The Cat by Jay Squires Story of the Month contest entry Artwork by seshadri_sreenivasan at FanArtReview.com |
The cautiously inhaled, thick, sweet, warm scent of it lodges high in the nostrils. So high, I’m sure, that only a thin, squeaky-tight stretch of skin separates it from the base of the brain, where the aging Queen Amygdala, cushioned in the cerebrum she calls home, captures the whiff of it, and within a hundredth of a second, sends out her smoky tendrils down the slippery pons. There she easily penetrates that membranous wall, swirls and drifts and sniffs, depositing a residue of her swampy warnings in the pit of my stomach. Then, with amygdalaic omniscience, she recedes to her brain cave. Oh, have no doubt that she visited. And that she’ll be back. She’ll slip in, now and again, to make sure my forebrain hasn’t trespassed with its ponderously slow reasoning processes into the region that is rightfully the Queen’s domain. ~ ~ ~ But thinking crawls on anyway …. If I hadn’t noticed it several days ago, with both my arms so loaded down with groceries that I had to maneuver sideways through the narrow garage doorway … … if I hadn’t glanced to my left for solid footing on which to place my next step rather than to set it down directly in front of me into the two-inch suck and muck of the mud and weed-filled lagoon that had originally been—and would still be (if it weren’t for the pipe that burst under the garage a year ago) six manicured feet of sidewalk between the garage and latched gate, that opens up into the backyard, and once latched again behind me, closes off this swampy hinterland ... … if my eyes hadn’t wandered to the left of where I placed my foot: well … then I’d not have seen the cat’s half-closed eye, the color of smeared eggwhite left to dry, and its mound of mottled fur there in the choke-weed up against the garage. If my emotional makeup had allowed me at the time to be reportorial and objective, as I can be now, writing this a week later … if that were the case … then I might have poeticized that eye just then as being languorous, heavy-lidded—and lethargic under the hot, August noontime glare. Still … and not to forget … it was dead. ~ ~ ~ Now, turning from my computer screen these several days hence, I dilate my nostrils and feel Queen Amygdala stir—and my forebrain counters with: Oh, yes. Most likely. I may have to do something. But give it a day. One day more. After all, it had been nature’s balanced way of disposal for millennia stacked upon millennia. Back before Man yawned and scraped the scales from his eyes and suddenly realized he was wandering in the hinterland and not the garden—the existence of which he was already starting to forget. Man came along, all his weaknesses exposed, his belly clutching this new fear. Amygdala was new at her game back then. She was merely a proud, protective mama to Man. It was she who plopped that fear in the bottom of his belly and taught him to respond to it in one of two ways: Fight to the death, or Run like hell. It would be another millennium before Man would learn his alphabet … and still another before he lifted his nose and whiffed and added an unfamiliar scent to his developing story: Time added a new ingredient for Man to attend to when neither Fight nor Flight was an immediate need—and that was … Dread. Yes, bellyfear, unacted on, had begun to fester into existential dread. Dread was not a comfortable solution. And it would be that dread that fed those traditions which Man structured to obfuscate it. No matter that after 300,000 years, Mankind still responds to the residue of that dread as an undefined heaviness he feels down near his bowel. So, it’s been a week. You’d give it another day. ~ ~ ~ Once … on an evening perhaps a year ago, while sitting in this same Amygdala-visited chair, with a view past my computer screen to the kitchen area, my eyes jerked to a blur that I was able to focus on long enough to see a tiny mouse scamper to squeegee himself under the fridge. That night, I slid a jelly-jar lid under the fridge on which I’d placed a dollop of rodent poison right in the center. The product came highly advertised on TV. They used a family of cartoon mice, holding knives and forks, and with napkins tucked under their chins. And with one nibble, papa mouse, then mama mouse, then, one-by-one, all the baby mice fell with a squeak and a comic thud flat on their little mice backs with their tiny mice feet sticking straight up—in that sanitized, Loonie-Tunes version of death, complete with little ghosty reminders of themselves, floating up toward the ceiling. It had been a commercial, designed, no doubt, after countless brainstorming sessions in Madison Avenue cubicles, with one purpose in mind: to sell death by cloaking reality—by separating the victims from the executioner. And I was the latter. I must say, the process apealed to me so much that, a few days later, I tapped a half-teaspoon of the crumbly, orangish powder onto the center of each of four other lids and placed them in strategic places in the garage. Those suited sociopaths had made the process look pleasant, even cute, and allowed me, the commercial’s viewer, and later its consumer, the privilege of perpetuating the fun while distancing myself from midnight scratching and squeaks and thuds. Obfuscation, all … ~ ~ ~ Yesterday, I went out into the backyard. I wore my NIOSH N-95 mask. The only thing I could smell was my breath. I stepped gingerly over, and maneuvered around, island-tufts of foxtails, the only weed hardier than the creeping sea of crabgrass that had completed its process of taking total possession of the backyard on the summer that followed my heart’s decision to shut down. I’d had such plans for this backyard. Yes, I would make it into a meditation garden, with a twenty-foot by fifteen-foot oval, around the periphery of which spicy, Madame Anisette heirloom roses would be spaced precisely three feet apart. And inside the oval, upon the redwood-chip groundcover, and amid the intoxication of fragrance, I would sit in my platform garden swing and breathe. Simply breathe. How long ago were these plans? Six, seven years ago? I had been well into the final stages of it. The grounds had been cleared, the oval measured and staked out. I’d laid out the treated, weed-deterring, plastic tarp, cut to the shape of a teardrop. In the middle of it, I dumped twenty bags of moist and fragrant redwood chips, spread them, and coaxed them right up to the periphery of the oval. It took a week to enrich and prepare the soil and a day or so after that to drop the roses into their holes—perhaps a month longer until they took root. Then I called my son over to help me carry the swing. We took it off the front porch, where it had been for ten years—a gift that all four adult kids had purchased and assembled for their mother. After dusting and inspecting it for black widows and their eggs, Joe and I hoisted the cumbersome load and carried it, end by end, while it rocked side-to-side. We skirted the house, went through the gate, and into the backyard. We had to stop en route a number of times, though. My breathing had become erratic. My arms and legs, it appeared, did not like their employer and were oh so close to going on strike. Somewhere above it all, my awareness floated, oddly disengaged. I didn’t sleep that night or the next: being propped up by pillows to a near-sitting position, it was all I could do to drag in one solitary breath. Part of me wondered, what’s the sense of it? At the end of its exhale, one more exhausting inhale would be waiting in the wings for its turn. It took my youngest daughter, now forty-four, conspiring by phone with my wife—who, for the last decade had been living thirty miles away in the tiny mountain community of Tehachapi—to convince me I had to check in immediately to San Juaquin Hospital. My wife, God bless her, who was at my bedside for the whole four-day ordeal, catching snatches of sleep now and again in the chair beside my bed, now listened with me to the doctor’s pronouncement that my heart was limping along at one-fourth its capacity. In time, I was released with a fistful of pill bottles and a diet I swore I’d follow. My wife returned to Tehachapi. ~ ~ ~ Whether what happened, and what was to follow, was, for me, a spiritual parallelogram, I’ll leave for the reader to decide. There followed two seasons of the worst drought in Bakersfield’s history. City fathers urged their children to conserve water. They rationed lawn and garden watering to twice weekly, from six to nine PM. The city’s siblings grew anxious, then mean, and they soured against one another. They watched through narrowed eyes as this neighbor and that one violated the curfew, or another’s swath of spray left a shiny semicircle of evidence on the street. Time and date-stamped photos were taken. Official notices started being slipped into the offenders’ mailboxes, warning of fines beginning at $200. It didn’t take long before lawns turned to terraced brown stubble all across this city of half a million. Meanwhile, the heart of my meditation garden simply gave out. The leafless stems of the once-proud Madame Anisette heirlooms had become bare and stringy stalks, thickened at their joints. Leafless and with only their stubble of thorns, they seemed embarrassed by their nakedness. ~ ~ ~ My mask snugged in place, I came upon my garden swing, its unvisited seat bleached from disuse, with spiderwebs and their tiny egg-puffs spread between the slats. I gave its backrest a tentative and apologetic nudge, and I felt the crunch underfoot of the blistered and graying wood chips as I approached the sagging fence and the garage beyond. I stood with one hand atop the fence, the other poised at the lower corner of my mask. I peered around the trunk of the dead apricot tree, and I searched the weeded area up against the garage. There—there it was … the half-wrapped parcel, the one pale accusatory eye, still staring through the crackling gauze of its cornea. I removed my hand from my mask. I couldn’t lift it. Just then—I swear it was at that instant— a story I’d read perhaps fifty years earlier came flooding back to my mind with the power of a vision. My 83-year-old memory struggled to keep those parts of it in an alignment that kept shifting beneath the weight of remembering. The tale was apocryphal, of course. But what kept shifting was the main character. First, it was Jesus, with one of his apostles, and then He was replaced by the Buddha, or perhaps Siddhartha—yes I believe it was Siddhartha—before his enlightenment. Siddhartha became the frontrunner in my memory. And it was his pre-enlightenment friend, Govinda who was with him. (And if I’m wrong, and someone points out it was Jesus and his apostle, after all, would you kindly swap names in the narrative? I’ll not need to know.) In the story—in the vision—Siddhartha was walking along a rising mountainous path with Govinda. Now, Govinda was very protective of his master. When he saw a dead dog ahead, lying across the path, he urged his master to stop; to turn and gaze out upon the valley of villages spread like a tapestry beneath them, while he would go on ahead and drag the carcass off the path. Siddhartha smiled at his friend, and while it was a dismissive smile, it was nonetheless filled with such love that Govinda lowered his eyes and the two plodded up the path and stood looking down at the gentle beast. “Please, Master,” pled Govinda, “Let me drag the body off and into the bushes. The stench is horrible!” “Or … my dear Govinda,” Siddhartha began, with a smile that cloaked any suggestion of scolding, “can’t you for a moment reorder your nose’s education? The scent is sweet. Is it not sweet?” “Oh, Master!” Govinda replied and turned his face away, retching. “My Beloved … don’t you see that Dharma* cannot be so easily thrown into the bushes or sent tumbling down the mountainside. Rather, should we not embrace what is before us and is real? Have we not been cursed by the training our parents and their parents before them, back through the mists of the past, have foisted on us? Have they not taught us to abhor death and all its clothing? Have they not pre-educated us from birth on how to use our Sadayatana?** “Today, my Brother, let us reeducate our Sadayatana. Allowing the sweetness to reside high in your nostrils—yes! like this!” And he breathed in deeply. “Let us accept it as the new perfume that this level of Dharma exudes.” “Oh, but I can’t, Master, I just can’t!” said Govinda. He gestured toward the dog, while his eyes were still averted. “Filthy maggots are swarming in his open belly.” “But, Beloved Govinda, are they not white as grains of rice? Must you consider them filthy? Won’t you gaze upon them? Look upon them with fresh eyes. Watch them play as maggots play.” He put his hand on Govinda’s shoulder. “Quickly—look, Govinda, look! In their movement, they’ve exposed a tiny glimpse of scarlet. See it? The way the sun glints off it—it’s as beautiful as any ruby.” He removed his hand from Govinda’s shoulder and finished with: “And as quickly gone.” He nodded. “Gone as when the moving cloud covers a glittering star.” Petulantly, Govinda refused to turn. “As pure white as you see them, Master, they still turn into filthy flies!” Siddartha laughed and gave his friend a playful jab on the shoulder. “Come my most beloved friend. Let’s resume our journey to my cave where you must leave me.” They continued along their path with Govinda cursing the flies and brushing them off his face while Siddhartha walked beside him in smiling silence. After they said their goodbyes and embraced at the cave, whose opening was away from the path and concealed by bushes, Siddhartha laid his hands on his friend’s shoulders and his eyes pierced Govinda’s until the student’s eyes brimmed and overflowed. “While I am gone, remember this: “Flies we will always have among us. But you, Beloved Govinda, have only had me, as I am today, for this season.” And leaving Govinda, Siddhartha headed off toward the sanctuary of the cave. ~ ~ ~ My thoughts, as I turned from the fence, were on Siddhartha and the hard lesson that his pupil, Govinda, would not—could not—allow past the gate of his mind in order for it to find entrance to his heart. I know what my younger me would have done: the me who liked to think I was in touch with, and could nimbly disengage myself from, my inherited Dharmic entanglements. The me who had silently scoffed at Govinda as I read. The me who had imagined myself in the place of Govinda, listening to Siddhartha that day: without hesitation, I’d have squatted beside the carcass, and while swallowing back my bile, would have stirred the warm maggots with my fingertips—so deeply ran the current of my love for my Master. I checked the snugness of my mask and opened the gate, swinging it out over the sludge enough so I could squeeze in and step onto the solid ground to my right. Once inside, I glanced at the back entrance to the garage—doorless all these years, a Siren’s call to any feral cat in the neighborhood during these scorching summer days and those frosty winter evenings. A fly buzzed at my ear and landed on my eyebrow. I brushed it away. Another, or the same, landed on my arm. I gave it a shake. Checking my mask, I slanted a turn to my right, stepping over a fallen apricot limb, stripped from its mother during last winter’s gale. At that moment, I no longer waged my battle, piecemeal, against a few errant flies. We knew their source. Like a tired and ineffective general, I decided to capitulate. My nose and mouth were protected; my trifocals feined protection …. Later on, soap and a hot shower would erase all the footprints. Meanwhile, I let them explore my forearms and hands, jitterbug on the back of my neck, and traipse across my forehead. I tried to adopt in me the insouciance of a beekeeper. Oh, Govinda! I glanced down. My glasses steamed, cleared, then steamed up again. Pinching my mask against the bridge of my nose, my lenses cleared to three flies (evacuees, perhaps, from my raised arm), two on the right, one on the left. I looked past them, and the others joining them, to the one opalesque eye, staring up at me, cold and distant as a February moon. Where was the other eye? I bent closer. There was no other—just a dark, slightly dented closure. I straightened up. I had one more thing to do. Gingerly, I nudged it with the toe of my shoe. There wasn’t the expected soft resistance. Slipping my foot underneath its back, it lifted like a piece of dried bark. I let it seat back into the bed of choke weed. I turned, stepped over the limb, and then took a larger, oblique step, over the sludge and through the entrance. I swung the gate back, latched it, and took one final, long look at 300,000 years of prehistory on the other side. Shaking and swishing as many flies off my body as I could, I trudged back to the house.
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