by Sigrid Nunez
The trip to the vet, the diagnosis, well, that at least, at last. Surgery, drugs. (Stop spitting out those goddamn pills!) Hope. Then doubts. How do I know if she’s in pain, and how much pain? Am I being selfish? Would she rather be dead?
Over the years, I’ve been there, several times, too many times, holding a cat that, the vet assures me, will go gently. My mother, who has been there too, said, The little honey lay in my arms the whole time, right up to the end, purring. (I know: that’s just a noise they make.)
Shortly after one of my last two cats died (in my arms, but not purring)—a cat I’d lived with for twenty years, longer than I’ve lived with any person—the surviving cat got sick. She paced the apartment, unable to rest, not for a single minute. Imagine: a sleepless cat. She wanted to eat, she tried to eat, but she couldn’t. Her voice had changed, always now the same troubled and insistent mewing: Help me, why won’t you help me.
The ultrasound revealed a mass. We could operate, said the vet, a soft young woman in assuringly rose-colored scrubs. But consider her age. I did, as well as how much she was already suffering, and the fact that, at nineteen, she might not survive an operation. The other option, said the vet, is to put her to sleep.
How Ackerley loathed that “dishonest” euphemism. But his word—destroyed—has always sounded odd to me when used for a sentient being. And neither he nor anyone else ever uses the honest kill. I had my dog Tulip killed. I took my cat to the vet to be killed. It would be better to have the poor thing killed. There’s no hope, she needs to be killed. If we can’t find them homes, they’ll all be killed.
Do you want to be with her?
Of course.
Two injections, the vet explained. The first one is to calm her. . . .
The first injection was problematic. Something about dehydration and how that affected the veins. And now the cat, who until that moment had kept herself very still, grew alert. She stretched out a paw and touched my wrist. She lifted her head, wobbly on its frail stalk of a neck, and gave me a disbelieving stare.
I’m not saying this is what she said, I’m saying this is what I heard:
Wait, you’re making a mistake. I didn’t say I wanted you to kill me, I said I wanted you to make me feel better.
The vet was clearly flustered now. Before I could say a word, she scooped up the cat and headed for the door: I’ll be right back.
We were in a large, busy hospital with many different wards. I had no idea where she’d gone.
Ten minutes later she returned. She placed the cat on the table, dead.
Do you want to be with her? Of course.
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them: What have you done.
• • •
I have heard of a study according to which cats, unlike many other animal species, do not forgive. (Like writers, perhaps, who, according to an editor I know, never forget a slight.)
• • •
Maybe the guilt was worse because, of all the cats I’d had, this one had been my least favorite, the one who always remained aloof, the one who would not let me cuddle her or hold her on my lap but who waited till I was asleep before sneaking onto my hip. Now she became the one I could not stop thinking about. I would find a cat hair or whisker somewhere in the apartment and hear again the hoarse, frantic mewing of her last days. No, I did not want another cat. I did not want ever again to watch another cat die, suffer and die. Not to mention that other anxiety: If I did get a cat, what would happen to it if I died first?
• • •
Thus was I saved, perhaps, from becoming an old cat lady. I am glad that, in the age of the internet, which has revived the ancient worship of cats as gods, the label is losing its stigma. I was once told by a medical resident that he’d been taught on his psychiatric rotation that owning multiple cats could be a sign of mental illness. Thinking of the horrific instances of animal hoarding I’d heard about, I thought it was good that the psychiatric profession had its ear to this particular ground. But when I asked him how many cats were said to put a person over the line, he said three.
• • •
Given a dog’s extraordinary powers of smell, I know that, even though it’s been years, Apollo is aware that this house was once feline territory. I want to know: What does he think about that?
• • •
There is a Hungarian film called White God, in which the dogs of Budapest rise up against the oppressor. Like all uprisings, this one has a leader. This is Hagen, the beloved mixed-breed pet of a girl named Lili. His ordeals begin when Lili’s father refuses to pay the tax imposed on anyone in possession of a dog that isn’t a purebred. Thrown out in the street, Hagen tries to find his way back to Lili (who meanwhile is doing all she can to find him), but is thwarted, first by dogcatchers, then by a brute who, using the cruelest methods, trains Hagen to fight. It is after he’s killed another dog, Hagen’s first time in the ring, that he understands not only what he’s done but what has been done to him. He escapes his trainer but is soon trapped by dogcatchers and hauled off to the pound, where he is slated to be destroyed. But again Hagen escapes, at the same time liberating a large number of other dogs who follow on his heels as he tears through the streets. The pack of running—in some cases attacking—dogs are joined by more dogs, dogs from every corner of the city: Hagen has raised a canine army. One by one his enemies are sought out and viciously killed. By now, though, the once gentle Hagen has been so transformed that when he finally meets Lili again, in the courtyard of the slaughterhouse where her father works as a meat inspector, he bares his teeth and snarls. She is a human being, after all—and her father, who started this war, is there with her. Ranged about Hagen are the members of his army, every one prepared to strike. The frightened Lili remembers how Hagen used to like when she played to him on her horn (her instrument in the school orchestra), and the soothing effect it had on him. She takes the horn from her backpack and begins to play. Hagen is calmed and lies down. Then all the other dogs grow quiet and lie down too. Lili plays on, prolonging the moment of peace.
It is not a happy ending, because we know, of course, that the dogs are doomed. But they have had their revenge.
• • •
It’s easy to see why many people—including myself, before a high school English teacher set me straight—believe that someone once said, Music soothes the savage beast.
Music has charms to soothe a savage breast is what the playwright William Congreve actually wrote. But it’s part of our mythology: a wild or angry animal calmed or tamed by music. Which makes sense, given all we know about how music can affect the spirits of a human being.
In White God, right before a dog is put to death, it is placed in a room with a TV showing the old Tom and Jerry cartoon The Cat Concerto, in which Tom plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
I don’t know if playing music really can soothe a dog’s breast, but on the internet I find it among suggestions for dealing with canine depression.
(Are you writing a book? Are you depressed? Are you looking for a pet? Is your pet depressed?)
But what kind of music?
I once had a rabbit that I let run loose in the house. In the living room was a stereo whose two large speakers sat on the floor. Whenever music was put on, the rabbit would make his way to a speaker and plant himself there. Usually he’d just lie still, listening, or maybe he’d start to groom his ears. But if I played Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” he would get up and cavort around the room.
What kind of music? Cheerful? Mellow? Fast, or slow? The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2? How about some Schubert? (Oh, maybe not Schubert, whose pen, in the words of Arvo Pärt, was fifty percent ink, fifty percent tears.) How about Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew? (I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic, but sometimes that is the form love takes.)
I play him Miles Davis. I play him Bach and Arvo Pärt. I
play him Prince, Adele, and Frank Sinatra. And Mozart, lots of Mozart.
None of which appears to affect him at all. I don’t think he’s listening. If he is, I don’t think he cares.
Then I remember reading about an experiment in which a group of monkeys that were given a choice between listening to Mozart and listening to rock and roll chose Mozart, but when given a choice between Mozart and silence chose silence.
• • •
White God was inspired partly by the novel Disgrace. After losing his teaching position, David Lurie abandons his life in Cape Town. He retreats to a village on the Eastern Cape where his daughter Lucy has a small subsistance farm, and where he will end up working at an animal shelter. On the fate of the multitude of unwanted dogs, Lucy reflects: They do us the honor of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things.
• • •
A letter from my building’s management office saying that it has been brought to their attention that I am in violation of my lease. The dog must be removed from the premises immediately, or—
• • •
Does something bad happen to the dog?
PART SIX
The problem with this story, a student I’ll call Carter says about a story by a student I’ll call Jane, is that the protagonist isn’t like a character in a story. She’s more like a person in real life.
Twice, he says it, because my mind has wandered, and I have to ask him to repeat himself.
You’re saying the character is too real? I ask, though I know this is what Carter is saying.
The character in question is a girl with red hair and green eyes who bonds with a girl with blond hair and blue eyes only to discover that the guy the blonde has just dumped is the same person as the redhead’s new boyfriend. The color of the boyfriend’s eyes and hair are not specified, but he is described as tall. Later, another student, whom I’ll call Viv, will say she wants to know if the girlfriend is also tall. Why is that important? I ask, masking my exasperation (as much cannot be said for Viv, who hates being asked to explain anything and replies testily, Can’t I just ask?).
There are things I’d like to know too. For example, why, when these two girls want to talk, do they keep getting into their cars and driving to each other’s houses? Why do they never use their phones, not even to text to find out first if the other one is home? Why do they not know things about each other that they could easily have learned from Facebook?
It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about—also mostly college students—the internet barely exists.
Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since—more than two decades now—I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled life and techless story.
If anyone could shed light on the matter, I once thought, it would be the students. But they have not been much help. The most interesting response came from a grad student who happened to be the mother of a five-year-old. Whenever she reads him a story, she said, her son keeps interrupting: When do they go to the bathroom? Mommy, when do they go to the bathroom?
There are things we do all the time in real life that we don’t put in our stories: point taken. But no one spends ten hours a day going to the bathroom.
Think of Kurt Vonnegut’s complaint that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
But that is another mystery. Nothing in their heads and nothing between their legs is how one teacher I know describes the characters in workshop stories. This teacher is someone who’s been at it much longer than I have and is about to retire. He tells me it wasn’t always so.
I remember when there was plenty of sex, he says, a lot of it pretty kinky. Now everyone’s afraid of offending someone, triggering something. We should be grateful, though. Nowadays you could get in trouble for discussing sex in class.
I know another man, a teacher at an all-women’s college, who got in trouble for including Your First Sexual Experience on a list of suggested writing prompts, prompting some women to file a complaint. According to the dean, what the teacher had done could be—well, had been—considered a form of sexual harassment.
I have taken my school’s required online course, Sexual Misconduct Training, and had my eyes opened to the fact that any oral or written reference to sexual behavior including suggestive jokes or cartoons, or casual conversation about one’s own or any other person’s sex life, comes under the heading Sexual Misconduct. There did not seem to be any exception for a writing workshop. I worried about having assigned a story that included a scene of autoerotic asphyxiation, but it went right over my students’ heads. I enlightened them, then worried that perhaps I should not have done that.
Though I confess I only skimmed most of the course material, I was surprised when I came to the final Test Your Knowledge part (“No one will see the results except the test taker”), and got two of the ten questions wrong. It was suggested that I go back and read the relevant sections again, more carefully. But why bother, since I now knew that, yes, I was required to report immediately any knowledge I might have of a teacher dating a student, and that although not required I was strongly advised to report a colleague for telling an off-color joke, even if the joke didn’t personally offend me.
What I’m saying, says Carter, is that I know this girl. I can tell you exactly what she looks like.
How’s that? The only thing I could tell you about what this girl looks like is what Jane has stated: color of eyes, color of hair—the usual student way of describing a character, as if a story is a piece of ID like a driver’s license. So common is this that I’ve come to think the students must feel that saying too much about a character is rude, an invasion of privacy, and that it’s best to be as discreet—that is, nondescript—as possible. A student writing about Carter, for example, would put in that his eyes are brown but leave out the tattoo of barbed wire circling his neck, or the way he keeps rubbing the wrist that is sore from hours of making espresso drinks at the campus Starbucks. They would mention his curly brown hair but not that it is almost always, no matter how warm the day, covered by a black watch cap. They would probably even leave out the silver-dollar-sized ear gauges, which I can never look at without wincing.
I can tell you everything about her, Carter says.
To me, the main character is as thin and gray as this strand of hair I just brushed from my sleeve. But to Carter, the problem is not that she’s too vague, but that she’s all too familiar.
It is his perennial critique: What’s the point in writing stories about the kind of people you meet every day in real life?
Dangerous, Flannery O’Connor called letting students criticize one another’s manuscripts: the blind leading the blind.
Carter’s own literary ambition is to be the next George R. R. Martin. His novel in progress depicts epic clashes between imaginary kingdoms waging never-ending war in pursuit of power, dominance, and revenge. Unlike his idol, though, he can’t be taken to task for scenes of sexual violence. There is no rape or incest in his pages. There is no sex at all, and women are hardly mentioned. When people in class express doubts about a novel that doesn’t include any significant female characters, Carter shrugs and says nothing. But alone in my office he tells me that, in fact, there are women in his novel. And there is sex, he says. Loads of it. Most of it violent. There is rape. There is gang rape. There is incest.
I delete all that for the workshop, he says.
He rolls his eyes when I ask him why.
Are you kidding? You know how people would react. I mean, like, the women? I could get kicked out of school.
When I say I’m sure no such thing would happen, he is not convinced. Today he is wearing hi
s black watch cap (oh what is he watching?) low on his brow, which gives him a Cro-Magnon look. His stretched lobes make his ears resemble the floppy ears of one of his fictional half-humans.
Well, I’m not taking any chances, he says. But trust me, it’s all in there. All the rough stuff, he adds. Which triggers something in me. Which he notices.
But if you wanted to see it, he says, I’d show you.
I don’t think that’s necessary, I stammer, and he gives me a knowing smirk.
• • •
Most of my students do it. Some of my fellow teachers do it. People who work in publishing do it. All are more likely to do it if the writer is a woman. But when did it start, this habit of referring to writers you’ve never met by first name.
• • •
A book festival event in Brooklyn. I catch the 2 train at Fourteenth Street. The car is full. I see two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, seated near me, but not close enough for me to hear their conversation. Body language suggests that they are friends, or colleagues, rather than a couple. Something tells me they are on their way to the same place I am. A half hour later, at Atlantic Avenue, they get off with me. It’s a Saturday night, the huge station is packed, I soon lose sight of them. The event is in a hall several blocks from the station. When I get there I go straight to the bar, and there they are, the man and woman from the 2 train, in line just ahead of me.
• • •
This semester I share an office with another teacher. She is a new hire, in fact this is her first time teaching. As it happens, only a few years ago this young woman was a student of mine. Same program, same school.
She sometimes does meditation in the office, and the air is suffused with the mimosa or orange-blossom scent of the candles she burns.
Because we teach on different days we don’t usually see each other, but we keep in touch through messages and notes, and she sometimes thoughtfully leaves me a treat, a cookie or a chocolate bar or a packet of smoked almonds. Once, for my birthday, she filled the office with flowers.
