Mike In The Lights (Larger)

But most wonderfully, every time you sit down and open your laptop, warm things come out of nowhere and get all snuggly-like.

It’s actually very possible to be productive this way — assuming you aren’t so distracted with enchantment that you are compelled to document the experience.

“Jack,” I’ll say. “Jack Jack.” I’ll check the food and the water. I’ll pet his glorious dark ruff, pull the tail that looks like a duster until he chirps and glares at me with gold-piece eyes. I’ll sleep in the space you usually sleep and turn off the light at the same time we do every night. But he is not so easily fooled. The other kitty, the dopey one we say loves me, is purring devotionals at my feet, all warmth and fuzz. “Jack,” I say, “Jack Jack.”

This is how we speak to them: purely in names. But I don’t know if he even hears me; he has buried himself in a pile of your clothes in the next room. He is wearing your underwear and has barricaded the door. He’s smoking your stash and fucking up your recycling; I hear the paper bin crash. All of the neighbors will know you are gone tonight.

Howl! Howl, howl!

Pipsqueak, or, name TBD

“So . . . what do you think?” I asked an hour and ten cats later. I was holding a five-month-old scrawny male, with grey spots and a siamese nose. He’d been one of the first cats we’d picked up, and drooped into our arms obligingly, falling asleep within minutes. We’d wondered aloud if he’d been drugged.

Jurvis gave me his overwhelmed, “I can’t make decisions right now, please, please don’t make me” face.

“Daisy is pretty, and calm . . .” I said of the marmalade-colored, older female. She’d been hiding under a bed until a few minutes prior. Now she sat in her cage, looking sad. When I tried to pet her, she let me, and continued to look sad. We’d picked her up for a few minutes, and she didn’t resist, sad sad sad.

“Yeah.”
“But. Maybe . . . too calm? Too fragile?”
“Yeah . . . it’s true. I’m worried Jack would murder her.”
“Yeah. We need a cat that’s both playful and cuddly. Hmm . . . I mean, this kitten has been nothing but nice.”

Jurvis smiled, and poked at the sleeping kitten’s belly. It stretched in my arms and looked up at him with big eyes.

“My favorite, though, is Sissy.”

Sissy sneezed adorably in the next room.

“The one with the upper respiratory infection?”
“Yeah, so. I guess we can’t take her.”
“Right.”
“But, she’s the cutest.”
“Cuter than this guy?”
“I like how her eyes take up half her head.”
“Ah.”
“But they said we shouldn’t introduce her to another cat with an infection like that.”
“Ah, yeah.”
“Pity, because she’s totally the cutest.”

A woman whose shift was nearly over perked her ears. “You want Sissy? I bet you can have Sissy.” She stood up from her folding chair and hobbled over to a front window.

“Erin!” she screamed to the sidewalk below. “Erin, did you tell these kids that they couldn’t take Sissy?”

Erin hollered an intelligible response.

“She’s sick! Sissy’s sick, Erin!”

A car door slammed.

“So they can’t take her, then? Erin? Erin!”

She looked back at us in frustration. “I can’t hear a word she’s saying. Why don’t you run down and talk to her.”

She hobbled back to her chair.

“Marco is very sweet and cuddly,” I offered.
“Yeah?”
“But he’s eight. And ignores other cats. I worry he’s too old for Jack.”
“Yeah.”
“So . . . I guess I think . . . we should get this kitten, here.”

“Are you sure?” The woman asked. “I’m writing down his name, in your forms. There’s no turning back. You want this kitten?”

Jurvis and I looked at one another helplessly, neither of us willing to say no.

“I can’t make this decision,” he said.

I turned to the woman. “Yes,” I said.

In this manner the issue was decided.

The kitten purred and purred and purred.

“Jack’s on fire!” Jurvis shouted.

I sat on the couch, a forkful of drunken noodles frozen in front of my mouth, watching as our blazing kitty ran towards the windows. We’re always yelling at him when he jumps on the table, and he knows that the windows, with their long gauze curtains, are a proper sanctuary. He’s allowed in the windowsills.

Well, now the curtains are on fire, I thought. The flames are crawling upwards and licking the ceiling. The entire apartment is burning down, and you haven’t even registered it yet. What will you save? Laptop? Camera? Striped socks? What will it be like to lose everything? To escape tragedy? Will you need the emergency ladder, stashed under the bed? Do you even know exactly where that is?

“I got him,” Jurvis was saying, face smooshed against the windowsill with the cat smothered in his arms. Jack — never one to be tackled, patted down, or generally prohibited from movement — mewed plaintively in his grasp, and the entire room reeked of smoke and scorched fur.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey, uh, good.”

But part of me still thought I was standing outside right then, covered in charcoal smudges and gazing upwards.

The one place he’s not supposed to be.

This isn’t actually very convenient either.

Jack goes on a tear every night between eleven and one in the morning, playing parkour with the furniture and curtains. His favorite thing to do is “the running slide”: this mostly occurs on the wood floors between rugs, but has also been known to happen on the coffee table (he gets a head start from the kitchen) — resulting in laptops, beverages, papers exploding in all directions. His pet peeve is objects resting on surfaces, and also, his own tail. He will chase it for much longer than is generally considered dignified, mewing like a banshee. Our lower neighbor’s pet peeve is all of the above habits: almost every night our floor thunders with his pounding.

I’ve never met him, but twice I’ve dreamed of going downstairs and knocking on his door to apologize.

Jurvis and Jack: The Showdown

Ah well. I wouldn’t have done it either. But for the record, out kitten was adequately displeased regardless. (See another, blurrier attempt here.)

“Adrianne,” my friend Sara said with some alarm, attempting to shake Jack off her leg during her first and potentially last visit to our new apartment, “your cat is kind of insane.” It was a little late to be shaking anything, to be honest. Once he gets those fangs into your marrow, there’s no getting rid of him; you have to make a few preemptive strikes before making a movement of any kind in our home. Or if you’re sitting for a long period of time. Really, if you’d rather not be attacked, you should just go into a closet and shut the door behind you, quickly.

“I think he’s teething,” I said a few days later, nose-deep in The Kitten-Owner’s Manual, which I actually own. “We need to get him some kind of chewing toy. Then he’ll stop eating us.”

We have our squirt bottle, our multiple cans of loud, alarming coins (which are more alarming to us than the cat), and, actually, our throwing arms. I never thought I’d be the kind of cat owner who threw her kitten across the room, but apparently, when the going gets tough, the tough get violent. It’s been a particularly rough couple of weeks; papers have been scattered, shoes chewed, garbage cans overturned, books projected off their shelves. Our kitten is that belligerent friend at the bar, always drunk first and last, forever starting random, stupid fights and damaging property for the heck of it. And we can’t tell him to leave.

“I am going insane,” I said the other day. “I will never be able to have children. Both mentally, and now physically, since he is attacking my uterus.” Jack began happily gnawing on my hand. “Ow! CHRIST! You little bastard . . .”

“Bite him back!” Jurvis suggested. “That’s what I do.”

“Yeah?” I said, half-delirious. “I guess that makes sense.” I began struggling with our kitten, attempting to fit one of his paws into my mouth. Uh, Adrianne . . . said my brain.

“Sometimes,” Jurvis confessed, “I place his entire head in my mouth, just so he knows I’m capable of it.”

I stopped, paw mid-mouth. It was a moment of clarity. Even the kitten momentarily loosened his jaws of death grip to look up at me with big questioning eyes.

“You do what?” I said.

“Look at that!” I would exclaim. “He’s, like, movin’ around!”

We watched Jack move around for three solid hours after we brought him home. Jurvis fondly referred to this as “the kitten channel.” He patted at things experimentally, sniffed and hissed at his food bowl, looked around with big eyes and nosed our palms. My mind was completely blown. When I sat down on the couch a few hours later to read about claw trimming, he tip-toed over and snuggled into my feet.

“ASkdfjaoisdofla;jf!” I said.

The true reality-check, however, occurred two days ago, as we were unpacking the new apartment late into the night. The kitten snuck into Jurvis’ closet when we weren’t looking, and disappeared for some time behind the suitcases. You know. Like kittens do.

“Where’s Jack?”

“I don’t know. When did you last see him?”

“Jack? . . . Jack?”

Whenever the notion of expensive veterinarian bills have come up, my dad always had this to say: “free kittens, free kittens, free kittens.” I would half-jokingly agree. But when our tiny poufball emerged from Jurvis’ closet crying and limping his leg, all reason and fiscal responsibility deserted me. This was no jpeg. This was the only kitten in the world, all warmth and purr and happiness. “Holy freaking Jesus,” I thought, “I . . . am responsible for your welfare.”

Jack tried to lay down and failed, tried to stand up and failed, stared up at us with big, wet eyes and mewed plaintively, over and over, his wee body beginning to tremble — and that’s how we wound up in an animal emergency room at four in the morning, handing over a credit card to the tune of two hundred and fifty dollars in X-Rays, painkillers, and doctor fees.