He has brought them home. Portia, the firstborn, and Astra, two years her junior. X distinguishes between them because it is the elder biped who transmits the warmest signals while the younger seems prepared to cede primacy in the feline heart to her elder sister, caught between her seasons, kitten and cat, where veterinary intervention has frozen X forever. Portia is her soul mate. Astrid is like a sometimes-seen cousin. Portia loves X.
Once, she heard Astra ask her father whether she could have a puppy. Whatever that is.
I humor Portia, of course, because I know she likes to play and needs only a little coaxing from her innate shyness. In my tiny but powerful jaws, I bring her favorite toys to her. She likes simple things—a silver star on a strand of stretchy stuff, a round thing made of some bright orange material that I once saw wrapped around human energy food. She needs a little persuasion but I know she wants to overcome her modesty, her natural reticence. (I hear these words and wonder if some other animal is speaking them from deep within me.)
So I perform a few predictable maneuvers to draw her out of her reluctance and help her find her happy side.
I jump. I sprint. I excel in catobatics worthy of the Olympiad, twisting in midair, landing on all four paws. And finally she is coaxed into the game. She tosses the bright sphere and I run after it to encourage her. She flicks the silvery star aloft and I leap. Silver is my favorite color. I am fascinated by silver. Between my teeth.
The thought stirs in my recent memory, like a zephyr through fallen leaves. (Again, I take exception to this simile as I am a flat-cat and have no direct knowledge of leaves, or zephyrs—for heaven’s sake—except from what I can observe through the invisible barriers of my prison, my Robben Island. My what?)
Recent memory is a jumble of signals. Alarm. Danger. Threat. Something has happened that changes the harmony of my environment. There has been a shift, an injection of hostility. No. More than that. An infusion of peril. Life threatening. But what was it?
Bipeds love shiny surfaces as much as cats love silver. They spend endless hours staring at flat, smooth tablets, interrogating them, demanding that they yield up secrets from sleek, glossy surfaces that they stroke lovingly to conjure colors, shapes, configurations.
Cats are accused of endless indolence. But bipeds have produced their own pretexts to while away the hours on a much grander scale, invoking time-saving technology to fritter time itself. With my own eyes I have witnessed the birth of their inventions, arriving in huge coverings, mounted vertically on walls—portals into a captured world of colors and shapes, spheroids and ovals pursued by humans in standardized clothing. Sometimes in this parallel world that can be summoned and extinguished at will, there are quadrupeds whose cycles of death and procreation are explained by a wrinkled form of biped known as National Treasure. Look, X, I hear them say—snakes in packs, urban leopards, fellow felines far away. I track these apparitions at close quarters, stirred somehow by the quiver of a wing or whisker whose function is a mystery to me but whose observation makes my claws curl in anticipation.
With the junior daughter at her side, the midrange biped is stroking one of her toys, laid flat on the floor. It is of little immediate interest. It does not bounce, sparkle, offer a hint of taste, movement. It cannot be sniffed or consumed or chased or tortured. It is an inert object that does not cross my radar of the familiar.
She touches part of the toy and a sound emerges.
She takes my paw and lays it on the same part of the surface and the same sound emerges. Then she strokes another part and a different sound. I allow her to take my front paw again.
I do not at first attempt to scratch the shining surface. I follow her signals. I prod my stubby stump of a fist at different spaces on the shiny surface and chime-like sounds follow one another. The junior and midrange bipeds slap their large, clawless, furless, bony paws together and utter gurgly sounds that suggest contentment.
I have made them happy. Mission accomplished: humans do not know what they are seeking until they are placed clearly and unequivocally in front of it. And yet they consider themselves infinitely superior.
The junior and midrange bipeds touch the shiny surface in a different way and the monochrome bars disappear and other shapes emerge. They are the shapes of mice, which cats despise and wish to taunt into unpleasant, messy deaths. But how is this knowledge accessible to a tame creature such as I? I have never seen a mouse. I do not know what a mouse is for. But if I smelled one I would chase it. Is this something locked in me that I can never escape? Am I doomed to pursue animals I have never seen because my forebears, presumably, at some point did? And if so, is my whole life determined in advance, programmed as surely as these tablets—a series of stimuli and responses dictated by a past that can never be modified or altered or erased, no matter how hard I try to shake off history by molding and breeding a new persona?
Is it, in other words, because I is a cat?
And if I is a cat, what place do these human musings have in my lexicon?
My claws tap against the shiny surface. And the shapes keep coming so that I can attack them. But, no matter how much I spear and wound them, the shapes do not bleed. They offer no prospect of nourishment and show no sign of mortality. They make no sound. They do not squeal with that tiny, tinny agony expected of rodents in extremis, which I know to exist without ever having heard it. They are not real. I have been duped into responding, reflexively, to chimera.
I walk away, my tail high and mighty. I was never really interested in this frippery, this tedious interface masquerading as a real game played with feathers on sticks, golden balls.
Because I is a cat I is able to display insouciance in the face of indignity, going about my business as if I had never even thought of doing anything else. But they know I will be back.