You get to a certain age, and you start to wonder about things. You wonder how well you know other people, you wonder how well you know yourself. You wonder how to deal with a phone conversation with an old high school friend, when she mentions feeling the need to "check in on ya" and jokes that she "worries who's gonna be there for your crazy ass when your liver finally gives out..." Then you realize you had a nearly word-for-word similar discussion with your brother just two weeks before. You start to wonder who it actually is that they are talking about, as you walk downstairs to the laundry room.
You have so much on your mind at that point that you find yourself unable to wrap your mind around it when a small black and orange tabby looks up and asks "Why is a cat?".
Wait, what?
"Why is a cat?" repeats the cat.
"Why don't your lips move when you talk?" you ask.
"It's an old joke, older than people," says the cat, ignoring your question. "'Why is a cat? Because all of our paws are the same'... I know an even older, dirtier version of the joke. But you are not ready to hear it." He held up his paw, which had seven lopsided toes.
"Why do you have seven toes?" you find yourself asking.
"To remind me not to fuck my sister." said the cat. "My dad was a pristine specimen, with nothing to remind him not to fuck his sister. So I was born with seven toes. When I finally fuck a she-cat that is not my sister, it is still possible we may create a kitten with the right number of toes, who will probably run off and fuck his sister. Such is the way of cats... Take my paw."
You cup his tiny, disfigured paw in my palm for a moment.
"Good," replied the cat, "another of my kind will visit you soon. I have dinner waiting." Then the cat dashed upstairs into the waiting ajar door of an apartment at the far end of the complex, closest to the dumpster and the overgrown, near forest-like drainage ditch beyond it.
As you prepare to retrieve clothes from the laundry room dryers, there is scratching at the door. On the back porch is a small, shivering kitten. You bend over to pet him, and he climbs up your arm to perch on your shoulder, much like a parrot in the pirate movies. You name him Simon and he sleeps on your chest that night.
He begins to teach you stories. Old stories.
At first having the cat around was a hit. He was like a mascot, and with him you became more popular than ever. And on those rare occasions he wasn't allowed in, you just walked out of the place and resolved to provide more for yourself. You begin dealing in rarities and antiques, and after only a month and a half of hard work, you find yourself doing better than ever.
Then the cat got bigger.
Rather than perched, he lounges about your neck, his tiny panting mouth never far from your ear. He whispers things to you.
That there was no reason to miss people when they were not there, because you never knew them in the first place. You had simply projected my expectations on them, and whatever they provided you could find within yourself. All you really were to other people was manifestations of their expectations of you. There is no true meaning at all to the ever-shifting pool of alliances, intimacies and partnerships that made and broke marriages, killed presidents and indeed even defined history itself; both in the events themselves and the prejudices of those that recorded it.
You find less and less reason to leave the house. Your stories were catching on, and you reached a point in painting (a never ending sequence of languid female nudes with watery eyes and facial features that seemed, somehow, feline) that your work was easily selling for as much or more as any other's.
Somewhere along the line, you had accumulated MANY more cats. Dozens of them. The smell became overwhelming. Your landlord shifted you to the apartment at the farthest end of the apartment complex, closest to the dumpster, without explaining what happened to the last tenant.
Eventually, even trips to the grocery store became too much of an ordeal. It started with picking the dumpster; then it was bugs, rats and then the occasional snake from the drainage ditch. One day a drunken homeless man stumbled, much like a lost Hansel and Gretel, into the forest-like clearing behind the convenience store on the corner and fell asleep behind the dumpster. If anyone noticed that they never saw him again, they didn't say anything. You and your feline companions ate like a lion's pack. You were becoming a real family.
You began developing a cough, however, that had become progressively worse over time. Eventually you got too sick to bring in any outside food. The other cats began to regularly pace around your bed, as if waiting for something.
In a hoarse whisper you called for Simon, and ask him the question that had been bothering you for what seemed like years...
"Simon, if I really didn't need anyone but myself, what drew me to all of you?"
"Why IS a cat?" replied Simon.
The answer was so absurd, you can't help but laugh. Why do cats always show up when it seems all we know about the universe is breaking down? Why did Schrodinger pick a cat? Why did Lewis Carrol have a cat say "We're all mad here?"
You begin laughing so hard it becomes hard to breathe. You try to catch your breath, but it became impossible. The room got darker and darker.
Why is a cat?
You look around a bit and cough. Wait, you think, you don't have a cough. You had a cough when you had a name. You are now a cat with no name (which is as it should be). Cats have no names. You figure it's best to work on forgetting your previous life. Whatever you were before is gone now, and there is no name for the meat that is here that should not be wasted (you will never know this, but when they do an autopsy to identify what is not eaten, they will fish nearly fifteen pounds of cat hair from the corpse's lungs and colon).
Before you completely forget to do so, however, you rush out the ajar door just in time to catch up with a strangely familiar young person to ask the only question still on your mind.
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