Catland - a humorous fantasy

Chapter Two: Greg Loses His Mind

Three weeks later, Greg was going insane.

The symptoms of his madness were relatively subtle. He didn't rant and rave and throw rotten fruit at pedestrians. He didn't prance naked about the neighborhood, singing old songs about weirdly generous kings. He didn't even put on a tinfoil hat and pester strangers with elaborate theories concerning dental implants or Martians. He was not, in short, a picturesque madman. He had simply become obsessed with his cat.

To be fair, the cat—knowingly or otherwise—had done a great deal to provoke his curiosity.

But perhaps we should back up.

For the first week Greg and the cat maintained a strict policy of mutual indifference. Greg had refused to give the cat a name, because a name would imply some sort of relationship, and Greg was frankly not ready for that kind of commitment. He also refused to talk to the cat, because talking to cats was the kind of thing crazy people did—and anyhow, Greg preferred talking to himself.

The cat, for his part, said nothing. The cat, after all, was a cat.

Greg had purchased some cat food and filled a china bowl with it, but the cat ignored the bowl, as it also ignored the litter box. At first, Greg assumed that the cat was simply not toilet-trained (box-trained?), and he kept looking for little feline deposits in the closets and corners of his too-big house. After a few days of looking and finding nothing, he came to the conclusion that the cat must be doing its business elsewhere—though, since he hadn't installed a cat door and wasn't in the habit of leaving windows open, he couldn't imagine where "elsewhere" would be. To judge by the fact that the amount of cat food in the china bowl remained constant, and the fact that the cat's weight and general appearance remained constant too, the cat must also be dining out.

So far, the cat's behavior was peculiar, but not exactly fascinating. Greg didn't want to eat cat food or defecate in a litter box, so he wasn't all that surprised that the cat didn't want to, either. He assumed that the cat—which after all was descended from the fierce lions of the African savannah—must be living off mice or something. He had never seen or heard any mice in his house, but then again his senses were only human. Cats could smell a thousand times more acutely than humans. Or maybe that was dogs.

The litter-box problem was more perplexing—but it still didn't exactly captivate his imagination. Cat poop so rarely does.

Then, just about a week after bringing the cat home from the shelter, Greg noticed that the cat's deep scratches—no, his wounds—had opened up again. Greg instantly felt a pang of guilt, though he couldn't see what he had done wrong. Those gashes were at least six months old; they dated from before the cat had been taken into the shelter. What could possibly have happened to make them gape all over again?

Picking up the cat and examining it more closely, Greg saw that his initial impression had been mistaken. These were not old wounds freshly opened; these were new wounds, bright and red and ghastly, showing against the healed-over scars like slashes of fresh paint on a faded canvas. The cuts were deep—troublingly deep. They were also bleeding. They were—Greg realized, with a sudden sick feeling—bleeding quite a lot.

Greg bandaged the cat crudely and brought it straight to the vet. The vet asked a lot of questions, and Greg could see that his answers were unsatisfying. The vet kept glancing at Greg from under his bushy eyebrows, and Greg realized—with a hot flash of anger and shame—that the vet was wondering if he, Greg, had inflicted these wounds himself.

When the cat was all patched up, Greg took it home and sat on the couch with it, stroking its head. This was the first time he had actually petted his pet, and the cat didn't seem to mind. It didn't purr and it didn't nuzzle, but it sat in Greg's arms peaceably enough, and once or twice it closed its eyes while Greg's big hand swept across the top of its head. Greg took this as a sign of enjoyment, so he continued stroking the cat until his hand cramped. Then he got up to make dinner. The cat remained on the couch, curled up into its usual ball.