Agent of Karma
A friend of mine dated a man whose cat was an agent of Karma.
In the days when she was a new homeowner with few furnishings or appliances, she met him at the laundromat. Perhaps the rows and rows of swirling clothes distracted her from a big red flag she should have seen waving. He was a cute, witty, athletic redhead with a master’s in math and a decent job – a refreshing change from a cavalcade of music-industry slackers.
He had an off-the-wall, dry sense of humor, an odd combination of imagination and sarcasm. She guessed it ran in the family, as his sister wrote for The Simpsons for a year or two. He didn’t always use his powers for good, though, and occasionally turned them on her in the form of meanness and condescension.
The man had once lived next door to an old lady who owned far too many cats. He said he had felt sorry for her, and offered, halfheartedly, to lighten her burden by taking one of the cats. He expected her to turn down his offer, but instead, without hesitation, she picked up a pretty white cat with blue eyes, and said, “Here, take this one.” He named the cat Parnell, after the sausage makers in his home state of Pennsylvania.
He didn’t know about white cats with blue eyes. White cats with crazed looks in their blue eyes. He soon figured out, though, that Parnell, like many other white, blue-eyed cats, was deaf. Moreover, Parnell was a destructive sensation-seeker, and completely batshit.
This fellow didn’t have a single pair of matched glasses, bowls, cups, or plates, which seemed odd for a 30-something professional. It turns out that Parnell would regularly get into the cabinets and onto the shelves, and swat the dishes onto the floor. The cat did this a few times while she was over at his apartment, eating dinner off of cheap, mismatched plates and drinking out of mismatched glasses. He would yell at the cat, but it couldn’t hear him, and would keep on wrecking the kitchen until he got up to chase it away.
A previous girlfriend had felt sorry for him and his broken dishes, and had given him a set. Those had also been mostly destroyed. So had the glass in the bathroom where he put his toothbrush. So had the bottles in the medicine cabinet. So had various other items around the house, items whose only crime had been that of being breakable – and therefore possibly faintly audible to a deaf cat? Or perhaps it was the most reliable way for the cat to get tangible attention from its owner.
Sometimes they would be sitting on the balcony of his third-floor apartment, and Parnell would leap through a hole in the screen, and over the railing. The first time she saw it happen, she was on the balcony alone, and was certain the cat had to have suffered a grievous injury after plummeting three stories to the ground. When she summoned the courage to look over the edge for Parnell’s broken, bloody body, ahe saw instead that the cat had vanished. A few minutes later Parnell was waiting to be let in at the front door.
As for intimacy, she said it was like being humped by a belt sander. A rough and impersonal tool. Sometimes she was actually relieved when he had to get up and stop Parnell from breaking things.
He bore the destruction in his home without question: it was simply the way things were. Later, when she tired of his barbs and his sanding, and left him to endure his cat-induced hail of plates alone, she couldn’t help but hope that someday he questioned the forces of the universe that brought Parnell into his life.
posted by katlanta @ 12:24 PM
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