SALLY CAVES

KETAMINE

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

-- The Gospel of Thomas

"The gods have retractable claws."

-- The Gospel of Bast

THE DOCTOR

I have found out electricity. Winds from the north, and I can't seem to shake
this damn cough. The doctor is sliding his cold stethoscope under my left breast
and I hitch away from him, shoulder jerking. "Sorry," I murmur.

"Breathe deeply."

I tell him nervously that eats have been many an inspiration to poets and
prisoners. I tell him that allergies are a kind of psychic electricity. My
humors meet my cat's humors and sparks fly. The Egyptians must have had special
prayers to placate their little gods who could make you weep and sneeze, driving
the very soul out of your nostrils.

Unimpressed by my verbal wit, the doctor says: "You still have the cat?"

I have no intention of booting the cat. The doctor's sending me to an allergist
anyway. "And an allergist is going to tell you that you treat an allergy first
by getting rid of the irritant," he pronounces.

My left shoulder strains to meet my chin.

I rescued the irritant from execution: a paper-thin, scrofulous little tabby
that had rubbed her face bald against the wires of her kennel. She was so hoarse
with calling she could only whisper. "MiAA," she cried through the din of
shrieking and barking that fills the halls of the Humane Society. When I ordered
them to take her out she climbed me like a tree and tucked her wailing head
under my chin. I could feel the sharp blades of her pelvis, the flaky matter
under her tail. She smelled like diarrhea. She clung on as though she'd stapled
herself to me. How could I refuse this suppliant?

"She has extra toes," I said, my shoulder gyrating out of control. "That's
supposed to be lucky," said the attendant. He was looking at me obliquely, the
way all strangers do, pretending not to see anything weird. I took Mia home and
became an irritant to my friend Dennis and everyone else.

Mia is about six months old, now, and still underweight, yet there's hair on her
face and her tail has filled out. She's an ordinary silver tabby with big
gallumphing feet but her face has the markings of her fetal ancestry: a lynx has
striped her forehead, Egyptian kohl accents either eye and has left its traces
on her cheeks. Out of this mask she smiles at me in that cat way with
half-closed lids. She's regained her voice. She has one word of many
intonations. There is her seductive "miah?" that ends in a rising trill, there
is her "mi-AH" that is an announcement, and the sweetly intimate "mi-ah" that is
mimed. "M--!" she smacks silently, disclosing the pink, tender source of her
humming. Mad poet Smart said of his cat Jeoffrey: "For by stroaking of him I
have found out electricity."

The electrical humors kicked in within days: a tickling under my chin, a
tingling in my sinuses, an itchy swarm of bugs across my eyeballs that made me
feel twitchier than ever, and, lately, a thick feeling in my bronchial tubes.
The doctor doesn't like this. Neither does Dennis, but for different reasons.
I'm used to Dennis's little seizures of meanness, but it stung when he told me
that, aside from my neurological problems and the condition of my arms and legs
(which he's very generously put up with), my constantly blowing my nose and
clearing my throat was making me sexually unattractive to him.

I told him to go hump a mannequin.

It's unfair, this immune system. Especially when it's always protected me from
humans. So I'll be damned if I know why Mia started changing into a girl because
it didn't diminish my allergies one whir. Or my tics.

 THE PHILOSOPHER

Winds from the northwest; they rattle through the naked branches of the Upstate
forest bringing sleet and rain. A brown woodland surrounds the Upland Meadows
Complex -- five staggered rows of beige stucco buildings. I sit on the couch in
my apartment that an inheritance from my deceased father pays for, and watch Mia
play with a tight little pink robber band that came off the clump of broccoli I
bought last night from Wegmans. She scoops it up with her lucky extra claws and
throws it over her shoulder where it lands, plick, on the linoleum floor and she
pounces on it, pretending it's a little fish she's dished up out of a river.
Dennis is in the bathroom. I look around the living room at the unsold webs of
my creation. Not a surface remains that I haven't festooned with fabric
sculptures, as if I can hide the fifties' ugliness of this house with my wool.

It must have started with The Three Lives of Thomasina, narrated by the cat,
with that dream-sequence where the Disney heroine has an after-life experience
during her coma and we see her trotting up the golden stairs of Cat Heaven
toward the gleaming image of Bast -- only to be lifted out of her little
premature grave by the witch woman who marries the vet. Happy ending. When I was
nine I had cat funerals but without the cat. I was deeply jealous of my friend
Leah because she had a Siamese. In all the years after my mother's breakdown
{when she broke up with Jack for the fourth time), the only pet I ever had in my
mother's apartment was a treefrog named "Freetog," who escaped; we found him
years later-- a tiny, dusty mummy-- under the piano when we moved it, and that
was it. No other animals. Certainly not cats that could spray and claw the
furniture. Other girls drew profiles of glamorous women in the margins of their
classroom notebooks: I drew cats. Panthers. Tigresses. Gods with retractable
claws. I was a sphinx in disguise, my tics were the displaced twitchings of my
invisible tail.

Mother's gentleman friend Jack was a dog-lover and he was allowed to bring over
his two horny German shepherds. "Stop it, Jupiter!" Loud whacks directed at me
with a newspaper. Mother never told me why Jack thought what they were doing to
my leg was so funny. All I knew was that dogs were gross. Cats were subtle. That
I was a target for male ridicule. Jack's contemptuous "hat bar." The boys in
homeroom: "I bet YOU couldn't kiss her!"

Dennis comes out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his generous middle. He
sits down sassily on the couch next to me.

"What do you have planned for today?"

I hate that question even more than "How was it?" It's his urgent need for me to
be productive. Normal. More urgent, even, than my being orgastic.

"I don't know," I say, and my hand wants to reach out and swipe something away
from the air but I deflect it with an upward thrust of my shoulder.

Dennis is productive. Even if he doesn't fix his glasses. He makes a fortune
illustrating science-fiction bookjackets. He has a loft downtown. It's full of
his expensive futuristic cityscapes. I hate sci-fi art. He's asked me to live
with him so I could save my father's money. I can't think of anything more
suffocating.

Mia comes to me and claws at my terry-cloth robe. She climbs up my leg and
settles and resettles herself in my lap, vibrating her pleasure. I wheeze
affectionately over her, examining her ears, her whiskers, the pink balls of her
feet, the web between the normal and abnormal toes, the ingenious sheathing
mechanism: you pinch it gently and out pops the needle, like pinching a
snapdragon and making it "talk." "This little talon went to market," I gabble.
"This little talon stays at home. . . . "

"I wonder what she's thinking about," I say, fatuous new cat owner.

"Cats don't think."

Mia draws her rasped tongue along her paw which she then passes over and over
her ear in that lovely nodding motion of her head and I suggest that I shouldn't
throw away the fur in her comb. "Maybe I could weave it into my next project," I
say, and as if she understands me, Mia cocks her little comic Egyptian face up
at me and I bend down to kiss her between her ears.

"Stop that," barks Dennis. "You shouldn't even be holding that beast."

I look at Dennis where he sits at the other end of the sofa: a man with a
bandaid on his glasses and a pink towel wrapped around his waist.

"Mia isn't a beast." Mia gets up and stretches.

"Any creature that doesn't cover its asshole is a beast," says Dennis.

"What does that make us, half an hour ago?" I say.

Dennis reaches for the plant spritzer. "She needs a shot where she forgot to
wipe." He aims, and Mia scrambles.

"Cut it out," I yell. "She has feelings."

"That's rampant anthropomorphism." Dennis smiles, pleased with himself.

"No it isn't." I retrieve Mia and soothe her. "Somewhere in this universe
there's a little cat consciousness, a little self that feels me scratching her
ears, that senses your hostility. . . ."

Dennis scratches my ear. "You're no good at being philosophical."

He launches into one of his numbing lectures about how cats don't have selves.
Or "subjectivity." That's the word he uses. That nobody really does except the
person who is in a position to speak about it. He has a degree from Berkeley. He
tells me about the Turing test and Descartes and the neocortex. He tells me
about somebody named "Purse" and how we are only"cognitively available" to each
other through language and all this other blotto that I can't refute. Dennis is
a cogsci student turned commercial artist; I didn't even finish school. I have
to endure his insensitive cat jokes.

"My cat is conscious," is my feeble retort.

Dennis plunks his bare foot down in my lap and suggests that what I was doing to
Mia I should really be doing to him. Mia darts out of the room.

"You have to go home now." I dump his heavy foot on the floor.

Dennis goes home. I go to the library on one of my reading binges. I look up
consciousness. Descartes. The brain. Abnormalities of the brain. I check out a
book on anaesthesia and one on veterinary anaesthesia. I read it obsessively.
Especially the chapters on consciousness and pain. I come back home and sit in
the bathroom on the edge of the bathtub, listening to the ping ping ping of the
radiator-- one, two hours at a stretch -- and, with a surgeon's cold-blooded
precision I give into my tyrannical compulsions and pluck the hairs out of my
arms and legs with my fingernails. Where the skin has become shiny and tough, I
start on the scabs. I'm powerless to stop removing the irritant.

Tonight I lie down on the carpet next to where Mia is sprawled and looked at the
underside of my coffee table. I've begun to draw things from the floor up.
Things without names. That's the unimaginable world of the animal. To go hunting
for pink rubber bands without naming them, without even naming self, is
unimaginable, isn't it? A cat doesn't wonder: why wasn't I born a human? Why do
I have a tail and you don't? A cat isn't into useless concepts. How refreshing.
I try to imagine what it feels like to purr.

There's the prickle of whiskers on my face as Mia investigates me and my strange
posture and for an instant I smell a faint cologne, like the kind girls used to
wear in high school. I stare into her eyes with their winking membranes, that
unmistakable feature of a cat's gaze, and hold back my sneeze.

Something, somewhere in the universe, is seeing me.

 THE VETERINARIAN

Cat myth: that cats are independent.

Cat mystery: no one knows how a eat purrs.

Cat fact: cats often purr when they're in distress.

Descartes fact: humans are "ensouled" machines. Because animals don't have souls
they're just machines. A vestige of this attitude operates today, which is why
we have vivisection, cosmetic testing on animals, and ketamine in veterinary
surgery.

I take my electrical cat to the vet. I need a carrier: twenty dollars. She must
have a rabies shot, a distemper shot, a test for round worms, feline leukemia
and a vaccination a week later. A hundred and nineteen dollars total. I
introduce Mia to the carrier and she backs away. I feel like I'm thrusting her
into an oven. She balks at the opening moans, her little "MIA" full of betrayal
and beseechment; she scratches, she holds her ground, I push her in and she
whirls around only to have me slam the gate shut in her face. She turns in
circles in her jail, rattling the carrier violently. She starts to pant, a
terrible sight in a cat. A terrible sound comes from her, and a smell: rank,
sweet. She has gone through this before. A carrier took her to the pound. "Mia,"
I croon. "Everything's all right."

Everything is not all right. She's trapped in an animal terror that can't be
assuaged by words. In the back seat of my car she makes that sound like a
peacock all the way to the vet while my shoulder hitches uncontrollably. The vet
is very professional. He turns Mia over and over as if she's dough, sticks
needles into her and reminds me that I should arrange to get her spayed. Yes of
course, I say, stroking my cowering beast who is shedding violently and leaving
big sweaty pawprints on the linoleum surface of the examining table. Spayed, I
think, and imagine a wedge-shaped gardening tool thrusting into the belly of my
cat and scooping out her sex. Spaded, say some people for whom the image has
overpowered the grammar. We go home, and Mia's obvious relief to see the
familiar nameless things of my apartment fills me with gratitude. That night she
sleeps under my covers with me, as though I am her savior, having saved her from
my other self. She can't visualize the weapon that we're dangling over her.
That's when I have my anthropo- or should I say gyneco-morphic dream.

 THE TOTEM

Since childhood I've had variations on this dream. I'm put in charge of some
little creature that is recognizable at the beginning of the dream as a kitten,
or a puppy or a rabbit, and it becomes a piece of string that I lose or step on,
or a blade of grass that I drop in the hedge. I hunt feverishly and when at last
I find it, it rebukes me for my inattention but it is no longer an animal. I
don't know what it is. A human totem of an animal. In fairy tales you have the
animal totem of a human. Not here.

In my dream Mia turns into a white moth which I've accidentally added to my
terrarium full of toads. Weeping hysterically (I always weep in these dreams), I
shrink myself and search the tank until I find Mia's empty dress. That's when
she speaks to me. She's sitting next to the terrarium which is in my old bedroom
at home. Freetog is mummified, but Mia is alive.

There she is: Mia and not Mia -- a girl of twelve or thirteen. She looks like my
old school friend Leah: freckled, with fluffy dark hair; gray-green eyes and
dark lashesj short upturned nose, childish little chin, serious mouth. She's
wearing a furry, close-fitting dress, one that I'd made her. Her feet are bare.
She's painted her long nails pink like the fingers of the models the other
schoolgirls always draw. She's thin and small and her eyelids are lined with
kohl. She bobs her head at me. I'm confused in my dream; I don't think I've
registered that she's not a cat.

"I don't like being put in a cage," she says.

"I'm sorry, Mia, but what could I do?"

I launch into an embarrassingly mawkish lecture of
"why-it-is-I-can't-explain-my-actions-to-a-cat" and how I'm going to make her
into a purse. When I wake up, the girl is a beast again, her little purring
spine pressed into the small of my back. My throat is sore from dream-crying and
allergies.

 THE GIRL

How much easier it would be to give Mia a pill if she could understand my
explanations. None of this wrestling around on the kitchen floor where she makes
me feel as though I'm forcing some sadistic and arbitrary punishment on her. "Do
you want to have parasites?" I tell her while I clamp her jaws shut with one
hand and stroke her resistant, nauseated throat with the other. What does she
know about parasites? All she knows is that I'm doing something bad to her. In
our struggles she bites her lip and blood oozes out of the comer of her mouth
and over her little speckled chin. I wince.

"You know who you look like?" I say in a feeble attempt at placation while Mia
swipes disgustedly at her face.

There was a girl who used to tell me secrets in the library when we were
supposed to be writing our term papers on the Aztecs. I would always write them
down in my diary. In the ninth grade she told me how she was invited to a party
by this gorgeous college graduate and her mother wouldn't let her go but she
snuck out anyway in her miniskirt and poorboy sweater and rode her bicycle to
the house across town where he lived but when she got there she was the only one
there. You got here early, he said. I thought you said the party started at
eight, she said. No, I said nine, he said, but that's okay. Do you want some hot
chocolate while we wait for the others? Sure, she said; she told me he seemed
especially grown up in knowing that she couldn't legally drink alcohol, and she
sat in the living room and waited for him to make it and bring it out from the
kitchen. She drank the hot chocolate while he leaned against the door and asked
her about her college plans and that sort of thing very polite -- he was very
cute, very sophisticated, at least twenty-five- when things got vague. He was
poking the back of her hand with a pin and the next thing she knew she was
collapsed on the couch with ten-ton weights on her arms and legs. She wanted to
say "I've fainted," but she couldn't even open her eyes, let alone her mouth,
and the world became rubbery and heavy and pressed down on her and choked her
like spit. Her date, meanwhile, took off her poorboy shirt and her miniskirt and
her underwear and her skin and her muscles and veins and bones and tried to do
what she'd heard reports of in gym class except that from where she was looking
down, as she floated around in the air above, it seemed as though he were a
priest bent over her lifeless, flower-bestrewn body, praying and praying and
church music was playing. And then he was stitching her up again except for her
heart which he sacrificed to the other Aztec priests and it wasn't a dream. You
were awake the whole time? Yes, she said, and swore me to secrecy. I think I
must've gotten a little dizzy, she said when she could move. He asked her if she
was all right. Yeah, I'll be fine. Do you need a ride? No, she had her bike, but
he was not convinced that she'd be "safe," as he put it, and with a great show
of gallantry and anxiety he tied her bike down in the trunk of his car and drove
her home, and it was hours and hours later. She said "thank you," got out, threw
up, and never told her mother what had happened. You never even said anything to
him? No. Not even you bastard? I whispered fiercely. No. Why not? I don't know,
said Leah.

When I told reconstructions of this story to my other friends, I always changed
Leah's name so that I wouldn't be violating her confidence. I never wrote this
incident down in my diary.

The wind is in the south bringing its thawing rains. Water drips off the caves
outside. The vet's assistant calls up, interrupting my ritual gestures at the
loom that Mia finds so fascinating and my tics find so restful.

"Bring her in," he says. "She'll be going into heat any day now."

"What are the consequences?"

"A cat in heat cannot be contained. She WILL have kittens . . ."

"I know. Four times as much dander floating around in the air."

Call-waiting. It's my mother. She wants me to come see her in Boston.

"I can't, Mother. I'd have to get a cat-sitter."

"Why can't Dennis do it?"

"He's too busy."

"Why don't you just kennel her?"

"I can't, she has a thing about being confined."

"Isn't that a little anthropomorphic?"

I call the vet himself.

"Will you be using ketamine on my cat to anaesthetize her?"

"That and other things. We. . . . "

"I read that ketamine isn't a real anaesthetic."

"It's a dissociative anaesthetic."

"Is it humane?"

The vet chuckles. "Of course it is. As I was saying . . . ."

"Then why don't we use it on humans?"

"Will you let me finish my sentence? Ketamine has been known to produce
temporary psychotic episodes in some people. In some people."

"But not in animals."

"No."

"Being a telepath, you're sure of that?" I say and the vet hangs up. Dennis
says: "You antagonize people."

I tell him I don't want Mia to suffer and he asks me why don't I show the same
concern for humans.

"Because humans stick detergents in rabbits' eyes. Humans make bombs."

"Look." Dennis puts his hands on my shoulder in a really unbearable
condescension. "There are some things you just can't think about too carefully."

I tell Dennis I have to go home and feed my cat at five. He tells me it won't
make that much difference if I feed her later. He tries to kiss me.

"She might run out of water," I say, yanking my face away from his.

"She won't."

"I might have left the burner on."

"You didn't leave the burner on."

"I have to go back."

Dennis throws his hands up in the air.

I gather my wool around me and slip out to the wet car. Stirring up the exposed
and rotting leaves of the March thaw I drive the country roads, roar into my
apartment parking lot, trot up the outside stairs and push through my front
door, keys jangling. "Mia?" I call. I check the burner. Not on. I check Mia's
water. Filled to the brim. I check the iron. Put away. I check the slip cover
over the loom. Cat proof. I check the heater in the bedroom. Not on. Not on, not
burning.

I check myself in the bathroom mirror. Not ugly; Dennis isn't quite so desperate
although he thinks I am. Poised behind me in the doorway to the lighted hall is
the purple silhouette of a girl, her pointed fingers spread out as if to beckon
or ward me off. My own startled hand strikes the ceramic tile with a crack and
she leaps away out of view. Slowly, I turn, like one of those tottering
marionettes in a jewelry box.

A cat is crouched in the hallway, two phosphorescent lenses like planets.

 THE PHILOSOPHER GAIN

It's my dogatonic three hours in the bathroom and I sit hunched in the corner
running my hand over my forearm, sniffing out the telltale stubble. I'm thinking
hard about consciousness.

It has something to do with the "reticular formation," which is somehow
responsible for the way in which our brains interpret external sensation.
General anaesthesia that is considered acceptable to use on human persons must
suppress this reticular formation. Its role in what we call "consciousness" is
not exactly known. Neither d-tubocurarine, pavulon, succinylcholine nor ketamine
are reticular formation suppressants, though they'll knock you out.

Mia is perched on the edge of the empty bathtub; her right foot bobs restlessly
back and forth -- along with her entire slender leg where it is crossed over the
other. She twists around suddenly and bends backward into the bathtub, running
her hands over the glossy porcelain. I've gotten used to those hands, with their
extra little fingers. With a neat flip all of her is in the tub, now, and she
follows the drip drip drip of the faucet with identical movements of her head.
Cupping the water in her hands she smooths it over her freckled face. She makes
a very strange girl.

Atrocious errors were committed in the course of surgical experimentation with
d-tubocurarine. How did surgeons discover its horrible effects ? The drug which
South American Indians used to tip their arrows with looked to those who trusted
their senses like a general anaesthetic. The animal was down, unmoving, its
neuro-vegetative system depressed, and it didn't respond to the most vigorous
stimuli. Obviously, it was UNCONSCIOUS. In the forties, curate was substituted
in surgeries for ether because of the superior post-operative recoveries made by
patients -- with one drawback: they accused the surgeon of torturing them. As
most of these patients were small children, however, and not in full control of
language, their plaints were ignored. To be aware of every scalding slice of the
scalpel, every piercing suture and unable to protest, unable even to lift the
comer of your lip-- it took an adult to confirm the terrifying consciousness of
children under curare.

Ketamine goes straight for the psyche: its use in human patients became
questionable when so many of them reported hideous hallucinogenic distortions of
what was happening to them. Without a neocortex, a cat doesn't hallucinate --
especially if it's immobile and not exhibiting a subjective experience. Hell is
for humans.

Mia scrambles out of the bathtub and over to me. She kneels down where I'm
crouched and catches my inexorable and destructive hand. I look into her earnest
green eyes. She wants me to stroke her hair. I stop what I'm doing and stroke
her hair. I stop what I'm doing. That's the amazing thing.

 THE TOTEM AGAIN

I'm getting used to coming home and finding Mia in her girl-form. She doesn't
take shape dramatically. It isn't anything you can see. You close your eyes and
open them and she's there as gynecomorph. You come in the door and a child
throws her skinny arms around you and presents her little heart-shaped freckled
face up to yours to be kissed. Then she struts away, back arched in mock
aggression, all twelve strange fingers spread. She wears a fuzzy little dress of
wool and cat fur that I wove for her. The other night she sat hunched in a
corner of the couch, grasping her knees. Only her slow blink cued me that she
wasn't human. For obvious reasons, I can't feed her out of a dish on the floor
when she is in this state, and with gritting patience I have been teaching Mia
the Girl how to eat with a fork.

Pointy elbows on the table, Mia dangles the fork over her tuna plate, and drops
it with a clang. She grips a greasy wad of salad between long-nailed thumb and
forefinger and shoves it in her mouth. "No, Mia," I snap. I pick up the fork,
load it with tuna and tuck it into her mouth.

"Don't you think it's a little weird," says Dennis, who happens to be dining
with us, "to feed your cat at the table?"

"Mia is exceptional."

"Don't get me wrong, your cat is nice. But I still think it's weird to feed it
at the table with a fork. Not to mention nauseating."

"Then go."

"Just get the cat off the table."

Mia, meanwhile, is licking my lettuce, elbows angled up on either side of her
head. Dennis reaches out a heavy hand and smacks her in the face, and she leaps
back, eyes fluttering in confusing.

I smack Dennis.

"You're crazy," he says.

"Hack!" says Mia, her first human word.

"That's right!" I cry. "Nothing BUT a hack! Hack!"

"Crazy bitch!"

Dennis lumbers out, like some big naked bear under ill-fitting clothes. I hear
the door slam and the whole cardboard apartment shudders.

I don't see him for a week. He leaves messages on my machine; whenever I'm
reminded of some nice thing he's done for me I try to think of his cat jokes.
Mia as "koosh-ball." I have to work at it. I tell myself he reminds me of Jack.

I have to work at Mia, too. As soon as I start to think that Mia, as beautiful
as she is in human form, does not purr, does not have retractable claws, does
not really give me the same protective signals that she does as an animal even
when she's curled up in bed with me, her thin girlish ribs warm and calm under
my defective arm, then the miracle dissolves and-- boof! she's merely a little
cat, like so many other common housecats under the bedspread, and soon I'm back
in the bathroom twitching and picking my arms and legs raw.

Seven months and no sign of heat. I try not to think about that as well.

 THE DOCTOR AGAIN

The allergist has turned the tender skin of my forearm into a gridwork of bumps
with her sharp little instrument and her various bottles of irritants. "And this
is cat dander," she says maliciously, indicating a welt the size of a dime.
"Four plus.

"I noticed the scabs on the backs of your arms," she observes. "Have you been to
a dermatologist about these?"

An all around ordeal, going to the allergist. Meanwhile, I've developed
conjunctivitis and it's back to the primary care physician who peers into my
reddened eye. "You still got the cat?" he mutters.

"Yes, I've still got the fucking cat. When are you gonna stop asking me that?"

"I'm sending you to an ophthalmologist. . . . "

I go to the eye-doctor who tells me I have a mild corneal abrasion and gives me
vasocidin which I'm to drop into my eyes every four hours. Dennis isn't talking
to me and Mia is putting my dangling earrings in her ears.

I come home with yellow dye on my eyelids and Mia greets me by throwing herself
at my feet and rolling, rolling, rolling. She arches her neck and undulates
along the rug. Her hands reach out and stroke my shoes.

"Get up. Don't do that."

"Heaven," says Mia. Her eyes are heavily lined, and she's been into my lipstick
as well. She scrambles to her feet and whirls around the living room, one gypsy
earring swinging luxuriously under her short black hair. Her dress is different.
It's my old purple leather disco skirt.

"What am I going to do? What am I going to do?" I moan.

Mia darts to the window and presses herself against the glass. "Heaven," she
says again, rubbing her pubis voluptuously against the sill. Dennis is walking
resolutely up the outside stairs.

I intercept him, pulling the apartment door shut behind me. Mia looks through
the window, a pale freckled gift face. Dennis can't see that she isn't a cat.

"What do you want?"

"I want my electric shaver."

"I'll mail it to you."

"I think we ought to talk about this," he says, moving toward the door. I block
his path. "Aren't you letting things get a little out of hand? Why can't we just
talk?"

"Not inside my house."

"Let meout! Let me out!" cries Mia, her breasts pressed against the glass.

"If you want to shut me out of your life, then fine, but I have a RIGHT to MY
THINGS!" shouts Dennis.

"Chill out, Dennis. I'll get the shaver for you."

I go inside; Mia makes a dash for the door but I grab her arm and shove her into
the bedroom.

"Listen here," I say as she writhes under my grip. "You cut that out now."

"Ow, owww!" Mia complains. She wants to get her hands under her skirt.

Dennis is pounding on the door.

"Just a goddamn minute!" I scream, and drag Mia into the wardrobe and close and
lock it with its little Victorian key. She makes a horrendous noise, muffled and
clanking.

I ransack the bathroom and gather up Dennis's toothbrush and shaver.

"Here you are," I say at the door and fling them at him.

"Let's be . . . " "No!"

"Jesus Christ! It's just a CAT! I don't BELIEVE this . . . "

I slam the door and chain lock it.

Shaking, I collapse on the couch. There is a scratching in the bedroom. Still
shaking, I turn the key and free Mia from her prison, a demure and grateful
tabby in heat. She drapes my ankles with her purrs.

 THE CAT

I have to go to Boston. Mother's had a stroke.

I'm in a swivet. Mother's all right; she's in the hospital, she'll survive. She
needs me. What do I do about Mia? Her first estrus has passed, but the next one
is unpredictable.

"Leave her," says the pet shop attendant. "A cat can stay alone for a week if
you buy one of those water and food dispensers."

I'm thinking: she can't be Mia the Girl if I'm not there, can she? And if she's
a cat all week, who will change her litterbox?

I can't have Dennis look after her. Dennis and I aren't speaking.

I call Dennis. "I'm sorry," I say. I tell him my mother is seriously ill and I'm
frantic to find someone to keep an eye on Mia.

Reluctantly, he agrees.

He enrages me by taking my careful list of cat tasks taped to the refrigerator
and crumpling it up in his hand. "She's a cat," he says. "I'll feed her every
day but I'm not going to set the table for her."

"Just make sure she doesn't go out. She's going in and out of heat. Make sure
you lock the deadbolt with the key when you leave."

"You've taught her how to open the door?" sneers Dennis.

I hate him, but what can I do?

I get on a jet plane. As the wheels leave the ground I'm clawing at the air
uncontrollably and pulling at the scabs on my arms. I should never have let
Dennis take care of Mia. I start hyperventilating.

"We've begun our descent into the Boston Metropolitan Area. Please bring your
seats to their upright position and make sure that your seatbelt is securely
fastened."

I'm crying about my mother now. Six miles above the earth and I can begin to put
some things in perspective. A stroke. The doctors weren't specific: would I find
her unable to speak? Unable to move? Would her left or her right side be
paralyzed?

I dodge the nurses in the hospital corridors.

My mother says: "I'm so glad you're here."

She can speak. She can even move both hands. She's in a hospital bed looking
like her old self.

"It's good to be here, Mother."

"I wish it were good. Nothing is good anymore."

"That's not true, Mother."

"I thought you might not come, because of that damned cat," she says with
effort.

"Forget the cat, mother. She's being taken care of."

"I need to have a brush with death before you'll visit me anymore. Is that the
way it goes?"

"Hush, Mother. I'm here."

"You always were a wretched girl," she whispers. "You never did anything to
please me. It's been a burden to raise you and you're still a burden."

I'm used to her seizures of meanness.

"Are they taking care of you, Mother?"

"They're all incompetent. I need you to fix me my food the way I like it. And I
need my chintz dressing gown. I'm freezing here."

Mother gives me a long list of items needed from her apartment.

In the taxi, resentment begins to set in. The cabdriver draws up to the old
block of brownstones. As I ride up the elevator with its familiar rattle
resentment gives way to despair and I have a vivid image of myself playing nurse
to my invalid mother for the rest of my life. The stroke wasn't bad. The doctor
said that she would just need a little help getting around.

The place hasn't changed. The big overstuffed chairs, the funeral parlor
curtains, the thick Indian rugs, the jade Buddha in the alcove over the
bookshelves. The black telephone on the polished cherry telephone stand. I could
just leave. I could call a taxi and go to the airport. Now.

Impossible. I can't leave my ailing mother three hours after I arrived. Guilt
has me twisting in its intractable claws. I take the stuff to Mother and go home
again by taxi and spend the night in my old sterile bed without once sneezing
and I can't stop thinking about little Mia --waiting at the window for my car,
waiting to come greet me at the door at the first rattle of my keys in the lock.
She'll wait and wait and only Dennis will come. Or won't come. Only Dennis will
slop her water bowl down on the floor for her, dump her food in her plate
without even washing off the dried rotting flakes of her previous meal. Or
won't. Maybe Dennis won't feed her at all. He would forget. Or get called out of
town and ask a friend to feed her and he'd forget. And Mia, trapped in her
discounted subjectivity, would watch the empty shadows of the apartment and
wait. I might be run over by a taxi. Or knifed and hospitalized. Or killed in a
plane crash. And Mia, waiting, wastes away from wanting and meowing. Not even
the neighbors will hear her and weeks later they'll find her maggoty corpse in
the bathtub where she could no longer lick at the porcelain. I'm tormented by
this image for two days while my mother gets heartier and more vindictive by the
minute. She'll need a companion to help her with her meals, says the nurse, and
to get her used to the walker. At least for the first few weeks.

"Why did you ever go off your medication ?" my mother demands as my left arm and
side do a Saint Virus dance.

"Don't you think there's just too much medication these days, Mother?"

"I spent thousands of dollars on you. And you're worse than you were."

"Do you want Earl Gray or Constant Comment?" I ask, holding up the colorful
boxes and jigging them back and forth.

"Oh, get some control," says my mother.

I take a bus out to Mount Auburn Cemetery and look at the grave of Dr. William
T.G. Morton who invented anaesthesia and "Since Whom Science Has Control of
Pain." Written on his tombstone. Tucked between my starchy sheets, I dream that
I'm on all fours searching the apartment for a rubber band that refuses to
become a cat.

I wake up early Saturday morning in the mausoleum, I pick up the black phone on
the cherry table and dial Dennis's number. It's busy. I try several times. Busy.
Busy. The phone rings. "Hello?" I cry hopefully. Jack answers me. His voice is
unmistakable.

"And who could this be?" it asks coquettishly. "Another of Lily's ravishing
helpers ?"

I pause. Jack's falsity was never lost on me.

"What do you want, Jack?"

"Don't tell me this is Leda! Why . . . we must SIMPLY get together again.
Pronto! What brings you to our fair city?"

"As if you didn't know."

"I know how important it is for you to spend quality time with your cat, so it
was really six of one and half a dozen of the other as to whether you'd come
down or not for your old lady."

It's like the walls are caving in on me.

"You never HAVE told me what you've been up to, you wayward girl. Are you still
living upstate?" Over the phone I can hear a sharp yelp.

"How's the pharmacy, Jack?" I ask.

"Splendid. Do you need any medications? I can get them for you half price."

"No thanks."

"Your mother won't even tell me what city you live in," Jack is saying. If I had
hair on my arms it would be standing straight out.

"Anubis," I say and the breath hisses out of my teeth.

"Never heard of it. You got a boyfriend, Leda? By the way, I have a couple of
new pups that would charm you silly."

And I can tell that Boston will finish me. I'll slip into a crevice where none
of my fabrications will save me. Paralyzed by convention, the Goddess cannot
withstand the Jackal.

He continues: "You must have heard about the ice storm/. They had a dreadful ice
storm in Rochester last night. Power is shut off for about thirty thousand
people. Is that where you live?"

"No," I lie.

"That's good. Well, I look forward to seeing you again. I'm sure I will. You do
know that your mother and I are on quite good terms."

"When aren't you?"

"What time shall I drop by?"

I take a deep breath. "Do you have keys to the apartment, Jack?"

"Sure do."

"Mother won't be coming back for a couple of days. Why don't you let yourself
in, say, around one o'clock tomorrow. Get there ahead of me. I'd be interested
in talking to you about certain drugs." Let him hear my voice shake. "Like
ketamine for instance."

"Is that a prescription drug?"

"One o'clock. The apartment. Just you and me. Auld lang syne."

"I'll be there, Leda." The familiar predatory undertone.

"Good." I hang up. I call Dennis's number. It's still busy. I call my own
number. It's busy, too. The phone lines are dead. Mia is crouching in the
darkness, wringing her strange little hands.

I call the hospital. "Would you please tell my mother that I've had an emergency
and have to fly home? I've arranged for a nurse to be on hand for her when she
comes home tomorrow at two. I'll drop by with the cab fare." I hang up before
I'm told anything new.

Breathless, I call the airport. All planes to Rochester are tied up because of
the weather. I put twenty dollars in an envelope for my mother's cabfare, shove
it in the receptionist's hands and fly out of the hospital. "I'll call," I shout
over my shoulder. A cab costs me thirty dollars. I wait for twelve hours at the
airport, jigging and grimacing.

Mia. My little Mia. Please don't hate me for leaving you. I'm coming home, I'll
take care of you, I love you.

I read the newspapers. Ice storm in the Rochester area. Winds from the Northeast
brought a sudden drop in temperature after warm torrential rains and everything
grew a heavy coat of ice. Car windows smashed in by fallen branches. Massive
damage to trees and property. No heat or electricity for thousands. Fourteen
hospitalized. Jack wasn't lying.

I fly standby at quarter after midnight. Thank God for my mother's credit card.
We coast over moonlit, glacial terrain.

The outskirts of Rochester are transfigured. Everything is white, but not with
snow. Whole sections of town are black and unrecognizable. The trees have put on
a strange spring foliage: they are festooned with angel hair, glittering tresses
of glass that trace haloes around the functioning streetlights. Drops are frozen
in rows along the powerlines like necklaces of teeth. Heavy with this unnatural
fruit, limbs have tom away from trunks and the roads are choked with severed
branches, live wires and hollow tubes of ice. It's breathtakingly beautiful. "I
don't know if we can get through to your neck of the woods," the taxi driver is
telling me. I hear explosions in the forest, as yet another crystal chandelier
shatters to the ground. The trees are shedding their unbearable clothes.

"Keep the change," I tell the taxi driver. "This is close enough."

I gallop across the frozen Upland Meadow.

As I gallop, I notice the tomcats. They're everywhere. Loping and mewing and
moaning and dashing into thickets. Big ones, stripy ones, black and white ones,
bold, furtive, arrogant, laid-back ones, all of them with their big saucy balls.
What are all these cats doing around here, I wonder.

The lights are on in the parking lot of my apartment building. It's one
fifty-five a.m. I see a couple of unfamiliar cars next to mine, one of them a
bright red thunderbird. There's a tomcat under the back left tire. He scuttles
away. I dash up the outside stairs and burst in to find two guys in sleeping
bags in my living room and Dennis in my bed.

"Hi," says Dennis groggily, squinting and groping for his glasses in the light
I've flicked on. "Your place had heat and electricity . . . "

"Where's Mia?" I can feel my nose wrinkling, my lips peeling back.

"Don't get all bent out of shape, but she went into heat again and . . ."

"Did you let her out?"

"There were three of us here coming and going . . . "

"YOU LET HER OUT! WHEN?!"

He can't restrain me. It's really quite ridiculous, this flabby man in his
underwear trying to hold my arms. He's telling me that I can't go out to look
for her, that it's dangerous out there. "Bullshit!" I keep hissing. He's
powerless to keep my hands down. They come up and snatch at the air in front of
his face and he's flung back. I've drawn blood. My hands snatch at my coat. I'm
becoming unraveled. Dennis is shouting and chasing after me into the living room
as I unravel my arms; he's shouting at the shocked, vulnerable men, naked as
jays in their sleeping bags, to help him restrain me. I'm ripping my dress off
and shrieking, "Bastard! BASSSSSSSSST!" and tearing at my skin. Dennis has his
back to the door. But the Goddess helps her priestess. She sneezes and I crash
through the window.

It is effortless. Really. The window shatters like a thousand exploding
lightbulbs and I'm teetering on the outdoor railing. From there I fling myself
one storey down in an exhilarating, twisting plunge to the ground where I land
on my feet. My shoulders pop into proper parallel alignment with each other and
with one well-placed swipe of my nails I rip out of the rest of my skin; I spit
and it falls away from me, withered, pathetic and threadbare. I'm rid of the
irritant. Shedding glass like water and strewing my allergies and tics and other
defects behind me in the parking lot I head for the woods of glittering angel
hair, wearing my real coat.

"Mia! MIAA!" I keen, following the line of her scent as bright as a color in my
nostrils.

The human things are blithering after me but they mean nothing to me. Wordless
specks on my retinas. All that matters is this electrical integrity: the sensual
coordination of desire and body.

And the galloping rhythm of the earth leaps up joyfully to touch all four of my
swift and perfect hands.