Kitty Continued

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….