At 2am last night, I woke up. The cat, Asa, a sweet little 10-pound monster who swats at my ankles and cuddles like a champ, was curled up in the crook of my left arm. I was hot, sweating like a racehorse, and needed to shift her. But when I tried to lift her, I found the blanket had wrapped around her, anchoring her tightly against my body. Half awake, I had a worry: what if she'd been suffocated by the binding comforter? I loosed the blanket, and reached sleepily around her midriff, waiting to feel the breath rise in her belly. Nothing happened. Now I'm scared. I start scratching her neck, trying to wake her. No response. She's limp. That’s it, I thought, I’ve killed the cat.
Now, lots of new parents are afraid to sleep with their babies because they’re worried they’re going to roll over and asphyxiate them in their sleep. They’re so little, you know. What studies has found is that this *never* happens. Except in one instance: when the parent (aka “smotherer”) has been drinking. This flashed through my booze-addled mind. The wicked, razor-edged justice of it doesn’t escape me. (Although it was Paul’s birthday celebration, after all. Must single women choose between their new boyfriends and their cats? 40-year-olds everywhere pray the answer is no. I’m just sure of it.)
So here I am, sweaty, now convinced I’ve tourniquetted my cat to death. I free her unresisting body from the bedcovers (damn you, Ikea, for making synthetic comforters so cheaply. They have no give!) and stretch her lifeless body out beside me. I look down at the dark shadow of her body. She’s very long, like 3 feet. Like she’s been hung from a pike. I have a hopeful thought: maybe she's not dead. She's warm-ish, anyway, and not stiff, so rigour mortis has not yet set in. Go to sleep, I think. And if the cat's still dead in the morning, you can deal with it then.
This idea almost works. I doze. Then I think of waking up, snuggling a dead cat, and start resuscitating her anew. Once, her ear flickers. Then I get her back leg to twitch. I think, she’s alive. Then I think, it could just be a nerve twitch, an autonomic reaction to physical stimuli. You hear how a corpses' hair and fingernails continue to grow, months after it's been interred. It doesn't mean there's still lifeblood in her fuzzy black body. I watch over her, undecided, still not quite able to grip the full faculties of wakefulness. Then I hear it: the telltale wheeze of a sleepy cat. Once, twice, and then a little kitty moan. She is, indeed, among the living.
And it’s true. The cat is in fact alive. She rolls over on her back in the morning, just like a live cat, being cute. She meows for her food. Jumps up on the window sill, then falls off it. She takes a piss in the litterbox. And then I have an uncharitable thought: how important is it for a cat to have consistent, uninterrupted access to oxygen, anyway? I mean, how much high-level brain activity does it take to get a cat through an average day?
Think about it. Cats do the same thing, over and over and over, without any apparent ennui or malaise, no apparent thirst for novelty except the occasional plaintive meow which might – or might not – signal a desire for some fulfillment beyond the kibble bowl or the mousie pull toy.
I love my cat dearly. You could even say, obsessively. But I’m not blind to the fact that this love could be 95% projection. That she is not, in fact, a fuzzy baby, a quasi-autonomous teddy bear, or a cherubic manifestation of my innermost child self. Sometimes she leaves bloody clawmarks in my tender white flesh.
Still, I’m glad she’s still with me, on this Saturday, the last day of March 2012. And it's not like I need her to solve Fermat's Theorum or anything. So maybe a pet that can survive just a bit of late-night swaddling is just the thing. Besides, she's super cute.
That’s all the news from Petaluma. Happy birthday, Paul!
