Cats. Cats in pink, tan, and gold boxes. Cats on spiral carpeted ladders. Cats climbing on the fake leather sofa and scratching holes in it. I live in one of those holes and am always, I’m embarrassed to say, scared for my life. Our enemies whisper to each other. You understand how it is. A house of 1500 cats shall never—well, fill in the blank and try not to linger. That’s the way it goes. Bengals, Persians, Ragdolls, Shorthairs, Angoras, Savannahs, Bombays, Munchkins. Meow meow meow meow all day long. My voice is nothing but a high-pitched thread of nothing. These sentries with their big constant eyes might as well have had boredom bred into them. Warm milk trickles out of the autodispenser at 7 am and 8 pm every day. They pile in around the large red bowl, middle of the kitchen floor, never late, tails high.
That’s when I peek out and scan the baseboards for a crumb of a goldfish or stray fruit snack. It’s been a while since I heard a closet door close or silverware clink. Now it’s all suspicion and slow idle tiptoe, s-shaped relaxed killjoy. Meow meow scratch paw. Oh you die. Time for a nap. Cats sleeping on the ceiling fan. Cats lounging in the mahogany wine cabinet, doors closed. One large orange and white tabby hanging out in the microwave, content or desperate and so large he might entertain life as a rectangular thing, alive and dead. One of them brushes against the TV and it turns on. Unrest at the Cambodian-Thai border, wherever that is. Unrest in Coral Gables. Sounds more familiar, but still far away. I retreat deeper into the snowy cushion stuffing. No one is coming for me.
I’ve lived all over, but not on purpose. Tucked back on a garage shelf behind a yellowing roll of paper towels. Yes. Nestled in the insulation behind the top buttons of the dishwasher. Yes. To imagine dishes being washed is to starve twice. I gnawed my existence into a soft black suitcase missing its wheels, full of dirty athletic socks, and called it my eleventh paradise. One time I got careless and roamed with a head full of what-ifs and fell through the floor vent into a rusted metal duct and stared up for days through the slats as if to trace my shadow one last time against the ceiling. I pictured my life without anything to eat, so I abandoned that terrible idea and found a way down into the crawlspace and while climbing over debris I found God in an empty bait box and then rose up upon his beckoning through a cracked floorboard in the living room.
A long time ago, I deciphered the code of liquor store boxes outside by the dismal blue recycling bin. I don’t know what it means for any of us, that they never got into the bin. I’m not old enough to know what happened when. My yesterdays are shorter than most. The robins, there are two of them, want to peck at my nose as if I’m a worm. I settled underneath a thorny vine patch growing out of the woodpile and no one bothered me there. I thanked the same God who saved me. I ate a few raspberries and was sick for a week. No one tended to me. That was the only time I wished I was dead.
Now the game of attrition. Are you an uncomplicated speck with four of everything? Let’s start with legs. A bunched up sweep up of living surfaces or a liquid failsafe tongue lick or a foldable molecule of skitter-tap hopelessness? Who can wait out who. Garbo is the beast of the house. A Cornish Rex with the ears of a hare and narrow cheekbones of a human, thinner than he has a right to be. Smells me through the hole, alerts the others—disturbance!—and now they all pace the floor in front of the sofa and across the back of it like lazy interrogators of a minor nuisance who’s ready to admit anything. Nothing is around. Not me to see. They sleep like land mines. I don’t worry about setting one off. My touch is light because I have walked over pillows and taken notice.
My mom’s voice, yes I remember it like the sun setting, catches me in my favorite mix of daydream and size-blind arrogance and scolds me for it. It’s over fast, she says. My mom had a short life, but at least she was always right.
Garbo has planted himself in front of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, escaped the need to sleep by treating drowse as a foreign substance, with away-strain and revulsion, aware of the weather but not wed to it, the death throes yeah those too, yawn, the choices of the living state, the rule of threes and the rules of whoever once lived here and did all the work their bodies demanded, the dumb courage of it.
It is the ask you make to all divine things and their contradictions, if this or that becomes just this, the neverness as in--never will you dictate your illness and its prescription into a serving spoon held like a snapped broom handle microphone--but if you had to do it, if you had to turn yourself into a paper fort and hide inside and inch closer to those cabinet doors hoping everyone would say hey look at that moving fort isn’t it so interesting, if you had to break into time and dismantle its tight logics and turn off its heartbeat, if you had to do all that and you were me, where would you begin and what would you dangle in front of yourself on a fishing line to not lose your way?
What would you deflate through a hundred million pinpricks, circumventing whoever Garbo is. How would you get into that relay box inside the cabinet inkdark that likes to hug you, printing your underside with its black kisses. What it feels like to slip past the muted protests of cleaners and sponges and ant spray and dish soap under the garbage disposal steeple, pausing to receive its brief blessing in churn and grunt (remembrance) before pressing on to the yellow wire chew chew chew like you knew knew knew and alternating between it and the steel wool stuffed behind it, clogging up the box because beyond that, oh you can guess what comes next—get it OUT dear friend and you will have no teeth left at the second and third and fourth endings of the world, but at least you’ll have dull implements yeah we’ve got those too rounded digging implements, useless useless but this is a moment of triumph let’s not ruin it with bibs and bobs the singular heave of purrr-less ecstasy to get at the air of the world again. Oh to be among the tremulous things and desiccated oak leaves, the dead claws wind-dragging you like chalk across the broken and lifted concrete slabs, carrying you forward in zigzag, robins be damned because they’ll never see you because they’re too busy poking at a dead cricket. Mind you, none of this happened. Garbo opened his eyes.
Numbers, they like me. And I’ve had my time with them, 9x9 grids. Every row must contain you once. Every column must contain you once. Each encapsulated 3x3 grid must contain you once. You are never to be repeated, bad bad for that to be. Numbers, they like me, have I mentioned? That’s my problem. I’ve always wanted too much agreement as to my use. The easiest way to start is to find an emptiness and put a number there. We are born numerous and must distinguish ourselves. I did so by counting. Which one’s missing. You can find out by eliminating the ones already there. Only one of Garbo. Fixed on me as if asking what do you have to say about this, little one. I have nothing to say, of course.
I could dart back toward the sofa. Maybe have my tail torn from my body by a somnambulistic feline brute dreaming she’s paddling through a school of sturgeon. I could dash toward the vent as a lemming might. I could scamper back toward the sofa, but for all the cats underneath and on the arms and on the back huddled in wait. The living room chessboard is sacred to them, frozen in dust on a round side table by the bookcase. The king and queen are blank-faced and morbid. I could knock them over with my body weight, flung at great risk and perhaps make them roll off the side like barrels onto the heads of my inquisitors below.
But I will do nothing of the sort, because I am a tiny mound of a thousand shivers, prostrate before Garbo, small as a dime. This is the game we have played since the world went empty. I ran at him instead. When he reached his outstretched paw to pin me, I hopped onto the back of it and before he could swipe me with the other, I jumped as hard as my hind legs could launch me, mouth wide for the intake, teeth bared. I have good aim so I’m told, enough that night to land on his nose, bite down for survival, all whiskers and flashes of fur and screeching, a trickle of blood, head-shake head-shake, roll over and again and a third time, retreat retreat into the living room seeing red red red. I let go of Garbo a century ago, waved goodbye from the poop deck of an Italian schooner I suffused with my germ, and said you are not king, no you are not anymore, and wedged myself like a soft pawn between the peeling cabinet door and frame, prying my way into the 4x4 tomb, one number in each catacomb, but no zeros or ones. No more counting our breaths, wriggling into the ammonia darkness comfort soon. I’m inside.
Another bait box, triangular death, and I laugh at it and there’s a snap-shut-door-closed-you’re-done. My bones are crushed dust. The robins are newly prayerful on a low branch of the magnolia tree. This is how I love them most. I imagine them kissing. They do not love me back, but I haven’t asked, nor have they asked me to stop imagining them kissing. The advice they wish for lives in the dirt. Never expose a wire, for it just might carry the electricity that runs wild through your soul. I do it anyway with a half-broken neck, chewing through that thick yellow ligament looped in the relay box until I hit copper and hurts hurts hurts onward to some strands of the steel wool, one mouthful to the open vein of wire and oh the beautiful fireworks arc-lighting like New Year’s Eve. The pounding of desperate paws against the cabinet doors behind me meow meow meow since they know I’ve become God. Why did you ever think you had to extract all that wool. Futile work. You should have stuck to your numbers. You should have kept playing the rows and columns of your catacomb and figured what’s missing.
The dishwasher’s accordion drain tube is cracked and now melts at the far end spark-flame spark-flame and into it I climb and crawl along, olay olay olay a tune I like, I heard somewhere. Get into the innards of the aluminum ghost and from that belly again into my birth. Chew your way in as you chew your way out. Shred and shimmy through the uteral insulation and up into the crevice running along the countertop to the back wall and then down born born born into that wall, tumbling deep into a familiar drywall gap, outward push push and then against the broken asbestos siding of the house and then pressing more hurts hurts until out onto the patch of crab grass by the toppled grill, on your side, bones don’t work, what muscles, what panting, what dying, joyful, robin dear robin come peck at my nose.