I wrote this story for a cat I saw at the Jefferson County Animal Shelter, a depressed cat who would accept no comfort, no socialization, no new owner. His story was as sad as his counterpart in the story, but he had no Mu Mao to guide him.
Mu Mao became Aware as he was reborn yet again. That is to say, once more he became embodied, for his rebirth occurred not at the body’s physical emergence from the mother’s womb, but from the time Mu Mao realized, “Here I am again. Here I go again. What now?” The current body gained Awareness as it was dumped unceremoniously into a cage with three siblings, all as hungry as Mu Mao, reincarnate, suddenly was.
Just once it would be nice if rebirth took place in a lovely home, somewhere warm, with soft blankets laid down for the arrival of the sweet little much-adored and wanted kittens. Instead, Mu Mao the Magnificent found himself in an animal shelter, among many other cats and kittens.
He knew it at once by the smell—it was clean, which was a blessing. And at least there would be some food. Often he was born into the wild, or into some great colony of wild cats. Being a Bodhisattva and helping others work out their destiny and achieve Enlightenment was no easy task when one had to skitter up trees to avoid being eaten by larger predators. Worse was having to avoid being eaten by other larger and more feral cats. Mu Mao was now born into perhaps his thousandth lifetime, the first several hundred of which had been devoted to evolving into the wise person, shaman, healer, priest, lama, hermit, monk, and counselor he had ultimately become, the latter thirty devoted to his reward—being born into the highest possible life form, that of a cat. He found it particularly upsetting when others of his exalted species aimed their teeth at his own helpless little kitten tail. True, even some cats had to evolve, but he found their process unnerving.
Did no one in charge of fate think it necessary for Mu Mao to help his fellow life forms from the standpoint of being a companion animal to some doting two-legged being with opposable thumbs?
When he had slaked his hunger and thirst, he researched his current situation by examining closely the papers covering the floor of his erstwhile home. They looked fresh and current and he could still smell the ink so he knew they must be no more than a day old at the most. It was the year of the Cat, according to Asian astrologers, and from the date, within the sign called Leo in Western astrology. The sign of the cat. Very catty. Reeking with cattiness. Very clearly, Mu Mao’s current mission would be concerned with events unfolding in the realm of his fellow felines.
“Ahem,” his Mother of the Moment said. “What do you think you are doing? Tear up that paper at once! Cats can’t read!”
“I beg your pardon, gentle mother,” he said politely, “But I can. In several languages actually. Which I also speak, though only after judicious consideration for the sensibilities and circumstances surrounding me. However, other than the information I have already gleaned, the reading matter lining our cage tells me nothing of value concerning our current situation. Perhaps you can enlighten me. Is there some great event in the making within the realm of cat-kind?”
His mother, a calico of undistinguished markings, reached out a hard paw and swatted him across the cage. “Don’t get saucy with me, young kit! While you drink my milk you go by my rules. Cats don’t read and cats of our clan don’t meddle in the affairs of the realm. What business have we with royalty? Did royalty step in a prevent my farmer’s land from being sold, the barn which has been the personal domain of generations of my ancestors from being torn down to make a parking lot for a shopping mall? Did it keep my elders from being put down and you and your brothers and sisters and me from being put in here where no doubt we’ll be gassed as soon as the kits take the kennel cough? Don’t speak to me of matters of the realm!”
“I beg your pardon,” he said with what sounded like a small pitiful mew as he washed his face very quickly to try to wash away the pain of the blow. It didn’t take much to hurt when you were five and a half inches long from nose to tail tip.
However, a small thing like personal discomfort could not obstruct his duty and so he sought other sources of information. The cage beside theirs was filled with what looked like a vast black and gray striped fur pillow. Mu Mao reached out a paw and touched the pillow. “I beg your pardon, sir or madame as the case may be,” he said to the pillow. There was no reply. It might have actually been a pillow—it might have been dead, except that there was some warmth emanating from beneath the fur and the coat twitched ever so slightly as Mu Mao touched it.
“Hey, little fella, don’t bother the poor old guy,” a man said. Mu Mao turned. The man was looking sadly toward the cage containing the inert animal. Mu Mao, sensing that there was something for him here, rubbed himself against the front bars of the cage and gave a small, cute mew. Manipulative and disgusting perhaps, but effective.
The man undid the latch of Mu Mao’s new home and lifted him out, holding him in one hand and stroking his head with a finger. It felt very good. Most nice things that happened to Mu Mao felt very good. Feeling very good when at all possible seemed to be one of the benefits of possessing the qualities of Catness.
“Would that older cat have hurt that little baby kitten?” a woman’s voice cooed from somewhere to the left and slightly behind the man.
“I doubt it. But the poor old guy has enough problems without being harassed by a little punk like this guy,” the man told her. He wore a nametag. It said “Andy.”
“Oh?” the woman asked without much interest, and sneaked a finger around Andy so that she could tickle Mu Mao’s chin.
“Yeah, poor old cat is a sad case. He’s lived with the same guy for almost twenty years and now his master is dying. The guy thought maybe if the cat came here, he’d have time to find a new home before his master died. But the old cat ain’t havin’ any. He sits like that with his face to the back of the cage.”
“Maybe he needs more attention,” the woman said. Her voice carried no reproach that Mu Mao could hear but Andy reopened Mu Mao’s cage and returned him to his siblings, then opened the adjoining cage and extracted the other cat.
The other cat lay like a lump in Andy’s arms, unresisting, but also indifferent and stiff, a deeply resentful look in his narrowed eyes.
He did not respond to Andy’s voice or touch or to the woman’s. He just sat there and glowered and pretty soon Andy put him back into his cage.
Mu Mao’s heart went out to him, but when he tried to speak to the old cat again, his siblings pounced on him and rolled him around the cage and his mother began to wash him with more energy than was strictly required.
After that, he needed a nap. When he woke up, the people had gone home. The first time he lived in a shelter, he thought that when the people went home, all of the animals would go to sleep. He was wrong. This was when the cats gossiped through the bars and wires of their cages.
“Did you hear?” asked a bobtailed black tom two levels down. “The King of the Cats is dead and nobody knows who the new king is or where he might be.”
“That’s silly,” said a fluffy neutered calico spinster. “How can anyone mislay a king?”
The tom tried to lash his bobbed tail and thumped it against the bars. “It’s more a case of the king mislaying his mistresses—and potential heirs. Tom Gamble was a very busy cat. The ladies always liked him and he hated to disappoint them.”
“Perish the thought,” Mu Mao’s mother said, yawning and settling her chin on her paws. “The world never has seen such a lot of scruffy longhaired tawny striped kits as His Majesty sired. And which of them is the crown prince, well, that’s anyone’s guess.”
“His Majesty wasn’t much to worry about details,” sniffed a gray tabby. “He never did appoint a court oracle.”
“You don’t appoint one of those,” a white almost-a-Persian said loftily. “They are born, not made. Not even by kings.”
“Well, whoever was made didn’t get recognized anyway. So now here we’ve got Bast-knows-how-many potential heirs and nobody to sort them out. There’ll be fur flying for sure, bloody civil war because of it I tell you.” The black bobtail was warming to his subject.
Mu Mao peered carefully down through the screen of his cage. He wondered if black bobtail tom had any idea what a war was like. By now, many generations of cats had come and gone since the end of the world. The warlords had made way for governments which were if no less rapacious at least more peaceable about it. These governments were extremely polite to each other. For now. A cat civil war wouldn’t involve nuclear devices, probably, but it could still be an ugly and horrible thing. As the many times great grandsire of almost all of the cats in existence today, Mu Mao mourned any carnage among them.
A frightening thought occurred to him then and he checked his own body. Whew! He had a little sooty black tail and a white chest and paws, black back with a white spot, white belly with a black spot. His face would either be black or have a mask he supposed. It didn’t matter. He was not a ginger cat as Tom Gamble and his likely heir were. So the heir was not him. Nor did he feel especially oracular. Therefore, he was free to pursue whatever business seemed to call for him to put a paw in.
As soon as the others settled down for the night, he began.
The first thing to do was get from his cage into the adjoining one, to confront the terribly depressed cat.
This presented only a small difficulty for Mu Mao, who as the most esteemed of lamas had excelled in the Tibetan psychic sports, which naturally included breath, and even molecular control. He simply exhaled all of the air in his body. His mother was not watching. Perhaps if she had been, she would have been alarmed for when he exhaled, he exhaled the air between his very atoms, becoming so small as to be virtually invisible. Thus he could easily slip through to the next cage, after which he inhaled mightily and regained his former kitten size, perhaps even adding an additional ounce or two of air.
Then he padded forward to confront the bitter old cat.
The old one was not sleeping, but brooding with both green eyes slitted resentfully.
“My dear sir, you simply cannot continue like this,” Mu Mao told him. “You frighten away those who would save you by your unfriendly demeanor. I have it on good authority that it is nearly impossible for an adult cat to find a home from one of these places as it is.”
Mu Mao thought for a moment the old cat would swat him but the poor fellow seemed to lack the energy, and instead sighed, letting much of the air out of himself, though not to the degree that Mu Mao had done.
“Don’t speak to me of homes. A home is nothing but an illusion based on the whim of a fickle and callous race. I should know. From the time I was smaller than you, all through kittenhood, I was with him, his true companion, loving him when others rejected him, bringing him mice and birds when he was hungry, licking his wounds. I even submitted to the veterinarian’s knife so that my natural urges to mate and sire children would not interfere with my closeness to him. And now, after all these years, he has betrayed me. Dumped me like so much feline garbage, given me into the hands of these people who cage me here, without my pillow or dish, without my weekly treats or my toy, without the drug that gave me the feeling of being wild and free—and without that cruel unworthy man I have loved for so long. He doesn’t want me anymore. I don’t care. I hate him now. I hate all humans and I don’t want to live with them. If I must live with another one in order to live, then I prefer to die.”
“Oh, you will die if you keep this up,” Mu Mao said. “But then you will be with your friend if you do, I suppose.”
“What do you mean?”
“You heard Andy. Your friend is dying. That is why he had you sent here to find another home.”
“You understand what they say? It means something?”
“You mean you don’t? You lived all those years with one man and didn’t understand what he said?”
“Well—no. Not really. It didn’t matter. I didn’t actually need to. He would say things in a kind voice and I knew I could do as I wished and if he sounded stern and pointed at something I knew I shouldn’t go back to it until his back was turned. Otherwise, he fed and petted me and babbled to his heart’s content and I sat on his lap and purred for him and meowed when I wished him to do something in particular. I must say, he spoke better cat than I did human. But then he stopped speaking to me, would not lift his hand to pet me, and finally turned away from me and allowed others to take me from our bed and put me into a vile case and bring me to this place where you see me now. Perhaps he was bored with me, do you think? I have heard others here speak of how their people became bored with them when they no longer performed kittenish antics such as someone like yourself might do. When that happens, I understand it is not uncommon for the people to simply dispose of one, as has happened to me, and get a newer edition.”
“No,” Mu Mao said firmly. “That is not what happened at all. Andy explained it to the woman. Your friend was dying. He wanted to see you in a good home before he had to leave, to make sure you would be cared for. Even as he dies, he cares for you and worries for your welfare.”
The old cat stared at Mu Mao and a large tear ran down the short fur along the side of his nose. Mu Mao noticed that he had black circular stripes that joined on the bridge of his nose, like spectacles. “He will be all alone and he sent me away to spare me. But I don’t want to be spared. I want to be with him. I want to go to him. If I die too, I don’t mind. But I can’t bear to be locked up in here when he needs me.” The old cat stretched briefly then rose to his feet and began pacing in a manner that was extremely tiger-like. “If I thought he would live until morning I would raise such a ruckus that the man—Andy—would unlock my cage to see what was wrong and then I would give him a great scratch and make him release me and I would run out the door very fast and home again.”
“Oh, good! You could find it again?” Mu Mao asked hopefully, for he was sure now he knew what his first mission in this young life must be.
“Well, it must be around here somewhere!” the old one snapped. “I know I would find it only—only, now that you tell me what is happening, I have a feeling.”
“A feeling?”
“Yes, I think—I think he is still here but I don’t think he will be here tomorrow. I think he needs me now. Of course, it is all his own doing that I am here but you and I both know this isn’t working. I need out.” The “now” and the “out” were drawn out and agonized, and meant the same thing in cat as they did in English.
“Calm yourself,” Mu Mao said. “I am here to help you. First, we must release you from your cage.”
“Yes, but how?”
“Patience,” Mu Mao said. He thought about it. He could make himself small again and slip through the front of the cage, but that would not release the old cat. If he were full grown, and the cage on the lowest level, he could easily undo the latch with his teeth and paws and the cunning of thirty remembered feline lifetimes and prior lives as a holy man. But this was not the case. “Hmmm,” he said to himself and then, “Hm?” That was it. A simple mantra, a chant—a purr, done with great concentration and deep vibration.
He leaned against the lock and purred with all his might and all his energy and all of the depth of his tiny being. The lock never stood a chance. It shuddered open within moments, and Mu Mao and the old cat leaped to the floor.
Instantly all of the other cats were awake and scratching at their cages. Mu Mao’s new mother was particularly vociferous. “Ungrateful spawn of a lecherous tomcat, why are you liberating that washed up old alley cat and not your own family?”
“Mother—friends, at least here you will have a warm place to sleep and food. Outside you will have nothing.”
“Except our freedom,” said the bobtail black. “And a certainty that nobody will pluck us helpless from our cages to take us to a gas chamber. I’ve heard about what they do in these places. Where do you think I was before I came here if not out there?”
The old cat was pawing and mewing at the door and Mu Mao turned from him to the others and back again while the old fellow went frantic trying to get out.
“Very well. There’s no time to argue.” He went to the door and jumped up on the handle and said to all of the other cats. “Repeat after me:” and began the purring Mantra of Liberation once more.
Moments later two dozen cats and kittens were straggling at various speeds behind the tail of Mu Mao, who was struggling to keep up with the old cat, his face never getting further forward on the old one’s body than the butterfly spirals of black stripes in the gray of his sides.
Mu Mao’s mother continually lost ground as she shifted kittens and at last Mu Mao in his tiny voice told three of the other adult cats that if they wished to go in the same direction he was, they should help carry the young. Much to his surprise, they agreed. But even more surprising, the old cat turned for the only time since their escape, and scooped up Mu Mao by the nape of the neck. After that, their caravan went much more quickly.
The old cat was not lost, nor was he confused. He unerringly homed in on his former home. A strong chill wind blew them along, but it was not yet raining or snowing and the night was clear, with many stars Mu Mao could not properly appreciate from his berth under the chin of the old cat.
The cortege of cats passed over and under a series of back fences, alleys and yards until they came to a small house with high grass. A light was on in a back window. The old cat dropped Mu Mao, hopped up to the sill and scratched, mewing.
Mu Mao jumped up beside him. The others started to do the same but the old cat hissed warningly at them and then modulated his tone to another plaintive meow.
Inside the room was a bed full of tumbled covers and a small, frail person. The person turned toward the window, as Mu Mao looked on. He seemed to have no attendant or helper however, and had barely the strength to raise his hand. Someone had brought him water and tidied the place recently, from the look of it however. Perhaps he had help come in during the day, or perhaps they slept elsewhere in the house, though it scarcely looked large enough for two people.
“Let me in, Fred! Let me in!” the old cat cried over and over and Fred seemed aware of him but unable to move. Finally the old fellow jumped down, narrowly missing Mu Mao’s mother and two of his brothers.
“If he won’t open the window, then I will take a run and break through it,” the old cat declared.
“Oh, that will be a grand surprise for your friend. A concussed unconscious if not dead cat lying cut to ribbons and bleeding all over his floor. I believe there is a better way,” Mu Mao said. “A moment please.” He began his chant of levitation, aiming at the window. It was a tricky business. Once he himself rose into the air and he had to start all over again. Another time he saw something move from the corner of his eye and looked around to see all of the other cats lifting from the ground, and once more started over. Fred lifted once, briefly too, but then Mu Mao at last chanted with the correct intonation and the window creaked, jerked, and flew open. The old cat flew through it as if he had wings, landing on the bed beside his friend and purring madly, rubbing himself so hard against the fragile body in the bed he threatened to crush it.
“Gently, old one,” Mu Mao cautioned. “His fires burn low. You wouldn’t want to extinguish them entirely before you had a proper reunion.”
Just then, however, Mu Mao heard paws on the sill and turned back to the other cats. “It’s a private moment,” he told them but bobtail black tom sauntered saucily forward, and had to bounce unceremoniously back to the ground to avoid losing his nose as the window flew shut again.
Mu Mao saw with surprise that the communication between the two did indeed consist only of cat noises on the one side and human murmurings on the other. It seemed to suit them fine, however, and he decided not to offer his services as a translator.
Fred was immediately enlivened by the presence of his feline friend, and gave the cat weak strokes and spoke to him while the cat purred and rubbed. Mu Mao found such extravagant affection almost distasteful, as he himself had learned to practice detachment in all things. However, in his heart he knew that love was not merely a great catalyst to many important changes and events, but the only catalyst if such things were to have Merit.
Slightly bored, nonetheless, Mu Mao looked about him while man and cat reunited. He noticed many framed photographs on the dresser. They were all of Fred and the old cat, who in some of them was a young cat, and Fred a younger man. In one of them the old fellow was a mere fluffball of a kitten and Fred himself barely dry behind the ears. Most of the photos said, “Me and Delf” although one, a portrait of Delf as a kitten, said “Delfy, seventh son of Alison Gray.” Delfy himself was very gray in that picture. The dark stripes would have come in later life.
Photographs also covered the walls but they were too high for someone of Mu Mao’s diminutive stature to see. Photograph albums were piled on the table beside the bed, as if Fred had been looking at them before his caretaker tidied up. Mu Mao jumped up on the table to see if any of them were open, but none was and they were too heavy for a small kitten to manipulate. He didn’t want to knock one off the table and disturb the reunion.
However, from his fresh vantage point, he saw a computer sitting on a table in one corner of the room. This was something even a kit with the right know-how could use. After all, it involved only the pushing of a few buttons and something called a mouse.
It was a small computer, and its power button responded readily to the touch of a tiny paw. Fred was not a secretive man. No password was required to see what concerns he filed on his machine. One choice said “Delfy” and Mu Mao pounced on the mouse. A number of things happened inside the computer with the result that soon there was a chronicle of Delfy’s life from the time he was born until Fred became too ill to be Delfy’s biographer any longer.
Man and cat had been intertwined throughout their lives to the extent that it was amazing to Mu Mao that Delfy had never learned more of Fred’s language or had mistaken Fred’s intention when the man sent his cat companion to find a new home. Actually, according to the sad note in Delfy’s chronicle, Fred had given Delfy to a friend who promised to find him a home. Apparently the friend had simply dumped the cat at the shelter.
But from the time Delfy was born, a Gemini in the year of the Dragon, when Fred had helped Alison Gray deliver her kittens and had wiped the caul from little Delfy’s face, they had been together. There were snapshots of the house Fred and Delfy lived in before and after the earthquake. Fred wrote that before the earthquake, Delfy had leapt from his arms and flown back and forth to the frame of the door, hooking his claws into Fred’s pants and insisting that Fred follow him. Fred credited Delfy’s instinct for survival with saving his life. There were the women friends that Delfy didn’t like who eventually broke Fred’s heart and the man friend that Delfy hated, who turned out to be a crook.
Fred even spoke sadly of when he first began to feel ill and Delfy began shredding a magazine that had an article about bladder cancer in it. Had he paid attention at the time Delfy did this, Fred believed the doctors could have treated it.
A Gemini in the Year of the Dragon. Well. Yes. Auspicious? Certainly.
Mu Mao gave the mouse a final, rather unenlightened bat, and jumped down from the table.
Fred’s initial joyous greetings had dwindled to incomprehensible murmurings. His pets grew feebler as the joy that had flooded him with adrenaline could not sustain his strength, and his hand faltered, and lay still.
Delfy stopped in mid-purr and looked into Fred’s face. His eyes, so fond and happy moments before, were now glazed and empty, though his lips still curled in a slight smile.
Delfy gave a mew that was half a whine and nosed at Fred’s limp hand.
Mu Mao jumped up on the bed and with his tiny tongue began grooming the old cat’s head. “We were just in time,” the kitten with the old soul said. “And you did a good thing for Fred. He was very glad to see you and had missed you very much, as you saw for yourself. I have read his words concerning you and it is true that he only sent you away to save you. But you didn’t want to be saved so now what?”
“You who can open doors with your purrs, make yourself invisible and levitate windows ask me what’s next?” Delfy asked in a dispirited voice.
“I do,” Mu Mao said. “We are all wild again. The others seem to wish to stay together for the time being. How about you?”
The old cat sunk his chin into his paws. He remained snuggled next to Fred’s body. Mu Mao licked and licked, projecting calming and healing thoughts as he did so.
“I don’t care.”
“You cannot stay here, friend. I know the ways of people. Soon they will come and take Fred away and someone new will live here. Probably you will not be welcome and will find yourself back in the place where we were. I think you and I both know you have a life with and a duty to your own kind now.”
Delfy turned away to lick Fred’s ear, and tried to groom his hair.
A horrible wild yowl sounded from without and Mu Mao jumped upon the window sill in time to watch a gang of strange cats descend upon the refugees from the shelter, tearing into them with ferocity meant to kill. The fur flew, screams and spits, hisses and the sound of ripping flesh met him. For just a moment, the small feline he was in this life thought it best to stay put, but he saw a grizzled calico with one ear leap upon his mother and try to get at one of his litter mates. He levitated the window with such force that the pane rattled in its frame.
The Bobtail black tom flew into the grizzled calico and tore her from Mu Mao’s mother’s back. Mu Mao was levitating his small siblings to the relative safety of the window sill when Delfy sprang up beside him.
The striped cat’s fur bristled until he was enormous, ten times the size of Mu Mao and his brothers and sisters. With a roar like a lion’s, a roar so unlike his mewlings and purrrings to his former companion that Mu Mao could hardly believe this was the same cat (a true Gemini, he reflected with satisfaction), he stilled the furor of battle. “HEAR ME AND BE WARNED!” he snarled. His eyes were rolled back in his face, and the black spectacles around them became a spiraling infinity knot that hypnotized the cats below and quite surprised and pleased Mu Mao with the definitiveness of its declaration of Delfy’s unique status.
“The King is Dead. You anarchists who would rend the kingdom apart for lack of leadership, beware. The new king is among us now. Long live Bobtail Black Tom, the only legitimate and non-neutered heir to His Former Majesty, Tom Gamble!”
The strange cats slunk away from those they were mauling, just far enough to roll onto their backs, as did the other refugee cats one by one, while Bobtail Black Tom strolled among them licking their faces or giving their bellies a warning tap with his paw. Mu Mao’s mother, having made her obeisance, brought her youngsters from the sill one by one, the last being Mu Mao, who jumped down unaided.
Beside him, Delfy landed but neither of them showed their bellies to the bobtailed black king. Nonetheless, the king graciously sauntered forward, quite full of himself now, Mu Mao noticed, though he doubted the black cat had had any idea of his own royalty prior to Delfy’s announcement. With great ceremony he licked Mu Mao’s forehead and then lowered his own head for Delfy to lick his ears, which Delfy did in the feline equivalent of a coronation.
“Great Oracle,” the king asked when this was done, “You took your own sweet time about announcing yourself. What kept you?”
Just then Fred’s caretaker, who apparently had been asleep in another room in the house and been aroused by the racket, came to the window. “I never saw so many damned cats in my life. Shut up, you lot! There’s been a death in this house and—why, Delfy! You came back. Come on back inside, kitty, and we’ll find you a good home. Fred wouldn’t want you to be a stray.”
But Delfy, a true Gemini now joined with his second path, turned his tail to her and nosed the king, who led his court back into the dark back yards and over the back fences and across the shadowed alleys that were his new realm. Mu Mao, his small body weary from his exertions, begged his mother for a ride.