The Disappearance of Basie the Cat
Rainy and miserable, cat at my side.
Prez, where is Basie?
Did you rub him out?
Now your claws catch at my pajama bottoms. You look so plaintive. You want affection; not any definite amount just more, more, more.
Basie is gone. We looked for him in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, after dark; no small thing. It has rained more than twenty-four hours straight.
Where is your companion? Don’t you care?
He’s out in the rain somewhere, the fur on his corpse matted and soaked and you miaow for me to stroke your warm fur, and blankly gaze off at the apartment’s bone white tenement walls.
Are you thinking of Basie? Is there a Basie anymore? Your beautiful owner called in her voice that sounds like Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” for Basie when the rain began. We searched underbrush and desolate streets. You are warm and loved and alive. Where is your companion?
I say Basie’s name and you shift. Again and you nuzzle my arm. Again and you turn around and lie on your back. I say “avalanche” and you shift again. I say “Cyrano de Bergerac” and you shift again. You really have no idea what I’m saying. It has been sub-arctic for two days, now the heat is on and it feels like the Amazon basin. I change into boxers and yawn. Outside it is frozen and soaked and Mary’s loved one is lost somewhere.
Now her peremptory sister is here and they’ve gone off in the rain to post pictures that say, “I am not a stray, I want to go home!”
I am just a lodger; the sister has ignored me. As a man, I am supposed to be in charge of such expeditions and such things as the loss of cats can be attributed to me even if I was asleep at the time; so the sister treats me like a eunuch that has been neglectful of its duties. When she arrived I was in my undershirt and boxers. It turned out that it was boiling in the apartment because she turned the stove all the way up instead of all the way off. So I was probably soporific from poisoning, not fatigue. When she comes back into the apartment she brings such cold with her that I put the pajama bottoms back on. And she’s short with me.
Prez leaps seven feet to the ledge of the window in my room. I see that down below his owner is searching the adjacent vacant lot for Basie. The flashlight wavers in the rain, darts across the graffiti-spattered concrete wall adjacent. The posters will soak through before midnight.
It reminds me of posters I saw on the Upper East Side. They said, “Have you seen my grandfather?” and had a picture of a late 70’s gentleman, dapper in that antiquated style grandfathers have, like they can now buy all the clothes they admired but couldn’t afford during the Great Depression. The poster explained that he has Alzheimer’s and disappeared from a home near Lexington and 86th I remember I cried instantly after reading it.
Just yesterday Mary’s phone was stolen from out of her car. She says she has to leave this neighborhood. Funny to leave right as it’s being gentrified: the mini-mall with the Target and Chuck E. Cheese’s is constantly packed, a melting pot of Brooklyn multi-culti that let doors shut in my face and run into me then wait for me to apologize because I’m white. Or bourgeois. I don’t advocate a world of strip-malls and outlet stores, but I also don’t think muggings are a signifier of cultural flavor. Anyway, I’m not white: I’m Jewish.
Now they’re back. This has been a family affair. I’m too new to have been included but not so much that the sister won’t seem to imply that I could have been out there with them. Of course, there have been two full days of sunlight since Basie’s disappearance during which they could have searched. In the middle of an ice-cold night, before the landlord finally put the heat on, Basie was being annoying, running around, keeping Mary awake. She put him out in the backyard of the complex as usual. He never came back.
It’s just as likely another neighbor got fed up with his constant clawing at doors and miaowing, or general scampering hyperactivity and offed him. Maybe Prez set the whole thing up; a conspiracy.
Where is the goddamn cat? The vacant lot on the other side is dangerous; it was pitted by a developer that said he would build new condos or a brownstone. Instead he left a giant hole in the Earth with a tall fence around it. Unfortunately, the backyard of our complex slopes up until the fence is only about four feet up; as Prez has just shown me, these cats can clear seven feet.
Basie is still AWOL. The sister is still pretending I don’t exist. I venture that perhaps my entrance into the apartment, into the room Mary was sleeping in for years, has changed the chemistry of the air somehow. Basie wanted to get into the room I stay in that night. He had been in it the night before, my first in the apartment, slamming his head on the door and knocking the VCR off the TV; he made me let him out and then in again at 4:30am; the heat wasn’t on yet and I was pacing to keep warm anyway. Mary was out of town that night. I eventually had to put one of the ten boxes that clutter my small room against the door to keep him from barging in.
The sister leaves without acknowledging me. Mary tells me that is typical of her. We have a beer, me on her daybed/sofa and her across the room at her table eating dinner. We speak for a long time about God, cats, the two-party system, and the dubious benefits of higher education. Then she decides it is time to go on another Basie patrol. I say goodnight and let her go, thinking of it as a personal quest. After she’s been gone for five minutes I remember where we live and scramble to get on some outdoor clothes. I run out the front door and realize I have no idea where she’s gone. I decide to circle the block. As usual, I get strange looks from the few people I pass. I can’t find her anywhere. The streets are pretty much abandoned, windswept. I round the block and point a flashlight into the vacant lot with the pit. I look around outside the building for any site of Mary. I enter the building and pass through it to the backyard.
The backyard area has a patio made of square stones, with a table, chairs and a barbecue. Behind this there is the slope with its inexplicably thick underbrush. I point the flashlight at my feet as I wend along the dirt pathway; the yard continues back about thirty feet to a tall fence. There is no place where even this cat could have jumped over. It is still drizzling. I try to listen for distant mewling but the neighborhood is suddenly alive with a thousand sounds: cracklings of twigs, wind through the underbrush, passing cars. I go back inside and find the chain is attached inside the door and Mary is in the bathroom. I try to unlock the chain from the outside but I can’t, which is comforting. Mary lets me in, apologizing for locking me out. I tell her I came looking for her. She says it’s sweet. I go to bed and dream about the two-party system.
Speaking earlier, I compared our conception of God and the third party to Santa Claus. Everyone believes that if there were an effective third party it would address all of their specific concerns, forgetting that the only effective third party in recent memory was Ross Perot. Meanwhile, with God we all imagine an anthropomorphized puppy-fairy. We can’t picture what God would actually be like any more than we can really imagine what we look like to other people. How can the same God that made Bruce Springsteen make the Holocaust? There must be some other bad guy trying to countermand whatever God does. That’s ridiculous, of course. God even takes away cats.
I say maybe there are two essential forces of order and chaos, no matter who controls them, and heat represents chaos and cold represents order. Ultimate cold creates unchangeable order and molecular motion stops at zero degrees Kelvin, like in space. Ultimate heat creates chaotic excitement of molecules: the sun. Yin and yang, yadda-yadda, but the chaos increases the complexity and the order keeps it from spinning out of control. Iterations increase in complexity exponentially; without the cold, entropy would reign and heat-death would result. Entropy, chaos, critical mass exceeded, produces aberrations and cancer. In the end it’s like toasting a marshmallow over a fire: too little and you’re there forever, too much and you’re up in flames. Problem being that there isn’t actually a force such as “cold” in the universe, there is only “less hot.”
She told me about the hometown hero that came back to her small city and slowly drank himself to death among small-minded people that backbit even as they kissed up. Even after his death they would couple a personal instance meant to enhance themselves by association with a sneer of distaste. I reminded her of the passage in the New Testament where Jesus is chased out of Nazareth with rocks when he returns there to preach; he says that the prophet is acclaimed everywhere but in his hometown; the people can’t accept that genius came so close and did not touch them.
She told me that her boyfriend is in a theological seminary. I ask if he’s especially observant. She says, “Not at all,” in a somewhat forlorn voice. She’s Irish Catholic. She asks me if I and other Jews don’t believe that Jesus Christ ever existed. I change the subject.
I wake up the next morning and Mary is not in the apartment. Prez is spastic. Mary comes in, her eyes soaked with crying. She tells me this is why she doesn’t usually have a lodger, so no one can see her like this. I grasp her hand, sit her down at the table, and put on some music for her, “Amorino” by Isobel Campbell. She offers me some coffee but I have to go to work.
The day I walk out into is a different world. The Red Sox have forced game seven and the Democrats are ahead in the polls with thirteen days left. Things feel like they could be turning around. I’m probably wrong. They buy it every year. God, what if we win?
********
The Red Sox win and still no sign of Basie. I am reading a novel by Haruki Murakami where the protagonist has lost his cat. Through chance he gets a job where he makes a large amount of money in a short time. The first thing he does with the funds is to go out and buy a very expensive, comfortable and anonymous looking pair of shoes. He leaves his old shoes at the store, and when he arrives home the cat has returned, but it is different. I buy a pair of $200 black Ecco shoes, waterproof and insulated. I leave my old shoes under the seat on a city bus when I get off in Prospect Heights. I look around somewhat expectantly. My new shoes pinch. Basie is nowhere to be seen.
********
Prez has become more accustomed to being the sole beneficiary of Mary’s attentions. I remain the perfect lodger, trying to impress. I get a phone call and learn that a guy who lodged with me when I lived in Hollywood, Sam, has been beaten to death with a hammer by a boxer nicknamed the Harlem Hammer.
I remember once I went out of town and let Sam borrow my car until I returned. When I came back I found that not only had he replaced himself as a roommate with an unstable imbecile, but also he had backed into the imbecile’s friend’s car. Sam asked me to put it on my insurance and I refused. Then I found out that he didn’t have a driver’s license. In the police report it says that Sam and the Harlem Hammer were sharing an apartment, and the Hammer fled in Sam’s 1993 Seville with Texas plates. Sam came from Queens and had no license. Events are shrouded in mystery.
I lie on Mary’s daybed/sofa, petting Prez and reading Murakami. Basie and Sam have vanished completely. They are never coming back.