My Stray Cat

I have been repeatedly visited by a stray cat. I step out onto my stoop to smoke and the cat appears, looking at me with hungry eyes. The first couple of times this happened, I ignored it. Since every cigarette brings me closer to death, I’d prefer to enjoy each one without any feelings of guilt about a cat I don’t know.
Then the cat started whining. This “whining” is not the random cat sounds you here late at night coming from an alley, though I suppose that might be worse and would require two cats. Imagine a one year-old child crying because it needs to be fed. Actually, even that analogy does not do the whine justice. When a one year-old cries, you’re never quite certain about why it’s crying. Maybe the child is hungry, or perhaps the child needs to burp. Perhaps the child is just colic and there’s nothing you can do other than wait for it to grow older. This cat’s whine was very specific. Its eyes were trained on me, and in its cat cry it said to me, “I’m hungry. Not only am I hungry, but it’s 23 frickin’ degrees out here. Do you know what nights are like for me? You step out of your cozy apartment and light up, slowly killing yourself on purpose, while I am trying desperately to survive. And there is nothing you can do for me? Absolutely nothing? I do not have the power of reason. I cannot pick myself up by my boot straps and get a job at McDonalds. You humans bred me to be taken care of and now you sit there smoking that nasty smelling cigarette and pretend I don’t exist while I slowly starve to death in the freezing cold.” This particular cat is very articulate.
So I started bringing it milk. This was tricky. I would heat up the milk a little and then put it out for Cat. Cat greedily lapped up what he could, but before he was halfway through, the milk would be too cold to drink, and eventually would freeze. Whatever. I did my part. I brought him milk. And I lost a lot of bowls in the process. I’m pretty sure my landlord would walk by while I was at work, see a bowl half full of frozen white stuff sitting in our dirty garden and decide it was trash.
This routine went on for about a week and allowed me to slowly kill myself in peace. It was at about this time that I noticed something tied around Cat’s neck. I also noticed how slowly Cat moved. On top of all this, I had now decided that Cat was once a house pet. This was not simply a stray cat accustomed to finding its own food on the streets; this was a house pet with a string strangling it, trying to learn to feed itself; a rich, paraplegic kid, suddenly living with homeless people in the subways. It had two major strikes against it. Strike three: I’m sure Cat belonged to the crazy lady next door who must be in a mental institution by now. I won’t go into the details of why she’s crazy, but I do know that she walked her cats. I’m not saying that walking a cat makes a person crazy. I’ve just never seen it done until a person I already knew to be crazy did it. After walking her cat, Rosa, the crazy lady, would lose said cat every night around 9:00pm and walk around our apartment calling its name in a creepy, creepy voice. Imagine the little girl from the film, “Poltergeist,” when she says, “They’re back…” only switch the line with one simple, “Christopher…” or various other names she gave to her successive cat collection. Once, while she was going through this routine, I noticed a cat hiding from her under a brush in our dirty garden. As Rosa approached, the cat darted to the neighbor’s dirty garden. I did not mention anything to Rosa, as I, too, would run under the circumstances. I haven’t seen Rosa in months, and now Cat sits in my dirty garden waiting for me.
Putting two and three together, I decided that Cat had broken free from Rosa’s leash, shortly after which Rosa got hauled off to a mental institution. I couldn’t decide if Cat was better off now or before. All the same, the string around its neck looked uncomfortable and once again, I could not smoke in peace.
I called my girlfriend, who has a much easier time touching cats than I do. She came over, I explained the situation to her, and I made her wear gloves. Who knows? Maybe this is not a domesticated cat and has rabies; next thing you know Girlfriend is foaming at the mouth. We coaxed it inside, Girlfriend grabbed Cat and gave it love while I painstakingly snipped off the string that was practically strangling the poor thing. There, I said it. “Poor thing.” You see, I have grown attached to Cat. A little. Enough to care. Enough to not want to see it in pain. I have a heart.
I looked up various organizations around the city, found the one least likely to kill it, and called. Turns out, I would have to trap and cage Cat and then wait for them to come pick him up. I don’t have a trap or a cage. Nor do I want Cat trapped outside in the cold. Life has not been good to Cat. Why add one more punishment? The other option was to bring him into them myself. I don’t have time for either of these options. I asked Girlfriend if I could use her cat carrier to bring him in, and after she said yes and kissed me for being so sweet, I did nothing to follow through.
Last night, I stepped outside to enjoy my cigarette and Cat was there waiting for me as usual. My first instinct was to kick it. Now, cut me some slack. I really am not heartless. I think about it this way. Have you ever been standing on a subway platform behind someone, the train is approaching, and you think, “How easy it would be to simply extend my arms and drastically change the coarse of both our lives?” One simple motion. I think about these things all the time. My guess is that many people think about such things. All I would have to do is extend my arms, and I would be guilty of an extremely violent act and spend a lot of time in prison and have absolutely no reason to offer the judge other than, “I did it because I could?” It’s like standing at the edge of a 300 foot tall cliff looking out over the ocean on the Aran Islands and thinking, “If I could choose my death, it would be here. I’d just take one simple step and dramatically change not only my own life, but the lives of everyone around me. And I would enjoy every second of the descent.” But I did not kick the cat. I do not push the person in front of me. And what’s more amazing is that I depend on millions of New Yorkers standing behind me every day to have this thought go through their heads and not act on it. That’s a lot of trust we have in strangers.
I’ve learned from my studies of OCD that ignoring or suppressing such thoughts is the very thing that leads to obsessive thinking. Let’s use the subway example. Joe Schmoe has the passing thought of extending his arms at an inappropriate moment, only for Joe it’s not a “passing” thought. It sticks in his craw because he’s terrified of the potential of having such a bad thought in the first place. So he suppresses it. Anyone familiar with psychology knows that suppressed thoughts gain more control over us than expressed thoughts. So every day on the platform, Joe has this thought and suppresses it further and further into his subconscious. With time, he’s not only thinking about it while standing on subway platforms, he’s thinking about it at work. He’s not even seeing the computer screen in front of him. Sweat starts running down his forehead. He decides to take a cab home even though he can’t afford it. He’s suppressed it even further. Now he’s convinced he’s a murderer. He can’t sleep. His dreams are haunted by monstrous figures chasing him while his feet are stuck in cement blocks. He never takes the subway anymore and depletes his family’s funds until it becomes a marital issue. Soon his wife leaves him because he’s such a sweaty, worried mess and no longer carries his financial weight. All this because he doesn’t want to tell her that he could potentially extend his arms at an inopportune moment and end a stranger’s life.
Easy. You don’t have to worry about the Joes of the world. Their obsession comes from the very fact that they have a conscience. There wouldn’t be an internal battle in Joe’s little mind if Joe didn’t have a huge part of his brain telling him not to follow through on said “bad” thought. The people you have to worry about are the psychopaths. These people are deemed psychopathic because they don’t have that part of their brain, or have little to no access to it. Like my best friend. He’s a psychopath. I love him, but he’s psychopathic. Most people would simply say he has no “filter.” Just watch your back around him.
I allowed the thought of kicking Cat to pass sweetly through my mind. I even savored the thought, imagining him whining in mid-air after the thud of my shoe on his belly, wondering if he would land on his feet. Once this thought had passed through my mind, I looked down into his eyes, his hungry eyes, hungry for love, and I felt nothing but pity and guilt.
Cat still haunts me. He’s made my dirty garden his home, always waiting for me, reminding me that I am too self-centered to take the time out of my life to get him proper care. I still give him the occasional bowl of warm milk. Is this enough? Or must I free up a day of my busy life to take the next step? And if I take the next step, are they going to put Cat down? Because if they put Cat down, I may have to figure out who exactly was responsible for that decision and extend my arms at an inopportune moment.