Giving Up (11 page)

work. And because this had become such an issue, even though I never really thought about it before (whether I believed in James or not) ,now it was something I thought about all the time. As I sat there at my computer looking at pictures Jen and Damion had posted from the night we came close to having a threesome, I wondered if maybe James was right, and that even though I loved him I never really believed in him, which is only to say that I've never thought of what he did down in the basement as something to believe in or not to believe in. I'm being completely honest when I say that it didn't matter to me whether he was a genius or just some guy fooling around by himself in his man-cave. It's a cliché, but I love him the way he is, which doesn't mean that I don't think there isn't room for improvement in certain areas, but, just like how I've been meaning to learn an instrument, or start a small business, or take a language class, or all the other things I plan on doing but never really get around to, it didn't matter to me whether he ever got around to making any of the improvements I thought he could stand to make. That is what I meant by
fine the way he is
. Not that he's flawless, just that I've made peace with the flaws. And I don't get why he couldn't see that it didn't matter to me what he did down in the basement so long as he was happy, or why I had to constantly reassure him by saying that I believed in what he was doing. It bothered me that he didn't really understand how I felt about him, or that if he did it was cancelled out by his own doubts about himself, which were pretty severe. It was at some point during this Facebook trance that I realized the cat was in the hallway. I must've already heard something by then but I ignored it or explained it away without even being conscious of what I was explaining. Sometimes I'm able to convince myself with the most far-out explanations for something without understanding what I'm hearing or seeing or feeling. Just last month there was an earthquake. Small. Only four point five or something like that. But large enough. I had just put some water on to boil when everything started to shake. If you've been through one then you know what it's like. The closest comparison I can think of would be having a train pass right by your bedroom window, but without the train noise, and since I wasn't
expecting
an earthquake – they never happen here or anywhere else I've lived, and this was my first – I thought that what was happening was anything
except
an earthquake. The first thing that occurred to me was that the water must be boiling so much that it was shaking the kitchen. This, of course, is insane. But this is the sort of stuff I come up with. I had put the water on not even a minute before so it was impossible that it had already started to boil, and even it if were possible there's no way that a boiling kettle can shake a kitchen, let alone an entire building – which was what was really happening – the way that an earthquake can. I immediately realized how crazy it was to think that the kettle was the reason for what was happening, but my next idea was just as ridiculous – I thought that my neighbours were doing laundry. I even listened for the sound of a dryer coming through the walls, but I eventually realized that this was just as stupid as the kettle theory. By that point I was panicking because I couldn't make sense of what was going on and just as I was considering whether it was a low-flying plane, the shaking stopped, and just as abruptly I stopped thinking about what had happened. I should've been at least mildly disturbed. I should've checked online at least, but I didn't think about it again until the next morning when I was listening to the radio and I found out that it
had
been an earthquake. I was shocked. An earthquake – and I had tried to explain it away by a boiling kettle, or a loud dryer, or a low-flying plane, and when each of these didn't hold up, I simply forgot about it. It reminded me of this time I had seen a couple arguing outside of a club and then read in the paper, the next day that a woman had been murdered outside of a club by her boyfriend. I was sure that the woman I had seen was the murder victim in the paper and for a moment I considered calling the police, but I eventually let it go. I feel like this happens all the time, all this tragic shit is going on and most of the time we don't even know it. The moment you walk out the door there's a very good chance you're going to pass someone on the street who is going through a serious crisis. But most of the time you walk by without even noticing. It's like that story Veronica told me about somebody she works with who was living next to a dead guy for a month. Apparently she'd just moved in and met her neighbour in the hallway that night and then never saw him again. She never heard him either, even though the previous tenant had warned her that the walls were thin. Every night she watched TV in her apartment she would wonder why she couldn't hear anything coming from the other side of the wall. Then she noticed a smell. At first she thought it might be a plumbing issue, but when she called and complained they sent someone to check and nothing was wrong with her pipes. The smell didn't go away though and eventually she called again to complain and this time the super decided to check next door. She was with him when he let himself into the apartment and they found her neighbour's body decomposing in his bed. But it doesn't even have to be that dramatic. You might find out that someone you worked with was going through the worst time of their life, and when you look back through your memory to see if you missed something, it doesn't take long to realize how obvious it should've been that they were in pain. It's not that you're ignorant about what goes on in other people's lives, it's just that you've got your own shit to worry about. When the cat first came through the front window screen I ignored it. More specifically, I thought to myself, ‘That must be coming from next door.' But then I heard something else, a breathing or sneezing sound. I knew right away that it belonged to a cat. Our street was crawling with them. Since we'd moved in there'd been a couple of cat incidents. James liked to keep the screen open in the basement because he said he needed fresh air, but this meant that our neighbour's cat would stroll in. After the second time he came into our kitchen we started keeping the screens shut. Now, I thought, the sounds had initially come from the front room. It was definitely a sneezing sound that I was hearing. I found myself wondering what sort of diseases cats can pass on to humans. I was pretty sure rabies was one of them. I felt sick to my stomach all of a sudden. The idea of a rabid animal in my apartment was literally sickening. I have nothing against cats. We had one growing up. I've never thought about getting one but I understand the appeal – they're cute. To each their own, I guess, but since our neighbour's cat started coming into our place I've been having nightmares of my bed being invaded. Needless to say, the moment I heard the sound of a sneezing cat in the front room I prayed it would go away. And for a moment, when the sneezing stopped, I even managed to convince myself that it had gone back out the window. Then the sneezing started up again and I knew that I was going to have to do something. There was a part of me that was considering all sorts of fucked-up possibilities, scenarios that were horrifying and totally realistic. But I never gave them any serious consideration, and they didn't develop beyond a flurry of sensations that crowded out my thoughts, like the way that darkness surrounds the headlights of an approaching car, so you only focus on what you can see, and take it on faith that nothing is going to come hurtling out of the darkness and throw itself in your way. Since my neighbour's cat had come into my apartment before, it was understandable to suspect that the noises I heard were coming from him, or from a stray in the alley out back, so I naturally ignored my more irrational fears (like a home intruder) and zeroed in on the cat theory. I grabbed the broom from the kitchen and ran back just in time to catch the cat coming into the hallway. All the lights were out except for the reading lamp by the couch where'd I'd been sitting, and the glow from the laptop that I'd put on the coffee table, still open on Veronica's Facebook page. I didn't recognize the cat. It was puffy and dark and moving slowly, but not with the usual alert caution, that way they have when they are exploring a new place – this was more like the weary movements of a cow, a sort of slow plodding that freaked me out. I expected the cat to be afraid of me but it kept coming at me. It kept its head low and swung it side to side, which only enhanced its resemblance to a cow, and I could see that there was something hanging from its mouth. At this point, I realized that it was making a sucking sound, like a drooling baby with a mouthful of candy. The thing in its mouth was limp and dark and stringy. All at once I felt a revolting mix of anger and pity. I assumed it had caught a mouse and that the sucking sound was something it did when it was excited, or that this was the sound cats made when they held mice in their jaws, and the reason it was coming right at me without any sign of fear was that it was proud of itself and was showing off its catch. Some of my friends own cats and I've heard them tell stories about waking up to find a bird on their pillow, or finding a mouse resting on the welcome mat as they are on their way out the door to work, but this wasn't my cat, and it didn't look anything like the neighbour's cat, which was smaller and had shorter hair, so why would it bring a mouse into my apartment? I wanted it to go away. Why did it pick my apartment? Why didn't it bring this mouse to somebody else? Even now that it was in my apartment, why couldn't it tell that I was angry and scared? Why didn't it leave? I thought cats and dogs were supposed to be all in tune with people's emotions. Not this one. It just kept coming at me with that stupid walk, making that gross Silence of the Lambs sucking noise. I started yelling at it to keep back but it actually started coming even faster. I stuck the broom out and pushed it into its face. Instead of scurrying away like I expected, she collapsed face-first onto the floor. Her movements were so clumsy, not like any cat I had ever seen. I was literally horrified. Like pretty much everybody else in the world, I have a deep fear of anything unusual. I know it's not cool to admit to that sort of thing. Everyone likes to pretend that they don't get freaked out by stuff that is out of the ordinary, but of course most people do get freaked out when they see something weird, or gross. At least I can admit it. Whenever I see someone with a deformity I can't help but be completely terrified. I know it's wrong, and that someone with a deformity is just as natural, or as freakish, as someone who's perfectly normal, but knowing this doesn't seem to change how I feel about it. There was something
off
about the way the cat reacted when I shoved the broom in its face. I wouldn't have been able to articulate it then, but now I would say that it seemed indifferent, or at least it seemed unafraid, which freaked me out. I tried to sweep it towards the kitchen – my plan was to kick it out the back door – but it flattened itself to the floor and as I was trying to push it forward it managed to squeeze itself under the couch. This only made me crazier. ‘This
thing
thinks it can just stroll into my apartment with a bloody mouse in its jaws and hide out under my couch,' I thought. ‘Like I don't have enough problems already, now I have to deal with some feral animal that's all high from killing a mouse?' I got down and jammed the broom under the couch. I could feel the weight of the thing against the handle, but I didn't look to see where it was. I didn't want to see it. The way it hung its head and the look of the bloody mess in its jaws made me nauseous. Even as I was crouched down on the floor trying to pry it from under the couch I was already remembering the image of the cat – whose head, I now realized, had a weird, box-like shape to it – and while the actual moment only lasted a second, it felt like I now had the ability to pause the image and examine it with the sort of deep focus of a witness who, after a crime has been committed, is brought in to stare at a series of photos, or a composite sketch, or maybe even the actual face of the suspect, so that they can take all the time in the world to figure out what it was (and who it was) that they really saw. Back in the hallway, when the cat was coming towards me, I'd been so freaked out I almost ran out the back door. Somehow I managed to overcome this urge, but, once I did, the next thought I had was to get the cat out of the apartment. I experienced all of this before I even really saw the cat. Everything happened all at once, and at some point I focussed in on the thing dangling from its mouth. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What
is
that?' and then I immediately decided, ‘It must be a mouse.' But as I was trying to pry her loose (she'd turned on her back and dug her claws into the bottom of the couch), I found myself stuck on this image of the cat coming towards me in the hallway. At the same time as I was frantically trying to get the cat out the back door, I was calmly reviewing the memory of my initial encounter with the cat just seconds before, and, just as I felt it give way a bit, I realized that the thing in the cat's mouth didn't look anything like a mouse. For a second I almost stopped. I probably let up a bit. The cat was desperate to stay under the couch. I could feel her fighting against the broom. The truth is, I wasn't doing a good job – I didn't have a very good grip on the broom so I couldn't put a lot of strength into it – and even though I desperately wanted the cat out of the apartment, a very significant part of me was scared to have to see it again. I managed to drag her to the edge of the couch. This was strange too. On the one hand, it was obviously desperate to stay hidden and was doing everything it could to resist the broom, but on the other hand it seemed listless, like its heart wasn't in the fight, and I remember thinking that for a stray cat it wasn't very wild. Where was the snarling? The hissing? I'd seen cats in fights – they go crazy. They flail and squirm and basically turn into little tornadoes of panic and fury. This one was almost limp, as if she'd more or less given up and was only making a show of resisting when it was actually looking forward to being captured, or killed (since I expect that most animals, no matter how domesticated, always assume that when someone comes at them with a broom it's because they plan on killing them). I couldn't understand why it was so intent to stay under my couch when to do so meant fending off my broom attack, and even though I was terrified of the cat's oddly shaped head and the bloody mass in its mouth, and had to fight the urge just to run out of the apartment and wait for James to get back and take care of it, I could feel a sense of outrage building up inside of me. It doesn't make any sense, really, but I felt that the way this cat had invaded my apartment was totally unfair. I realize that ‘fairness' doesn't really apply to the behaviour of stray cats and that it was just as ridiculous to take offense if it rains when you're on vacation. You spend your days in the hotel room trying not to let it get to you but it's impossible not to feel like life is messing with you, testing you, or even that the actual weather was conspiring against you, as if nature was something with a personality, and was being a bit of a prick. I know how narcissistic this must sound, and I know that the cat didn't come into my apartment because of some grand design, or in order to torment me, or as a sign or symbol of my fate, but that it picked my place at random (well, almost at random, since James must've opened the window before he went on his break). There's a huge gap between knowing something is true and actually believing it, and at that moment what I truly believed in my heart of hearts was that this cat was deliberately messing with me, or that someone had sent it in order to mess with me. Of course nobody was messing with me, it was just bad luck, for the both of us, especially for the cat, who thought she might be safe in my apartment (the chances were in her favour since this is a cat-friendly neighbourhood and I expect most people wouldn't have reacted the way I did), but now that I was crushing it with a broom she was obviously afraid for her life. She was terrified that once she was out in the open I would catch her and kill her. This was all that was going on. Just a frightened stray. But I didn't believe it – or maybe I kind of believed it, but I definitely didn't