World without Cats

by Bonham Richards

  “Well, that is certainly a feminist play,” remarked Dorothy as they walked from the theater to Angelo’s rented car under a star-flecked sky. “When was it written, anyway?”

  “About 1880, before the word feminist had entered the language, I suspect, especially the Norwegian language. I think maybe Ibsen was ahead of his time.”

  “Do you consider yourself a feminist?”

  Angelo remained silent for a moment. “I believe all people should be judged and rewarded on their accomplishments. Women are people. It follows, that, if I understand the meaning of the word feminist, I am guilty of being one.”

  “Oh, you’re such a scientist, even when we’re discussing a nineteenth century play.” She gave him a peck on the cheek.

  Angelo took her hand. “A Doll’s House is more than a feminist play, you know. There are other levels of meaning. Some people find the last scene, where Nora walks out on her family, ambiguous. They see Nora as a villain, and not a heroine, because she abandons her children.”

  “Yes, I can see her that way. Maybe she’s not such a feminist role model after all.”

  “Besides, throughout the play, Nora comes across as self-centered. She doesn’t seem to be a very deep person. In the final scene, she complains to Torvald that they never have serious conversations. But whose fault is that, anyway? Torvald’s or Nora’s? I once read an essay about the play where it was compared to a Greek tragedy and Nora to tragic figures like Oedipus.”

  “I don’t know much about Greek plays,” noted Dorothy. “Angelo, you know so much about the drama and about music. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe you’re a scientist.”

  “I suspect that is what you call, in this country, a backhanded compliment. Can’t a scientist have interests outside his field? Oh, Oh—I should say, his or her field.”

  Dorothy laughed and squeezed his hand.

  “My father was a lot like Torvald,” Angelo offered.

  “Really? That must have been unpleasant.”

  “It was not so bad. He was away on business much of the time, and my mother was everything my father wasn’t. She made up for his coldness.”

  “But Torvald isn’t what I would call a cold person. He’s just very conservative and bound by society’s rules.”

  “Yes. That is correct. My father resembled Torvald in just that sense. He was also very reserved, unlike Torvald Helmer.”

  In the car, Angelo mentioned, “I once saw a performance of the play in Norway where they had a living cat sitting on the sofa through most of the play. During one of Nora’s conversations with Dr. Rank, the cat woke up and made a big yawn. It started clawing the sofa, the way cats do—you know, to stretch the claws. The audience laughed, and the actors had to wait before they could resume talking.” He was quiet a moment. “I suspect we are not likely to see A Doll’s House with a living cat anymore.”

  “How many times have you seen this play?”

  “Mmmm. Maybe six. I’m not sure. I’ve seen most of Ibsen’s other plays too. You know, Ibsen spent a good part of his life in Italy. I think of him as a kind of Norwegian-Italian like me—only with me it’s genetic, with him it was cultural.”

  “You must be his biggest fan.”

  “Absolut!”

  During the last two weeks of May, large numbers of cats in Tacoma, Yakima, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, Vancouver, British Columbia, and other western cities came down with the rapidly developing, universally fatal disease. Newspapers across the nation reported new outbreaks on their front pages.

  Beth Murphy, owner of the Coos Bay Cattery tearfully locked the doors of her breeding business. Without cats, she saw no point in keeping the business operating.

  When he was seven years old, Juan Valenzuela’s father had introduced him to the great outdoors on a hiking trip in the Grand Canyon. Juan’s love of nature and open spaces had begun with that trip and was a dominant facet of his life. Now twenty-two, the native Chumash-American was hiking the John Muir Trail alone, through the high country, in Sequoia National Park. Much of the trail was still buried under snowpack. Resting by an ice-covered tarn, he noticed movement about a hundred yards away.

  “Madre de Dios!” he gasped. The tan shape moved again, and Juan recognized it as a mountain lion. Juan’s ancestors were Southern California mountain Chumash and had hunted pumas in the old days. His father had told him that the old hunters would use every part of the kill—the meat for food, the bones for tools, the hide for clothing; nothing was thrown away.

  Juan drew his hunting knife and remained watchful. The cat also stayed where it was. After some twenty minutes, Juan realized that something was not right. By now, the beast should have made a move or slunk away. Juan slowly began inching toward it. The animal did not move. Shortly, the young man was within a stone’s throw of the puma. He stared, and the cat stared back, but it still made no move. There was terror in the eyes of the animal.

  He then saw why. The cat was sick—very sick. It was emaciated, and there was mucous stuff and blood around its eyes and nose. The young man stood in awe a long moment. Presently, Juan, having been imbued with a love of and respect for animals by his father and mother, quickly put the animal out of its misery with several well-placed thrusts.

  12

  May 2020

  1,010,000,000

  As June approached, Angelo had run out of ideas. He’d uncovered nothing to bring him any closer to understanding the epidemiology of the feline disease. He prepared to fly to Seattle. But first he wanted to talk with Pete Wingate.

  He drove ten miles east along Highway 118 to the Wingate farm. The red barn with its water tank and white-frame house, complete with chickens and ducks, reminded Angelo of picture books he’d read as a child in Norway. Irma Wingate set out home-baked rolls with coffee, making Angelo feeling welcome. He chatted with the couple about crops and weather, displaying a sincere interest in farming. This was not at all an affectation, as Angelo’s interests were eclectic. Finally, he asked about the cat named Clyde.

  “Yup,” said the farmer, “I took a cat over to Dorothy Knowland in February. I remember, because it was Valentine’s Day.” He nodded toward an Irish Setter asleep on the rug. “Mike over there don’t take too well with cats.”

  “How long had you had the cat?”

  “Just a week. The wife and I had been up to Seattle visiting my sister—”

  “Seattle? Did you say Seattle?” Angelo scrawled on his tablet.

  “Right. She volunteers at the zoo there, and they had this cat they called Clyde that was sort of a mascot. Clyde was allowed to go wherever he pleased in the zoo. They finally had to get rid of him because he kept getting into the animal compounds. It’s one of those zoos that don’t have many cages, just a lot of open spaces with moats or pits around them. They were afraid one of the big animals would injure that cat. I figured I could give it a good home on the farm. The wife didn’t mind, so we brought it back with us, but Mike wouldn’t share the farm with no cat, and Clyde had to go.”

  “What is your sister’s name, please?”

  “Geraldine,” answered Pete. “Geraldine Moore.”

  “Thank you,” Angelo said, “you have been very helpful.”

  Driving back to Camarillo, he hardly noticed the scenic countryside. Angelo’s mind was churning. There it is, he thought, the connection I’ve been searching for … tenuous link to be sure, but a link nonetheless—a tie between the Camarillo and Seattle diseases. Angelo figured that the cat known as Clyde would turn out to be the index case, the first instance of the disease, marking the beginning of the epizootic. But what’s the association with the university? Where do Chamberlin’s plasmids fit in … or the sarcoma virus?

  At five thirty in the morning, on the first day of June, Angelo headed his rental car back to LAX, arriving two hours before his flight. He always took a
long a supply of reading material, so the interminable waiting wouldn’t be wasted. Dorothy had been sad to see him go, but Angelo promised he would return. He had no professional reason to come back to Camarillo, but during the past few weeks, he had become very fond of the widow, and he was determined to see her again.

  On the plane, he began to review his copious notes, but the flight was short, and soon they were landing at Sea-Tac airport. He rented a car identical to the one he had in California and drove north in the rain to the city. He intended to go straight to the zoo to see Wingate’s sister even before he found a place to stay.

  Angelo arrived just after the noon hour. The zoo was bustling with excited schoolchildren and young couples, all seemingly oblivious to the light rain. At the administration building, he was told that Geraldine Moore was taking a group of Japanese businessmen on a special tour and would be finished in an hour.

  Angelo elected to go on a tour of his own. To get out of the rain, he went into an exhibit building. He found it quite dark inside; he could hardly see his way. He then noticed a sign with the information that the room housed nocturnal animals. Indeed, the only illumination came from the glass-enclosed cages, lit by a dim, bluish light. As his eyes adapted, Angelo spied an anteater, a sloth moving about slowly in a faux treetop, and, below them, a porcupine.

  A door at the end of the corridor led to the well-lit reptile room. Here, he found slow-moving tortoises, gopher snakes, lizards, and rattlers, as well as hairy tarantulas and various kinds of insects.

  He went through yet another door into a room identified as a tropical forest display. A light rain was falling on the animals. A flash of bright movement caught his eye, and he observed a couple of golden tamarins. They were the most beautiful primates he had ever seen. Their long, silky-golden hair would be the envy of many a young woman—or young man for that matter, he thought. Angelo passed some time observing a variety of tropical insects. Just then, a group of noisy youngsters shepherded by their teacher came in, and he figured it was time to leave the building. A bit of rain was preferable to yelling kids.

  Pete Wingate is right, he thought, there aren’t many cages. The large animals—lions, llamas, apes, and the like—were able to roam in sizable open areas with few fences separating them from the observers. Only the smaller animals, such as monkeys, were caged. Angelo watched the gorillas for a while. Although they were free to move about over a considerable area, they were kept from the public by large, glass panels. In back of one of these panels was a mother with a watchful eye on her tiny baby frolicking a few feet away.

  Angelo looked around him at the many open areas. I suspect that viruses could easily be transferred from animal to animal in this zoo; insects could carry them—biting flies, maybe.

  Shortly, Angelo passed the bamboo-enclosed elephant compound where African and Indian elephants of various ages comprised a happy family, seemingly oblivious to species differences. He ambled past the polar-bear enclosure and meandered over to look at the big cats. He eyed the dozing lions in an area landscaped to resemble an African savannah, complete with flat-topped acacia trees. He walked around the perimeter, noticing at the back only a four-foot chain-link fence enclosing the area. Inside was a deep, water-filled moat, presumably large enough to keep the cats in. Angelo looked it over. Would it keep a small domestic cat like Clyde out? I don’t think so.

  The tigers were similarly enclosed. The lithe cougars, on the other hand, were in cages surrounded by a fine-mesh screen that a small cat would not be able to penetrate.

  Angelo moseyed over to an imposing building, in front of which were two stone lions in the classic pose. This turned out to be the feline house. Inside, he came upon a sleeping lynx within a glass-fronted cage. Next to it was a flashy ocelot. Further on, there were quite a few species with which he was unfamiliar. These creatures are in close proximity; it’s not difficult to imagine viruses hopping from cat to cat. He jotted down his thoughts.

  He found fishing and Chinese desert cats, flat-headed and Pallas’s cats. Stalking caracals and restless sand cats were in cages on the other side of the hall. There were, all in all, dozens of species new to him, ranging in size from smaller than a house pet to almost the size of a panther. I should have brought Dorothy with me—she would have enjoyed seeing all these cats. Angelo became so caught up with the animals, he returned to the administration building a half-hour later than he had planned.

  Geraldine Moore, a slim, middle-aged woman, was waiting for him. She introduced herself and told Angelo that her brother had phoned to tell her of the investigation. She invited Angelo into a small meeting room festooned with a colorful collection of animal posters, photographs, and newspaper clippings about the zoo. In one corner Angelo glimpsed a few small bookcases housing a modest library. He noticed that the woman’s uniform was a size too large for her. The two sat at a worktable and Angelo asked Moore about Clyde.

  “Yes,” said the woman, “we had to find a new home for him because he’d become a little too curious, even for a cat. He had gotten in the habit of going into various animal compounds looking for mice, and, one evening, he frightened one of the elephants. It took half the night for our people to calm the animal.”

  “Scandaloose.”

  “Another time, Clyde went down into the gorilla grotto and almost got mauled by Godzilla.”

  “Godzilla?”

  “That’s our largest male. Besides, there was always a danger that one of our animals could contract toxoplasmosis from a domestic cat. Anyway, that’s when we decided we had to find a new home for the cat.”

  “You are aware of the feline epizootic in this city?” asked Angelo.

  “Why yes, of course. It’s terrible. But what has that got to do with Clyde? Is he okay?”

  “I’m sorry. I assumed you knew. Clyde is dead. Maybe the epizootic has nothing to do with Clyde. I don’t know. But in the city where he was taken, the city where your brother lives, there is also, as you know, a feline epizootic. It would be odd if the two diseases were not related.”

  “I see.” Geraldine Moore pondered this a moment. “But Clyde wasn’t ill. If he had been, I never would have given him to my brother.”

  “Possibly the cat was in the early stages of disease. Anyway, he is dead now. He died of the same disease that has killed all the domestic cats in Camarillo.”

  “All the cats? … I … I had no idea … Oh, my God!”

  “Absolut. All the cats.” Angelo paused to let this sink in. He then asked, “Tell me, were any of the zoo animals sick in the month or so before your brother took the cat?”

  “Why yes, as a matter of fact, we lost three cats. In September of last year, a lioness came down with a viral or bacterial disease, we’re not sure which, and died three weeks later. Then, about the middle of October, we lost one of the two Felis chaus. Two days before Halloween, one of our European wildcats became ill and died after a couple of weeks.” She frowned. “Wait a minute. There was another—a chimp we found dead one morning of an unknown cause.”

  At this, out came Angelo’s e-tablet. “Please, what is common name of Felis cha … cha …”

  Geraldine Moore smiled. “It is called the jungle cat. It comes from Southeast Asia, India, places like that. Ours came from Egypt.”

  “How many species of cats are there? Do you know?”

  “Thirty-seven in all, I believe.”

  Angelo was trembling with excitement, but he asked in a calm voice, “What do you do with the body of an animal that dies in the zoo?”

  “We usually incinerate them.”

  “These cats, were they incinerated?”

  “Yes. Their bodies were incinerated.”

  “Scandaloose!”

  “I am sorry. I suppose you wanted to examine them.”

  Angelo nodded. “It would have helped.”

  She continued, “Of course, our people always perf
orm a necropsy on animals that die from causes other than old age, and we do have some frozen tissue specimens. Would they be of any use to you?”

  “Absolut!” said Angelo. “I will need to arrange for keeping them frozen.”

  “No problem. We have insulated containers for that purpose. We do it all the time. All we need to do is order some dry ice.”

  “Marveloose!” Angelo thought a moment. “I noticed that many of the animals are out in the open, but others are in cages. Could Clyde have gotten into the glass cages like the ones in the feline house?”

  “No, not likely.” She stood up. “Come, I’ll take you into the feline area.”

  “I have already been there.”

  “But I will take you behind the scenes,” she responded with an air of mysterious playfulness, “the part the public never sees.”

  Inside the feline house, Moore unlocked a door marked “NO ADMITTANCE—EMPLOYEES ONLY” and, entering first, she stepped into a shallow tray containing spongy Astroturf saturated with a soapy-looking liquid. “What is that?” Angelo asked.

  “It’s disinfectant. It is supposed to kill viruses and bacteria that we might bring in from the outside.”

  “That’s convincing.” Angelo stepped into the tray. Inside he noticed a decidedly gamey, but not overpowering, animal odor. He followed the docent on a raised wooden walkway along a corridor, well lit by a skylight. They climbed a metal staircase to the roof, and Moore opened a door leading out.

  The rain had stopped. The two made their way across a catwalk overlooking the lion compound. A large wall separated the lions from the tigers.

  “Look down,” Moore said. Immediately below, Angelo spied three lions sleeping on a rock platform.

  The docent pointed to the rock above them, as tall as a house. “That rock is entirely man-made—sprayed concrete over a foundation. The platform is heated so the lions can keep warm in winter, and yet be in full view of the public. The entire compound is surrounded by a dry moat that keeps the lions in. The chain-link fence outside the moat serves a primarily psychological purpose. It would keep neither the lions from getting out nor people from getting in if they wanted to.”