3. Mom Cat

I can't remember exactly on what date Mom Cat passed away. I could only remember the sensation of the wind when it brushed across my skin as I frantically carried her carrier along 9th Street toward 1st Avenue in order to catch a cab to Park Slope. I was wearing my red knitted sweater, a pair of jeans, and a jacket that I eventually took off because of the sweat.

Till now, I am still afraid that her spirit would pay a visit to my 12th Street apartment, where she would find the new tenant who could hardly understand her language. I could see the disappointment on her face, her hope to seek warmth in my arms or from my cheek, and the pair of eyes that would tell me her want, her fear and her life story. I wish that I had the courage to stay home with her the entire time when she was ill. It was unforgivably cruel of me to leave her home. Her desperate cry, generated from the depth of her solitude and her love for me, a cry that she voiced as she protest the very first time I had to step out of my apartment for work, is something that still confounds my soul.

Mom Cat had a name, which I finally put onto her death certificate, though Bob and I habitually called her Mom Cat. As Bob and I leaned against the desk in the office of the Humane Society, Mom Cat leaped up to the desk and caressed Bob's hand with her chin. She wanted us to bring her home. She kept wandering around us as we went to see Pupazzo. The staff in the Humane Society told us that they were lovers, and we decided to bring her home.

Bob was assigned to take care of her on our way home and I took care of baby Pupazzo. She cried all the way on the taxi. After we open the carriers, she walked out and strolled along the walls of the apartment for a full circle. Pupazzo followed her. She did a survey of the entire room. I was watching them with Bob. She then hid underneath the futon. I had to go to work soon after their arrival. Mom Cat walked out from her hiding place and cried at me. I realized then that our paths were truly crossed. She had found me. If she were looking for someone during her brief visit to this world, it was probably me for whom she had been looking and to whom she wanted to convey something.

One day, Bob brought home a large electric fan. He temporarily put it on a chair. The fan fell down and Mom Cat dashed into the bathroom. She refused to come out for a few days. We also realized that she would cry during the the day when I was away from home. My neighbor would sometimes suggest that I should hire a cat-sitter to accompany her. We deduced that she had probably suffered a lot at her previous home(s), and had probably gave birth before. All I knew was that she needed me.

I spent a lot of time trying to befriend Pupazzo, as he turned out to be more independent than I thought. I probably should have given more attention to Mom Cat, if only I knew that those were the last three years of her life.

Mom Cat and I talked both verbally and through our eyes. She understood me and I tried my best to understand her. She always wore a shameful, humble and frightful look that she carried from her last host. She was always careful not to step onto my body when she moved around the bed. She never asked for food and she was always clean and proper in the bathroom. She was probably trained in a sub-humane manner before. Conversely, Pupazzo has always been a boy a nature: a proletarian cat. He was raised to do whatever he wants and to be whoever he wants to be, besides some basic disciplines. Bryan said that whenever Pupazzo wanted his loving, he would walk right up to you or crawl onto your face. Mom Cat never did these. She was a civilized cat, an elegant cat, an aristocratic cat: a “regal” cat who enjoyed a quiet afternoon or evening lying next to the aquarium. Nonetheless, her shameful, humble and frightful look always gave me an unspeakable melancholy. She was always afraid of doing something wrong.

The summer before she left this world was a good summer. I noticed that she was getting smaller and smaller, and was craving for water all the time, though I gainsaid the possibility that she was sick. I was financially disparaged, so as Bob, and it was inconceivable for me to bring her to the vet. I remember that I spent an afternoon correcting my student's papers. When I took a bathroom break, Mom Cat knocked down my cup of espresso. I came out from the bathroom and discovered it. She hid herself behind the lava lamp, afraid that I would hit her. How could I hit you, Mom Cat? Your eyes told me everything. All you wanted was to be close to me and what was wrong with you spilling that bit of coffee?

We all suffered from the blackout that summer. Now I remember it, out last summer together. I lied in bed and played “Norwegian Wood” on m guitar and ate my little piece of bread that was left over from the day before.

Mom Cat got sick sometime in September. Her chin was swollen, and I was cruel enough to wait for a week before I sent her to the ER. That day, she had difficulty urinating. On 9th Street, the vet told me that she was dying; but they could probably stabilize her. Her temperature was dropping and her body was beginning to shut down. Death had never been translated to such scientific and physical terms to me. In the words of the vet, it was a clinically documentable process. He recommended me to send her to Brooklyn to cut half of the cost. They admitted her and she stayed there for three days.

She got to a state at which her condition resembled normality by the time I got her back from Brooklyn. I were to IV her water and feed her pills, which she absolutely detested. In addition to all these, I gave her some herbs. She cried all the way from the hospital; but that cried gave me hope that she was “alive.” When she arrived home, she walked out of the carrier and looked around. She gave a deep sigh and slept for hours.

She never managed to eat by herself again––a cat who had never missed an opportunity to miss a meal or a snack. She threw up a lot and she also had trouble using the bathroom. All these were fine with me, except from the time when she would absolutely refuse to eat or to receive her IV. I yelled at her, telling her that it was the way we could hope that she would stay alive. I understood that she knew better that she was dying, that death had already claimed her. We were only buying time.

One day, she was acting better. She wanted to eat with Pupazzo the dry food that I poured into the tower. I still regret that I didn't allow her to eat the dry food. It was bad for her, but what more could I do for her besides giving her what she wanted? She never showed any interest in food from that very day. When I was a boy, I heard that a dying person would normally have one afternoon when she/he would have the impression that she/he was “normal.” In Chinese, people call it “huiguang fanzhao” (light from the wheel of life reflected from the other world). It is a divine grace for the living a brief moment before a dying being.

I prayed all night when Mom Cat was hospitalized, and I found one of my keys bent in my pocket. Every time I used that key to open my building's door, I thought about a testament under which Mom Cat and I were allowed to spend that month of borrowed time. One night, Mom Cat, who always hated to cling onto a human body, slept on my lap for hours. If I were allowed to stop time and preserve one moment, that would be it.

The IV ran out the day before her death, and from her eyes, I realized that the inevitable was about to come. I needed to go to Williamsburg to sign my apartment application. Before I left, Mom Cat had an attack. She screamed painfully but then she calmed down. I told her to wait, that I had to find a place for all of us to live. She stared at me grudgingly. She was blaming me that I couldn't stay home longer with her. At Williamsburg, I found out that the landlord wouldn't allow any pet, and the broker was about to negotiate with the landlord with me. On my way home, I saw a crowd standing in front of the small brown-stone building close to 3rd Avenue with a telescope. An old men invited me to look through the telescope, “see, it's an eclipse.”

Mom Cat heaved a sign of relief when I got home. I was so exhausted that I was ready for bed. I knew from her eyes that she was waiting. I made my bed, crawled into the blanket and held her in my arms. Unlike her usual self, she rested there. Boy Cat crawled up and prepared her. Since she was sick, she had been having difficulty cleaning herself. I also found it difficult to keep up her soiling and vomiting. Pupazzo cleaned her up thoroughly. For a moment, she resumed the way she looked before her illness. Both of us lied together, and we fell asleep, at least both Mom Cat and I did.

I checked her breathing now and then during the night, and she seemed peaceful. I had a sense that her temperature was dropping. I was torn between wanting to see her leave in peace and wanting to see her stay alive. At five o'clock or so (or six, I couldn't remember), she was still breathing. She moved herself slightly away from me, the way she always liked. Bob Cat was still lying next to us. I fell asleep again and genuinely hoped that she could survive the night safely. At seven o'clock, I found her four legs all stretched out, her eyes wide open and her mouth agape. She was staring at the gap of the window. Someone came in through there and took her away. Death was just inches away from me, physically speaking, but death had me asleep while it did its work. Pupazzo ate his breakfast and jumped up to me. “We're alone now.”

Till now, I don't know what she saw at the gap of that window, and I moved away from that apartment less than a month later. All I could see from her face was pain––the pain of life that she carried through her suffering, and the pain that I failed to relieve in her last three years of life.

Sleep well, Mom Cat, and play to your heart's content.

Two Attempts on Xiaopin wen

1. On Death

The window filtered the sky with a layer of dirt, the kind that stained the glass with the leftover from seasons of deluges. Most pedestrians were in their summer shirts and shorts, as though the the fall weather had been hitherto a transient and mildly disturbing dream. I was condemned to the confinement of a room overcrowded with SSHSAT students in a Saturday afternoon, in which the kids were working hard for their foreseeable future.

The colour of the sky, the temperature and the humidity reminded me of Chicago. Chicago was that kind of city that had subtly dwelt right underneath the corrugated skin of my underused brain. It was a city that rose along the lake of Michigan, a stretch of almost transparent blue.

My life had never founded itself upon a vision of future. I had always been deprived of the future. Deprived by whom? Taken by whose hand? Erased by whose effort? Perhaps there had always been none for everyone, and I somehow just enjoyed the privilege of understanding the quasi-Bergsonian reality that time, in an experiential sense, is a sequence of presents projected to numerous perceived images of the past and the future. None of my works can be declared finished or unfinished, for that I envy the Romantic artists. History will certainly not write me down as an artist. I am simply part of a gigantic Tedium destined to its own eventual and microscopic self-destruction.

Around me, there were all these talks of death. I seemed to have the ability to absorb and internalize these talks. I staged my own destruction, and I knew very well that it was me who performed this act of suicide. But why the pain? Why the time? I dare not question.

What I long for is quietude, a sense of peace in which I could write, compose, and be myself. I now realize that people cannot truly “plan” on the last years of their lives. It's not that there is so much to do, nor is it that people deny their counted days. There is simply no choice. You simply need to learn to let go.

I am always afraid to be misunderstood by my mother, to the extent that I have given up to be understood. Her words still shape who I am, and I still feel daily disturbed by every word she said.

The photo of Bob Dylan, the writing of Jack Kerouac, the films of Derek Jarman: people do die, don't they?

2. Cat

Granddad Cat,

Olga said that despite of all the drama that occurred in the last few days, I was still beaming and energized. I wouldn't have known if I were truly beaming. All I knew was that I had grown older in the process of reclaiming and rejuvenating a stronger self.

All I hope is that I have not lost you, though I am in no position to bargain or to negotiate.

I also wouldn't necessarily say that I am rehearsing a “new” life that excludes Scott. Life precludes rehearsal, subterfuge and contrivance. Something slipped away at a given moment in time. It is not a form of escape, let alone an attempt to punish. It is like the moment of darkness between frames in a silent movie, a subtle split-second at which the present has become history, even though its form still remains in our brains as a perceived illusion, something that gives form to our sense of continuity, something that has no existential predicate. How much I love Garbo. Garbo does not signify solitude. She gives shape to the triumph of the self––the desire to be left alone, with a laughter that performs and proliferates with companions who truly understand this intricate boundary.

I read Xia Mianzun's leisure essay about his cat. Cat has its own lineage and history that vibrate with those of humans. In a way, cat becomes an index of a human relationship, a reminder of an absent being––it makes an absented being present through its stand-in for the rapport propre.

Our cats are not verbal, and in them, I see life. It is always a comfort to feel a breathing being lying next to you, exuding its desire (perhaps a kitty's dream for “fish”) and providing you with a concrete sense of ontology. Garbo is feline, and from frame to frame, she allows parts of her soul to escape, which register themselves onto film. I wonder if some of these sparkles of the human soul have found their new lives in cats, who stand in for the flitting moments which we can only capture with our eyes wide open.