Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daugh­ter Karen, had to find a home for her when a land­lord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were liv­ing mere blocks away, com­pletely pet­less and, some might say, care­free. Karen had found Althea in the ani­mal shel­ter in 1991, and she took her back to the apart­ment that she shared with a boyfriend who was busy fur­nish­ing an ancient blue school bus with bunkbeds, stove, sit-down shower, brake lin­ings, wind­shield wipers, car­bu­re­tor and other refine­ments. The new cat was a year old or a lit­tle more and had had a lit­ter of kit­tens, none of whom were still with her. She had long grey hair and green eyes. Karen and her boyfriend named her Althea for a song writ­ten by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter in 1980 and often heard at per­for­mances of the Grateful Dead attended by Deadheads, which is a term that Karen and her boyfriend applied to them­selves in 1991. They liked to meet up with friends in enor­mous park­ing lots some­where in Oregon or California, Mexico or Montana, or pos­si­bly Kamloops, BC, to lis­ten with thou­sands of other Deadheads to the songs of the Grateful Dead in the heat of the noon­day sun as the asphalt soft­ened around them and dust got into every­thing, or so one imag­ines it look­ing at the snap­shots brought back by Karen and her boyfriend from these dis­tant gath­er­ings: smil­ing peo­ple squint­ing in the heat, aroma of patchouli oil, sound of tam­bourine and bongo drum wielded inex­pertly and con­tin­u­ously only a short dis­tance away from wher­ever one was in those days; or so it seems while look­ing into the snap­shots and won­der­ing how it was pos­si­ble that the Grateful Dead had been going on for so many life­times, with­out ever imping­ing on one’s own life until now, look­ing into the snap­shots and then out the win­dow at the blue school bus wait­ing for fur­ther repair in front of the place that Karen and her boyfriend moved into up on the Sunshine Coast, where at the edge of the for­est the shad­owy fig­ure of Althea in the wild emerges from green leafy shad­ows: she flops over on her side in a pool of sun­light on the grass.

Such were the for­ma­tive years of Althea, the long-haired grey cat who appeared in our apart­ment and seemed slowly to assume mate­r­ial form as I became accus­tomed to find­ing her bask­ing in sun­light in the morn­ings by the east win­dow and in the after­noons by the west win­dow. Althea was an accom­plished sit­ter in laps, which she accom­pa­nied with purrs and the stretch­ing out of a paw when more caresses were required. She was eas­ily adapted to; by the time she achieved old age (when could that have been?) she was the cat in the house and the house was a house with a cat in it when you came home and she was wait­ing inside the door for you. Last year when Althea devel­oped symp­toms of kid­ney fail­ure, the vet gave Mary a bag of saline solu­tion and a sup­ply of ster­ile nee­dles, and every few nights Althea would lie purring on the cof­fee table while Mary probed the loose skin at her neck and then thrust the nee­dle in; it was my task to hold the bag in the air and open the spigot, and a hump would begin to form at the back of Althea’s neck.

In the fall Althea took to jump­ing onto the bed in the morn­ings and tread­ing through the bil­lows of the duvet onto my chest, where (so it seemed) she could keep an eye on me as I con­trived to get an extra hour of sleep. When she was too weak to jump she scram­bled or scrum­bled at the edge of the duvet and had to be scooped up in one hand (gen­tly, to pre­serve her dig­nity). Every morn­ing she weighed a lit­tle less; she began to float on the duvet and I became aware of my own breath as she rose up and down on my chest. Her eye­brows had grown into a wild thatch of fur tipped with frost and thrust­ing long grey hairs and ran­dom whiskers, and she began to resem­ble an ancient philoso­pher in a movie or a dream. In the evenings Mary would take Althea on her lap and comb out her long grey hair and Althea would stretch her­self under the comb as a cloud of fleece the colour of smoke formed in Mary’s hand. Then Althea would lie on her side in front of the gas fire­place and stare into the gut­ter­ing fire and its per­ma­nent glow­ing embers. Occasionally she would rear up and sink her claws into the links of the fire­screen and pull her­self even closer to the flames, until her body became almost too hot to touch. During her last days (and we knew them to be her last days) we endeav­oured not to leave her alone for long. I took to work­ing at the din­ner table; when I came in the front door I was instantly aware of her at the top of the stairs, not com­ing down the stairs as she had used to do, but instead look­ing over from her spot at the fire­place. And then when she turned her eyes toward us we could see that she was no longer look­ing into this world. In Greek myth Althea is warned by the fates that her baby son will live no longer than the log burn­ing in the hearth; she extin­guishes the fire and con­ceals the log, and years later, dri­ven by the same fates to a ter­ri­ble des­tiny, she rekin­dles it, and her son, by now a hero in the world, suf­fers instant death by burn­ing. In quan­tum physics, Schrödinger’s cat in his quan­tum box exists in two states at once: the alive and the not-alive, until we open the box and look into it. The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland leaves behind only a grin float­ing in the air. Well! I’ve often seen a cat with­out a grin, thinks Alice; but a grin with­out a cat! It’s the most curi­ous thing I ever saw in my life! John Berger, in his essay “Why Look at Animals?”, writes that ani­mals are mes­sen­gers and promises; they come from over the horizon. 

Althea died at the vet’s office in the pres­ence of Mary and Karen, and that night I looked over at the fire and saw Althea behind the fire­screen, float­ing above the flam­ing ceramic log, her body unburn­ing and per­me­ated by flame. Every night since then, the gut­ter­ing of the gas-fire her­alds her pres­ence here in the house, where it has been dif­fi­cult to get up in the morn­ing and go out in the world, for it’s always pos­si­ble that Althea will not be here when we return.