A Burned-Over District

  Chapter 4

  After poking around in the bizarre world of Matt’s fantasies, it was a relief to return to the routine of my little family’s life. By the time I’d finished writing one of my finals, Lu had given Albert his bath and suited him up for bed. He lay in his crib with blankets up to his chin and his brow unwrinkled by any worries. Lu had turned off all the lights except for the little nightlight in the shape of a glowing angel, and Albert waited quietly in the dim radiance, staring up at us without blinking. He yawned, but resisted closing his eyes. I wondered what kind of memories he was compiling.

  “Sing something for him. I’ll give Mervyn his water shot,” Lu said, heading for our bedroom. I sang “Dark Brown Is the River,” remembering my mother singing it to me while sitting on the edge of a bathtub. Albert gave me his undivided attention while I serenaded him, but then closed his eyes, suggesting politely that it was time for me to leave. I turned on the radio thingy, so we’d be able to hear him during the night, and tiptoed out.

  In our bedroom Lu had Mervyn in place on his yellow towel on the bed, but she was having trouble getting the Ringer’s solution into him. He was crouched tensely, refusing to lower his butt all the way to the towel and twitching just the tip of his tail, while Lu probed, clucking sympathetically, for a spot around his shoulder blades that might be free of scar tissue. His old skin was so thin and dry by now that it practically crackled when she pinched it into a furry ridge, trying to create some space underneath for the fluid. There had been times when one of us had accidentally poked all the way through both layers, so that the liquid came oozing out the other side and beaded uselessly on his fur.

  Mervyn had been for practical purposes a perfect cat. He was a handsome devil, warm gray with pristine white socks and a white cravat to which he devoted a lot of cleaning time. I’d had him since he was a kitten small enough to hold on the palm of one hand, having found him one morning mysteriously on a fluffy rampage in the hallway of my Brooklyn apartment building. When Lu arrived in my life a few years later, she was, if anything, more taken with him than I was. Mervyn, on the other hand, though generally satisfied with his comfortable existence, was frustrated by our refusal to allow him out into the cat-deadly streets, even though by that time we’d moved to laid-back San Francisco. In what was the only serious mistake of his life, he did manage one escape from the apartment, an ill-conceived leap off our little balcony while chasing a fat fly. He landed on a spike of the wrought iron fence three stories below, impaling one of his legs. The hateful darkness failed to claim him on that occasion, however, and I later concluded, in fact, that if it hadn’t been for the fence he wouldn’t have been hurt at all, and might actually have achieved his heart’s desire of spending at least one day in freedom.

  Except for that one misstep, and once we’d relieved him of his testicles, he was a delight: elegantly beautiful and effortlessly confident, affectionate, athletic, intellectual, and always covered his shit. He invented superball games for us to play with him and provided body-warming services at night, after first circling the bed two or three times to find the right spot. Even his rare faux paws were carried off with aplomb, such as the time he inadvertently rolled off the kitchen cabinet on which he was lolling and plunged like a county fair low-water man into a meatloaf pan that was soaking on the sink. Placidly licking the meaty water off his coat, he almost succeeded in making it seem like a deliberate performance.

  I was therefore deeply shocked to realize one day, a couple of years ago, that Mervyn was beginning to fail physically. There were a few humiliating falls in the act of trying to reach surfaces, like the forbidden dining room table, that had previously been easy for him. This creature, who had never before needed exercise other than the occasional luxurious fore-and-aft stretch to stay in perfect condition, was actually getting creaky. He began to spend an inordinate amount of time sleeping, even for a cat. He no longer met us at the door when we came home. We would find him sleeping at the foot of the bed and realize that he hadn’t heard us come in. He would awaken with a start when we greeted him loudly and would look in the wrong direction – his eyes were going too. Their pupils developed a milky blue veil, in contrast to their original bottomless black. He began to wander around the house late at night, yowling disconsolately, and his comfortable bourgeois padding melted away, so that I could feel the jagged hogback ridge of his backbone when I stroked him.

  I was well into my fifties at the time, and the decline of the deathless entity we knew as Mervyn opened up what was a new line of thought for me. Although I “knew,” of course, that everybody dies, I had always maintained the unconscious belief that people get old and wear out because of certain kinds of physical and mental sin: overeating or eating the wrong things, smoking, too much alcohol or chocolate, failure to exercise regularly, the slow mental sedimentation that accompanies too much time in front of the TV, and, above all, acceptance of the inevitability of aging. That belief became less and less tenable as I watched our vice-less feline lily of the field sink into old age; and it suddenly occurred to me that I was on the same road, and might even die at some point. Not that I had ever been able, or wanted, to jump up on the dining room table. Like Mervyn, though, I had never been seriously ill, and my body, short and hairy like his, had been a dependable if not highly esthetic instrument. But Mervyn’s troubles called attention, by analogy, to my own accumulating infirmities: varicose veins, tendinitis in both elbows, aching knees, whining digestive tract, encroaching deafness in one ear, and pains that dropped in and departed for no apparent reason.

  I responded at first by refusing to admit that Mervyn’s condition led inexorably to only one conclusion. We took him to the vet in Fetlock ($500) and returned home with bags of Ringer’s solution and lots of green hypodermic needles, which we had to use every day to inject 50 milliliters or so of Ringer’s solution under the slackening skin over his shoulders. He tolerated this nightly ritual patiently, with only a light flickering of the tip of his tail, and it did succeed in stabilizing his kidney readings. Nevertheless, he continued to lose weight, though not as rapidly, and the trend was clearly downward.

  A few months before the episode of the Christmas Eve heavenly lights, we noticed a strange reddish cast to his pupils, and within a few days he was quite blind. With this event, according to the vet ($1,000) probably due to high blood pressure, doubt seemed to enter Mervyn’s own mind for the first time. He now paced slowly around the house with his head lowered, sniffing and feeling for obstacles with his long white whiskers, and began limiting himself to a single sleeping spot, a nest of old polar fleece that Lu prepared for him in one of her closets. No more stretching out on a horizontal thigh or spending the night on Lu’s soft hip; he seemed to be disturbed by open spaces and the movements of a bed or a body under him and to need the security of a ceiling close above his head. He was able to use his nose to find the litter box (Lu and I could do that, too), which had always been located only a few feet from the closet anyway, and his food, which we moved out of the kitchen and into the same room. Otherwise, he made only brief excursions to the back room where I graded papers, announcing his presence with a pathetic peep, before pacing cautiously back to his polar fleece den.

  “Ghost cat,” I’d say to him, lifting him out of the polar fleece and putting him on the bed, where I could gaze into his boarded-up eyes and ask him “Where are you, dude? Is there anybody still in there?” As he had slowed down physically the foggy frontier between the feline sleeping and waking states had grown even more indistinct. Now, with his vision, his hearing, and his physical mobility gone, I wondered whether for him there was any discernible boundary at all; or was “reality” – the pressure on his bladder, the grit of litter under his feet, the ache of his arthritic joints, the slippery texture of pureed turkey on his tongue, a human hand bumping along his unpadded vertebrae – merely a more restless stage in his dreaming? I taunted him mercilessly about his weakness, his skinniness, his laziness, his crappy fur, thinkin
g uncomfortably about my own thinning hair and sagging pecs. I invented abusive knicknames: Bones, Blinky, Skimbleshanks. But my heart actually ached for the poor old guy, trapped alone in his dark waiting room and shut off from all the light and sound he’d once enjoyed along with the rest of us.

  “You’re being morbid,” Lu told me. She didn’t want to discuss it with me, but I was sure she believed in some kind of cat heaven, for which Mervyn was merely undergoing his shriving, and she had no doubt of a happy issue to all this indignity and discomfort. She left the metaphysical speculations about his spiritual condition to me and focused in her pragmatic way on his physical comfort and on preventing his waste products from overwhelming the house. Thus the polar fleece nest, the daily gentle combings, her tireless efforts to tempt him with new flavors of food or with a rotation of his old favorites, the Ringer’s shots, and the careful repositionings of bowls and box in which she was perpetually trying to close in on their optimum locations, from the perspective of a blind cat. We’d had to cover the floor of Mervyn’s room with newspaper, because although he always adhered to the letter of the law by climbing wearily into the litter box when he had to pee, his butt would often be left hanging over the edge; and his increasing dehydration had resulted in constipation and made bowel movements a time-consuming trial to him. His marble-like turds, with the texture of desiccated modeling clay, might thus be encountered nearly anywhere in the house, especially in the dark of night when Lu or I would get up in our bare feet to visit our own litter box. Lu’s morning ritual, while I showered and shaved, involved neatly rolling up and disposing of any wet newspapers plus touring the house with a strip of toilet paper to pick up the above-mentioned coprolites, which could then be deposited in the toilet. After all the pickup was done, she would put out a selection of two or three different flavors of food, all carefully mixed with water to give them the mushy texture dictated by Mervyn’s crumbling fangs, so that he could begin preparing the next day’s output.

  One dark winter morning a couple of weeks before Christmas, just before the alarm was due to go off, I felt a familiar but long-absent tugging on the bedspread, and craned my neck to find a patch of deeper gray creeping slowly across the bumpy terrain of our legs. Mervyn had returned to the bed. From then on he slept between us, under the covers. Perhaps it was loneliness or only the cold that had driven him out of the closet; but whatever the dim feline mentation involved, we were happy to have him back, and immediately moved all his equipment into the bedroom. He could get down to go to the box easily enough; but when he was done he’d hover by the bed and call briefly, as if ringing for the elevator, upon which signal one of us would hoist him back to his warm spot between us. When we weren’t in the bed, he seemed to feel cold even under the blankets, so I used his old fluffy bed to build the little cave, roofed with a blanket and floored with a heating pad, close to the box and bowls. There he would lounge hour after hour, occasionally turning end for end, and emerging only to hit the litter box or reject Lu’s latest menu offering. He seemed reasonably comfortable, but I thought I could read on his face the pained expression of someone who was expecting bad news.

  I pondered the mystery of Mervyn’s slow descent into non-being with gloomy fascination. What was he thinking about it all, or was he thinking anything? The unknowability of animals’ minds is part of what fascinates us about them, along with their athleticism and fur; but a dying animal is an even profounder enigma. I ran my hand over his tattered coat, feeling the sawtooth of his vertebrae and the twin peaks of his emergent hipbones, hoping for his faint purr and wondering how long we should try to keep him alive.

  Accompanied by these gloomy musings, I now got onto the bed with Lu and held Mervyn, scratching under his chin, until she found an acceptable spot for the needle. He winced and tried to walk away as the first cold drops dripped under his skin. “We really have to start thinking about putting him down,” Lu said.

  Of course I’d already been thinking about it. But I said “He’s doing all right for now. I don’t think he’s really uncomfortable, do you? He doesn’t like this, but otherwise he’s OK, he just lies on his heating pad. It doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “We don’t know what he’s feeling, obviously. But he can’t be very happy, without his sight or his hearing. Doesn’t it bother you that he’s so isolated? It’s painful just watching him get to the box.”

  “He hasn’t lost his appetite,” I countered. We watched as the fluid level crept down past the marks on the plastic bag.

  “No,” she admitted, “he’s still got that. But I really don’t think we’re doing him any favors by keeping him going this way. What kind of life is it?”

  “What do you think he’d say if he could talk?” I said. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t agree to have us pull the plug.”

  “Well of course, we’re all programmed to try to keep living. But in the wild, something would already have killed him by now, or he would have starved to death.”

  “You could say the same thing about Albert,” I pointed out.

  “But Albert’s not in pain! He’s on the way up. He’s got a whole life ahead of him. What’s ahead for Mervyn? Just more needles and more trips to the vet, and probably more pain, and then he’s going to die anyway. Don’t we have a responsibility to save him from some of that nastiness at least?”

  She shut off the flow of water and carefully extracted the needle. Mervyn lurched forward and then stopped, uncertain of his whereabouts. Lu shoved the saucer with a little dollop of pureed turkey baby food under his nose. He crouched in slow motion and somberly licked at it.

  “You’re the religious person,” I said. I was annoyed that she was prodding me into this moral chute, even though I knew I’d find myself in it eventually anyway. “Doesn’t it make you kind of uncomfortable to be playing God?”

  “You’re the one who’s playing God. God would have let him move on a long time ago.”

  So we had these irreconcilable beliefs. I only knew it was bad enough that Mervyn was blind and deaf and dying; but that I had to be the one to pull the trigger, to boot him off the merry-go-round and out of my own life, seemed a bit thick. Look at him, I thought. He’d finished with his turkey and proceeded to the edge of the bed. Putting his front feet cautiously over the edge, he braced himself and finally dropped to the floor, almost falling down in the process. But he’d made it. He wasn’t done yet. I kept hoping he would just go to sleep and not wake up. I’d suggested it to him many times. I didn’t want to be the one to send him on his way, although he seemed increasingly ready to travel. Now he nosed out the entrance to his heated den, crept in, and lay down, with only his tail sticking out. Waiting.

  When we were ready, I tucked him into the bed with the covers over everything but his ears. We lay on our backs staring up at the dark ceiling. “There’s too much death around here these days,” I told Lu, trying to dissolve our little squabble. “Mervyn the ghost cat, and now Janet down there in that room in Hathwell. Even Parnell’s starting to lose it.” I didn’t mention that Mervyn’s fate was bothering me more than that of my human friends, I suppose because I didn’t have to make any decisions for them. I kept trying to visualize myself treacherously stroking my unsuspecting pal while the vet injected him with whatever vile poison they use, but I couldn’t do it.

  Lu sighed. “I know,” she said. “It’s sad. But we’ve had a lot of good years with him. And it’s a completely natural thing. I’m sure he doesn’t see it the same way we do. To him, it’s not sad, it’s just part of his life. He’s just living, waiting for whatever comes next, the way he always has. We should learn from that.”

  She reached carefully over Mervyn to put a hand on my stomach. “You have a tendency to focus on the down side. There’s Albert too, you know. Why don’t you focus on him? He’s on the way up.”

  “Yeah, but this just reminds me that it’s all the same thing. Mervyn’s going into that void, whatever it is, and Albert’s just coming out of it. But it’s still the same
void, and we get this little flicker of daylight in between.”

  I knew I was just whining now. Lu was silent. She doesn’t agree with me about the void, of course, but she doesn’t like to argue about it, either, knowing that nobody’s opinion is going to get changed. As I’ve already mentioned, Lu is a very practical person. Her mind moves from A to B without intermediate stops or digressions. Her imagination, for example, is not equal to the task of conjuring up images of me rolling around in bed with one of her friends. So it was with mild relief, knowing my secret was still safe, that I felt her hand moving lower on my stomach. I’m sorry to report, though, that there was also a tiny grain of contempt for her cluelessness.

  After a while, I picked up the nearly limp Mervyn and carefully rearranged him on my other side, then rolled toward Lu. I pushed my face against her side, smelling her skin, and ran my hand along one smooth thigh.

  It was a measure of Mervyn’s deterioration, I thought, that he no longer budged, no matter what was going on in the bed. In the past he would have stomped off in disgust the minute the blankets started moving around. This time he stayed, and eventually we all got to sleep, but not before I’d spent some time on my back, ala Janet Blythe, mulling things over. Lu was already asleep, with her damp and loosened flank pressed comfortably against mine. It’s a mistake, I thought, to reject lust as merely a base impulse. The simplicity and directness of skin sliding on skin can be a kind of shorthand for everything about love that’s too complicated for us to sort out. Lu seemed to have an instinctive grasp of this elementary fact. On the other hand, no matter how exciting the chemical stampede, there’s always the silence after the parade has moved on, and what’s left is a sort of veil of emotional dust hanging in the air. Is there any meaning to it, or are all our diversions just delaying tactics, deployed in the hope that if we can drag our heels long enough someone, or something, will rescue us? And where did that leave Mervyn, who never even had such thoughts? He was there beside me, so still that I couldn’t even tell he was breathing. But I knew his useless ears were erect and his blind eyes wide open, as though he were waiting for messages.