(5)

A few days ago I went out to my parent's house, visited awhile with them and then had dinner.  After dinner, I decided to go to a grocery store located out their way and do some shopping.  My parents live in a fairly quiet residential district at the edge of town, but to get to the grocery store you have to drive down a short stretch of busy highway.  I'd gone only about a quarter-mile or so when I saw, on the opposite side of the road, a cat that had recently been hit by a car.

He must have been hit only a few moments before, for he was still alive, though badly injured:  he kept raising the front half of his body, bending himself over double in a jerky, spasmodic way, as if by instinct still trying to leap to safety even while in the throes of death.  It was a horrible thing to see.

Whoever had hit the cat had not bothered to stop.  Other drivers coming down the highway swerved their cars to avoid hitting him again, but none of them were stopping either.  Apparently no one wanted to be responsible for delivering the death blow to the cat – but neither were they moved to stop and see if there was anything they could do to help.

I found a nearby driveway to pull into and parked the car.  As I began trotting down the side of the highway, I noticed a group of three or four people getting out of a truck and walking towards the backyard of one of the houses I was passing.  I noticed that these people were watching me closely, and I kept glancing over at them as I jogged along, thinking that perhaps they were the cat's owners, or that they were maybe going to offer me some help in attending to it.  Then I saw that they were nudging each other and smiling – grinning, in fact.  Finally one of them looked straight at me and laughed out loud.  I couldn't understand this.  I wondered if they were the ones who had hit the cat?  Or did they think that perhaps I had?  I didn't know.  But whoever they were, whatever they thought, one thing was clear:  they found my behavior . . . funny.

By the time I got to him, the cat had stopped his terrible, spasmodic jerking.  Cars were still veering to one side to avoid hitting him again; I let several of them go by, then decided to just not worry about them.  Creeping out onto the highway I knelt down beside the cat.  He was a slim grey tabby, and lay quite still now.  There were splatters of blood all around where he lay, as if he'd been spun in a circle when hit.  Blood was dripping from his mouth; he was not breathing.  Gently I ran my hand along his side to see if I could detect any response.  The cat heaved one last, great sigh – and then he was gone.  Gingerly I lifted him up in my hands.  The side of his head that had lain against the road was badly smashed.  The eyeball had been pushed out of its socket – a gruesome sight.  I lay him down in the grass at the side of the road and left him there.  I didn't know what else to do.

As I walked back down the highway again, I saw that the people who had been watching me were gone.  When I got back to the car I noticed a smear of some sort of yellowish-brown goo on my fingers.  It had a very strong, very foul odor.  I bent down and wiped my hand on the grass.  But the odor remained.  Even after I'd gone back to my parent's house and washed my hand, it lingered.  It lingers still, in my nose, in my mind.  It's the odor of death, I suppose.

Cats have always held a peculiar significance for me.  I've had one or more of them living with me almost all my life.  I like their affectionate, yet still slightly wild natures, their aloofness, their quiet camaraderie:  they make the perfect companion for a loner such as myself.  They've played a significant role in my dreams as well, appearing as good omens for the future, or acting as symbols of my physical, animal self.  I cannot deny that coming upon a dying cat in my waking life at this particular point in time feels particularly significant to me, what with my being so long out of work and feeling such uncertainty as to what my future holds . . .

But I do not want to reduce the cat I found to a mere symbol.  The futility that was expressed by the manner of his death, and the suffering he underwent in the face of it, were both quite genuine.  In fact, if that cat revealed anything to me, it's that if life is a dream, it's also a true dream – a real dream.  Still, with all the wondering I've been doing lately about the ways in which subjective and objective realities influence each other, I'm forced to consider whether or not I could have somehow contributed to the enactment of this cat's death.  If this seems too extreme or simply absurd, should I not at the very least hold myself responsible for being a part of the larger context in which he died, which helped him to die?  Yet, how do I explain this, how do I understand it, without falling into maudlin self-pity, into pompous egotism, into mere sentimentality?

I do it by simply recognizing this:  it is not I who matters here.  The only one who matters is the cat.

WHAT DREAM IS THIS