mry writes

*a story*

The old man glanced over the top of his book and across the table. He looked at the lithe young cat sitting in front of the window, erect and prim-looking.

“You know you are not supposed to be up there.”

He tried to impress the cat with his mock irritation. He reached across and scratched her head for a moment before nudging her off the table, saying “Down!”

“Talk about mixed messages”, he muttered. “No wonder they have control of the place.”

The cat climbed onto the opposite chair and looked across the table at him. She decided not to push the situation. Instead, she climbed down and walked around the table to his chair. She stretched up to his thigh and softly touched it with her front paws. When he shifted slightly, she took it as encouragement and lightly sprang to his lap. He lightly and absent-mindedly fluffed her back while continuing to read the paper.

The old man took his hand off the young cat and reached around the book for his cup. It felt light in his hand. He sighed. He could not recall drinking any of it and now it was almost empty.

After setting the cup down he absent-mindedly ran his finger around the rim. When his finger ran across the chipped area he stopped and picked the cup up again. Peering at it to see if the old chip had enlarged into a crack, he turned it over to see the opposite side. The last of the cold tea spilled onto the book in front of him and ran down towards his lap. Oddly embarrassed, since there was no one other than the cat to observe his clumsy action, he quickly set the cup down and harrumphed.

He folded the paper and laid it down. He removed his glasses. With his now-naked eyes he stared out the window, looking through blurry eyes at the lake. He sat and stared at it for a couple of minutes. Finally, he shook his head in a vain attempt to shake off unwanted thoughts.

“So where is your brother now? You two were sure going at it a few minutes ago. Did you wear him out already? You know you need to have a bit more respect for us old ones.”

He stroked her head, then scratched under her chin. She raised her chin in a gesture of cat ecstasy. Her purr motor came to life as he indulged her for a minute, and as he indulged her he felt a sense of peace mixed with loneliness.

The old man eyed the young cat and wondered who was really getting the better part of the deal. Was it the free-loading cats in his house, or himself? He felt a twinge of guilt and anxiety. Had he the right to consider only himself, and not consider the wishes and needs of his companions?

While he, like most humans, was blind to the fact that cats might have wishes and needs beyond those that humans ascribed to them, he did ascribe to them basic emotions such as loss, longing, and the capacity to care. In this fashion he elevated them above the level of dumb brutes. In his capacity to believe that they might care, might feel loss and longing, he also elevated himself above the level of dumb brute.

But the cats had no real say, no real control, over their situation. Unless they were willing and able to strike out on their own, to become feral or to purr their way into a new situation of their own choosing, they were basically at his mercy. He felt a pang in his heart.

He wandered into the study. It was a room overflowing with memories. His books; Alex’s books. Maya’s books, full of stories he had read, re-read, re-read, when little Maya was a sponge for words. Pictures. Hand-drawn elementary art and sophisticated college sketches. Photos. First days, last days, momentous events. He took a box of snapshots off a shelf and randomly pulled some out.

After wandering through the box of memories for close to an hour the old man, also known as Sam, set aside the photos. He sighed. Time to set aside the memories and to move on. The slow decay of memories and an aching for what he could no longer have would have to reach an end.

Sam thought of how he had encouraged Maya to look forward and try to act in her long-term interest. After years, a lifetime, of prescribing a positive and active course, it was time for him to mix in a few drams of sugar to leaven the bitterness of inaction and uselessness.

It was time to follow his oft-stated prescription. Act. Act, not react, dammit it. Determine one’s own course, rather than be swept along by events and actions of others. Decide where to go, how to get there, what to do there. And then do it. Be true, be content, maybe even be happy, but certainly try to be useful.

These thoughts swept in a fresh wave of nostalgia, remembrances of younger days when the centre of the world had been his women. The reality was they were gone. One had purported to be his life-partner, but in the end that was not true. He was sad, and his sadness was tinged with anger. Anger that his life had continued without her. It was not that she set out to deceive him, for her body had deceived her as well, and too soon. She was gone before either of them was ready for it. She died with so much life yet unlived and with great angst at leaving him and Maya.

The old cat, the young cat, the photo boxes, the nostalgia. These things had to be left behind. He knew the cats would be safe and loved, though neither Maya nor they yet knew they were joining forces. Hardest of all, even Maya, his reason for going on, had to be left behind. After all, the past, and even the present, could be a drag on living. You could not progress far if you were trailing an anchor behind you, slowing your progress and hindering your forward movement. Not that Maya or the cats were drags on his life; not at all. They had kept him going for a long time after Alex was gone. He feared he was about to betray them by his actions.

“Better to act now while I can think clearly. Look at George… He was betrayed by his mind before he was able to do anything about it. I won’t let that happen to me. I am not going to go like that. Sitting in a chair all day, drooling on myself and not caring. Shitting myself and not knowing. That is not for me.” He no longer felt silly talking to the cats.

George’s metamorphosis was essentially complete. First he lost any semblance of his old mind. Gradually, then fast, he had lost his awareness of the world around him. The alteration in George had been insidious, a creeping loss of function. It had been so painful to watch, especially after the loss of Alex.

Alex was still vibrant and active, acutely aware of the world and interacting with it right to the moment she left it. It was not fair. George, who was now nobody, was trapped in that old body of his, lingering as a shell of a person. It was enough to scare Sam into action. Drastic action. Sam was not going to drool his last years away, a nobody trapped in a human shell.

Alex had gone the right way. Quick, active, living until the very moment of dying. It was the right way if you had a choice. How was he, Sam, aka the old man, going to end? Not passively declining. Not slowly sliding into lonely bitterness. When Alex died he had resolved to control his life right to the very end, just as she had. He was not going to sit around doing the same old things in the same old way with the same old people at the same old places. Sit and watch as they disappeared to a dark hole one by one. When it was his turn he would not shirk; he would not shriek. But he was certainly not planning to sit around wasting what time he had, waiting for his box to be dragged out to the mud.

He looked at the framed pictures on the shelves for several minutes: young Alex and young Sam on a high rocky ledge. A slightly older Alex by a forested stream, holding little Maya. An older Maya looking back at Sam and Alex as she was leaving for her first day at high school. Maya and Alex at college graduation.

Both of his women, the centres of his life, left him behind. Maya stopped by occasionally. She was still sort of available, but she had her own life to live. Alex was available only in pictures and memories. That was what was left: memories and occasional moments. That, and time. Time for loneliness, time for aimless wandering, time for thinking.

He knew he spent too much time in the last few years being lost. Lost in loneliness, lost in thought. He tried to keep active, tried to keep his days full, but there was a hollowness pervading everything. More and more he felt that he was betraying Alex. He had let his time, and even his life, slip into greyness and meaninglessness. He told himself that he was holding on for Maya, but perhaps he was not. Perhaps he was holding her back.

Sam sighed. He sat at the desk and opened the second drawer. He took out a sheet of the good paper. He dug under the stack and found a matching envelope. From the middle drawer he removed his Waterman. He placed the paper on his desk and uncapped the pen. For a moment he reminisced. Maya had given him the pen for his 60th birthday, back when time still to come stretched long.

He gripped the pen and tried to feel Maya’s touch on its smooth barrel. He felt, or imagined he did, a bit of her spirit permeating the pen. He was sure it had not been a quick, almost thoughtless, purchase. No, she had been thinking of him. She had seen him stroking its nib across the paper when she bought it. And now her touch flowed from it, flowed into his fingertips. It was ironic that he would be sending her this message using the tool she provided.

Sam scratched the nib across the paper to start the flow of ink.
He wrote a simple message: “I have lived, I have loved, I have lost. Now it is time for me to find a new way.”

He folded the page, put it in an envelope, and pressed the flap closed. He turned the envelope over and wrote her name on the front. Maya. She would find it when she stopped by for dinner that evening, a dinner they would not share.

He placed the envelope on top of a pile of folders which would tell her where everything was, told her what she needed to know about accounts and papers and such. He took his old slouch hat from the chair, picked up his travel pack and parka, and walked out the door. He was careful to close it properly, then walked down to the street and off to find himself in whatever corners of the earth he wandered to.

The old cat and the young cat sat side by side in the window. They silently watched him go. He did not look back.

END