The Cat and the Mouse

I grind my claws, I keep them sharp as nails. I file until the tip of each is beige wax grey, curled and honed razor-sharp. It’s a ritual I can’t control. During the hot months, I set myself down upon the place that I have sat for the better part of days gone by for far more years than I wish to count. It’s a cool spot saturated by shadow and situated against the hard cement foundation of the beaten old gift shop that rises out of the boardwalk at the far end, as if someone came along and threw it there. I sit for hours, staid and still, I don’t move, I remain within myself. I attend to my claws and I stare at the influx and flow of people and I study them and wonder who they are. I remain silent and unremarkable like an old trophy or one of a thousand things that fall out of pockets of those who shuffle back and forth upon those ancient wood slats and all the while I remain a recluse within my own silent aura, tentatively fixed upon the weathered, grey boardwalk floor.

I sit below the large shop window that presides over the vacillating tide of people who move from shop to beach to bar to somewhere else or back again. Behind the window are umbrellas and T-shirts and sundry silly things that people buy when they get bored. On occasion, a group of two or three or four lean forward to stare at those trinkets as though mystified by objects they’ve seen a thousand times before. In the course of their leaning or entry or exit from the store, one or more will pat my head and stroke my mottled fur, soft and warm, animalic orange, white and black.

The people are a distraction. I am preoccupied by my own needs and I sharpen my nails by filing and grinding them against each of two brick blocks that are especially coarse as compared to others that line the facade below the window. I grind my claws until they curl to a point but, sometimes, I don’t quite stop, at least not there. Sometimes I continue until the new points break which causes my nails to bleed and yet I grind those nails again and then some more until I achieve the sharpest of all points possible on every claw on all four paws. And then there are times at which I feel peculiar and low and, when these times come, when I feel my inner self cave in upon itself and the bottom falls out and I feel afraid and beset by my own gravity, I grind those nails with undue energy and commitment, I can’t stop the process, I keep at it, I am relentless despite the blood and the discomfort. Grind, break and bleed, over and again, the nails break and crumble until tiny shards remain which dangle from the raw skin and I sever the bits by peeling them from the skin with my teeth.

The pain can be overwhelming but, when pain overcomes compulsion, I terminate the process only to begin again when my nails grow back. I understand what I am doing, I realize it’s a casual form of self-immolation but it only goes so far and, rest assured, the process stops at my feet, so to speak. Perhaps it could be considered an endeavor or a purpose or an identity or a life’s work. I don’t have another purpose or plan and I don’t see where I am headed. But as painful as the process is, I don’t mind it. Perhaps that’s not quite accurate but it is true that pain, at least in this particular form, has a strange and soothing effect upon me and relieves that incessant inner degeneration that stings and throbs in a different way but is no less agonizing. The spiritual relief that comes with it is worth the price. I gladly pay: though the relief it brings is brief, I am momentarily relieved of the anguish that pulses out of the tangle of psychic ligaments that have become intolerably twisted and stretched in a tortured jumble and seem, for some odd reason, to begin and end and collect in my feet. If I have grown tired of the practice, it is insufficient for me to simply say that I am weary of it because, in fact, there is something within me that requires it: I have no choice but to live through the stages of my life within mental and physical parameters that have somehow been established for me, tired or not. Is the syndrome triggered by something in my heart or brain or something in between? Is this malady simply the physical consequence of an obscure cat gene damaged along the way or is it, perhaps, something much simpler: unmet need, obvious yet overlooked? It could be all of these. The embryonic origin lies embedded in my cells and is lost within my muddled cat subconscious as well.

I push my tail and back firm and hard against the interface of those sandy bricks. And when I stare out, I see the water, sometimes green, sometimes black, as it heaves itself against the pier and throttles the ancient sand that lies passive and unknowing before it and I see the humans and their children and I see the insects and mice and the dogs constrained by leashes, all loping leisurely as they bump and hurdle upon the wood slats. Like other cats, I am blessed with the ability to hear the thoughts of others. The people and insects and mice and dogs meander along and, as they pass, I hear what they are thinking. Their thoughts become loud as they come close and I gradually lose the signal as they move on. When I was young, it was thrilling and quite entertaining to listen in to the ideas, hopes, resentments and dreams that resounded in the minds of unsuspecting people and animals as they passed by. It was amusing to hear all of it and bear witness to the thinking of creatures of high order and low caliber but, in time, the novelty wore off and, in fact, my talent has become somewhat of a burden. I hear the same things routinely and, at this juncture, the constant flow of others’ thoughts is nothing much more than noise that, typically, abates in cooler months when the crowds thin out and, in any event, dissipates to the degree to which I am able to find a modicum of empty space for myself. It is all in the whiskers. My whiskers are no ordinary whiskers: they are beautiful grey bristle twists, they are long and overhang stiff like whisks of a broom and vibrate madly as others pass by. Through some process that I can’t begin to understand, they sweep through thoughts and retrieve them like rogue antennae.

Those around me share their secrets with me unwittingly and I’m quite sure they cannot hear my thoughts though my own thoughts seem so loud to me that I would think they could be heard for miles. Perhaps other cats know my thoughts and that is the reason they avoid me. More likely, the truth is that no cat would want to know the thoughts that reverberate within me. The particular content of my thinking is a terrible business which no cat would want to intrude upon and, if some cat happened to overhear my thinking, he or she would walk away or, more likely, run and never stop. My thoughts are questions that run rampant in the confused cage that is my mind, trapped like desperate animals, primitive, unknowing, grasping, hopeless like fish tangled in a net. Question after question courses out of me, questions that fizzle and fall like sparks from the broken lamp that is my brain and pervade my inner self and emerge within the conscious part of me as multitudinous questions overcome thought and I become my questions. And the questions are quite simple and embarrassing and sophomoric and yet they consume me. At this moment, for example, I look at the weathered old shell stuck beneath the clump of grass in front of me and I realize that this small, chipped shell once housed life and I ask myself “why or how is this shell, inanimate and indistinguishable from countless other shells, different than me? Why am I not this shell? In what way is shell existence any less profound than the existence that I have sustained over the course of my many cat years? Why is that shell not me and why or how does it persist unaware, unknowing, unfeeling, not me but something other than me?” and on and on. But the thoughts and questions don’t stop: “Why do I sharpen my claws? Why do I keep my fur so groomed and clean as to be irresistible to the touch of children and adults? Why does the warmth that emanates from within me, so soothing to others, provide me with so little comfort on random days when the sun resigns and rain beats down upon the beach? I think my questions are anxiety’s offspring, an anxiety that has no bounds and governs my life in the same way a trainer leads around some spiritless gorilla.

I wander from one end of the boardwalk to the other driven by some vague instinct before returning at the end of the day to take my usual spot in front of the store and ponder the imponderable. It may be instinct that causes me to seek stability in strange, habitual routines but I feel hopelessly lost and this uncertainty and equivocality and fear and anxiety ferments and blossoms within me like an infection and, like an infection, it evolves over time. It comes with an overriding sense that I am wasting the holy share of spiritual energy and physical space that has been allotted me in this life, in this world. Whatever it is that consumes me, it refuses to leave, it never leaves. It is invisible to the onlooker; no one can see it. Every filament of my fur remains in place, my coat glistens as the sun passes overhead, my claws can be no sharper than they are and I am truly a cat to the onlooker’s eye, beautiful and whole and precise while, behind the curtain of my skin, a relentless psychic wind bellows and blows through me like a winter storm that hustles dead leaves across the boardwalk. It is foreign to cat nature but has found within my cat-being a place to live; it feeds upon my cat sensibility in a silent way. I treat it as I would some infirm neighbor, resigned to it, afraid to abandon it, protective of it, prepared to help it and poised to assist it navigate the steps of its own house should the need arise. It cannot think or reason and yet it is the thing with which I must negotiate. It is the thing that I cannot assault or appease or kill. It is this, all this, that drives me to wage war upon the very paws upon which I walk.

I’m not sure I know the names of the seasons but it must have been spring because the earth had turned warm beneath my paws and I began to feel the sun correcting the course of its light as it directed its beams upon the beach and lifted life out of the nests beneath the sand and woke dormant seeds and jostled insect eggs lodged within the breaches and holes of the pitted wood of the boardwalk. The light invaded the crevices of the rocks and drew people out of their homes and onto the walkways, roused rodents from their dens and crabs from the icy mud. The orchestra of footsteps upon the boardwalk grew loud as the baton of heat and light rose and fell in symphonic rhythm through the afternoon sky and beat down upon the cool earth, day after day. The light called forth the beach grass and sea oats and tiny senseless translucent fish that emerged and swam and disappeared among the water weeds.

I meandered beneath the boardwalk to the place I sometimes go. It is a patch of mud and sand, soft and cool, bereft of grass and sheltered from the noise. I go there when the sound of the people and animals and the crashing waves and the creak of the boats and the vibrations of my own thoughts become too loud. At those times, sound and energy seem to swirl around me so that air itself seems to explode and sound convulses like thunder through the corridors of my body and it is all too much for me to bear. When I am overwhelmed, I look to escape and, consequently, I seek the solitude that can be found within this small shelter below the boardwalk. I am usually able to calm myself to some degree within its small auspices. It is refuge within which stillness has a chance to survive and prevail.

On one particular spring day, I felt considerably lost and I tramped to the shelter of my tiny enclave. As soon as I lowered my body, I sensed a darting motion from the corner of my eye. I saw the movement of light and then I spotted the source: a tiny mouse was hiding in the corner. He watched me watching him and suddenly he ran, mad with fear. I was too quick for him, however, and in a moment I had him by the neck. I carried him beneath the boardwalk until I came to a spot beneath a wide gap that allowed the light to pour in and I could see the whole of him. But what I saw in him was nothing much at all, nothing more than a child: I had captured a child mouse. He was barely old enough to wander. He was all shades of beige and pink and brown and his string of a tail, slightly segmented and pale red, was almost as long as the whole of his body. I pressed upon that tail and I released him and he cautiously walked away. I let him wander no longer than the length of a cat’s leg and then I sunk my claws into his hide and swiped him up and I stared into his moist, black eyes and I released him again and recaptured and I did this over and again. I tortured him horribly in this fashion for several minutes. I then held him in front of me, inches from my face and the bristles of his brown fur stood on end, his round ears fell flat back against his tiny head, his body weakened and submitted to the vice of my grasp and, at that point, I grew tired of the game. I released him but he was too scared to move. He balanced himself as best he could and I could see the movement of his heart pounding against the thin skin of his chest. His tiny twig ribs throbbed in frantic rhythm and his whiskers and fur stood straight up like grass upended by the wind. His breathing catapulted back and forth in a way that seemed explosive and unsustainable. He was free to leave but he couldn’t move. And then I began to hear his thoughts though I tried my best to avoid them: I didn’t want to hear his desperation but, nevertheless, his thoughts entered my own consciousness as would a whispered word that falls into the cradle of an ear and, immediately, the thin wisps of his thought entered my conscious mind and all I heard was a mantra: “ . . . mother . . . mother . . . mother . . . mother . . .”

And immediately upon hearing the pitiful cry-thought of my traumatized victim, my mind recoiled and my memory was alive and I was brought back in time to a scene out of my own life that I had long forgotten. I remembered myself as a newborn, I remembered myself upon the sandy green, I remembered my hunger and fear and I remembered myself inching forward through the grass, desperately pushing against other tiny bodies who, like me, crawled and struggled forward as we all moved in the same direction toward the same crucial focal point. And though I couldn’t see, I felt the warmth of their skin and the sensation of the ground moving beneath me as if some force were carrying me to my destination and I smelled the muddled odor of skin and sea and dandelion and excrement and grass and I sensed the warm body of my own mother. I reveled in the warmth of her fur and I lurched forward feeling the overpowering heat of her torso. I bit onto her and drew the milk from her and felt it surge into my body and I drew it in long draughts as if I couldn’t be filled. I fell into a peaceful sleep though somewhat conscious of myself and her and never have I experienced peace as sublime and real as I did at that moment and never since that moment have I been as free and connected and real although, of course, I didn’t realize that I was free at all, not at that moment. I was very much alive, unconscious of the fact that I was alive, tethered to the source of sustenance that I would not release for the longest time. I was overcome with contentment and I beheld myself not needing, not wanting.

I remembered that moment and I also remembered that, sometime later on, I became aware that the moment ended. I can’t remember how or when I first became aware that a change had come but I only know that, at some juncture in my life, I realized that my mother was gone, my siblings were gone and all was gone. I may have gained this awareness at once or over time but, when it came and however it came and under what circumstances it occurred, I did not know that I became, at that moment, alone. I may have felt lost but the truth of loneliness and the magnitude of my aloneness was an abstraction quite beyond my ability to grasp. It was only now, in the course of tormenting a weak and vulnerable mouse, did I fully understand what it meant to be alone.

I emerged from my reverie and realized that a mouse, a poor mouse, a mouse life that was but a tiny crumb of the collective whole, dangled from the trap of my jaws. I restrained myself and eased my grip and held him gently in much the same manner that a mother would cradle a kitten. He swung from my mouth as I carried him to the safety of the mound of mud and straw in which the rodents live.

The episode was over but my life changed dramatically. Beginning that day, my body and brain became subject to sharp stabs of guilt that visited themselves upon me in frequent, irregularly timed attacks. I couldn’t understand why I had done it; I couldn’t let it go. I was shocked by my own cruelty and couldn’t fathom the force that had caused me to unleash such terror upon that small, aimless creature. I repeatedly replayed the scene in my mind and each time I recoiled at the realization of the trauma he must have experienced. My guilt cut to the core: I was repulsed by my own self. I had harbored no malice toward that defenseless animal and yet something in me compelled me to torture it. No inner voice told me stop; in fact, I heard no voice at all. Guilt consumed me and it lodged within my consciousness in the way a splinter wedges its way under the skin, powerful enough to divert all attention from the aches and infirmities of the body at large toward its own tiny harbor of pain. It refused to leave and it wouldn’t release me. It waged war upon me but wouldn’t let me surrender: it required me to remain subject to its weight.

It was at about this time that I began to let myself physically unravel. I surrendered myself to the force and mercy of the wind and I let the dust and sand embed itself deep within the recesses of my fur which, over time, became dull and matted. Dirt lodged within the funnels of my ears and my tail, weighed down by dried mud, lost its elasticity. Guilt would wake me long before my eyes opened in the morning and would crowd my mind at night when I tried to sleep. It was a constant companion: it stayed with me during the course of the day, pulsated within me and relentlessly reminded me of what I had done. It castigated me, derided me, questioned me and forced me to consider, for the thousandth time, what I was and who I was and, of course, demanded that I deliver a vision of myself and an outline of the measure and nature of my own essential purpose.

Time moved on and the warm season transformed into the season of heat. I felt myself deteriorate as I fixated upon questions that rose from within me. I ate little and would feel my stomach implode during the mornings making it impossible to gain nourishment and live and breathe in the standard manner of a cat. My walking slowed due to the aches that emanated from my bones. My depreciated spiritual state had clearly overrun that which was physical and external.

There came a time at which I decided, for some reason, to revisit the scene of my crime. I entered upon that familiar patch of mud and sand beneath the boardwalk that had served as my small, peaceful sanctuary. No sooner had I arrived when, once again, my attention was drawn by a movement of light. I sensed the presence of another creature and I detected the shadow of an animal. I spotted a mouse, that same mouse, now a bit larger and heavier. He had been sharpening his claws against a small branch and was now racing toward the beach. Suddenly, I felt intense rage explode within me. Anger filled every pore of my being and, in the span of a short moment, my teeth were firmly embedded in the thick of that mouse’s neck. I proceeded to squeeze the life out of him but his death was only the beginning. In a frenzy, I ripped him apart and tossed his parts in every direction and those parts landed at odd angles in the mud. His head rested against his arm and bore a mawkish grin. Burgundy blood ran out of him and I ripped organs, red and bleeding, from his torso. His legs lay under him and his entrails lay beside him. Tiny hairs slid along glistening bones scattered upon the ground.

He had been dead and dismembered for a short time when, surprisingly, I felt quizzical exultation rise within me. For a moment, I was truly happy. I lay atop the broken bits and pieces of him and I rolled over the top of him, joyous and liberated. For a brief time, I beheld a sense of the cat I am.

Much time has now passed and the memory of that moment has begun to fade, muddled among other memories scattered about the attic of my mind to the extent that, at this juncture, it is precariously close to having been forgotten. But on that day, beneath the boardwalk, the world presented itself to me and I was elated.