Blinded by the Light
My mama always told me not to look into the light of the sun,
but, mama, that's where the fun is.
Bruce Springsteen
I feel like I just became aware that the commuter train that I am on,the one that I have ridden on faithfully to work each day for years, has just skipped the track. That moment when you come to understand that something is horribly, horribly amiss. Imperceptibly at first, the sense of weightlessness expands and slides, almost a floating just before and entering into the state, the stomach shuddering place, where the understanding begins. Despite all the factors saying no, I helped to turn a rather large day in Tinker's life and without question the biggest day in the life of her four babes, into a yes. In my time here playing human I have mastered just a few skills. One of them is that of making poor decisions.The knowledge that is shifting my view, that is driving a cold nail into the back of my neck, is the response that I got earlier today when I naively asked one of my coworkers if he knew anyone who may be either interested in taking one of Tinker's new brood or who may just have some good advice for me in general as I can't really see having them all join the small group of felines which already tax the kindness and the garbage resources of our apartment complex at Old Shabab Court.
Simon. That is the first name of the gentleman who said that bad thing to me, that thing that I can't stop thinking about, that I wish I could stop thinking about. I had mentioned the kittens arrival to another Britisher, a man named Franklin, last night as I was returning home from the co-op. Franklin suggested talking to Simon as Simon and his wife have sort of taken charge of the affairs of the wild cats in the Ferdaws area of south campus, the family housing neighborhood. I ran across Simon in the hall today up in Building 58, and probed him for advice. When he took in what I was saying, his response was completely immediate and assertive, and while it seems to me like he should have hesitated first, he did not even for one small portion of time. When he spoke it was as though my ears cleared of built up atmospheric pressure, my eyes sharpened focus. it was like in the most dramatic part of the movie where everything shifts into complete and total silence. While his eyes stayed locked onto mine, rising a bit, his head all in slow motion tilting just up and back, his lips moved as everything else froze, and the world around us stopped making any noise at all. I can play it back, see his lips, see what sounds they make, but still I am not allowing the sound of the words to be expressed. It just can't really be.
When my mind gets vapor locked like this there is sort of a lateral shift that occurs in my space/time, as though through some prism I slide, refracted into the same place but different. It is impossible for me to discern how much of this sensation is physical vs. emotional/mental. All I know is that things get weird, move sideways in ways that things aren't supposed to be able to move and it is akin to traveling but going nowhere and yet everything is changed. The Harry Nielsen song made famous in Midnight Cowboy recurs for me at this place, in this time. Cue blustery day trying to cross New York City traffic, lonely montage,
Everybody's talking at me, I don't hear a word they're saying
Only the echoes of my mind
People stopping, staring, I can't see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes
I'm going where the sun the sun keeps shining, Through the pouring rain
Going where the weather suits my clothes
Banking off of the North east winds, Sailing on a summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean line a stone
Well her water broke as she tussled with a larger, overly fluffy calico a couple nights back. There she was, leaking, looking freaked. What was I gonna do? Found a box and an unused sheet, popped them together and into my walk in closet. That was last night. And so I'm sitting here in the chair that I've pulled next to the closet door and I'm needing to leave for work in a matter of twenty minutes or so. Smoking a cigarette with the front and back doors open, the wind traveling through the hallway, and I feel some unclean mix of helplessness, false bravado, and cowardice. I mean she's getting to the last stages, it has become quite plain to see. The sounds she is producing right NOW are new, torturous, the kind that make a man want to walk away or to end it. In all reality, I suppose, they are the sounds that women have endured and moved right through as the men have stayed in the waiting room extending cigars and clammy congratulations towards one another.
I walk away to continue to prepare to go to work, make my lunch, text Jim to see if he is gonna come by, need my wing man back, and she sort of drags herself out onto the carpet in the main room, well, the only room in my one room flat, and is on her side, her leg raised up, the center of mass in her abdomen solidly settled now down low towards her tail end and she makes a plaintive wail and looks at me, don't leave me alone. When I move back to the chair she picks herself up and waddles back into the box in the corner, seemingly fully aware that it is in that space that the deed will be done, despite her possible unknowing of just what precisely the deed will consist of.
Tinker, as I came to call her based on her scrappiness and resourcefulness, her pluck if you like, has been the only one of the four or five cats that share Old Shabab with me and my teaching mates that I have bonded with. Cats are considered somewhat sacred to the locals, some trickle down of pre-Islamic tribal paganism, I'm guessing. Dogs are dirty, unclean beasts that are not kept as pets or tolerated in most any regard. Cats, however, are not to be eradicated and so they live near garbage dumpsters, bin cats as they are called, or, as with many on this campus, they are fed by dislocated expatriates who haven't much other connection with their former lives back home.
She stood out from the others it seemed. Not a big cat, but alert, feisty, a combination of endearing and assertive, the personality of an urchin, a natural fluency in the language and behavior of the street, an innate master at knowing when to pour on the charm and when to fight. We flirted for a while, she coming into my place to shine her light on me and then, after receiving food and attention, like a teen aged prostitute, slipping quietly out the back door. My idyllic misconceptions about this true bond we had formed, like my last marriage I suppose, hell, like most all of my romantic liaisons short or long, were to be over and over again shattered as we worked through our cycle of me preparing to save her, she responding, me shelling out affection and promises, and she showing me the hard side of how things really work. Then after she spent a day or two working the other fellows and their cat bowls, she'd come a knocking at my back door, all oversized eyes and fuzzy sounds, and we'd pretend to start all over again. Hell, if she's gonna play her part in this small drama I may as well take the other role.
I was maybe seven when my mother, a premed student at the University of Minneapolis where she met my father, dropped out, and married, decided that it would be a good idea to give her three children a small, completely serendipitous lesson on mammalian anatomy. Our cat, Girl, had grabbed a baby rabbit, shaken it just enough to break its neck, and delivered it to us, a small remuneration for our mother's continued provision of room, board, and affection. My mom tacked the small, still aware being spread eagled to a piece of wood and sliced it open. The sight of its bared heart wiggling and bumping amidst the gaggle of internal organs as its eyes stared up at the ceiling is one of those sights that makes me refuse to watch terrible scenes in movies: I know that once impressed into the retina those pictures. do not leave.
Like a pro, Tinker set the hook the first time out. She has slept with me maybe three times, two of those times occurring within the first week that we started, I don't know, seeing each other, for lack of a better or more apt phrase. And it was a strange, kind of eerie experience for me. It all, as they say, happened so fast. It was unexpected, as these things are. Me fresh out of a relationship, a marriage, spent, dog eared like a worn paperback, shrunken back into myself like some old before its time tortoise. Then she appears, pops into my life and wham, zero to sixty we connect. I mean I guess I'm kind of old fashioned, but I'm not really the guy to spend the night with a female on the first night, prefer a bit of wining and dining. Given that even in cat years Tinker is probably about fourteen, she's not really even old enough to drink. She's a minor. I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
I've just met her and one thing leads to another, and wham, we're in bed together. It's too sudden, I'm thinking. Oh well, just roll with it, right? There's frolicking, touching, heavy petting even. A veritable love fest, and I don't get a whole lot of sleep. Soon the birds are chirping and the prayer call comes, another night gone, first light. We get up, and I make us a little breakfast, then she splits. Typical, yeah. Whatever. No hard feelings. No promises broken, no time to really set up any expectations. Just another roamer in the night. What was strangest possibly of all about my first intimate encounter with her was that she promptly brought me a gift. Now I have long held it to be axiomatic that the way to a girl's heart is an unexpected gift at an unexpected time. That being said, the bloody, tailless, headless lizard that Tinker set squarely in the center of my welcome mat sort of properly summed up the prospects of any long term relationship. I mean usually this happens in the giving of a cold shoulder and a quick exit the following morning. I gotta say it's never happened just like this before. But then that is just how my little street wise "friend" rolls.
It was difficult to walk out on her this morning nonetheless. Sure we have an unconventional relationship, she stopping by for a quick fix when she needs it then always disappearing again in a flash just when I think more intimacy may be coming. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that she probably has daddy issues, raised like a feral animal as so many are today, especially here in the Kingdom where they hang around the complex all day lounging until the men come stumbling on back weary from another day of the white collar shuffle. Then they make all nice, rubbing up against us, all purrs and can I come home with you eyes. I mean it's not like I am not aware of how she has been in the bedroom of pretty much every man here. So sure all off us men eyeball each other with that singular, less-than, stare at the ground glance, but what are you going to do? Sooner or later she always comes back around. Yet even so as she shook and cried, her body tightening up, her moans almost growls, begging for company, for just a touch, I left her, and, truth be told, I worked to keep her from my mind's eye for the next almost ten hours until I walked, anxiety building, back to my front door and in.
There they were, the four little blind bundles of squirms and squeaks, rolling like a roiling mass of eels on top of one another, affixing their barely visible slits of mouths onto Tinker's swollen teats. And she looking up, her eyes a cross between oh, there you are, like why do men always leave at that time, and a resigned, the tough part is over why don't you just fix me a meal.
Walking home after work today, a day after they were birthed, the day of Simon's molten words, a hot wind blowing strongly, throwing shovelfuls of sand into the air, the grains shooting hard against me, occluding the outside world in a blustery reflection of the storm inside, his two words come against me. His words playing out over and over, the shortest short film in the history of the world, and the most savage. Am I considering his advice now? Will I ask Jim over to discuss it? Is it the moral choice? What will it feel like, I mean in my hand, what will it feel like? And inside. What will it feel like inside. Will it be like the rabbit opened all red and brown and purple tacked to that piece of wood? Will it too never go away?
Squinting my eyes behind my glasses, my hand up in front of me against the anger of the wind, against the my internal reaction to Simon's two words, my legs continued to lessen the distance between me and the new, helpless family awaiting in my flat. Like some unclean beast I fought the tentacles of self loathing and disgust. Why did I have to approach him? What caused me to believe that in his words would be found the proper answer to the conflict that I had created for myself, the perfect knot to begin the third and final act of this dramatic set piece, just the most recent installment of look how much emotional damage I can provide for myself by reliving over and over the fallacy of watch me save the world.
And I'm looking at her looking up at me, the teeny mewings of the still blind newborns acting as the score, while his words print out across the screen in large black and white block letters, "Drown them."
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