I'd been asleep, absorbed in myself, not thinking about the animal I professed to love, while I convinced myself theirs was an empty threat, because it was inconceivable that my parents would give her away, then my dog was gone. I know a woman who defended her dogs from criticism even when they attacked a stray cat, which could have been torn apart and killed, and also didn't express any concern for the cat or believe that her dogs should be controlled; instead, the dogs' owner talked about another cat who had successfully defended itself against her occasionally vicious dogs, and, from a safe place, hit them with its paw. Cats can defend themselves was her spurious point, but a domestic animal shouldn't have to know how to defend itself against predatory dogs. People defend the bad actions of their animals, themselves, or their children rather than face the unsavory conclusion that there is something wrong with the animal, their children, themselves, with the world, and their job is to acknowledge it, even to rid the world of it, certainly not to pretend that it isn't there, that everything is all right, that they and their animals are good, because they didn't mean it, and can't help themselves. Instead they do nothing, accepting the brutality of animals, themselves, other people, and the world, since they believe it has nothing to do with them, they want to think it has nothing to do with them. A slap in the face is not a slap in the face when it comes from them, because they didn't mean it, because they had sad childhoods, their parents gave away their dogs and cats, their parents gave them away and didn't love them.
I love my animals. People love their animals, the way they love their own farts and everything else attached to them that is close to them yet not them. Because they are not their animals or their farts, they love them. Eskimos have a saying, Every man loves the smell of his own farts, which most people wouldn't admit. I know a man who was kicked out of a fast-food restaurant because he farted. I was once in a restaurant when an obese boy farted, the smell was overpowering, and a friend and I had to move to a different part of the restaurant, but the boy appeared satisfied, because he loved the smell of his fart. Everyone loves their own farts, which could get them kicked out of restaurants or humiliated in public settings, where people try to act not like animals but sensitively, if it serves their purposes, but no one is sensitive enough about other people. They are sensitive about themselves, their animals, their feelings and beliefs, and other people can go to hell with their dogs, their farts, and their feelings.
At breakfast, I noticed the expressions on two women's faces, women in their late-twenties who looked unhappy, something had not gone well for them, was not going well for them in that moment or in their dreams or in last night's telephone call, but I didn't say anything to them, though I believed I should show concern. I walked past them and ordered two fried eggs over medium-which I like, though when I was a child I would have gagged on-before the kitchen closed, otherwise I wouldn't have eaten until lunch. Lunches are rarely good, they are often the worst meal of the day, and sometimes there is very little anyone can eat, but I didn't want to be hungry later, waiting for dinner, alone, thinking about the dog I hadn't saved, who loved carrots, seeing her guileless face before me, her tail wagging happily, as she ran up the driveway which had an oil slick on it, a leak from my father's gray Buick, of which he was proud, the dog unaware that one day she would be given away by the people who loved her. I've never had another dog. I've had cats, and one especially I cherished, in Amsterdam, all of whose kittens but one died in a week from an infestation of fleas, which occurred frequently during Amsterdam summers, but of which I'd had no experience and no one spoke, never warning me of the inevitable and severe consequences for newborn kittens, for whose deaths I take responsibility. They lay in a drawer in my desk as their lifeblood was drained away, sucked by fleas, whose own life may be valuable to some, but I now have a young cat, technically a kitten, rescued from the streets by animal lovers, who resembles the sole survivor of that doomed litter. My young cat had distemper but he survived, because a veterinarian believed it was worth dosing him with strong, expensive antibiotics, while warning me soberly that the kitten had only a 50/50 chance of survival, but when I visited my cat during the four-day ordeal in which his life hung in the balance, I was chastised by the veterinarian's receptionist, because, upon hearing my kitten cry, I ran to the room from which the cries emerged, a room no bigger than a closet, and messy, and the receptionist became angry, suspecting that I might steal her bag and coat, which were also in the room with my lonely, sick cat. Though the vet saved my cat's life, I have never returned.
My cat plays, purrs, bites, and goes for people's hands. He is a little wild and may become vicious when he's older, or he may calm down, but I don't want to have to put him to sleep, to kill him, if he turns vicious and attacks someone. When I am no longer here, eating breakfast with other people whose complexions and facial expressions signal a distress I don't want to deal with, wondering how much I should get involved with them and their problems, I won't have people come to my apartment and meet my young cat. I don't like their coming, anyway, I don't like people seeing or saying things about what I have around me, on my walls or on my shelves; it is no business of theirs how I live or what I put on a table or my desk, a wooden board with a plate of half-inch-thick glass over it, a reasonable desk in an unexceptional apartment, in which I live with a young cat, and for some years with a man, but not now, and the cat may or may not become vicious, which is a problem for the future.
Everything is a problem in some way, I can't think of anything that's not a problem from the past for the future, and I often worry, frowning to myself, unaware that I'm frowning, my lips turning down involuntarily, which I've been told to stop doing since I was a child, because it creates the impression that I'm sullen and also etches fine lines around my mouth, but I can't. My father worried about the future, which presumably he could imagine, but I can't, just as I can't imagine lines like tributaries running from the river of my mouth the way they do from my mother's, who was angry, who'd abandoned her girlish hopes of marrying a violinist named Sidney, and who often speaks of him now that my father is dead, wondering where Sidney is, and also wondering where my father is, if he is outside, waiting for her in the car that he loved. She might have seen the future in us, if we'd been someone else's children. By the time I knew my brother, he was thirteen and I was two, so he and my parents were the future that lived with and preceded me, it lay before me and also excluded me, so I didn't consider it, not when I was a small child, since it was already in their lives. I didn't mature fantasizing its arrival, and even knowing that I won't be here to witness another future and be dedicated to it, or of it, that I exist as one version of the future I hadn't fantasized, I'm only vaguely intrigued by its promise. The tenacity of the past makes me melancholy, though people like to say the past was a simpler time, but there is no simpler time, there are only simple people, and even they are not simple, but so exhaustively undermined as to be plain. Memory can be consumptive, a sickness, whose effects are wily and subversive, worthy of flight or fight, and tenacious unwritten histories leave tremulous marks on bodies in action, at rest, but not their final rest, and under siege. My body is encased in sensitive, dry skin. Skin is an organ, and the body's largest one, protecting the body under coats of many colors. The story of Joseph is one of two Bible stories I remember, because it was about fabric and colors, both of which my father mentioned, since he was in the textile business, and it was also about rivalry, which my parents never mentioned, though I wasn't aware of reticence then.