me. Despite the kindness of his eyes, his shoulders were hunched and he looked frail and tired. I sympathized. He took a few moments to search out my full attention – he hadn’t missed the fact that I was intoxicated -- and then spoke slowly, offering a few questions which I deflected to Audrey. “It doesn’t belong to me,” I kept saying, like a witness invoking his right against self-incrimination. “You need to ask her.”
Undeterred by my absence of sympathy, the vet patted me gently on the shoulder. He whispered, “Take it easy now. We’ll get through this.”
I answered by looking down at my watch. “Soon?” I had clearly entered the drunk, exhausted, and sick-of-the-bullshit phase.
He sighed. “Look, as I explained to your wife—“
“Whoa – not my wife, pal,” I said, scoffing for emphasis. “We’re on a road trip among friends.”
“Yes, well, nevertheless, I can give him something for the pain, but that’s really it. In fact, I haven’t seen a cat in this bad of shape for quite a few years and I’ve seen a lot in that time period. The most humane option – really, the only option as far as treatment goes -- is to put the animal down.”
“I appreciate that, but what am I supposed to do? Like I said ten times, it’s her fucking cat.”
“Can you talk to her at least? She doesn’t even want to consider it and I think she needs to.”
I stared into his evenly spaced, appropriately furrowed eyes which I now began to see as less kind and more diabolical.
I swayed across the room and took a seat beside Audrey. She was rocking the cat back and forth. Somewhere in depth of the sterile facility, a dog yelped once and was silent. “Audrey,” I said as softly as I could manage.
“Yes?” she said, almost singing the word.
“Maybe we need to think about the, uh, humane option.”
“You mean the death option?”
“At a certain point,” I said, letting the words tumble from my mouth. “it stops being about Isaac. It starts being about what you’re doing to the cat, not for the cat. And that’s not fair to Isaac. Or you. Or anybody.”
Audrey kept rocking. Finally, she looked up, her face streaked with the faint remnants of her tears. A single tuft of cat hair was stuck to one of her cheeks. “So you agree with him?” she said. “With the so-called doctor?”
“Yes, Audrey,” I said. “I do agree.”
“Then all I need from you is for you to get me out of here. Now. As in, right. This. Minute.”
With that, we were back in the giant green cough drop. The cat was back on her lap, stretched across her thighs like a pelt. It groaned at the world with a sound like nothing I had ever heard from any animal, let alone a cat. It was a death moan, the wheeze of an old screen door about to topple from its hinges. I thought we would end up riding back to the motel in silence, but Audrey began talking, lecturing, as if in answer to a student’s question. She talked about the Middle Ages of all things and something she called Great Cat Holocaust of 1347. Cats all over Europe were systematically slaughtered, she explained. Gangs of cat killers roamed the cities, villages, and country farms, killing cats by smashing their skulls against trees and rocks, getting paid by the sack full. She waited for this grisly trivia to settle on me and then said, with intense earnest: “Do you know why they did it? Why they killed all those cats? And don’t say it was because they thought cats were inferior animals – although that was true. Seriously, do you know?”
I stared ahead and navigated the unfamiliar city streets with surprising ease. The sun was coming up, painting a sick yellow paste across the blight of our temporary neighborhood. My head was aching. I didn’t have the first fucking clue why long dead peasants killed their cats.
“Because they believed the Black Death was a result of witchcraft and cats were associated with witches. As a result, the flea-bitten rats – which we know now were the true source of the Plague—flourished.” Her hand began to smooth out Isaac’s ragged fur, and she said, in a voice soaked with sadness and regret, “Mankind was nearly wiped out.”
I felt a deep yawn coming on and did my best to stifle it. Once back in the motel room, Audrey hustled the shrouded, dying cat straight into the bedroom and shut the door behind her without so much as a good night. I waited a moment for the door lock to sound, but didn’t hear it.
The room was ice cold so I fiddled with the thermostat on the wall before giving up. I started for the couch, thinking briefly about whether or not to take my shoes off. Sleep must have been instantaneous because I don’t remember making the decision to leave them on (which, I discovered the next morning, turned out to be my decision).
I do remember the dream though – clearly prompted by Audrey’s historical recitations. It wasn’t a dream about Egyptians. I wasn’t lazing by the banks of the Nile, surrounded by frolicking felines lapping up goat’s milk from gold-plated saucers.
No, I dreamed I was sitting in a wooden cage, naked and freezing like a refugee, my cellmates scores of mangy, feral cats. The cage stood in the shadow of a castle wall, a castle under siege by a medieval army, complete with battering rams, catapults, and yes, grappling hooks tossed over the parapets. The din and iron clank of the battle all around was deafening, but the cats showed no fear. And every time I reached down to caress one of them, it craned its back and hissed at me.
These raspy hisses carried a message that was clear and cutting. Outside the cage was life, violent and unforgiving though it was. Inside was hopelessness and death. So who was I to complain or condemn? I – and they – were trapped in the smallest of worlds, the world of emotional pain and isolation. We were all just waiting. Waiting for our turn to be bashed against the killing tree.
~ ~ ~
I emerged from what felt like a coma about noon, my face pressed into the stained, sweat-dampened couch cushion that I had used as a pillow. There was a vague drift of sound that spiked suddenly when I opened my eyes, as if synchronized to the second my mind became aware I was still alive. It was the soft sound of a woman singing.
I forced myself into a sitting position. The relentless, nauseating smell of frying egg whites hit my nose like a punch. I fought off a gag reflex and managed a hollow groan. Turning left and then right, my eyes settled on the kitchen. Audrey was there, humming to the kiss of saucer and cup, the scrape of spatula and skillet. She did not appear aware of me until she stopped singing and I heard her say, “I can tell you want something, handsome. I sure can.”
I was about to say that it smelled good when she kept talking, “It won’t do any good to flash those big, beautiful eyes at me. You know the rules. No second helpings. Just like everyone else.”
That’s when an answer came in the form of a robust and healthy mew. Isaac. Sir Isaac to be exact.
I stood and stumbled forward. In just three steps, I managed to ram my shin into the glass coffee table and almost twist my ankle.
“Ah,” she said brightly at me. “I’d say, look what the cat dragged in, but that might not be too appropriate.”
I reached for and clasped the edge of the kitchen table like a blind man and settled heavily into one of the wicker chairs. Isaac was instantly at my feet, rubbing up against my shins. Audrey came around the counter and placed a cup of coffee in front of me even as I was shaking my head no. She sat down beside me and sighed through a bright smile that looked frozen on her face.
“How’re you feeling?” she said, her voice kind and curious.
I could only shake my head again. Had things really ended so disastrously the previous night? Had I imagined it all? The cat seemed not only alive and well, but fused with renewed energy. It circled my leg affectionately, a younger version of the hot mess it had been just hours before.
“Notice anything about Isaac?”
I sipped the coffee, burning my upper lip. “Much better,” I croaked.
She nodded and stirred her own coffee, peering as if searching for a sign of good fortune in the ink black of the cup.
“A miracle,” I said.
“Yes. A miracle.” She continued to stir the coffee and there was something about the way she kept doing it. The needless repetition, the uncompromising clink of steel on porcelain.
“I’m happy for him,” I said. “I’m happy for both of you.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said, finally looking up at me, her expression forming into a cruel, almost predatory stare. “Of course, if it were up to you,” and here she stopped stirring and allowed a beat of heavy quiet to settle between us, “Sir Isaac would be dead.”
The weight of everything – the trip, the night, the Jack, the weed, the cat – pressed onto my shoulders like a flak jacket. “Audrey, listen…”
“I want you out,” she said carefully in words that she had clearly rehearsed. “I don’t ever want to see you again. If I ever do see you again, I’ll call the cops.”
“You—“ I stopped myself, felling a rush of a hundred things to say, to hurl back at her. But I couldn’t spit them out. My mouth was too dry. Instead, I stood up and shuffled around like a hung-over zombie, gathering up and stuffing my meager belongings into my back-pack, taking a moment to look at Isaac who had stopped his strutting around the room to watch me with droopy-eyed feline curiosity.
I don’t recall much of the next hour. I do know that my sense of anger and frustration evaporated into a sense of thankfulness that the day, although somewhat brisk, was sunny, the air light and clean. I was determined to get home and to be home and I didn’t care about the obvious obstacles to making this happen. I had no car. My cell phone battery was dead. But I was only a five-minute walk from the bus station. The ticket cost me everything I had in my pockets.
I waited about an hour and was the first passenger to board the bus so I took a seat in the last row, wanting only to be left alone. I dozed while keeping one eye slightly open as the bus filled to near capacity. As we neared our departure time, I was still alone in my row and was relieved that it would stay that way until I noticed three Catholic nuns in full regalia floating down the aisle.
Two of them peeled off and sat with other passengers. The third, a short woman who looked about my age, continued down the aisle, her regal head turning fluidly from side to side, passing several open seats. I thought, No way. Please God, no. After all that’s happened, don’t do this to me. I briefly considered my four years of Catholic school, my abandonment of the faith, my ultimate conviction that religion was for suckers and drug-addicts.
The nun took a seat beside me. I shifted and continued to pretend I was sleeping. The driver announced last call and I heard the whoosh of hydraulic breaks releasing. All the while I kept thinking – no praying – that the nun beside me wouldn’t say a word to me all the way home to Kansas City. But she said, “Wow, you look wiped out.”
I shifted again, resigned now to my fate. “Thanks,” I said.
She leaned over without quite turning her head – as if her habit restricted her movement. “Sorry, I know you’re not supposed to talk on buses.”
“Really? I didn’t get that memo.” I made a show of looking at my ticket. When I realized how rude – and stupid - the joke was, I said. “Look, I’m just tired. And really, really…”
“Wiped out?”
I smiled. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
She sighed, smoothing out her smock. “Believe me, I know the feeling.” She must have sensed my skepticism because she added, “You’d be surprised how difficult this job is.”
“I thought that was part of the appeal. What makes it so tough?”
She smiled easily at me. “You first,” she said, and I thought, Jesus, am I really talking to her? Am I reallly about to engage in a potentially endless conversation?
I leaned back in the seat and looked heavenward. “Don’t get me started, Sister, or you’ll be Hail Marying for me to stop.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Makes the trip go faster. And I’m a great listener.”
I stared out the window. The bus lurched through the last city intersection and rumbled toward the freeway. A flock of geese – out of formation and flying toward the city – spirited across my line of sight before disappearing. “On one condition,” I finally said.
“Name it.”
“You tell me your problems after I tell you mine.”
“Deal.”
I took a deep breath. The now out-of-sight geese honked from somewhere in the distance and the sky was bare and blue. I don’t remember if I ever stopped talking before we arrived home. Maybe the nun did tell me her troubles in the end. If she did, they weren’t the least bit memorable. Or maybe her troubles and anxieties just weren’t that much different than mine. Besides, what difference did it really make who needed to be heard and who needed to listen? I was going home. I was going to live for myself. I was going to be who I was, who I always would be. And that was all that mattered.
