Black Kitty
Written by Dr. Jonathan Brownlee
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” cooed a cool, dispassionate, tired female voice. A thin young woman was standing rigidly on the cold sidewalk underneath a large, nearly leafless, blackening oak tree. Her head was tilted upwards; she was viewing one of the highest branches on the giant, old tree. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” she cooed without inflection.
On one of the top branches of the pre-barren tree was perched a large, elegant black cat. The cat had nuclear waste-colored eyes, a hue mixed with bright emerald, dark yellow, and blood orange. It had pin-sharp whiskers and a very arrogant disposition. It sat on the bleak branch like a magnanimous monarch at his long-awaited coronation. The cat’s rich black coat of fine fur glowed with a healthy manicured burnish. On its regal face was a distinctly malice-free frown—the frown of a pondering philosopher or brooding scientist.
The thin woman thought to herself, “I am not imagining it. That cat is frowning at me. That cat has a fuckin’ frown on its face… weird.” The voice in her head was also dispassionate.
The woman methodically rubbed her twiggish neck. She was getting colder; microscopic bumps were beginning to crop up all over her forearms, triceps, and shoulders, and she could feel her northern-most vertebra sandwiching small strands of cartilage and bundles of sensitive nerves. She assumed rubbing the painful spot would help. It did not.
The large black cat looked down from the tree analytically[1]. Its adorable ears flickered and swiveled mechanically, like sensitive satellites picking up enemy signals. Its florescent eyes were peering through the woman like two laser beams in a quantum experiment. Its noble, human glare made the woman uncomfortable and confused. She wondered why the cat was wearing such a profound look, then she began to wonder if the cat was actually real. The cat looked too human to be a real cat, she thought. The eyes were too powerful; the face was too introspective, too high-minded, and too rational to be the face of a mere animal. The thin, cold woman began to contemplate whether the cat was a hallucination or some kind of illusion. She had never hallucinated before (that she could recall), so she had no way to determine if she was hallucinating now. The thought that she could be having some sort of hallucinatory episode, paired with the semi-conscious thought that she may have had other hallucinatory episodes she was unaware of, worried her for only a moment. Her mind quickly shifted to a skinny man jogging laboriously along the sidewalk in her direction. She decided to ask the man for help.
The slim man was wearing an orange shirt with the words “ON THE RUN!” embossed in black lettering across his pre-pubescent chest. He had on tiny nylon shorts that made the sound of paper ripping with every strenuous step, and his dazzling running shoes looked like long ovular rainbows (with what looked to be the aerial view of a metallic-grey overpass stitched on the side). His high-kneed strides were gangling, discordant, and awkward, and his face was twisted into a knot of concentrated discomfort.
“Excuse me, sir,” the thin woman shouted. She waved her hands over her head like an anxious kick returner signaling for a fair catch. The jogger’s face turned to annoyed irritation as he approached. He continued his quasi-rhythmic trot. He pulled out a tiny bud from his ear; the earbud was connected to a hair-thin cord that was attached to an expensive-looking purple rectangle.
“Uh-huh?” the man said breathlessly, poking deftly at the glossy rectangle. The jogger was so close to the woman she could smell his bitter odor (which reminded her of old, browning produce… “Bananas?”), and she could see the jagged pocks of pours leaking orbs of brown sweat from his emaciated face.
“I am very sorry to interrupt you, sir, but I need some help. You see that ca—, my cat? You see my cat is stuck up in that tree. Do you see it?”
“Uh-huh! What—want—me—do—bout—it?” the jogger said. He was trying hard to catch his breath while trying even harder to look like he wasn’t trying hard to catch his breath.
“So, you see my cat?!” The thin woman was surprised by just how relieved she was that the strange cat was not a figment of her imagination, that the cat actually existed in corporal space. The cat’s eerie coolness combined with her progressing fatigue and temperature-based discomfort made her second guess her own vision, and, to a certain extent, her own sanity.
“Yeah, lady! Da—that fat black c—” before the man could finish his thought, he was interrupted by a piercing sound from high-up in the tree. It was not a hiss, not the hiss of a cat anyway; it was more like the hiss of a broken industrial machine in the midst of exploding or the screech of a deranged man who truly thought himself a streaking bomb. The terrible sound was like an ominous shriek. The sound of a flashing firework bursting out of silence or of molten steel hitting cold water. The dissonant noise sat on the air like a difficult question. The slim man stopped jogging in place and looked at the woman with trepidation and horror.
“What wa- that? That sound? Was… was that… your cat!?” The jogger’s head was darting in all directions. His eyes were the size of silver dollars, and his crooked nose was flaring.
“I don’t know?” the thin woman said. Her voice was grave with concern. “It couldn’t have been the cat… right?”
“I don’t know!” the man shouted. “It’s your damn cat! What is this? Is this some kind of practical joke!? What you trying to pull, lady!?” His hand fumbled in his pocket for his earbuds.
“No, no!” The woman put her hand on the jogger’s wet forearm. “I don’t know! Maybe it was an airplane or something?”
The slim man harshly tugged his tiny arm away, stumbling backwards slightly. “No! Somethin’s weird!” he shouted. His voice was shaky, loud, and false. His dark eyes peered around in anticipation of more unearthly sounds. Within seconds he had taken off, moving at ten times his approaching speed. His jogging form was no longer studied and mechanical; it was now pure panic. He scurried away like an injured arachnid looking for a dark hole to hide.
The woman stood frozen and stunned; she watched the jogger’s pencil-like frame shrink into the gloomy distance. The man contracted in her visual space until he was nothing but a strange memory. When the frightened jogger was no more, the thin woman looked back up into the dark tree. The intense cat was still peering through her fiercely and objectively. Its authoritative eyes did not blink or shift, they simply peered with a pessimistic wisdom. There was something about those eyes…
_____________
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” she cooed again, trying to inject some bouncy inflection into her dull voice. She could not mimic the false joy she’d seen parents and pet owners manufacture. The woman was childless, and she had no pets; she didn’t have the time or patience for those things. She rubbed her slim neck. The pain was still there. Her heart palpitated fitfully. Something wasn’t right. Something was very strange, unnatural.
For a time, the thin woman thought about calling the fire department. “Maybe they can deal with this shit,” she mumbled to herself. “I don’t want to deal with this shit. I don’t have time for this! Don’t they deal with this kinda stuff? They have the tools for this shit, I don’t.” But she was unwilling to create a scene in her omni-quiet, scene-averse neighborhood.
“What if the cat came down before they got here? Could I get arrested for falsely reporting or something? Could I go to jail?”
She eventually settled on calling her next-door neighbor. She did not particularly like her neighbor, but her neighbor had proven to be useful in previous thorny situations. The thin woman’s neighbor seemed to always have an opinion, and sometimes that opinion was correct; so the thin, cold woman decided to phone her self-assured next-door neighbor.
Within minutes, Trista! came bounding out of her red front door with the “fierce” walk and mean mug of a seasoned runway model. Trista! was wearing an extremely tight, pink hoodie with the word: “PINK!” sprawled across her enormous, augmented chest. She also had on tiny black spandex shorts (which could double as cheerleading bloomers or children’s underwear), and once white flip-flops that made the sound of brand-new playing cards being slapped down on a wooden table when she walked. Attached to the hot-pink leash in Trista’s! freshly manicured fingers was her trusty, dust-colored dog: Franz Kafka the Dog. Franz Kafka the Dog was an elderly, always agitated, belligerent, beleaguered, nearly blind, poodle mix[2]. He was extremely difficult to be around.
Trista! strolled over to the thin woman and flashed a friendly and familiar smile. From the pocket of her pink hoodie she pulled a turquoise paper box. The front of the box had red and black lettering, a red circle—outlined in yellow—that was partially filled with a black silhouette, in profile, of a male figure wearing a large white Native-American headdress, smoking what appeared to be a “peace pipe.” Trista! pulled out a small white and tan cigarette and lit it with a purple lighter.
“Sup?! So, what’s the problem?!” Trista! sung in an inexplicably high voice. Franz Kafka the Dog started barking wrathfully.
“No problem, really. I’m—I’m just trying to get this weir— this cat down from the tree. I don’t know what to do.” The thin woman’s voice was finally animated; it was now anxious and somewhat angry.
“I didn’t know you got a cat! When did you get a cat?!” Trista! yelled with glee. She gently tugged at Franz Kafka the Dog’s leash, but to no avail; he was still barking as if he were bit with the virus of madness.
“Oh, no, no. It’s not my cat. It’s just a cat. I don’t know who’s cat it is. I wish I did. I would—”
“So… So it’s someone else’s cat? How are you going to get it down?!”
“I don’t know. That’s why I called you. I don’t know what to do about it. That’s why I called you. I need some help… figuring it out.”
Trista! took a long pull from her cigarette. “Oh! I see! So you came out here to get a cat out of a tree?”
“No! No, I came out here to get my mail, but then I saw the cat in the tree, and I just figured I should do something to help it. I figured that was the right thing to do when you see a cat stuck up in a tree. Isn’t that what people do?”
“What is wrong with you, Franzy?!” Trista! Shouted. She bent down to stroke the angry dog’s crusty hair. The mad dog was looking high up in the tree. His foamy mouth made a right-angle with every bark. Each bark was less sane than its predecessor.
“I don’t know,” Trista! said, taking another puff of her cigarette. “I guess, if I were you, I would just let it be. I don’t know. It seems fine where it is! If it got up there on its own, it can get down on its own, I guess!”
The kingly cat was still in the tree sitting as stoically as Marcus Aurelius. The only things that had changed were the eyes. His technicolored eyes were gazing pointedly at the severely disturbed canine. Ropes of slobber were dangling from the dog’s snapping mouth. Trista! was starting to get evermore concerned about Franzy’s behavior. The thin woman looked from the cat to the furious dog.
“Is that cat driving this dog insane?” she muttered half audibly.
“Franzy, what the fuck!!!” Trista! yelled. Her voice was no longer high and false. It was filled with the truth only fear can bring. “That cat is freaking my dog the fuck out! I don’t know...” The dog was gesticulating, hopping left to right in a low-shoulder hunch. “I don’t know!? I think you should leave that fucking cat alone! It must got rabies or something! I need to get Franzy out’a here! I’m sorry, I gotta go!” She angrily flicked her cigarette.
“Okay,” said the thin woman. “Thanks.”
Trista! picked her dog up and tried to carry him in her arms, but he flopped around like an angry fish on a trampoline. The barking had stopped, but he was now growling from the deepest regions of his gut. The growl was some sort of primeval hum, the clear sound of animal nature.
The thin woman watched as Trista! and her dog struggled in a perpetual state of dropping and catching; the thin woman was sure that Trista! would drop Fran Kafka the Dog on his head, killing him instantly. But eventually the two finally reached their front door. As Trista! furiously fidgeted with her lock, the thin woman heard an unfamiliar, sybarite voice over her shoulder.
“Hello, madam, yes, hello there, yes!” A booming voice shouted. The words startled her immensely. Her knees felt like they had been tasered. Beside her, on the frigid sidewalk, had materialized an enormous, very strange, out-of-date looking man. The man looked like a person who was paid to impersonate someone from the distant past, a reenactor of some kind; he was enormous—twice the size of a normal man. He was wearing a top hat that was approximately four feet tall, a black suit (the exact same shade of the cat), shiny black shoes, and a very thick monocle over his left eye.
“Why, yes, yes, I see you have found him, yes? Emp—, oh, yes, you have found him, indeed!” the man said ratcheting his head back to an abnormal angle. His shiny top hat stayed on without reason. The enormous man smiled up at the cat and shouted, “Dear, Emperor! What have we here, sir?”
“The cat’s name is Emperor?” the woman whispered.
“No!” the man quickly shouted. He swiftly slapped himself over the mouth with his huge hand, in shame of his outburst. “Yes, sorry, excuse me, madam. He iiis Emperor.” Then, leaning over, he whispered in the woman’s red ear, “Yes, he gets very perturbed, yes, very perturbed indeed, when one does not address him with the utmost of respects.” She thought that the man smelled like firewood and sadness. She was not frightened by him; she was simply confounded by the strange information he was attempting to convey. Things where now too weird to question or believe. They simply were.
“Well, I was just calling him kitty because—” The man gasped with genuine shock and slapped himself over the mouth with both hands. “Did I say something?” the woman asked, nearly covering her own mouth.
The stately black cat turned its glowing eyes to the immense man. The frown on the cat’s face was still there, etched in indubitable stone.
“Is he a cat?” the woman said. She uttered the words before she understood what she meant by them. The profundity of the four words jarred her. The thing in the tree was clearly a cat, wasn’t it?
Suddenly she said, “Is it your cat?”
The top-hatted man screamed like a spoiled child, “Hawaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” His voice echoed through the neighborhood like an aftershock. The thin woman covered her ears. Her insides shook.
The strange man tried to compose himself. He adjusted his vest and his displaced monocle, then he softly said, “The Emperor in Black is the most unique and violent anachronism that has ever existed. No human can own him. He is far beyond such things, you see?”
“The Emperor in Black…” she murmured. It was not a question, it was an appraisal.
“Yes, yes, my dear, madam, yes. The Emperor in Black is… yes… he is. He is what he is, what he has been before, and what he shall forevermore and for always be. He also is what isn’t, you see? He rules with violence and virtue… a paradox, yes? He is always good until he is un-good, you see? He is no more or no less than more and less can ever or shall ever be. He comes from before and exists until thereafter. Yes, he was small once. Small as a string, or a quark, or a gluon. But also, he grew so big at a point that no one could lift him, including himself. So he burst into a million whole pieces of himself, then they all decided to come together again, as one. He glides on gravity waves, um, yes. He created dark matter because he was hungry. Schrodinger was his cat, you see?! Schrodinger was his cat!!!!! Yes!!!!! He remembers things which have yet to happen, you understand? He forgets the unforgettable, and he remembers the future!”
The thin woman could not believe she was still standing there. Why could she not run away? She felt as though her feet were frozen to the cold concrete. “What is going on? What am I still doing here?” she thought.
“Shall I tell you a story about The Emperor in Black?” he asked.
She did not respond. She simply stood.
“I’ll tell you the story, yes? Once upon all of time, The Emperor in Black’s enemies outnumbered him by the millions, hundreds of millions. They had his camp surrounded and they were preparing their siege, a siege to end all other sieges. But The Emperor in Black had a brilliant idea, you see? Very brilliant idea. He sent his most trusted messenger off with this letter written to the Sun:
If you become my eyes, I will become your body.
If you lend me your energy, I will lend you my insight.
If you give me your power, if only for a time, I will give you everlasting essentiality,
Both in the Skies and on Earthly grounds!
“Inevitably, the Sun agreed.
“With the Sun as his eyes, The Emperor in Black could have destroyed his enemies with ease and spiteful brutality, yes? But instead, he simply closed his eyes for a time. Yes. His adversaries could not survive the blackness, you see? They could not survive the dark. In the blackness, they destroyed themselves, you see? Yes.”
“His eyes?” she said.
“Aww, yes: his eyes. They give and they take. They are the soul of all souls. His eyes know all, see all, and tell all… you see? They can heal or destroy, save or sabotage, shine florid light, or bring the power of blackness…”
In that strange, perfect, awesome moment when the thin woman’s eyes made deep contact with The Emperor in Black’s resplendent gaze, the rarest of things happened—what she would forever refer to as a “revelation.” She saw herself objectively, as a set of unequivocal, polemically free events, interdependent stages of being connected by the blue link of life, in and out of time, as a chronological group of irreversible, yet tiny, circumstances that may or may not make a mark on the ever after, the future, the complete stream of Beingness, the Grand Everything.
She saw herself as a happy child in a fluffy, yellow dress. The child boarded a school bus that was as foreign, mystical, and large as a space shuttle. She recounted how she used to say L, M, N, O, P as “LEMONOPEAS,” until she was nine-years-old. She recounted unwrapping every Christmas present she had ever received, good and bad.
She remembered her first kiss.
Her repressed mother and cardboard father.
Her terrible stepfather.
The pain.
Shame.
The hatred.
The shame.
Breaking free.
Sunlight.
Pure sunlight.
The physical pain of heartache.
The blinding beauty of joy.
The gray gravity of sadness.
The son she would never have.
Her first time in the back of a flatbed truck (after the church hayride): it didn’t hurt. She remembered the boy treating her like shit the next Monday at school… like she didn’t even exist.
She remembered getting her college acceptance letter, and she remembered her repressed mother’s expression: fake joy? Relief?
She remembered dropping out of college because there were not enough worksheets and there were way too many papers about dead German men. The cliques were too solidified, too obvious. The professors were too stiff, too studied, too hard to read. Out of touch and too theoretical. What about life? The boys were more like D-list actors than real people. They would say things that clearly weren’t funny, things that were so clearly for attention they should have just said: “Hey, I’m looking for some attention. Could you please give me some?” They would laugh extremely hard and loud at the things that weren’t funny. They were strange. And the girls were either too chippy or too chipper, always one or the other. The trees were too green, the grass was too kempt, the cars were too new, the answers too pretentious, the meanings too vague, and she just couldn’t take it!
She thought about how strange it was that she had never once felt lonely, only like she was on a vacation from other people. And she finally understood why she’d been punishing herself by working as a receptionist at Punch’s Peanut Factory, despite the fact that she detested the mere smell of peanuts, despite the fact that she hated talking on the phone and using a phony phone voice, and despite being told at a very early age that she had an IQ that hovered around 165, she punished herself because she was embarrassed that she couldn’t or wouldn’t muster the energy to live up to her full potential. The job was chastisement for her fear of fighting to be her best self. She remembered everything.
_______________
When her penetrating vision finally collapsed under its own weight like a dark star, she realized how much it all meant and how it all meant nothing. It had so much meaning but so little time to be meaningful. She knew that people intimate with death and agony must also know this contradiction to be true. The thin woman looked to her right to see the strange man’s reaction, but he was no longer there. He’d dissolved into the chilly air. When she looked back up in the old tree, The Emperor in Black had vanished as well.
There was silence on the sidewalk. She was alone. But she did not feel alone. She was there with her real self, her new self. With soft, shaky legs, she slowly walked to her blue mailbox. It was empty. She could not contemplate what had happened. She was tired, and she tried not to think. But, as she walked slowly towards her door, she was aware of one thing: nothing would ever be the same. And nothing was.
[1] The cat wore the look of an old mathematics professor who had, for hours, been staring at a whiteboard riddled with frantic Sharpie scribbles concerning the Hodge Conjecture that he had been trying to solve since his days as an overly ambitious, perhaps even arrogant, undergraduate student.
[2] The thin woman always felt nervous and squeamish around Franz Kafka the Dog due to his grumpy temperament. What is more, the thin woman always felt guilty around Trista! and her dog because of her unwavering, judgmental belief that there was no possible way Trista! had ever read (and/or was capable of genuinely appreciating or understanding if she had read) Franz Kafka’s writings, and therefore had no business and/or “right” naming her dog “Franz Kafka the Dog.”
