Ode to Cat
Mulder and Scully are looking for a UFO outside of Sitka, Alaska. Mulder and Scully think the killer might be a clone of the victim’s step mother. Mulder and Scully overhear higher-ups whisper about the tracking devices they’ve put in the polio vaccine. Mulder and Scully don’t stop their theorizing for me to blow my nose, they’re illegible beneath the sound of my rock tumbler sinuses. In the moment it takes to clear an airway through my nostrils it’s already too late, the threads of the plot have slipped past my understanding. I’ll have to wait for the next episode. I roll away from the laptop screen, the motion enough to dismantle the Tetris game of mucus stacked inside my head, and I feel the tower cascading down my throat. I’ve never been so aware that my face is full of holes.
My movement is rewarded with a brand new view of the living room down the barrel of my half cracked door. From the couch, Micha’s tail twitches. His dinner plate eyes have locked onto mine and within seconds he’s launched off the cushions and stomped his way to my bedside. As stealth-based predators, most cats have evolved a silent gait thanks to “digitigrade walking”, or the practice of distributing weight along the tips of their toes rather than their heels. It’s one of the many memos Micha has missed about how to be a cat. His footsteps are the heaviest in the household, his running along the second floor hallway almost as reliable as any alarm clock.
He stretches his (not-so) load bearing toes against the side of my mattress, kneading biscuits into my comforter. A claw hooks around a loose thread and pulls it free. I try convincing myself to swat him down but in the same moment he leans his head back to show Muppet Baby vampire teeth and, more importantly, beg for scratches beneath his chin. Because I was born with a moral compass, I oblige. He starts purring almost immediately, a little engine turning over and over somewhere in his chest.
Micha is at his cutest when he’s making noise. He’s a chronic purrer, a vocal response humans have self-satisfyingly simplified to mean “I love you” but can actually serve a variety of purposes, from inter-feline communication to metabolizing stress. He’s been getting into chirping lately, a series of open-mouth clicks are often the only warning before an attack on your subconsciously wiggling toes or a light fragment absentmindedly splayed against the wall by your phone screen. Scientists are torn on what chirping is meant to accomplish- whether it’s intended to lure prey within striking distance or just an expression of excitement or frustration- but they agree that the behavior is linked to hunting practices.
There’s something unattractive, to me, about my instinct to “aww” at these little noises. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-domestication. I roll my eyes at Peta ads the same as everyone else, I’m even willing to overlook up to one fishing picture on an otherwise well-crafted Tinder profile. But as a former vegetarian and current sentimentalist, I get melancholic seeing in Micha shadows of the African Wildcats he and his fellow house cats descended from. I imagine the thousands of years it took to cultivate his specific set of instincts, the pride and dignity of surviving cut-throat Darwinism- only to find yourself a would-be predator whose hunting practices are restricted to houseflies and ponytails, and whose earnest attempts at honoring your genetic legacy inspire the most obnoxious strand of baby-voiced exclamations imaginable. “Poor bastards never stood a chance,” Mulder muses from the laptop behind me, eyeing a polaroid of aliens trapped in a realm of earthling architecture.
Micha’s had his fill of my attention, at least the positive kind. He crosses to the opposite wall and paws at the corner of my Sharks of the Atlantic poster, glancing over his shoulder to see if he’ll get away with it. I let it slide. The poster is leftover from my meat-rejecting days, bought at a rehabilitation aquarium on some summer vacation. I was the type to bring up sharks wherever I could, and rattle off bite statistics the moment I sensed apprehension. “You’re more likely to be killed by a champagne cork, or a hot dog, or a vending machine,” I’d fire off at people who had already stopped listening. The shark tank was my favorite in any aquarium, drunk tank pink had nothing on that slow, extraterrestrial wall of blue. At the same time, it inspired a hypocritical sadness. The circular monotony of their movements depressed me, and I christened them tragic beings with broken spirits. Children gasp and scream when the great white slides past them through the inch-thick acrylic, but wouldn’t any fish in a bowl of water think he’s a guppy? On the other hand, was this assumption not just another form of infantilization? Could I really not imagine for them enough self-awareness to believe they knew they were powerful and feared, and had the autonomy to welcome this perception? Maybe not from humans (how dare I imply they give a shit what we think), but surely from the tuna and rays that orbit with them?
Micha’s bored again, he paces back to the bed and starts licking at my dangling hand, the ridged papillae that cover his tongue tickling my palm. My favorite fact about cats, and the greatest source of comfort I’ve found when my worm-riddled brain tells me to dress them in little sweaters, is that they assume you, too, are a cat. Because their domestication was not task-fulfilling, meaning it was purely for companionship, the social processing of a cat’s brain sees no distinction between human beings and themselves. Any differences they notice in our behavior does not indicate to them a possible separation of species. Instead, it hints that they’ve chosen to live with a very stupid and poorly-adjusted cat, and as a result, they attempt to fill in our instinctual gaps. Higher capacity for reasoning be damned, if I don’t lick myself clean every night? I must be a massive idiot. In Micha’s mind, he’ll just have to do it for me.
Anthropomorphizing animals is, perhaps, not the best way to go about cultivating healthy relationships with them. At the same time, it’s delightfully ironic that this instinct is one we share with the very beings we think we’re evolved enough to view objectively. It’s lovely to view owning a pet as a relationship of mutual care and codependence, as incomprehensible to us as it is to them. Our misunderstanding of the needs of the other is where the greatest capacity to express love lies: the thoughtless lick from a dog perceived as a kiss, the accidental kick of a toy an invitation to play. I’ve never given much credence to those corny bumper stickers, the ones with the paw prints and the phrase “who saved who?” in sprawling cursive letters, but they may have a point. Corny bumper stickers often do.
Satisfied with his work on my palm, Micha moves his focus to cleaning the crevices of his own paws. I roll to my back and click my incisors together, think about the chicken tenders I have in the freezer, resolve myself to make them after one more episode. I glance back at the screen as Mulder holds up his newest piece of evidence and Scully sighs. “You’re looking for meaning where there isn’t any,” she says.
cover image by Vanessa Stockard.
