In the comfort of Mexico City or Mumbai or Montreal, over a breakfast of raw tuna sashimi and shrimp ceviche and duck liver pâté, my puss-puss wouldn’t eat a bite. My mother and father surreptitiously watched my failing efforts to feed him, sneaking glances from behind their respective notebook computers while I placed my hideously swollen kitty on the breakfast table beside my plate and tempted him with succulent tidbits. To me, Tigerstripe represented my opportunity to shame them both. My care of him would demonstrate proper nonpagan, nonvegan, non-Reagan parenting skills. All of those past lives my mom and dad had brought to my upbringing, I’d eschew them. My strategy would be simply to lavish adoration on my kitty and raise him to a well-adjusted, non-body-image-dysmorphic cat-hood.
Here did I fake a tiny meow for my fellow breakfasters.
Do you see what I’d done, Gentle Tweeter? Do you see how I’d trapped myself in a corner? In Bangalore and Hyderabad and Houston, my catkin was obviously sick, but I couldn’t admit that fact by going to my folks to beg their advice. Over the breakfast table in Hanoi, my father eyed the bloated fuzz ball breathing heavily as it lay on its side beside my plate. Feigning Ctrl+Alt+Indifference, he asked, “How’s little Tigger?”
“His name is Tigerstripe,” I protested. Reaching to scoop him up and lift him into my lap, I said, “And he’s fine.” Between motionless lips, I said meow. Subtly using my fingertips, I moved the inert kitten’s mouth to match. Meow.
My father exchanged a raised eyebrow with my mom, and he asked, “Tiger’s not sick?”
“He’s fine!”
My mom laid her Ctrl+Alt+Serene gaze on the comatose blob now shivering atop my napkin-covered thighs, and she asked, “He doesn’t need to see a veterinarian, maybe?”
“He’s fine!” said I. “He’s sleeping.” I couldn’t let them see my fear. The quivering fur ball I petted, he felt hot—too hot. Gummy gunk rimmed his closed eyelids and sputtered at his teeny black nostrils. Even worse, stroking his sides I could feel the skin stretched tight, his belly distended. Through his soft fur, his faint kitten heartbeat felt a million-billion miles away. One possibility was that I’d fed him something wrong. Or I’d fed him too much. He was panting now, his kitty-pink tongue protruding slightly, each breath a death rattle. In too many ways, poor Tigerstripe was reproducing my nana’s slow, painful passing. Without thinking, my fingertips sought out the spot behind his front leg where the heartbeat felt strongest, and within the thinking bowels of my brain I began counting, One-alligator… two-alligator… three-alligator… between the slow, irregular beats. I noticed that neither of my parents was eating. The sickroom reek of afflicted kitten eclipsed everyone’s appetite.
My dad proposed, “How about you and Tiger go together to see a grief counselor?” He swallowed, betraying his Ctrl+Alt+Anxiety, and said, “You could talk about your grandpa and grandma dying.”
“I’m not grieving!” Under my breath I was counting… Five-alligator… six-alligator… between the fading heartbeats.
My mother’s worried eyes swept the table until they settled on the pastry basket. Lifting it, she heaved the tasty goodies toward me. “Would you like a muffin?”
“No!” I counted, Eight-alligator… nine-alligator…
“But you love blueberry muffins.” Her eyes tested me, measuring my response.
“I’m not hungry!” I snapped, counting… Elevenalligator… twelve-alligator… My kitty’s raspy, rattling breath had stopped. With frantic fumbling fingers I sought to massage his failed feline heart back to life. To hide this effort from my parents I wrapped my linen napkin around Tigerstripe’s swollen body. Thus thickly swaddled, his heartbeat became impossible to locate. To mask my panic, I said, “I’m not hungry! Tigerstripe is healthy and happy! I’m not hungry, and I didn’t rip off anyone’s man banana!”
Hearing that, my mother’s face looked Ctrl+Alt+Slapped. Her hands reached across the table in what must’ve been some instinctive maternal gesture, some attempted mammalian embrace inherited from our primate ancestors, and she said, “We only want to help you, Maddy, Raindrop.”
Recoiling, cradling my still, silent kitten, I countered, my words pure acid, “Maybe we could just desert Tigerstripe on some remote farm outpost upstate? How about that?” My voice rising to hysteria, I said, “Or perhaps we could ship my kitty off to some expensive school in Switzerland, where she could live, socially isolated, among hateful rich pussycats!”
Under my breath I was counting, Eighteen-alligator… nineteen-alligator… twenty-alligator… but I knew it was already too late. In Seoul or São Paulo or Seattle, I was half falling, half sprinting as I abandoned my place at the breakfast table and fled back to my bedroom bearing my baby kitten wrapped in his napkin shroud.
DECEMBER 21, 10:49 A.M. PST
In Denial
Gentle Tweeter,
The long-ago predead, eleven-year-old me carried my bundled feline corpse through Antwerp and Aspen and Ann Arbor. Like the blanket-wrapped cadaver of some expired Granny Joad, another bookish reference, I smuggled poor Tigerstripe through various immigration and customs checkpoints. I wore him strapped to my skin, hidden beneath my clothing, the way my mom and dad had so often played mule for their contraband narcotics. Needless to say, his sour odor did not abate; neither did the faithful entourage of winged parasites, primarily houseflies, but also their adolescent grubs and maggots that appeared on the scene as if conjured by some foul magic.
Whether international security was alarmingly lax, or my parents had placed big-money bribes to the right officers, my sad burden was never discovered. Occasionally, I’d mew quietly, defeated, but I kept my secret always wrapped in that original breakfast napkin. Don’t imagine that I was deranged, Gentle Tweeter; I knew my kitty was dead. No one in contact with his deflating fur coat could ignore its constant drip-drip-dripping of cold fluids. Under my sweater, lumped against my belly like a pregnancy, like a miscarriage, I felt the jumble of his collapsing bones.
In the hours since he’d passed, his furry tum-tum had begun to balloon. And, yes, I might’ve been temporarily insane with grief, but I knew that my kitten was filling with gas, the excretal product of renegade intestinal bacteria. And, yes, I might’ve been secretly terrified that I’d fed him something that had caused his demise, but I knew the word excretal, and I knew that my beloved was about to burst and that such an explosion would reduce my heart’s treasure to a bug-infested carcass. The linen felt sticky against my fingers. To my caressing hands Tigerstripe wasn’t dead, but I was careful not to pet him too vigorously.
At present, we shared a stretch limo, my parents sitting side by side with their backs to the driver, withdrawing themselves as far as possible from my not-happy circumstances. My parents’ flattened emotional aspect, their somber voices implied that they sensed the truth. Nevertheless in that car between the airport and our home in Jakarta or Johannesburg or Jackson Hole, my mother asked, “How’s the little patient?” Her eyes bloodshot. Her voice forcing a Ctrl+Alt+Lilt. “Feeling any better?”
In the limo’s plush interior, the perennial flies and rank smell proved difficult to ignore, and one of her yoga-sculpted arms flailed out, seeking the controls for the air-conditioning. Her manicured fingers increased the air flow to a full arctic blast, and she plucked a prescription bottle of Xanax from her bag and upended a few pills into her mouth. She handed the bottle to my father behind his newspaper.