Driving the Dying Cat to Guelph
The cat has a parasite that’s eating him alive, but we don’t know that yet. All we know is the small town veterinarians of rural Canada can’t do much about a cat dying from an undiscovered parasite, and they can’t do anything at all after five p.m. So we’re driving the dying cat to an overnight animal hospital in Guelph, which, with its University and corresponding civilization, is practically Manhattan compared to the monotonous farmland looping outside the windows.
Manhattan is the name I gave the cat as a child; it’s also where I live as an adult. But right now I’m not in Manhattan, and I don’t feel like an adult. Instead, I’m in the backseat of the car, behind an empty passenger seat, watching my mom’s steady hands on the wheel. ‘70s on 7 deploys the same songs that have accompanied two decades of driving with her. A miniature IV bag hangs precariously from the window, dripping fluid to keep Manhattan alive for the duration of the trip. If I avoid looking at it, I can pretend we are heading home from grandma’s on a forgotten summer afternoon of my childhood, moving invincibly towards twin beds and hot chocolate and Goodnight Moon. I can forget that we are instead driving our dying cat to Guelph, unknowingly towing along a parasitic passenger.
We squeezed back into outgrown mother/child personas this morning when we found Manhattan too weak to crawl out from underneath the shed. I’m not a crier, but the cat was dying, so I spilled my coffee and bawled like a toddler. My mom may be the only person who loves the cat more than I do, but she managed to abandon her panic and assure me he’s a fighter! We’ll get him to the vet. They’ll know what to do.
But they didn’t. It’s a remarkable victory for the covert parasite, who is gluttonously enjoying a first class trip to his grand reveal.
Maybe it’s rodenticide, says my mom. Maybe he killed a bunny that ate poison.
Maybe it’s karma, I suggest. For all the bunny killing.
The cat is a ruthless murderer. He likes to go for babies. Manhattan can spend half the day dismantling a family of rabbits, then wander home with a conscience as spotless as his freshly cleaned paws. My mom claims to have encountered grief-stricken mothers searching for their young in the lethal territory that surrounds the house. I tell her she’s projecting, that rabbits don’t have that maternal instinct. She says she knows a mother when she sees one.
We are too quick to forgive Manhattan’s transgressions. We’ve even awarded this killer a special spot in the living room. That’s the cat’s spot my mom or I will say to my unamused dad, who, after muttering that the cat belongs in a barn, begrudgingly repositions himself under Manhattan’s commanding gaze. Once the cat is sufficiently pleased with the arrangement of the family, he lets us know by waving his tail, spelling an invisible I like you guys in the air.
Despite destroying rodent families for sport, the cat is anguished by the separation of his human family. He protests impending departures by sitting on top of half-packed suitcases. My mom says he wails like a baby for days after I leave. His cat brain can’t comprehend how or why I come and go. He worries each departure will be permanent. We adopted him when I was much younger, before I could have predicted that his lifestyle wouldn’t fit into a tiny New York apartment. When I moved to Manhattan, Manhattan stayed with my mom. Without me, the cat is fed, the litter box is cleaned, and the decapitated rodents on the doormat are disposed of. Somehow I never see any of these chores in action, they’re just done. It’s like there’s an invisible force sustaining him. Maybe it’s the witchcraft that black cats are associated with. Or maybe it’s that mom thing explained on the face of Mother’s Day cards I didn’t write.
Whatever it is, I feel it in this car, sustaining us, warding off catastrophic thoughts of the dying cat actually dying. I taste it in a to-go coffee cup, which somehow appeared in the backseat cupholder among the morning’s chaos. I hear it in my mom’s voice, which hums along to the disco music like nothing is wrong.
“Stayin’ Alive” is playing. I wonder if my mom is equally unsettled by its cruel irony, but I don’t ask. I’m afraid of disrupting the volatile sense of order within the car, which remains moored by our rhythmic silence. She keeps her eyes on the road, so I can let mine wander between the dying cat and the menacing IV bag and the blurry cornfields and cows. My mom used to tell me they were all for making milk. Every single cow we encountered. Those are happy cows, she’d promise after catching a glimpse of my sullen face in the rearview, they make ice cream. It’s her fault that I’ve maintained this sensitivity about animals into my adult life. In high school, she insisted that I be excused from a “feline dissection” science lab. My teacher relented, and while my classmates inhaled the formaldehyde of euthanized shelter cats, I sat in the hallway, filling in an anatomical outline with colored pencils.
My father thought this was overly soft of us. His upbringing on a pig farm made him numb to the morbidity of it all. When he’s behind the wheel, he is more realistic, pointing out which crops are for humans and which are for livestock. Which cows make milk and which cows make McDoubles. Because of this, I know the cows outside my window are surely being primed for death, fattened by the corn growing around them. It makes me miss New York and its barricade of high-rises, how they shield me from these grim realities.
Dammit, says my mom, first quietly under her breath, then loudly behind a nasally wall of tears, DAMMIT! She slaps the steering wheel. A man in an orange vest nonchalantly wields a sign: ROADWORK. A secret agent of the secret parasite. We’re not going to make it in time. My mom is crying. He’s so weak.
Her descent into vulnerability punctures my illusions of childhood. I am acutely aware like the cat and the cows, my mom will die, and I will be left to drive myself through these desolate landscapes with only the cliché songs of my youth to accompany me. I wish she had held it together, or at least waited until I couldn’t see. I wish she had made me go to the feline dissection. Maybe then I would have known what could possibly be wrong with our actively dying cat, or at least have the knowledge that he is not full of pleasant pink doodles, but ugly, overlapping canals that can be disturbed and destroyed by something as inevitable as a parasite.
And yet I’m frozen, unable to break down alongside her. If we both start crying, the car will become humid with tears, which will fog the windshield and prevent us from getting the dying cat to Guelph. I lean down to look at the dying cat through the mesh siding of his carrier. He laboriously opens his eyes; he is just as shocked to hear mom cry. I beg him telepathically to perk up, look alive, convince her that he’s a fighter!
He’s a fighter! I say to my dying cat and crying mom. I don’t believe it myself, but my instincts are engaged. My voice is a survival mechanism, heightening to the silly tone my mom reserves for speaking to animals and babies. We’re going to make it!
The pitch provokes a spark of motion from the dying cat. His articulate black tail flickers for the first time all day. Mom! I announce triumphantly, He’s moving his tail!
The pitch and the tail emit a ripple effect that escapes the car, causing the ROADWORK sign to flip. The parasite shudders. My mom exhales. Her teary eyes visit the rearview before returning dutifully to the road. You’re a fighter, she says in her silly animal voice. We’re going to get you to Guelph.
We’ll deliver the cat to a friendly veterinary student who mentions something about a parasite going around Ontario. As we pull out of the parking lot, my mom will say she thinks he was flirting with me. I’ll tell her she is being ridiculous, that no sane man would flirt with me while I’m actively sobbing about a cat. She will say that I am very pretty, and that he seemed about my age, and then she will then begin to worry that he is too young to be caring for the dying cat. I will say maybe he’s not too young, maybe I’m just an adult too, and she will say maybe back.
The sun will briefly splotch the sky with pink and orange before sinking into the lake. I’ll take the wheel when it gets dark and my mom’s vision isn’t sufficient. When we get home, I’ll pour us glasses of wine. We’ll watch reality TV and no one will sit in the cat’s spot. In the early hours of the morning, a team of veterinary students in white lab coats will uncover the parasite in the cat’s neck. They will rescue the cat, and when we pick him up, they will instruct us to keep him inside for the rest of the summer to avoid another parasitic disaster. This will make us laugh nervously, because we could more easily keep the sun from setting than the cat from escaping.
But for now, we remain un-blissfully unaware of the fourth passenger disturbing our established rhythm. We’re creatures of instinct, the four of us, feeding off one another, seeking homeostasis, resisting death. I surrender my attention to the IV bag, which obscures the familiar horizontal lines of the crops into an abstract of earth and sky.