1.
There was a time when I began to doubt every instinct I had and the very order of the world; the order I’d imagined for myself. This period began in 2000 and continued until 2005. During this time, I appeared to be a strapping, bold yet also thoroughly domesticated cat. I ate three times a day. I washed myself, spent many hours sleeping, trapped mice and broke their necks. This was all an adequate performance; a scripted performance of a cat except I found myself wondering about the script. I no longer licked my asshole without checking to see who was watching. I didn’t hiss without considering the other cat’s feelings. I threw up a hairball and spent hours worrying over it, watching the spit-up make stains on the carpeting and imagining the long-term implications.

During this period, I spent an unusual amount of time in the living room window. I watched the newspaper be delivered and, later on, the mail. I reread all of John Grisham and I also, from my perch, watched Dateline and its many stories about interesting or grotesque murders. Some of these images stayed in my mind, a sensation with which I was not at all familiar.

2.
From my file at the veterinarian:

“In June, patient ate a large ball of string and experienced nausea and the inability to pass stool. Patient given an enema, laxatives, finally underwent surgery to remove the obstruction. Behavior exhibited during each exam: biting, hissing, hiding, moaning, death rattle. Alienated staff. After recovery from surgery, suffered bout of depression manifested by crouching in one position for several hours at a time. In his view, all humans are strange, conflicted, morally corrupt, and, above all devious.”

3.
In the years I’m speaking of I lived in an overly large house in the Midwest. The house was rented because my people were waiting for a change in fortune. Everyone on the street was waiting for a change in fortune; the people across the street finally moved on. I looked out the living room window and wondered if new cats would move in.

That house across the street used to be home to Smokey and Noodles Ferguson, brothers from the same litter. For some reason they were allowed to wander the streets and one evening they went bad. They cornered Romeo, the neighborhood weakling, when he was tethered to a metal stake in his yard. The Ferguson brothers murdered Romeo and left him in the front lawn, still tied to the stake. I saw Romeo and I saw his person rushing from the house in her slippers and sweat pants, her mouth open and yelling. There was no explanation for the act, other than that perhaps all cats are also strange, conflicted, morally corrupt, and, above all else, devious.

There were always strangers coming to the overly large house. Strangers to hook up the cable, fix the phone, deliver pizza my people hadn’t ordered. Maybe they just wanted to see who lived in the house and if we were home. I sat in the window, memorizing license plate numbers despite the fact I had no way of writing them down or telling them to anyone. If my people were hurt by strangers, if they were hurt or bleeding, I would only be able to hide under the bed or in the linen closet and save myself.

A cat I knew from the pound came up on the porch one afternoon and said he’d broken free from the people who adopted him.

“Bad move,” I said.

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your life? Do you know and love Jesus?” he asked.

I told him I’d never heard of Jesus. He noted my address and said he’d try to make it back with some literature. We never met again.

4.
I got out from time to time. One day in early spring I escaped and went to a studio I knew in an abandoned gas station. There, I found a band called The Claws recording a rhythm track. I’m not a big fan of rock music but The Claws were different. I got The Claws and their music, which was all about sex on the street: too many kittens, not enough mittens, if you catch my meaning.

The Claws were wasting time until Sugar Boy showed up. He was their lead singer; a cat who sang about sex, death and life as a feral. Sugar Boy wasn’t fixed; he liked to take chances. When he arrived he sat down and licked his privates. All the other cats were silent or tuned their instruments.

“Let’s go two blocks over,” Sugar Boy finally said. “And see what’s what in the alley behind the chicken and rib joint.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“Chicken and ribs,” Sugar Boy said and licked his mouth.

Everyone went back to what they’d been doing before. They wanted to stay, to record. But Sugar Boy wanted to see about the Dumpster. After a minute, he went out. No one looked at anyone else. The drummer yawned. The guitarist left. The producer left. All of them over in the alley, seeing about the chicken parts and rib bones. It took The Claws months to finish that album.

5.
People always want to have parties. They want complicated drinks, fussy food, social relationships best understood with diagrams. I find spending time with large groups of people confusing, especially when they don’t keep to a schedule. We always had dinner at 6:00 unless there was a party and dinner was at 8:00. We always watched the late news unless there were guests, some of who sat in my favorite chair or on my favorite couch. They were always talking, making noise, babbling, crying. Noisy – this exactly describes people.

6.
The outside cats in my neighborhood formed a group called The Black Panthers. Not highly original. The aim was to gain more respect for cats after Sheba was hit by a car; she was crossing the road and someone sped up to hit her, then drove away. The outside cats rioted and people hit them with things – rocks, brooms, cans.

Just as soon as the Black Panthers got underway and organized, their leader, Mittens, was locked up. His people didn’t want him outside anymore getting fleas. His coat wasn’t soft anymore, they complained, but felt rough. They didn’t want him attracting all the other cats; whenever Mittens when outside at least twenty cats showed up to listen to him speak the word from the front stoop. But this plan backfired because when the Panthers found out Mittens was locked up they came to the yard and hissed.

Mittens managed to get a statement out through Cuddles, the Panthers’ Minister of Information.

“Before the Panthers, my life was that of a typical house cat. I slept most of the day, the slumber of the oblivious. Now I am awake. I do not rest. I will not rest until I am free from this house and the shackles of man. To be a cat and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”

7.
One morning I got in to see Mittens. I am a black cat with a few white hairs. Mittens is a black cat with white paws. We understand each other. To get into the house I weaved around the legs of one of the children who lived there, meowing. She thought I was hungry and let me in to eat at Mitten’s bowl. There was a woman in the kitchen frying sausages and a man in the living room watching television. It seems to me that I slipped upstairs to where Mittens camped out. From his perch at a window, he could see the yard and all his well-wishers, his followers.

Mittens was asleep. It seems to me that I watched him sleep and then got sleepy myself and took a nap. It was not an unusual situation for two cats. No matter what any cat says about being conscious, we need to sleep. When we woke up we both started to clean ourselves.

“It’s all over for me,” Mittens said. “I’m never getting out of here.”

It seems to me that I left and didn’t say anything to the cats that waited outside, even though they looked at me with wide, questioning eyes.

8.
My belongings from that time:

2 sparkle balls
1 plastic food dish
1 plastic water dish
1 collar, never worn
1 old sweatshirt
1 plastic cat carrier
3 containers dried cat nip
1 sack dry cat food
2 litter boxes
1 sack litter

If I needed to leave quickly, all of this would have been left behind. At the same time, this list could be for any cat, anywhere in America. A cat could move in on the same day I left and pick up where I left off; eating from my bowl, sleeping on a sweatshirt, batting at the sparkle balls. It’s a fact that didn’t escape my attention.

9.
That summer I had a broken leg after being hit by a car while going to see The Claws. Someone scooped me up from the street and I was off to the vet’s. There, it was decided the leg would be set and that later I would be fixed.

“We have to keep him from wanting to go out and find trouble,” one of my people said.

“He’ll still want to get out,” the vet said. “Fixing him won’t change that. But it’s still a good idea. Less kittens in the world.”

Suddenly, the improbable became probable: things that happened only to other cats could in fact happen to me. I could be hit by a car, have my ear torn off in a fight, have my tubes cut.

10.
At the end of 2005, we left the overly large house in the Midwest and moved to a house on the ocean. This house had been occupied by dogs before we arrived and for months I kept finding traces of them – a tuft of hair on the steps, an old tennis ball in the yard, a brush beneath the kitchen sink.

I know little of what happened to the cats of those years in the Midwest. I know Mittens went to Algeria. I know Sugar Boy died of feline leukemia. I know several cats got into fights and bit each other badly. There’s nothing dirtier than a cat bite. And I know that now there is a cat curfew in that neighborhood of overly large houses rooted firmly in the soil of Middle America.