Montalvo has this theory: why
study history since nobody knows it anyway and we’re all fucked to relive it
anyhow, so why bother?
OK—this revision of Santayana’s famous dictum left me
speechless, a state that only Montalvo seems to be able to induce. But I
thought of him today, as I read the fifteenth article in The New York Times about
the United States and torture. And why did I think of Montalvo? Because I
wondered if he knew the source of my previous thought, which had been, “will
nobody rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
It was Henry II who said it, four men who heard it, and one
priest—actually the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket—who got it. “Got
it” in our modern terminology of being offed, on the steps to the altar in the
cathedral.
So it certainly could be argued that the four men had misled
Henry, since he hadn’t said, “hey, go kill the archbishop.” And one has to
admit, how many times have we all of us said something like, “I could just kill
that guy?”
Of course, of course, what Henry should have said
was, “please use all means that are consistent with international, nation and
local laws and policy to mitigate the influence—if that influence be undue or
unjustified—of his eminence, the Archbishop.”
Well, we have one president who thinks and talks like that—and
he taught constitutional law at Georgetown. And we have an ex-president who
took so many detours through his sentences that he rarely got to any
destination. So Bush made some ringing declaration—“Gentlemen, your mission is
to safeguard the nation!”—to the CIA, and they went off the deep end.
Oh—except they didn’t, since the Department of Justice
signed off on it all, as Dick Cheney has utterly no problem admitting. But one
thing should have been a red flag: the term “enhanced interrogation technique.”
Look, what’s the first thing that anyone has to do to
disguise an unpleasant reality? Of course water-boarding and what we now have
learned is rectal feeding—sorry, hope you’re not reading this over the
breakfast table—can’t be called torture. So it’s enhanced—OK, let’s just call
it EIT.
So of course over my coffee I was pondering the many
enhancements that—if I were president of the United States—I could get away
with. Enhanced amatory techniques, for example, for when I wish sexual activity
and my victim does not. OK—that gets Ohio State off the hook. Enhanced
merchandise discount, if the term “five-finger discount” becomes too much of a
cliché.
It’s a day when I yearn for poetry, since it lives at the
opposite end spectrum of all this purposeful linguistic deceit. And I need
music, too, since my MacBook Pro has gotten all uppity and refuses to speak to,
or even recognize, my new Galaxy phone. “This device is not recognized,” it
tells me, and what do I tell it? “Yes, you do, in fact, you just did. It’s just
the same as Eeyore, or whoever it was, shouting ‘Nobody’s home,” to Pooh. So
stop it, make friends, and put my music on my phone!”
And I need music, too, since the drama of Kitty is still
unfolding. The problem? Raf can’t get the look that Kitty gave him last Sunday,
after Raf had screamed at him. So Kitty is marginally eating, and how will Raf
go on, with that look of Kitty’s burned into his brain? So should we take him
to the vet, after all?
I left it up to Raf, so he called the vet, or rather the
receptionist, who told him, as she had told me two days ago, “3:30.”
If you have lived in Puerto Rico, you’ll know what this
means: you are ostensibly being given an appointment, but in reality the
receptionist is telling everybody “3:30.” So that means that we will
arrive, and the waiting room will be full of dogs,, cats, and maybe a bird or
two, as well as the anxious parents. And “3:30” will become 5:30, when the
results come back, and the need for intravenous treatment announced.
Then the decision will have to be made: leave Kitty
overnight, or try and take him to the vet first thing in the morning, run the
IV in him, and then take him home. The question? How likely is it that Kitty
will jump into the cat carrier tomorrow, and say, “hey, let’s go back to that
nice place we were at yesterday!”
Equally, how likely is it that, once there, we will say,
“well, let’s not treat?” I learned this with my mother: if you go to a
hospital, you’re gonna get treated. So what did I tell my brother, when he saw
my mother have a seizure? Don’t call the ambulance—keep her home with
the Valium in her hand.
So it’s now several hours later, and it happened just as it
was scripted. I found the red cat carrier in the back bedroom, and discovered
that the salt air had gotten to the steel zipper, which meant that Raf had to
slip the carrier over his shoulder and grasp both sides of the front of the
case, all the while eyeing the top of the front of the case, through which an
imminently fleeing Kitty was periodically sticking his head. So Raf was
periodically pushing Kitty’s head down with his chin—all the while saying “bandito Kitty—which was excellent fodder
for the cameras and the comments of the denizens of the three enormous cruise
ships that had docked at the ports. So guess how many Facebook pages we’re
gonna be on today?
“We’re taking a cab,” I told Raf.
“Oh, but I think we can take the bus…” said Raf.
I’m a saint, an absolute saint—we all know that. There are,
however, certain occasions when my voice borrows a few steel girders from
whatever construction site is handy. Right—so we took a cab.
And of course my plan, which would be to simply run the
fluids in and take the cat home? Well, naturally it wasn’t that simple. So
what, from a veterinarian point of view, was the best treatment?
“It’s your decision to make,” I told Raf, rather meanly,
since seeing him caressing Kitty, nuzzling Kitty, and murmuring to Kitty, had
put a few thousand daggers through my heart. Worse, Kitty knew perfectly well
what was playing out, and was putting up no resistance.
“I just keep remembering that Pink—our beloved first cat—had
revived after the IV treatment,” said Raf.
“You’ve made your decision,” I told Raf, and he could only
nod.
The vet carried Kitty off, my imagination of how hard it
would be to get a vein into Kitty went into overdrive, and we decided: time to
go to Walmart, to get another carrier.
Is it crazy? Yes. But it also taught me something about the
amazing nobility of animals, who know perfectly well that the end is near, and
have no fear or reluctance to get to that end, but who patiently allow their
humans to put them through pain and bother…all because their humans can’t let
go.
Could I be that noble?
Don’t think so….
