Our first glimpses of each other
I think about how stupid lucky you are, every day. You may have forgotten this, you’re still very young, but you didn’t always have me and mom around. I actually had quite a fulfilling, if not sedated, existence before you were born. Let’s just say I had want for very little. I did not have want for you. But it was a brisk January day when your mommy May walked into the office with a blanket bunched up by her breast and a meek face peering out from over it. She had been out walking when she saw a man stride past, swinging a box violently in his hand. You know the type, a hard-faced farmer that leaves cigarette smell lingering in the air. He turned into an alley, then a few minutes later she turned into an alley, and saw the same box sitting square in a dumpster half-full of rotting food and rotting boxes. That’s why we call you dumpster kitten or trash cat. She plucked you from destitution and sat down across from me at work, brimming with anger at what she’d seen. As you pawed around in between chair and table legs, mewling non-stop and shivering, we looked at each other. “Can we keep him?” I asked out of posterity.
We don’t know what your first name was, probably nothing at all, but when we met we started calling you Lucky. It seemed apt. We even gave you a proper Chinese name, 乐奇 leqi. Le for happy, qi for curious (as in, killer of cats). Xizhou is a town of pet-owners, and within minutes word had circulated that the two foreigners were taking in one of their own. Your kitten carrier, litterbox, and the first few days of food came to us free from the hands of a coworker who had lost his own cat a year before. We considered the spectral implications of taking items from the recently deceased, but I’m not exactly flush with cash at the moment so the marinations of that thought were short-lived. We lifted you from the rancid box as I lowered myself on the asphalt floor of my room, our eyes level. May took a bus forty-five minutes away for food bowls, litter, and toys. I don’t intend to make you feel guilty, but that first night, I just couldn’t sleep. As soon as I turned off the lights and crawled into my bed, you leapt in with me and buried under the duvet, nestled in the crook of my knee. I thought cats slept on the floor? I laid there petrified for hours, terrified that in my unconscious slumber I would roll over onto that being next to me, small as the palm of my hand, and wake up in the morning to a dead cat. We’re in bed together now actually, as I write this. My computer leaning against my thigh, your body warm near my feet, eyes unfocused as the night and clacking of the keyboard wear on.
I’ve never met a cat I liked, and that included you. I didn’t like your fragile body, estimated at five weeks old at time of abduction. I didn’t like it when you crawled up onto my chest and started purring. What a foreign sound. I already have my big dog back home, and I felt that by taking you in, I was committing a betrayal (he still doesn’t know about you yet and I would appreciate discretion on your part moving forward). But I responded to your neediness, and I think that was what saved us. You need me for your survival, and if I don’t sit with you in the sun every morning, come back home during my lunch break to change your water, or keep an eye on the viscosity of your bodily functions, you’re not going to be okay. You don’t have a mother cat to teach you, nurse you, or discipline you. I used to run to the litterbox after you’d used it and grab your paws with my own hands, both of us going through the motions of burying things in the sand. As you know, we call you Sen 千 now. The name of a brave girl from a movie we love.
Not long after we’d found you, May and I decided it might be wise to take you to a vet. It occurred to us that the reason you were so unceremoniously dumped into the ether was because your first family didn’t want to deal with some disease, an illness we would have no way of knowing about until it was too late. That was a day. There’s just something about a countryside veterinarian. The bus ride took us an hour and a half, and you were shaking in your carrier the whole time. May and I took turns holding you and susurrating in your ears, in your belly, into your back. We arrived at the clinic early, peering through the grates until a hard-boiled woman unlocked the doors. As the lights turned on, the howls and yips of interned animals rang out. Dogs with limps and snaggled-teeth began to emerge from the corners, sniffing you out and causing your claws to attach to skin that had previously belonged to my shoulder. May and I looked at each other, wondering if, in our mission to protect you from disease, we had brought you into the very place you might contract one. As we waited for the vet to finish looking you over, we saw a mangy dog get stepped on by another client, and a mixture of blood and excrement violently ejected from its rear. May and I, aghast, clutched you between us and vowed never to return. I think you like our current, different vet. I’m not getting the same conviction out of you when you nip at his hands.
You’re growing, Sen. I have pictures of us in the early days when I would take you to the office, so you wouldn’t be alone in the mornings, and you’re a mite. And as you grow, you become more intrepid and courageous. You’re a pain in the ass, but you’re so brave. Nothing scares you, not even if you tumble down from the top of my fridge and onto the cold floor. All you do is climb back up. You bolt out the door whenever I leave the room and make for the second floor of the courtyard. How many times have I asked you not to go up there? The landlord recently bought chickens and I know that’s where he keeps them. This is a non-negotiable. You do not have all your shots yet, so you will not approach the poultry.
You’re a pain in my ass in ways you can’t even comprehend. Remember last month, when we thought you might have worms, so we got you a little pill to take? It was traumatizing for May and I to feed you that thing, even wrapped up in a piece of pork we asked the kitchen staff to cook up special for you. In the process of holding you down and forcing it down your throat, you tore up my hand so badly I was bleeding onto the floor. As I walked to the sink, an older man saw my mangled limb and turned pale, insisting I rush myself to a clinic for a rabies shot. That seemed a bit dramatic. I suppose, yes, you’re not vaccinated against it yet because you’re still too small…and we did find you in a literal dumpster so it’s hard to know your medical history, but rabies? How could you have something as vicious as rabies without having already died, or at least exhibited symptoms? I laughed it off and washed my cuts, but after a couple of hours the thought persisted. I’d go, but only because it’s 100% fatal. I hate you for this. Did you know it’s five shots over the course of a month? And no consumption of coffee, alcohol, or seafood (?) during the course? I got to the hospital the next day, and officially leveled up on risk tolerance. Walking into that country hospital, the first foreigner to step in there since Nixon opened up China, just repeating the Chinese words for rabies, vaccine, and immunoglobulin under my breath. Next to me a farmer pulled down his pants and motioned for the nurse to give him a shot on the ass.
May and I are partners in this. Everything we do is in service to you, our baby, who needs us. The complaining, the clean-ups, the texts I send May at three in the morning when you’ve decided you’ve had enough sleep and want me to partake in a game of slaughter the moth— it’s all worth it to know we stole you away from that wicked life. You seem happy. We may not be momma cats, but you still retreat into primal bliss with your soft cotton blanket, kneading it between your paws every night, suckling on its surface. May takes my key in the afternoons to spend time with you, rub your ears, and play, even as you attempt to separate her fingers from the rest of her corporeal self.
You are my roommate, my baby, my ward. I live alone, but I have purpose with you, and someone to come home to. This was always going to be a short-term living engagement, a temporary room and a temporary life. We still don’t know what we’re going to do with you once our year in Xizhou is over, and we talk about finding you a good home among our loving friends. But every time I go through the motions of discussing it with May, I know in my heart that no one is going to love you the way I do. No one else saw you with the dirt in your eyes, crying for hours from hunger and fear. No one else lay frozen from 10 pm to 5 am, willing themselves to keep still.