Cat Love

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Emotional Statistics Course

“In the field of study best known as emotional statistics, the word “maybe” is a term of art . . . is the language of the wanted and the language of the one doing the wanting . . .”

—Charles Yu, “32.05864991%”

Course Description
This ten-day course will emphasize feeling and the feeling process, including pre-feeling and emotional revision. Students will take daily quizzes in response to the Schrödinger’s cat experiment, as well as read and react to the feelings of classmates in order to improve emotional competency. Emotions are a process, not an event, and the best way to improve is to feel often and deeply. All of this takes time and work.

Requirements
PPE (Personal Protective Equipment: laboratory coat, gloves, safety glasses, appropriate footwear (no open-toed shoes), fit-tested respirator, and good-luck charm.

What our students are saying . . .
“This was the best emotional experience I’ve ever had! Thank you so much! You’re the best!”
—Nina L.

“I thank you for the program. With my certificate I am now off my deferred sentence.”
—Vic Z.

“I am forty-eight years of age and learned a great deal. Not only was this a great refresher course, but it has opened up a whole new career path for me. I am very pleased.”
—Misha P.

NB: Please do not bring a cat. The cat, box, and vial of poison are provided by the Institute.

***

Call me . . . call me whatever you like. I’ve had many names over the years. Did you think I was going to say Ishmael? Or actually tell you my real name? Not today. Maybe not tomorrow, either. I bet you’re wondering how a cat knows about Moby-Dick. Especially the tortoiseshell cat sealed in the box in this lab.

This box doesn’t define my existence, you know. Although, if you already knew that, you could’ve tested out of this class and not had to take it. But you didn’t, and so here we are, under these awful lights. You, in your white coats and masks, taking notes, sitting in a circle and staring at me inside this glass box.

I can see the food on your breath and taste the fear in your tapping shoes. I can even see the ridiculous poster on the wall behind me of a penguin and polar bear embracing above the words “An Eye for an Eye Makes the World Go Blind.” You think that I can’t see you, that I can only see my reflection. Well, that just shows how much you know about seeing.

Ahab had a problem with seeing, too. Okay, I confess that I read the book. Maybe not the actual words on the page, but I did hear them one summer, when my roommate, the Mustache, listened to the audiobook. It was over twenty-four hours long, and he would listen to it while he cooked dinner. That was the year he was obsessed with John Coltrane’s album My Favorite Things.

He was slow to come to jazz, as was I. He was afraid it would scramble his ears, would keep him from being able to hear the blues, the music that had been his first love. Son House was his man. Skip James, too. Listening to them sing about death and poverty and love gone sideways made him happy. The blues was one of the few things that could make his smile turn up enough so that his thick mustache looked like a black caterpillar had come to rest on his lip.

My years with the Mustache were my happiest. We lived in a small apartment tucked next to a parking garage surrounded by a dense forest of oaks and cedars. I had friends outside: a fox and a possum I would share meals with under the garage, and a goldfinch that I would chirp with when I made my rounds after the Mustache returned from work in the afternoons.

He sold men’s dress shoes at an outlet mall. All day long, he would measure the width and length of men’s feet and keep the store tidy. He even kept a shiny metal shoehorn in his pocket, like a real pro. He had a secret passion, though. When the store was empty and all the boxes sat perfectly on their shelves, he would print a blank receipt from the register and scribble a poem on it. When he read these poems to me on our couch, I would purr in his lap, just happy that he was happy for a moment.

I’d give anything to be back on his lap, or anywhere in our home, just as long as I wasn’t in this stupid box.

Where is my food?

Where is my water?

Where is my fluffy bed!

At least I have room to stand up and stretch. But really, why are the walls mirrors? Of course, it’s nice to be able to see all my angles, to make sure the hairs in those impossible-to-see spots are flat and clean and all going the same way. And what’s that liquid inside that glass marble with the tiniest hammer I’ve ever seen hanging over it? I rubbed my lips on it, because it didn’t smell like anything, and everyone knows rule number one in life is that everything belongs to someone.

When I was first brought into this white room, I was shocked. It didn’t smell like anything. Not human or cat, or even a spider who can live in the unseen corners behind corners.

The day I arrived at this unholy place began like any other. The Mustache was traveling to visit his mother, so the neighbor boy who would feed me when the Mustache was gone came by at first light. I watched him empty my litter box and then run the scoop lightly over the top of the clay. The Mustache had told him that if the clay wasn’t perfectly flat, including in the corners, I wouldn’t use the box. The result would be I would squat on the rug and leave my caca there or, worse yet, make myself sick holding it in until he returned.

The boy topped off my water bowl, taking care to make sure it was all the way to the top while also not spilling any drops on the floor. Getting my fur wet was guaranteed to ruin the rest of my day.

Next, he took my metal food bowl, which had “QUEEN” written in big purple letters on the side, and washed it. I sat and watched his hands rub away the powder and saliva from the previous day. After he dried the bowl completely, he set it down and poured a third of a scoop from my blue-and-white bag of prescription food. It was brown and shaped like pellets, nothing like the food the Mustache fed me when we first met. Those colorful bags with cartoon cats licking their chops on them contained kibble shaped like fish and stars and chickens. And even though that food didn’t really taste like fish or stars or chicken, it at least tasted like something that had once been alive, like a carrot or green beans.

Since the vet had said that I had kidneys that would one day go bad, the Mustache had started to feed me these pellets that tasted like someone’s idea of food. When my hunger strike hadn’t worked, I relented and ate the pellets.

After I finished eating, the boy sat on the couch. He didn’t turn on the TV, like he usually did, and watch The Price Is Right. I sat by the French doors in the sunlight and washed my face. After I had done one side, I paused, tongue sticking half out, and looked at him looking at the clock.

There wasn’t anything different about the clock that would explain why he kept looking at it. It was round, the hands moved, and it ticked softly with absolute precision. The person who invented the clock clearly was descended from cats.

An hour passed, and the boy went to the garage. When he came back, he had my carrier. In the two years he had been my cat sitter, we had never gone on a trip before. He was too young to drive, so I wondered where exactly he wanted to take me.

The Mustache had bought me a black carrier made of mesh and pretend leather. He told me the mesh would let me see where we were going so that I wouldn’t be scared. Sometimes the Mustache would take me on long drives in the country. Once we were in the car, he’d unzip the carrier so I could wander around and look out the windows.

The inside of his car was the color of the ash that one of his ex-girlfriends used to leave on the patio. Her cigarettes smelled worse than her breath. And that’s saying something. I never knew what he saw in Miss Camel Lights. Sure, she was pretty, but nothing ever made her happy. She was even picky about socks. They were either too long or too short. Too loose or too tight. Too white or not white enough.

They met at an old record store that collected almost as much dust as it did vinyl. She had been working as a Pity Party Planner for a few months back then. Since she had been a semiprofessionally unhappy person for years, it made sense that she’d finally put all that experience to good use and get paid for it. Ever since the cult of empathy had swept the country, people were eager to find new ways to celebrate self-sacrifice. Pity parties became all the rage. All you needed to set up shop and make money off the sadness of people was a Certificate in Emotional Statistics.

A Pity Party Planner would help you sort out all the details of your event: venue, invitations, vendors, photographer. They’d plan the menu, and, maybe most importantly, manage rude family members who tried to make themselves the center of your party because they thought they were sadder than you were.

What first caught the Mustache’s eye when he turned the corner into the synth-pop aisle was a black album cover with a bunch of mouths on it. He had loved Future Islands from their earliest days. She was there to inject her Pity Party Playlist with some new music. Besides Future Islands, she also had Blind Willie Johnson, Tom Waits, Bright Eyes, Lil Wayne, Samuel Barber, and some Major Tom David Bowie was always a hit at these sorts of parties.

After he broke the ice, he saw that she had one of his favorite 45s in her basket. The A-side had “Cotton Flower,” maybe my favorite Future Islands song. The B-side had two Ed Schrader songs with thumpy bass lines. On the slipcover of the 45, there are two calicoes in an orange diamond.

I swear the cat on the bottom looks like a dude. Male calicoes are rare, which makes it even more annoying that I sometimes get mistaken for one. Just because I have wide shoulders and look like I can throw down doesn’t mean I’m not a lady. One year, for my birthday, the Mustache brought this Calico 45 record home. Until the day he met Miss Camel Lights, his copy was the only one he’d ever seen in person.

She did have good taste in music. I’ll give her that. When she dropped the needle one Saturday on “Please, Please, Please,” I thought, “Well, well, so she knows her early James Brown. Maybe this one’s a keeper.”

Before my years with the Mustache, I had a whole different life. Long before I ever lived with anyone, I was sleeping under the deck behind a coffee shop when that song drifted down from a speaker attached to one of the trees. It was a live audience, probably the Apollo, and when Mr. Dynamite, The Godfather of Soul himself, growled “please,” the word dripping with sweat, well, it took me back to the first time I heard a hungry tomcat. And I don’t have to tell you what he was hungry for.

That tom was howling one word over and over all night long and had me trying everything I could to bust out of my house and find the Hardest-Working Cat in Show Business.

Two months later, I was tits up with a pair of kittens drinking my milk. “My milk . . .” It took a while for me to get used to the idea that food was coming out of me. Here I was, two years old, and already with babies after my first tomcat. What a life.

The Mustache and Miss Camel Lights didn’t last long. The final straw was when, one day, I wasn’t moving fast enough out of her way and she nudged me with her purse. Some cheap thing that spelled Michael Kors with a “C” instead of a “K.” I turned and scratched her bag. She jumped back and cried like she was hurt. I told her, “Keep it up and I’ll cut you, too.” All she heard was a hiss, but the fear I smelled on the back of her neck told me she knew exactly what I had said. The Mustache got between us, and I never saw her again.

Her not being around anymore to feed me when the Mustache traveled is how the neighbor boy started coming over.

When that boy unzipped the door to my carrier and sat it before me, I had no reason to go inside, so I just sat quietly.

When he put his small hands on my back and tried to nudge me in, I pretended to bite him. He jumped back. The second time he did it, I wheeled around and bit his hand. I ended our conversation with a hiss and walked away. The body can speak so much louder than words sometimes.

He ran to the kitchen, where he washed his hand and whimpered. I hoped that my teeth had gone deep enough that he would have a scar. I wanted him to never forget this moment, to remember that a second “No” comes with something extra.

I sat in a corner in what the Mustache liked to call my Great Roast Chicken position. I never took offense, because I loved it when he would read to me Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s magnificent poem about Charlie Chaplin. How could any poem with roast chicken in it not be the favorite of a cat?

Most people assume the favorite poet of all cats is Christopher Smart. What cat wouldn’t love these lines from “Jubilate Agno”?

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger. . . .
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.

I watched the boy dry his hands. He walked over slowly and set the carrier in front of me again. I sat up and stared at him. From his pocket, he pulled a green mouse made of felt. Inside its belly someone had poured catnip and then sewn it shut. He tossed the mouse into the back of the carrier and took a few steps back.

You can guess what happened next. I didn’t want to go inside, but the body wants what the body wants. That catnip hijacked my brain, and the next thing I knew, I was as high as a kite and locked in the carrier. I pawed at the netting and tore a hole, but it was so small one of my
paws wouldn’t even fit through it. The last thing I remember before arriving at this lab was the boy setting me on the ground in a park and some guy in a tacky trench coat handing him an envelope.

I meowed the word “mustache.”

Then the guy threw a towel over my carrier, and everything
went black.