Cat

A fiction

Today’s post is a short story I keep rewriting. In case you are interested, I rewrite everything I post a zillion times. I will keep rewriting this story. I see new possibilities in a thing when time passes and I go back to it. It’s one way of working. I guess.

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Yesterday I participated in a videoed discussion of Martha Stewart’s body hosted by

Sari Botton

. She will post the conversation this Friday, and I will post a link when it’s up. The short version of my take on things is: It's not the job of a person with a body to calm the anxieties of people living in different kinds of bodies.

CAT

I was sitting beside a stranger on a train when we passed the house where I had lived as a child. It was surrounded by tall trees whose names I didn’t know. Limbs would fall, and I would crack them over my knee like bones. I held the stranger’s hand under his coat. I could have left it at that.

He was drinking from a flask. He said, “What were you like as a child?” I said, “I stole other people’s stories.” He said, “All children do that.” Did they, really? I was prepared to believe what he said. It was relaxing. I liked him. It was a sense of trust, whatever that means. He said, “One day when I was drunk, I fell down a flight of stairs and cracked my head. When I woke up, an angel was sitting on my bed. She had red hair and she said she loved me. After that, I stopped drinking, but only for a while.” He smiled. Was it a sad smile? How can you figure out strangers? The pleasure of a stranger is the pleasure of nature. It’s beyond our capacity to know it, because we are outsiders.

I had a friend her father owned a seaplane, and he would take her flying. I told people I had flown in this plane. I said that clouds and foam looked pretty much the same from the air as they did from the ground. I didn’t want her father to be my father. He was a pretty unhappy man. He had one of those mouths that’s a straight line. I wanted to have been somewhere, and I wanted what other people had.

I said, “What do you do when you aren’t riding trains?” The man had gray eyes. He said, “I study aging in cells.” When he said the words aging in cells, I fell in love. It felt like being swooped up in the mouth of something. I said, “How do cells age?” He said, “All organisms are subject to damage, but younger organisms have more stem cells, which repair damage. Aging is the failure to repair damage.” This put a new light on everything. Do you know the sensation when you’re in a strong emotion, and you have no idea why?

We passed a farmhouse. There were cakes of snow on the slanted roof. The sun was gleaming on the whiteness. It hurt my eyes, but it was impossible not to look at it. The snow was melting in streams. I could see into the rooms. In one was the head of an elk, mounted on a wall, its antlers branching out on either side, its mouth curved up at the ends like a smile, a coin of light glinting off a large glass eye. Maybe elks were happy most of the time.

I’d bought a ticket to the end of the line. I thought I would walk to the airport from there and fly somewhere new. I could see myself as a series of beeping lights, pulsing along. The stranger moved his face close to mine, and I smelled whiskey on his breath. He said, “What do you pretend to like?” I said, “Clothes.” His hip pressed against mine. I could have left it at that. It was cold on the train. He said, “What do you do when you aren’t riding trains?” I said, “I design sets for plays.” He said, “You’re an artist.” I said, “I make frames for artists to work in.” 

Suddenly the man jumped up and pointed to the seat across from ours. A mouse had scurried up and was circling around with its thin, sad tail. It had a fat brown body. It moved to the window, and we followed its gaze to a baleful winter garden, studded with dead stalks. The stranger snatched up the mouse in a way not to hurt it. I could see its fur quivering in his large hands, and I tried to remember the last time I had eaten something. I wondered what those hands would feel like on me. He said, “I’ll set it free when the train slows,” and off he went to the end of the car and opened the door, leaving nothing behind.

I counted the seconds he was gone and thought of calling my mother, who was dead. In my thoughts I said to her, “Mom, have you ever felt suspense that comes out of nowhere? Suddenly, you’re hanging by a thread. I love the sensation of not knowing how it will end.” I remembered the man’s face. There were deep, vertical grooves beneath his nose. One side of his face had been cast in shadow the whole time we’d talked. The dark side of the moon.  

By the time the train pulled into the last station and the man had not returned, I felt a sense of heaviness it didn’t seem possible to recover from. Love is love. I honestly liked that about love, and I didn’t want to feel bad about liking it. Humans do this thing of retelling a story if the ending makes them sad. They retell it so they could have avoided the sadness if only they’d looked. All the signs were there, staring them in the face. We don’t look. That’s the fun.

I walked in no particular direction away from the train station until arriving at a row of tents grown up along the concrete embankment of a dry river. The tents were not really tents when you drew closer. They were blankets and sheets propped on tree limbs and other makeshift stakes. It had rained the night before, and the ground was strewn with the scaly remnants of clothes and packing crates.

I wondered about the people who had drifted there. The climate was mild, and I remembered a time I hadn’t strictly speaking lived in a house. One summer I lived in a potato field with the friend whose father had a seaplane. We slept in a shed, becoming poisoned by pesticides. Our movements slowed, and the edges of colors faded until we returned to college in the fall. While we were being poisoned, I told her I had stolen her story, and she told me what basically the man on the train would later say—“The things we remember didn’t happen to us.” We brushed off the danger of the pesticides. We were young and didn’t know how easily things ended. It made us carefree in a way you can’t recover after a certain amount of time has slipped through your fingers. By then, you are just like an aging cell.

I could think of reasons the stranger hadn’t returned, and the openness of the question moved up and down me as I breathed. He was a drunk. It made me think of all the things that were wrong with me. A certain kind of softness falls over you from failure. 

As I stood there, wondering where to go next, a cat moved up from the encampment to the bridge where I was stopped. The cat was black, and sleek, and muscular, with white whiskers and gold eyes. The cat understood the radical rupture from the natural world that humans experienced because of language and the way they could makes things up in their minds. The cat rubbed its head against my leg, hard and insistent. And as I knelt to touch it, I lost interest in searching for the man. Not really, or why would I be telling you this?