Tiny Cat

Today, tonight, I am Popeye. No spinach, but I admire my bulging forearms with a thumb and middle finger as often as I think of them, which is often. I do it in between trips from my slowly emptying apartment to the U-Haul to remind myself that I’m not in agony.

A quarter of my apartment is in the dumpster, and two-thirds of it is in the U-Haul. The rest of it, my neighbor—whose name, I’ve just learned after 8 months of sharing a wall, is Carlos—has enthusiastically agreed to take off my hands in exchange for half an hour of help with a boxspring and a couch and a bookshelf and table.

“You should have knocked on my door when you started, I wasn’t doing anything,” he pants as we carry a stained and cat-covered but still-very-loved couch down the stairs to the truck. He admires all the belongings in the back, not because they are beautiful, but because my bulging forearms have done all of this alone.

“You’re like a whole truckload of Mexicans,” he says. This is not racist, because Carlos is Mexican. I feel free to laugh.

Today is Sunday. Today is my last day to be a superhero. I cancelled my classes the previous Friday to make room for being a superhero. I told my students not to turn in a homework assignment this week, because I would be too busy being a superhero to grade them.

Carlos is asking about my new job, my new life, the new home I am preparing to occupy. I ramble to him good-naturedly. I realize that it is not Carlos’s bulging forearms that I am most grateful for. It’s a lonely business, moving. 

When we finish, he shakes my hand and wishes me well, and when I smile at him, I feel the muscles around my eyes bunch up. Eyes only do that when they’re really happy. I’m acutely aware of my sweaty arms, my sweaty hands, my scalp which is also sweaty, and probably my armpits too. Carlos doesn’t seem to mind. I thank him again, not just for moving my couch but for taking away a number of lamps and an entertainment system that I won’t have room for in my new life. He doesn’t know whether to say “you’re welcome” or “thank you,” so we stand there, facing each other awkwardly, until I pull myself away and wave goodbye. Our friendship was brief, but intense, and we both feel a little melancholy to be parting.

My apartment is dark, and looks cleaner than I thought it would. For the past few months, I’ve been a disease. Fourteen hours of commuting per week took away my time for cleaning and cooking and sleeping, and I thought the space would show it. There should be a green tinge to the walls and armies of mold taking over the corners. There should be ghosts of takeout boxes haunting the living room. But the floors have been vacuumed and the counters and appliances have been Cloroxed, and I can imagine someone inhabiting the space without a second thought to its previous tenet. It’s like I never existed here.

I finish off the energy drink on the kitchen counter and do not feel particularly energetic, but I do feel as though I am alive. I gather up the straggling remains of my life: screws, pushpins, cleaning products. Then it’s time to load up the cats, who have been hiding in closets from the sounds of vacuum cleaners and the smells and grunts of unfamiliar men.

They are resistant to the cat carrier. I can’t blame them. It’s small for two cats, especially when one of the cats is the size of three cats. But the second cat is only the size of a half cat, I reason.

I lure the larger one into the carrier using treats (obviously). It’s a geometry problem: furniture first and smaller things around it. So the smaller-things cat is shoved in unceremoniously after the furniture cat. She struggles, but she is no match for my forearms.

She immediately starts yelping, and she will not stop until I release them into the new apartment. I know this from experience. The other cat is characteristically silent and stoic, but he stares at me from behind the bars, and I would be chilled by the look if I wasn’t so much larger than him. Well, somewhat larger. He is large.

“You don’t intimidate me, buddy,” I tell him. He stares.

I throw the strap of my purse diagonally across my body, pick up the cat carrier with more than a little difficulty, even with my bulging forearms, and look back once more at the now-dark space. Will I miss it? I see 6 years flash before my eyes, but it is not a very bright flash. I close the door behind me, and I lock it and that’s it. Six years gone. Grad school concluded.

It is 9 P.M. as I take the onramp to the interstate and toward my new home. Tiny cat is still yelping periodically, but the contractions are growing further apart. Progress of a kind. Two miles pass in silence. Then, she is shrilling like a car alarm.

“Shut up. You’re fine.”

Sometimes, I am more understanding than this. Sometimes, I am more kind. But superheroes crash in the pages between the comic books. They don’t show you that part. After the manic flying and the manic climbing and the manic rescuing, they spend days on their couch that turn into weeks on their couch watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother and drinking PBR and chain-smoking. They don’t show you that. 

She is still shrilling like a car alarm.

“Shut—“

Then, I smell urine. I sigh. The massive cat has participated in this kind of spiteful behavior before. I smell my armpits to make sure the smell isn’t me, and it isn’t.

“Goddammit,” I say. I hit the steering wheel. “Seriously? You aren’t fucking anyone but yourself, buddy. We’ve still got 45 minutes to go, and I’m not fucking pulling over.”

The little one is shrilling like a car alarm, and the contractions are becoming further apart, and somehow this doesn’t make me feel better.

I think about pulling over, but I don’t. I don’t know what I would do to fix the situation if I did pull over.

Then, I smell shit.

I’m not sure whether it’s rage or self-pity or righteous indignation or a desire for retribution on behalf of the tiny cat that fills me. I try to make the moment about me Moving was supposed to be a rebirth but it’s not about me. It’s about the increasingly confused and oddly resigned yelps of the tiny cat.

At the gate of the complex, I am asked for a code. I rifle around in my purse for the slip of paper containing the gate codes but can’t find it. I sit there in a stupor for a moment. A car pulls up behind me. I feel very conspicuous in my U-Haul. I pull away from the monitor and let the car behind me input the code. I rush through the gate behind him, thinking of what I will say if I am confronted, how I will justify my entry to his insistent demands, but I am not confronted.

I awkwardly pull into one of the spaces, nearly scraping the car next to me. I sit for several minutes wondering if I can reposition the truck without inflicting massive damage on the adjacent car. I look at my forearms and decide that I can.

I sit for several minutes in my repositioned truck and inhale deeply and consider the cats. Tiny cat has fallen silent and she might be dead. I grab the handle of the carrier, and she immediately starts yelping again and my shoulders sag under a weight.

At the threshold of the perfectly clean apartment, I stop and put the carrier on the floor and look around. I know what will happen if I open the cage now, and I am too tired to deal with the aftermath, but the tiny cat is still yelping. I have to do something. I take the carrier into the bathroom and shut the door. When I open it, the massive cat rushes out and crouches like a tiger, eyes darting from side to side and sometimes up and sometimes back at me. He considers the vanity and the tub and the toilet. He jumps into the sink and briefly admires his reflection. He leaves muddy-looking prints wherever he goes.

There is no sign from the tiny cat. She has always been the more timid of the two, and doesn’t seem interested in exploring. I should remove her from the cat carrier. I know she’s in there, wet, in a puddle of some other creature’s misplaced rage. But I don’t. I leave the bathroom and return with their litterbox and food. I should run a bath, and I should clean them both up, I should at least lift her out of the carrier and help her find some other place to hide, but I can’t. I just can’t. I walk back down to the U-Haul.

In my imagination, unloading the truck at this hour is private, but in this new complex in the city, there is always traffic. There is a car accident that has just happened at the threshold to the complex, and there are residents wandering out of their homes to stare at the flashing lights, but not to give me more than a glance as I lug trunks and boxes and boxsprings up the stairs. It’s a lonely business moving.

There is a dog in the apartment next to mine who starts barking shrilly as I carry the first boxes up the stairs and doesn’t stop, even briefly, for a full two hours, when his owner finally returns. She pretends she doesn’t see me as I wrestle a particularly heavy box up the stairs. This is no mean feat, as she is less than 10 paces ahead of me.

I think of a study I read as a graduate student, something about how people idealize their purchases just before they make them. In the abstract, new cars make you happy because they never break down or get flats, and new apartments make you happy because they never get shit all over them or are attacked from all sides by never ending sires and dogs barking and neighbors being calculatingly cold.

It takes nearly three hours to empty the truck, and by this time, I have almost forgotten about the tiny cat and the smell of shit. All I know is the intense physical presence that is my body. My forearms are on fire. My legs are being attacked by a thousand amateur acupuncturists. I collapse momentarily behind my closed front door, and then I remember the cats. The air doesn’t let me forget. I stand unsteadily.

I walk to the bathroom door and stare at it. I feel prickles of rage at the massive cat and rolling waves of dread well up at the thought of what I will have to do to undo this situation. My imagination tells me that what I will see behind the door will be awful, and when I open the door, it is.

There are brown paw prints covering the floor and making it resemble a smooth, peaceful forest floor, and there is a massive cat crouching before the door, poised to dart out into the spotless apartment, but I block his transit with a well-positioned foot that is nearly a punt.

Tiny cat is nowhere to be seen. I peer inside the carrier, but she is not there. I look into the tub and open the cabinet doors to look beneath the sink, but she is not there. She is not behind the toilet. I turn to the litter box. Under the cover, I find her crouching in the back. She doesn’t move, not so much as a flinch, when I lift the cover. She is staring into the clean litter. She has found some deep truth there. She is wet. She is filthy. There is so much litter clinging to her fur. I can’t even begin to think of what I will have to do to restore her, so I return the cover to the box and turn my attention to the massive cat, who is also filthy.

I run water in the tub. I think about the temperature. My mother told me once that you shouldn’t run a hot bath for cats, that they run warmer than we do, and the water should be tepid. I run a tepid bath, and I wet a washcloth in it, and I follow the massive cat around the bathroom with it, toweling him off as we both walk. He is not pleased. When he’s clean enough (when I am sufficiently frustrated with him), I open the door and he lumbers out, still crouching, exploring the new space like a predator.

I turn back to the litterbox. There has been no noise from the tiny cat this whole time. I lift the cover again, and find her unmoved, still staring into the litter.

Tiny cat, historically, has never stopped moving. Tiny cat is a ball of nervous energy. Tiny cat can barely stand to be petted affectionately without wriggling away and finding some other way of occupying her attentions and energies. Tiny cat refuses to be picked up. The few times that I tried it, I had to explain to friends that the cuts on my arms were not self-inflicted. Tiny cat does not even sit still to eat. She grabs a morsel or two and sits back cautiously to chew as she considers her surroundings, and then pounces back at the bowl like it’s tried to escape her in the past. Tiny cat drinks like it’s from restless oceans.

But tiny cat isn’t moving, now. And when I cautiously lift her, expecting an arm full of claws, she’s limp. And when I lower her into the half-full tub, she doesn’t turn into a cartoon ball of razors and chainsaws as her paws hit the water. She sits. Quietly.

I sit on the edge of the tub, pants rolled up to the knees, tiny cat between my feet. I take a washcloth to her leg by leg. It’s like washing a doll. We are both shaking from the lukewarm water and the cold of the apartment; I haven’t turned on the heater yet, and it must be 60 degrees in here. She is clean, and she is shivering, and still, she’s just sitting.

I find a dry towel. I lift her out of the tub, and dry her off the best that I can, and set her down on the tile floor. She walks like a windup toy and she hesitates on the threshold of the living room. She looks around. There are four or five stacks of crates along the far wall, and she crawls toward them, finds a crevice between two stacks and makes a home. I spend the next three hours unpacking, but I don’t touch that crevice.

Massive cat climbs on counters and claims couches. Massive cat disrupts my bed-making process, and knocks over glasses as I set them on the kitchen counters. Massive cat defies gravity and jumps onto the mantel above the fireplace and peers down at me and pretends to be tall. I ignore him.

It is nearly 6 A.M. on Monday, and I teach in 3 hours. I start up the coffee pot and open the sliding glass door to my balcony. The sky is beginning to lighten and I feel myself depleting with every new hue that appears in the air. There is a parallel in the Superman story that I’m trying to access and can’t.

I pull a camping chair out to the balcony, and pour a cup of coffee and grab my pack of cigarettes. I collapse into the chair to watch the sun rise. Massive cat has fallen asleep sprawled across my bed. Because he’s a fucker.

I light my cigarette. I’ve seen the sun rise nearly every morning for the past few months. This is a stark contrast to graduate school. I’ve seen it through my windshield, just over the horizon, miles of flat plains, burning off all manner of mists. I’ve seen it killing stars. I found myself setting off on my commute earlier and earlier to avoid it. I prefer spending time with the stars than with that massive, foreboding sun.

Just as I stub out the cigarette, I feel a gentle weight do a galloping leap into my lap. It doesn’t crush me, so it can’t be massive cat, but I can’t bring myself to look to confirm. I don’t want to jinx it.

Tiny cat turns once and forms a tight circle with her body and settles into my lap. We stare over the railing of my balcony and into the rising sun.