Ending

IVAN, MINNEAPOLIS
August 2001

There was, that summer, a strange feel in the air as if somehow the light and the heat were vanishing, leaving the world washed in a pale watery strangeness, although the heat was there in the full force of the sun, steaming in the soggy humid air. The heat was enough to keep the air conditioners humming day and night, enough to keep the fans blowing, enough to kill a pro football player practicing in the sun one stifling morning. But I was chilled and stayed in the corner behind the stereo where the wooden floor felt both warm and comforting, I was chilled, chilled to the bone, with the feeling in the air. The girl would lift me out when she came home from work and rub cool water on my fur, and being in her arms helped dampen the dread for a moment, but then I was cold again, cold, shivering in the yellow wavering light of that summer.

Eleven days into August they said I was sick, only 14, maybe 28 days left of my life, kidneys past all hope. They were supposed to ride the roller coasters that day, the girl and boy, a company picnic, but instead they kept me company on the sun porch, the boy unable to look at me, the girl unable to look away. There are pictures from that day, me hunched on the old green-covered couch, paws and tail already disappearing beneath me. I hated having my picture taken, would not respond to my name, would not look into the camera, but this day I did, giving them one last view of me, old and fragile, wavering like the light.

They tried to feed me, tempt me with all the things I loved: yogurt and tuna fish, first mixed with cat chow, then straight. I could not eat more than a mouthful but I tried for their sake. They injected me with water, an IV hanging from the dining room door, a needle in my back every night but it was too late, too late to flush me clean. The boy could barely look, while the water dripped into my skin, and the girl could not look away.

The girl was packing a suitcase but I had taken my last trip, last spring, with the boy and the girl, to Duluth. I puked in the night on the shaggy green motel rug and the girl cleaned it up. I threw up in the morning and the boy scrapped it off the rug with damp toilet paper and flushed it away. The boy and the girl could barely speak to each other, the boy could not look at her and the girl looked away. This time the girl was traveling alone, her and the suitcase. I would stay home with the boy and his needles of water. I would wait for the girl to come home.

The girl came home, later than expected, on a train, not an airplane as planned. "He got sicker the day it happened," the boy said. That was the day, eleven days into September, when the girl could not look away from death, and it made the boy unable to look at her. The girl smelled of death, smelled like me, many days past the 28 I had been given, and still I was waiting to go: she smelled like I would smell.

The boy and the girl did not speak, not about me dying, or the death she had seen when she left with her suitcase, or the dying of the last shreds of them being together. They were getting married and they looked away from each other and looked away from the nothingness between them, the nothingness that they did not see although I did. So I kept living for them, my life for their marriage, feeding on hope they would have no need of me, waiting for something to wash the horror from the eyes of the girl and the hatred from the eyes of the boy. They got married, and by then I was spending all my time on the bed in the blue room downstairs. My legs were failing, I could barely stand and could not eat. The boy filled me with water each night and it went through me onto the bed. He changed the bedding daily, looking at me in secret while he moved the wet sheets, not looking at the girl. He would not let her help and she would look away, her eyes seeing nothing but death. On the wedding day, he had led people into the room to see me on the bed, like commoners to a king, like mourners to a casket. He did not allow the girl to see me that day.

He was angry at the girl, angry because her eyes were overflowing with human death. He thought the ending of my life was tragedy to stop the world, but her world had already stopped by the tragedy of what she had seen, when she had gone away with her suitcase. I understood: the loss of hundreds of her kind tore away her very soul, and I was still alive, still taking in water and letting it flow through me. They moved me from the bed after the wedding, onto the black woolen pillow under the desk in the living room, the place they called my cat cave. Once when I was a baby, and naughty, I had peed deliberately onto the black pillow, staring at them, daring them to stop me. Now my back legs were paralyzed and they were afraid I would drag myself to the edge of the bed and fall off. They went back to work, after the wedding, leaving water and yogurt and tuna next to my pillow, close to my mouth if I should want to eat or drink. I peed on the pillow and was laying in wet when they returned home. They did not look at me or each other. They knew it was time. I knew it was time to spare them from my death being placed in their hands.

They went to get rings the next day, to replace the ones loaned for the wedding, rings that would fit although the marriage itself was not fit, just days after it took place. I did not want them to go, even to the store, but the girl said they would be back in time, before it was too late. I trusted the girl, trusted her from the moment she picked me out of my cage as a kitten. I had crawled into her hair, behind her ear, and purred so she would take me home with her, a lifetime ago, when I could climb and move and purr. I told the girl with my eyes to hurry, to come back quickly, and she understood. I was no longer waiting for the end of my life, just waiting for the girl to come home.

When she did, she lay on the couch and the boy lifted me from my wet pillow into her arms. She wrapped her arms around me like she did for years, all the years of my life, and we fell asleep. Just before the twelfth day of October started, I heard my name called from deep inside me. I could not look away, and what the girl saw was my eyes staring inward, my ears alert for the final call that would take me away. The last of the water in me flowed onto the couch. I coughed and coughed, fighting it, as if I were still full of life and water and food, and just throwing up. “It’s okay to go,” the girl told me through her tears. “So many are dead, so many people, they will need a cat like you to hug in their strange new world. Go to them and be theirs.” I coughed up my soul then, it poured out of my mouth, and dissipated into the place where the humans were, dead just a month before me. The girl held me quietly, knowing I was gone, and my body began to relax, left behind, no longer wavering but starting to chill. She got up and awoke the boy, telling him it was time and that I would be gone soon, and indeed my body still moved for a few minutes more, but I had already left.

I watched as they smoothed my fur, the girl first touching the places she knew I loved best, and then as I stiffened and cooled, the places she loved the best. The boy got some towels and a blanket and a cardboard box that once was to be a disposable litter box for the trips we would take together. When they were ready, the boy wrapped my body in the towels and laid it on the blanket bed in the box and closed the lid. “We’ll have him cremated,” the boy said, and the girl did not protest, even though she had always hated the thought of burning, of being consumed violently instead of slowing crumbling into soft pieces into the earth. But there was nothing to be said about the body of a cat, whole and unblemished, when she had seen thousands of humans consumed by fire and reduced to dust, had breathed them into her very lungs. It felt right to the girl that he become ashes as well, and so he did, mixed with the ashes of other creatures dead that day, never to be returned. The boy and girl went home and picked up the old dishes of yogurt and tuna and water and rinsed them clean, and threw away the needles and the tubing and the bag of water over the door, and washed the black pillow and the stained couch cushion. And then there was no longer anything to look at but themselves, and each other, and in the end, they could find no place to look.

For Ivan
September 1989 to 11 October 2001