“Interesting.”
“I hear people I know say, ‘I don’t like him, but he has some good ideas.’ Once I heard a friend of my father’s say that about Hitler.”
Dorn smiled. “Ah. Hitler did have some good ideas, you know. The German people went to him as an alternative to chaos. And he put a stop to inflation, and increased employment, and raised the standard of living, and ended civil disorder, and reversed the terms of Versailles. And—”
“You make it sound—”
“And then, when he had evidently saved the German people from chaos, he went on to create for them the most nearly total chaos the world has ever known. He launched an impossible and unnecessary war. He guided the war so as to make utter defeat inevitable. He slaughtered millions. Millions. He destroyed all that he had created along with all that had existed before him. The savior from chaos turned himself into the supreme nihilist. But he had some good ideas.”
“Do you think—”
“A wild exaggeration on my part,” he said. “After all, this is America.”
There was the noise of a small struggle outside, and unfamiliar sounds of pain. Dorn rushed out the front door. Jocelyn was close behind him. The cat was in a bed of irises by the side of the front steps, killing something.
“Oh, Vertigo!”
Dorn stooped for a closer look.
“Is it a mouse?”
He took hold of the cat by the nape of the neck and retrieved its tiny victim.
“It’s a bird,” he said. “A young robin.”
“Oh, no!” She stood over the cat, her face drawn with anguish. “Vertigo, you bad cat! How could you do it? Oh, you bad, bad cat!”
Dorn had released his hold on the cat’s neck. Vertigo looked up, puzzled, as the girl wailed at him. He stood still while she slapped him twice across his face. Then, baffled, he darted off into the bushes.
“Oh, God,” she said. She was shuddering. “How could he do that? How did he get out?”
“It was my fault. There were windows open. It did not occur to me that he might leave.”
“No, I should have thought. He never did anything like that before. He’s always been a good cat, a wonderful cat. He never even puts out his claws. How could he do that? Is the poor thing—”
There was life in the bird that he held in his hands, but it was terribly mauled. “I’m afraid it’s dead,” he said gently. “Go in and sit down. I’ll bury it.”
He walked to the garage, giving the bird’s neck a quick snap as he walked. He got his trowel and buried the bird in a flower bed.
She was on the front steps, calling to the cat. “He won’t come,” she said. “Oh! I never hit him before. He didn’t know what was happening, and now I don’t know where he is and he won’t come when I call him.”
“Come inside,” he said. “He’ll be back.”
“How do you know?”
“He wants to go off and consider what’s happened to him. But he’ll be back.”
In the living room she said, “Was it one of our birds?” They went together to the kitchen window. One of the baby robins was absent from the nest. She began to cry, her shoulders heaving, tears flowing freely. Awkwardly he put an arm around her shoulders. She pressed her face against his chest and cried for a long time. He felt as though something was breaking inside his chest. At last her sobbing stopped and she sighed deeply. He released her. She took a step backward, turning her face from him.
“I’m such a child,” she said.
He said nothing.
“I don’t understand how he could do it. I named him Vertigo because he has this height thing. I never met a cat like that before. He has to work up his courage to jump down from my bed. How could he get into the nest?”
“They’ve been leaving the nest. But they don’t fly well. They’re easy to catch, even for clumsy cats. The parent birds would have driven Vertigo away, but evidently they were off on other errands.”
“We watched those birds grow up. And then he—”
“You can’t blame him. It’s the nature of cats to kill birds.”
“But how would he know to do it?”
“As he knows to arch his back at dogs, land on four feet, and clean himself.”
“Damn it, he doesn’t have to catch birds! I feed him twice a day. I spend more on his meals than—”
“What do you feed him?”
“Cat food.”
“What does it contain?”
“Everything he needs, protein, vitamins—”
“I mean the composition?”
“Everything. Beef and liver and chicken and fish and — oh!”
“Don’t, Jocelyn.”
But she began to cry again, and this time he did not attempt to comfort her. She covered her face with her hands and wept. “It’s so wrong,” she sobbed. “Why does everything have to eat everything else? Why?”
“Why must cats eat birds?”
“Why?”
“Why do we cry for the birds eaten by cats, when we do not cry for the worms eaten by birds? And why does all our knowledge of the balance of nature and the survival of the fittest do nothing to stop our tears?”
“It is so awful, Miles.”
He ached for her. She was getting a quick glimpse of Hell from a new perspective and there were no words he could speak to blur her vision.
The cat’s return to the house was as unremarked as his exit. All at once he was there, in the living room.
“Oh, Vertigo,” she cried. She ran to pick him up. He turned, wary of her, but she snatched him up and clutched him to her breasts.
“Oh, poor, poor Vertigo,” she said. “I should never have hit you. I didn’t think you would come back. My poor baby. My poor sweet baby.”
She sat with the cat purring in her lap. Dorn went from room to room, closing windows.
Jocelyn, it’s the nature of cats to kill birds. Jocelyn, it is my nature to kill men. Vertigo and I are assassins. It is our nature. And to live in accordance with one’s nature is to make one’s peace with destiny.
“Tyger, tyger... did he who made the lamb make thee?” The same hand made both beasts, Jocelyn.
Jocelyn, I go through life with a gun in my hands. But I, Jocelyn, am a gun in the hands of a man named Eric Heidigger. And he in his turn is a gun in an unseen pair of hands. And famous Danton Rhodine (who has some good ideas) is part of this chain of guns and hands, but whether he is a gun or a pair of hands or both I do not know.
Why, Jocelyn, do we grieve so much more bitterly for the death of a young animal? Why is the death of a child so infinitely more sorrowful than the death of an adult?
You wept at once for bird and cat. I weep for you.
One evening after dinner she turned suddenly and caught him looking at her, his face open and unguarded.
“Oh, Miles,” she said.
He tried to turn his eyes from her. They stayed on her face, her perfect face.
She said, “You must know that I love you.”
(“I should have been a pair of ragged claws...”)
She said, “And you love me. I know you do.”
(“... the mermaids singing...”)
She said, “I don’t have anyone else. Not anymore. When you go out of town—?”
He thought of Rebecca Warriner (“You’re very sweet, Milton... That was lots of fun.”) He thought of the streetwalker.
“No,” he said. (“No. I’m far too old for that.”)
Jocelyn, Jocelyn, I am not a lover but a killer. My penis is a rifle spitting bullets into other men’s brains, a steel bar that pulps their heads. A knife. A stick of dynamite. A dozen dozen forms of phallic death.