monster

I was sixteen and already late for work when I pulled into the driveway of a large but poorly-tended house, a sign taped to the mailbox having promised “kittens—free”. I almost drove off again; I knew my mother would be furious. The kittens still left were one skittish silky-grey creature I glimpsed behind a pile of boxes piled in turn with magazines, and a ginger tabby arranged neatly in the center of a pillow who took no notice of me until I scooped her up and spirited her off. I hurried her into my room and dumped her rather unceremoniously into the fleece hammock my beloved Ben was knotted up in, sleeping. I stayed long enough to watch the ferret wake and stretch, unfazed, inspect the confused kitten up and down with his long, rattish face, then curl into a crescent around the tiny orange body and bury his nose into her ear. The kitten closed one eye and cocked her head, an expression she still makes when the correct ear-toggles are pressed. I bustled off to work.

Monster was christened differently but is now too proud to acknowledge the stupid name she was given in her infancy by my first boyfriend. She was largely ignored in her early years. She was not an affectionate kitten. Her enthusiasm and attentions were saved almost exclusively for Ben, her playmate, and our elder cat Peter, to whom she was devoted and looked like a smaller copy of. I, in turn, was rather disinterested in her. My heart only had room for myself and for Ben and his terrible, destructive creativity.

When Ben passed on Monster became very private, less friendly, and more interested in stealing things from peoples’ dressers and storing them in her water dish. She was never popular with my family, and was only my cat in that I had found her and stubbornly insisted on keeping her. When I moved out on my own, my mother sent the cat along with me. I liked the idea, as I’d never been without an animal for companionship. It had nothing to do with Monster personally. I was just so used to feeding something every morning and night, I couldn’t imagine life without the routine.

Once we were on our own, though, I found myself growing more fond of her. The affection seemed reciprocated, or she at least grew more patient with me. This was when she was renamed, ‘Monster’ being somewhat ironic but also appropriate to the sinister intelligence I sensed somewhere behind her golden eyes. Monster has a Medusa’s glare, and although she was never violent or even really mean, there lurked in her something unnamed that did not seem safe or wise to offend.

Monster is not terribly photogenic or particularly cute. When seated she has the pyramidal shape of an indoor cat, and her gold-and-orange mottled coat furthers her resemblance to the monuments in the desert at Giza. Her head is a size too small for her body, her ears a size too small for her head, her eyes large, wide and supremely round. She carries a belly around with her like a fanny pack. Her only physical pride is the white flag she waves along behind her as she wanders, flipping it glibly from side to side, not indicating surrender but a trick she has conjured to take you unawares.

Monster followed me from apartment to apartment, through the relationships and mistakes of my youth. We grew comfortable with each other; we learned to understand each other, in a way, or at least learned to compromise over the prime real estate on the sofa and bed. We grew closer in our sleep, there existing more and happier photos of us passed out together than in waking proximity.

It wasn’t until I was hurt that Monster became my darling. I had lost something, some kind of innocence that had survived beneath the skin of my indifference and cynicism, and Monster saw. We drove three days across country from our home in Milwaukee towards a dim basement apartment in Seattle. It was January; there were snowstorms; Monster sat on my lap for the three days, watching out the window with patience and tolerance that even I could not match. In Seattle we were alone, living without the man who had been in both our lives and hearts for three years. Without the outside attention the two of us had only each other to look to.

Perhaps we’d never been alone together before, or maybe it was connected to the rawness I felt and the hurt that wracked my being, but Monster became a new creature. She was all I had, and I the only other living thing she saw on any given day. We were desperate for each other. Her greeting at the door and insistence on participating in everything I did at home gradually made me realize the power I had over her. She relied on me for everything now. If she were to have a full life, a pleasant one, then it was entirely upon me to provide it. The responsibility was heavy but gave me some small purpose. She, in turn, understood that the only affection, sometimes the only conversation I had in a day was with her, and the amount and quality of love she found capable of producing was astounding. I watched her, tended to her, learned about her. She had been the only constant in my life for six years and I had never yet tested the depth of affection I had for her.

Monster cleans her toes, focusing mostly on her nails, and bites them smooth. She twists her neck to clean her shoulders but rarely proceeds down her broad back to clean the rest of herself. When woken from a deep and satisfying nap, she extends one paw, toes splayed in pleasure, and pushes it into my shoulder or cheek. She is not a physical animal; if I try to pet her like one would pet any other cat she will get up, walk two paces away, and lay down again just out of reach. She prefers to dictate the time and place of our proximity. If I am laying down—especially if I intend to nap or sleep, which she seems to be able to tell even before I do—she will approach, still not to be scratched or pet, but just to be near. If I am on my front or back, she will occupy exactly the same space on either side of my chest, over my heart and lungs; if I am on my side she will spread herself over my hip or lay, her chest against my belly, her paws propped up on my side, and sleep sitting upright. If it is cold she joins me under the blanket, curled up inside the semicircle of my shoulders, back, and knees, and vibrates quietly until she is too dozy to purr any longer, or until she remembers something she forgot to do and is promptly and unceremoniously gone.

Cats are social animals. They are not social in the way that we are, or a pack of dogs is, and therefore we do not understand them as such. But cats want to have and sustain relationships. A housecat who sits three feet from you, makes eye contact, and squints at you is being just as affectionate as the dog who leaps up to lick your face. We as humans are pack animals with close social bonds; cats’ bonds are just as strong but allow them more freedom, more space. But a non-social animal would not carry a grasshopper into the house and place it at my feet, then look at me expectantly, waiting me to join the feast with her. This is a profoundly affectionate and undeniably social action. We simply misunderstand the cat’s aloofness as disinterest, their independence as dislike. We are stupid. We make few attempts to speak to them in their language; they have not choice but to attempt to learn ours.

Monster is an early riser and therefore so am I. She does not tolerate or understand sleeping in when there is morning to be taken advantage of. I am often woken by hot breath on my cheek; two perfect, smooth fangs pressed against my skin, not biting but waiting. She nibbles me awake, cheek and shoulders and ears. On several unfortunate occasions she has nipped me square on the nipple. We stare at each other, eyes half-closed in contentment. It is allowed for me to lay abed as long as I am awake and conscious of her. Restless, she curls over my knees, and then my chest, then shoulders and head, pacing over me back and forth, stepping on my throat, and then jumps to the window and pushes aside the curtain. She sends me glances over her shoulder, eyes still half-closed, overwhelmed by her luck at having a home like mine, a love like mine, a window like this to look out of.

The short trip to the kitchen for breakfast is accompanied by a chorus of whining, howling bird-noises, sounds pitiful and moving, reinforcing the guilt I have begun to suffer from: I am not good enough to her. All of this power I have over her, and what do I do? I make her wait for breakfast, I make her wait for attention, I become upset when she demands anything. I begin pining for her during my classes, planning for our evenings together, curled up in one of my two small rooms, staring dreamily at each other.

When I fell ill Monster sustained me. She saw my weakness and understood it as her job to tend to me. During the long days I spent sleeping she was a constant presence, her weight on my back or my side; she kept me from floating away. Every step I took out of bed, few though they were, she attended; breakfast was no longer accompanied by wails of impatience, but was eaten gratefully and quickly so that she could return to bed with me. She patted my face with her paws to wake me now and then, worried I might not wake at all. When I did wake she twisted herself into yoga nap-stretches; she didn’t complain at all when I took another pill and went back to bed again. And when I often wept she spread herself around my neck like a stole, unable to fix me but giving me all she had nevertheless.

Monster is clever in her own way; she understands, or she tries to, when I ask things of her. She certainly knows when she is doing something wrong. The knowledge of a taboo does not stop her from an action, but changes the quality with which she does it: she becomes slow and cautious, carefully deliberate in every move, consciously avoiding making any eye contact or even acknowledging that I am watching her, although she knows that I am. She will continue to do wrong in this calculated way until I comment on it, at which she flings herself away from the crime with all the affront of one wrongfully accused and fixes me with her powerful glare.

She is not graceful and does not attempt to climb anything higher than the back of the couch. When she lands after a jump it is not the close of an elegant spring but the thudding terminus of a hurled rock. Until last year she had never really been out-of-doors; until this summer she had never been outside without intensive, worried supervision. Now that Monster has some discretion over her comings and goings, she has discovered the joy of hunting. Her prey of choice is moths, although grasshoppers will do. Moths that have strayed indoors are her favorite quarry. They land and rest high on the walls and she follows them, cackling in eagerness, from the baseboards. The first time I lifted her in an attempt to help her reach a high-up moth, she squirmed and whined and meowed her low, open-mouthed “nooo” that is almost too appropriate and perfectly formed not to be intentional. Monster does not like being picked up, an eccentricity but one which I hardly blame her for. She, as a smaller creature in my oversized home, can be scooped off of her feet and swung unsteadily and inexplicably through the air towards whatever I might choose, even the bathtub, whose purpose she understands and loathes. But after her initial scramble to escape, the fluttering of the doomed moth caught her eye again. Suddenly she understood, and she knew that I understood, too: we both wanted the same thing. She stretched from the platform of my arms and pinned the bug’s wings to the wall, and then scooped it into her mouth to hold onto until I set her firmly on her feet. She crippled the moth with a quick bite, then looked up. Her ears set back, her pupils absurdly dilated in her round eyes, white flag flicking back and forth on the floor, one dainty paw pinning down her prey, she looked me in the eye with understanding and thanked me with a slow, heavy-lidded smirk of pure happiness.

Since then I throw open the windows at night, burn the lights bright. Anything I can do for her, she deserves.

What sets my cat apart from the world population of cats? What has cultivated her particular generosity, her wisdom, her sense of humor? Why did I only discover these things about her once I was alone with her, and lost, and wounded? I must conclude that she has always been who she is, and that it was me who could not see or understand her. Had I scooped up that gray kitten instead of Monster, would my life with her, this other creature, be as full? Perhaps I would not understand her as I understand my Monster; perhaps she would be less interested in communicating with me. Or perhaps I would love her just as dearly. And what would have become of Monster herself? As an unnamed barn cat, she would still possess the same giving spirit, the same quirks, the same intelligence. She is who she is. Monster is not a remarkable cat, not unique in possessing cleverness and sweetness. She is an average example of her species who I happen to love dearly. But that love does not make her who she is.

Our assignation of worth to animals is completely arbitrary. We are fond of some; we take them into our homes and translate our values onto them, try to make them as human as possible. Some we worry about in an abstract way: the plight of the tigers, the whales, the chimpanzees. Some we ignore, and some we use. To use these animals, to not care about them, we distance ourselves from them as much as we can: they are unthinking, unfeeling; they were put on Earth for us to use; it’s just the food chain; it’s just natural. But those we use have value, too. Whether we choose to acknowledge or ignore them, it does not negate their uniqueness, their life.

Does my love for a cat give that cat worth? Does Monster only have value if she is useful to me, or to some other human? If she was not loved, would she be nothing? If she automatically has worth, has value as a living being, then what of the feral cats put to sleep en masse? The cats shot with pellet guns in alleys? What of the herds of horseflesh, of beef, mutton, chops, roasts, ribs?

It is irresponsible to love an animal—any animal—and not consider these questions.