an interview with my friend's cat
A good friend of mine just adopted a cat under strange circumstances: She was walking to her scooter after running some errand, and a woman approached her and said, "Excuse me, would you like to have a cat?" My friend, being a nicer person than I am, didn't assume the woman was a crazy person or con artist; instead, she followed the woman home to take a look at the tiny young cat that this woman had somehow come into possession of. In the end, my friend took it, and the woman, who already had more than a few cats herself, gave my friend all the basic cat-related equipment.
Actually, I was more surprised to get a phone call from my friend than to learn that she'd adopted a cat. I'd always been a little surprised she didn't have one already-like me, she's the type of person who spends most of her time alone in her room reading and writing. Also, she collects cat puzzles. For my birthday, she gave me a framed puzzle of a cat and some fish. The puzzle is made to look like the viewer is inside the fish tank, and the cat is peering in longingly with its paws up against the glass and big cartoon eyes crossed comically. I'm not sure what I did with that puzzle. I remember putting it somewhere where I felt like I could get at it easily if she came over and I had to hang it up.
When my friend called, I was busy and couldn't talk. She was clearly excited about the cat, though-almost from the second I picked up the phone, she started to tell me the story and describe the cat, as well as to voice her indecision about whether or not to keep it. Some friends were over and I felt rude leaving them in the living room, so when the timer on my cell phone said "we" had been talking for ten minutes, I said, "I'd love to meet your cat" as a way to begin to end the conversation. To my surprise, though, she said, "Sure."
So I found myself in Jingmei, wearing jeans and a college sweatshirt, with all the money I have to my name in my pocket-about US$50. The MRT ride down had cost a lot-with the money for the round trip, I could have bought two packages of mushrooms from the supermarket, or even some meat from the traditional market that opens near me on weekends-but to be honest I wanted company more than I wanted meat.
The weather has been turning cold again, and class started again too, so I haven't been in a great mood. I'm having to adjust my sleep schedule again, so my brain isn't able to focus on the writing that was so much fun over vacation. And on this day I was not only totally underdressed for the weather, but due to my being too lazy to check the time and to my boredom, I had gotten to the Jingmei MRT station nearly forty minutes before I had planned.
I walked around for a while in order to fight off the cold. Eventually I went into a coffee shop and bought a pastry for NT$28. I felt incredibly tired and I'd planned to get coffee, but I was hungry too and I figured the pastry would wake me up. Anyway, it was NT$7 cheaper than the coffee.
So with my pastry in hand I wandered around by the Jingmei MRT station for a long time. I kept passing by one particular family. It was a mother and a few children, and also an old lady in a puffy dark-red jacket. The old lady was stooped, but spry for her age. She seemed to be practicing taichi on one of the children. She would rear up on one leg, spin her hand around several times, and jab two fingers into the boy's forehead. Every time I came back she was poking the poor kid in a new place. The final time, she spun him around, pulled his shirt up, and stuck him over and over on various points in his chest-really hard.
I don't know how I feel about this qi business. Who does? I sort of like the idea of it as a way of thinking about things rather than as a thing itself. A philosophical entity that explains everything if you just think of it in the right way and don't base any major decisions on it. Some people say we should look at love that way. At least three people have told me that, but I rarely know what they mean.
My dad was the first. For the first time in my life I had discovered a fear of death that transcended instinct. I don't know if this is a common thing to remember. I guess most people are raised to believe in an afterlife, and by the time they're old enough to question that they've already been exposed to the idea that there is none, or that you have no way to know, so it's not such a huge shock-or it is. But for me, I felt like a scientist standing alone in his laboratory in the middle of a stormy night, scratching out the horrifying answer to some equation on a table littered with complicated beakers and test tubes full of strange liquids. I don't remember how old I was, but I couldn't have been that old if this was, as I remember it, really the first time in my life that I wondered what happens to us after we die. I remember crying and crying. I remember standing in my dining room, on the ratty old brown carpet we had back then, and responding to all my parents' explanations and mitigations the same way: "How do you know?" That's when my dad said, "I didn't believe in an afterlife until I had you. And then I thought, 'How can all this love just stop?'"
I don't know whether my dad believed what he said. It didn't console me much at the time. In my experience, nothing external can console someone who is in the grip of that particular type of fear-the only solution is to construct some thick tissue of logic you know is flawed and use it to suffocate your own reason. But in the many years since then, I've thought about that a lot. I want to think that my dad believed that, because then maybe I can believe it too. I have no idea in what ways it might be true.
The second person I remember to express this idea to me was a professor in college. He had this kind of hard-nosed, too-cool-for-school attitude sometimes that was probably more an invention of the students than his own affect. It was a writing workshop, and somehow we started talking about Eastern philosophy, and the idea of something abstract or metaphysical that underlies existence. "If you think about it," he said, "there's only one thing we can say for sure exists. Love." For a moment-and even this moment may exist only in my memory-there was a heady silence, in which perhaps we all thought of something different and interesting. Then the entire classroom burst into uproarious laughter. The entire classroom with the exception of the professor, who was more self-conscious than people realized. I always meant to apologize to him for that, but I'm not sure whether or not I did.
The last person was Meredith, an atheist. She'd talked to me about this before, but this time-maybe a week ago-we both wondered, "What counts as love?" For a question that I've asked myself so many times before, it seemed to have a new meaning. Somebody else asked me a few days later, "How do you know when you love somebody?" and I couldn't give the usual answer of "When it happens, you'll know." At first glance, it would be nice to believe that, but the more I think the less sure I am that that's something I want to believe after all. Meredith says you can love strangers briefly. What is sad about loving someone briefly?
My friend finally arrived at one thirty, just after the family had left and the taichi lady was walking off alone into an alley. I got on her scooter (something I rarely do) and she drove us through the gray, miserable day to her apartment building.
Inside was warm enough to take off my sweater, and the apartment didn't have the strange smell that mine has always had. It was just one room with a little bathroom and gas ring and sink built into the wall. The cat was asleep on my friend's black office chair, which was next to her bed. It woke up when I started to pet it, and as soon as it became fully awake it was remarkably playful. I teased it with the strings from my sweatshirt hood for a while, and then we let it scurry off and frantically attack my shoelaces.
I was lying diagonally on my friend's big bed while she sat in the chair. "I'm going to have to kick you out at three thirty," she said. "My boyfriend is coming at four, and if he finds out you were here, he'll kill me. Well, he'll kill you."
The cat was getting tired. It came back to meander by my friend's feet. I rolled on my side and reached down for it, lifting it with one hand and plopping it against my stomach, where it curled up and went to sleep. My friend knelt down on the ground by the bed and leaned over to talk to the cat.
It was a small tabby, black, orange, and brown. Classically speaking, it wasn't especially cute for a kitten. It was scrawny, and its big eyes looked almost insect-like in the little inverted triangle of its face. Everything about it said that it was meant for the life of a stray. It felt delicate under my hand as I pet it. It seemed like I could feel all of its bones and everything about it, but in some way it still existed in a different universe than I did. I could destroy it by pinching two fingers together; I could take it home and grow to love it. I could learn everything about its habits or its body, and yet the substance of it would always elude me.
My friend scratched the cat around its collarbone, while I continued to play with the fur behind its ears. I'd never looked at my friend's hands before. Actually, they are the kind of hands that you can't look out without imaging what they've done and will do. They are the opposite of the cat, in a way-they shed ideas at an overwhelming pace, so that you feel anything you could meet them with is swallowed up as though it were nothing, except perhaps for in those few places where their skin rests against yours.
"He doesn't think my male friends should know where I live," she said. "How stupid. Do I seem so untrustworthy? Do I seem dangerous, like one of those women in film noir?"
I laughed. "I can imagine you in one of those old detective movies," I said sleepily. "You kind of appear naive enough to be the dame who walks into my office, and I should have known that you were nothing but trouble, because in the-"
"In the end I kill you!" she finished, laughing.
I looked at the clock behind my friend's head. It was three forty.
The cat was still lying against my stomach, sleeping and purring and trembling constantly in that way that cats have. My friend's upper body and head formed an arc from the edge of the bed to just above the cat, so that her hair hung down in a way that really did look a little like a film noir woman. The cat was so vivid, lying there on a purple blanket, with its three-colored fur and the two colors of our hands. Indoor colors feel safe and real on a cold gray day.
Actually, I was more surprised to get a phone call from my friend than to learn that she'd adopted a cat. I'd always been a little surprised she didn't have one already-like me, she's the type of person who spends most of her time alone in her room reading and writing. Also, she collects cat puzzles. For my birthday, she gave me a framed puzzle of a cat and some fish. The puzzle is made to look like the viewer is inside the fish tank, and the cat is peering in longingly with its paws up against the glass and big cartoon eyes crossed comically. I'm not sure what I did with that puzzle. I remember putting it somewhere where I felt like I could get at it easily if she came over and I had to hang it up.
When my friend called, I was busy and couldn't talk. She was clearly excited about the cat, though-almost from the second I picked up the phone, she started to tell me the story and describe the cat, as well as to voice her indecision about whether or not to keep it. Some friends were over and I felt rude leaving them in the living room, so when the timer on my cell phone said "we" had been talking for ten minutes, I said, "I'd love to meet your cat" as a way to begin to end the conversation. To my surprise, though, she said, "Sure."
So I found myself in Jingmei, wearing jeans and a college sweatshirt, with all the money I have to my name in my pocket-about US$50. The MRT ride down had cost a lot-with the money for the round trip, I could have bought two packages of mushrooms from the supermarket, or even some meat from the traditional market that opens near me on weekends-but to be honest I wanted company more than I wanted meat.
The weather has been turning cold again, and class started again too, so I haven't been in a great mood. I'm having to adjust my sleep schedule again, so my brain isn't able to focus on the writing that was so much fun over vacation. And on this day I was not only totally underdressed for the weather, but due to my being too lazy to check the time and to my boredom, I had gotten to the Jingmei MRT station nearly forty minutes before I had planned.
I walked around for a while in order to fight off the cold. Eventually I went into a coffee shop and bought a pastry for NT$28. I felt incredibly tired and I'd planned to get coffee, but I was hungry too and I figured the pastry would wake me up. Anyway, it was NT$7 cheaper than the coffee.
So with my pastry in hand I wandered around by the Jingmei MRT station for a long time. I kept passing by one particular family. It was a mother and a few children, and also an old lady in a puffy dark-red jacket. The old lady was stooped, but spry for her age. She seemed to be practicing taichi on one of the children. She would rear up on one leg, spin her hand around several times, and jab two fingers into the boy's forehead. Every time I came back she was poking the poor kid in a new place. The final time, she spun him around, pulled his shirt up, and stuck him over and over on various points in his chest-really hard.
I don't know how I feel about this qi business. Who does? I sort of like the idea of it as a way of thinking about things rather than as a thing itself. A philosophical entity that explains everything if you just think of it in the right way and don't base any major decisions on it. Some people say we should look at love that way. At least three people have told me that, but I rarely know what they mean.
My dad was the first. For the first time in my life I had discovered a fear of death that transcended instinct. I don't know if this is a common thing to remember. I guess most people are raised to believe in an afterlife, and by the time they're old enough to question that they've already been exposed to the idea that there is none, or that you have no way to know, so it's not such a huge shock-or it is. But for me, I felt like a scientist standing alone in his laboratory in the middle of a stormy night, scratching out the horrifying answer to some equation on a table littered with complicated beakers and test tubes full of strange liquids. I don't remember how old I was, but I couldn't have been that old if this was, as I remember it, really the first time in my life that I wondered what happens to us after we die. I remember crying and crying. I remember standing in my dining room, on the ratty old brown carpet we had back then, and responding to all my parents' explanations and mitigations the same way: "How do you know?" That's when my dad said, "I didn't believe in an afterlife until I had you. And then I thought, 'How can all this love just stop?'"
I don't know whether my dad believed what he said. It didn't console me much at the time. In my experience, nothing external can console someone who is in the grip of that particular type of fear-the only solution is to construct some thick tissue of logic you know is flawed and use it to suffocate your own reason. But in the many years since then, I've thought about that a lot. I want to think that my dad believed that, because then maybe I can believe it too. I have no idea in what ways it might be true.
The second person I remember to express this idea to me was a professor in college. He had this kind of hard-nosed, too-cool-for-school attitude sometimes that was probably more an invention of the students than his own affect. It was a writing workshop, and somehow we started talking about Eastern philosophy, and the idea of something abstract or metaphysical that underlies existence. "If you think about it," he said, "there's only one thing we can say for sure exists. Love." For a moment-and even this moment may exist only in my memory-there was a heady silence, in which perhaps we all thought of something different and interesting. Then the entire classroom burst into uproarious laughter. The entire classroom with the exception of the professor, who was more self-conscious than people realized. I always meant to apologize to him for that, but I'm not sure whether or not I did.
The last person was Meredith, an atheist. She'd talked to me about this before, but this time-maybe a week ago-we both wondered, "What counts as love?" For a question that I've asked myself so many times before, it seemed to have a new meaning. Somebody else asked me a few days later, "How do you know when you love somebody?" and I couldn't give the usual answer of "When it happens, you'll know." At first glance, it would be nice to believe that, but the more I think the less sure I am that that's something I want to believe after all. Meredith says you can love strangers briefly. What is sad about loving someone briefly?
My friend finally arrived at one thirty, just after the family had left and the taichi lady was walking off alone into an alley. I got on her scooter (something I rarely do) and she drove us through the gray, miserable day to her apartment building.
Inside was warm enough to take off my sweater, and the apartment didn't have the strange smell that mine has always had. It was just one room with a little bathroom and gas ring and sink built into the wall. The cat was asleep on my friend's black office chair, which was next to her bed. It woke up when I started to pet it, and as soon as it became fully awake it was remarkably playful. I teased it with the strings from my sweatshirt hood for a while, and then we let it scurry off and frantically attack my shoelaces.
I was lying diagonally on my friend's big bed while she sat in the chair. "I'm going to have to kick you out at three thirty," she said. "My boyfriend is coming at four, and if he finds out you were here, he'll kill me. Well, he'll kill you."
The cat was getting tired. It came back to meander by my friend's feet. I rolled on my side and reached down for it, lifting it with one hand and plopping it against my stomach, where it curled up and went to sleep. My friend knelt down on the ground by the bed and leaned over to talk to the cat.
It was a small tabby, black, orange, and brown. Classically speaking, it wasn't especially cute for a kitten. It was scrawny, and its big eyes looked almost insect-like in the little inverted triangle of its face. Everything about it said that it was meant for the life of a stray. It felt delicate under my hand as I pet it. It seemed like I could feel all of its bones and everything about it, but in some way it still existed in a different universe than I did. I could destroy it by pinching two fingers together; I could take it home and grow to love it. I could learn everything about its habits or its body, and yet the substance of it would always elude me.
My friend scratched the cat around its collarbone, while I continued to play with the fur behind its ears. I'd never looked at my friend's hands before. Actually, they are the kind of hands that you can't look out without imaging what they've done and will do. They are the opposite of the cat, in a way-they shed ideas at an overwhelming pace, so that you feel anything you could meet them with is swallowed up as though it were nothing, except perhaps for in those few places where their skin rests against yours.
"He doesn't think my male friends should know where I live," she said. "How stupid. Do I seem so untrustworthy? Do I seem dangerous, like one of those women in film noir?"
I laughed. "I can imagine you in one of those old detective movies," I said sleepily. "You kind of appear naive enough to be the dame who walks into my office, and I should have known that you were nothing but trouble, because in the-"
"In the end I kill you!" she finished, laughing.
I looked at the clock behind my friend's head. It was three forty.
The cat was still lying against my stomach, sleeping and purring and trembling constantly in that way that cats have. My friend's upper body and head formed an arc from the edge of the bed to just above the cat, so that her hair hung down in a way that really did look a little like a film noir woman. The cat was so vivid, lying there on a purple blanket, with its three-colored fur and the two colors of our hands. Indoor colors feel safe and real on a cold gray day.