Negative

Nobody is putting another needle in me unless there’s a bottle of gin at the end. That’s what my grandmother said, according to the nurses who were there, when she was hospitalized in her 90s and chose not to receive fluids and to die.

I must have given more than 2000 injections to my cat every day for years, keeping him alive by inserting a needle in the skin of his back. We’d lie on the bed together for the ten minutes it took for a hump to fill with liquid to supplement his failing kidneys. 

*

Now, at my house, all that sits on the windowsill where he once sunned is a glass bottle etched with Gallagher Prescription Druggist. Gallagher was the maiden name my grandmother surrendered so long ago. It’s a negative impression scratched, by a heavy steel needle with a handle like a pen, onto this empty vessel which light passes through.

I am sitting in a tattoo parlor holding sketches of a cat’s shape on waxy paper, the design that a gun will drum into my skin with its clusters of fine steel needles.

*

People may have admired my grandmother’s decision to die, while they probably thought her life was sad: She’d been a widow forty years, hundreds of miles away from her one son and granddaughter.

Certainly, they thought that I cared for my cat as I did (administering more medications and preparing a special diet, too) because my family is in other states. I have few friends. And that it was regrettable, how I let my feelings stray to a feline body—

*

In Why Look at Animals, John Berger wrote of human relationships with pets in our post-industrial age when we no longer encounter animals in nature or work beside them in agriculture. We make them possessions held within the walls of single-family homes and, he says, With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.

Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote a book-length elegy for an animal companion (in this case a donkey), Platero and I. In the section “The Best Friend,” while Platero still walks beside him, the speaker explains why he prefers to share his life with Platero rather than having humans as companions: You give me your company and do not remove me from my loneliness…you allow me my loneliness without removing your company.

*

My grandmother stayed in her three-story Victorian house, in the town where her parents, friends, and husband had grown up and been buried, alone. She kept herself occupied with walks to the library to borrow and return books she held dear and were not hers to keep and Latin masses to attend for the comfort she found in that dead language.

And she busied herself with letters, which she wrote every week from the time of my birth to the time of her death.  Weekly, without fail, they came from her northern end of the country south to me.

*

I had her letters for company when I was an only child in a rural county with no neighbors for miles around, and when I went to college to a bare little room where the mailbox was protected from the city by lock and key.

Later, when my first love left the home we had shared, the cat is what he left me with. The cat would catch reptiles and bring them in. A slender, creamy-colored Oriental shorthair with a black snake extending, contrasting, from either side of his mouth, he was a striking picture of the un-Edenic condition into which we’d fallen. 

*

My grandfather died well before I was born. My family was too poor to fly, my grandmother too old and set in her routines to travel, and so I saw her, when my father had time to make the long drive, at most, once in a year.

The cat was my partner for almost 20 years, as other men, after the first, came and went in briefer stints.  When I began to roam, the cat was under my seat on airplanes and beside me hitchhiking, a caterwaul escaping the carrier. A tongue that licked the hand I stuck in, soothing. Or a paw that scarred it with scratches that, even when trying to break out of the box’s confines, clung tight to my fingers.

*

Tattoos are not a big deal these days, I know—they don’t mark you as a bad girl or otherwise special.

But I’m not sure whether it makes me feel tougher or more out of my element when a man walks into the tattoo parlor and says that this is his first stop upon release from prison.

*

My grandmother’s letters told of some of my grandfather’s troubles, how he had been given a job at her family’s drugstore, but as soon as her father sold it, the new owners fired him. Then, in what might seem a rejection of the party of health, he began working as an undertaker.

What she wrote was not the content everyone would share with children. She continues, in a letter in which she also inquires into what I am studying in the third grade, about the mortuary profession: You may not realize it, but there is a great deal of artistry involved, particularly in accident cases. They work HOURS on the bodies.

*

I don’t deny that, as a pet owner, I made a being dependent on me for survival and the decision about when his life would end. Yes, I participated in the practice of depriving animals of the ability to hunt food, neutering them and removing any other source of interaction.

And then I had my cat killed with another needle. I called a vet to come to the house and euthanize him on the hearth where he was curled in my sweater when he no longer had the ability to stand. All I can say in defense of what I’ve done as a pet’s master is that his death, in a familiar place, seemed kinder than many humans’, solitary in hospitals.

*

Another of my grandmother’s letters included, Your grandfather said, when he died, he wanted to be stuffed and mounted with his hand raised in greeting and displayed in a case in the entry hall.

I am getting the tattoo on the inside of my right wrist so it will show it when I reach my hand to take or offer something, to grasp someone else’s hand in introduction.

*

The man just out from behind bars selects some skulls and smoke plumes for his tattoos—images of vanishing, demise.

But he cannot complete the tattoo parlor’s releases because he has no photo ID. He has been stripped of who he his, or how a man is supposed to prove he is the kind of person society supposedly wants him to be, by our systems.   

*

My grandfather died of a heart attack in his 50s, though he was the boy who had announced that he intended to marry my grandmother when they were just eight and was supposed to care for her for decades more. After, my grandmother wrote that she sat in the hospital beside his body and said everything she hadn’t yet had a chance to articulate. A reserved woman, she must have left a good bit unspoken, of which only the air of that temporarily assigned room may be aware.

Later, she’d make a hard choice for herself, but first, there had been this dying, this horrible surprise.

*

I think of what I don’t know, perched on the stained church pew that is the tattoo parlor’s ironic waiting room seating.

While the man stares at the blanks in his paperwork.

*

If I say no member of my species will ever get closer to me than the cat was, that no lover has been at my ankles at every step or would accompany me into the bathroom like my pet, that there is no other presence I would miss at so many moments in every hour after I let him go—That should be taken, not as a commentary on my loneliness or need, but as a testament to depth of a love. 

In the 1700s, Christopher Smart famously paid tribute to his cat Jeoffry in the rapturous “Jubilat Agno.” He praises the cat as an instrument to learn benevolence upon, and proclaims, For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. Smart writes of the cat’s admirable qualities: of quickness and tenacity, kindness and elegance, his mixture of gravity and waggery. And, centuries after, there is still much to love in this writing.

*

A recent book by Louise Gluck contains the lines, The little cat is dead, meaning, I suppose, / one’s last hope…The cat is dead: who will press now, / his heart over my heart to warm me? I used to say that Gluck was the first influence on my poetry, and her acerbic work does resonate. But I’ve realized of late that I may have loved her words because they sounded like her predecessor’s, my grandmother’s.

My grandmother’s final letter contained the observation, The music of today offends my aesthetic sensibilities, but not enough to get excited about it. I do not care for jazz as music. My taste runs to funeral dirges. At least she was still thinking of music in the end.

*

I hear my grandmother’s voice every time I write. I borrowed an austere, stern tone from her when I was young and not as sure of myself or anything as of her letters’ arrival. She’s the influence who made me an author.

I see my white cat, for an instant, in any corner where, at his height, there is a shaft of light.

*

The freed man is wearing white Air Jordans with a white tee and white jeans, stunning against his dark skin. Someone must have bought and sent these for him to wear out into the world, pictured him immaculate. Or did they just think this nicety was what they could offer, small and momentary as a piece of white clothing and its mint condition are, in the face of a history dirtied with injustice and the many more trials of daily life he will be subjected to ahead?

What did my grandmother see when she watched my grandfather working in the drugstore when they were young and he still had that job, where he was put behind the soda shop counter more often than the pharmacy’s, as he scooped ice cream for children? As he admonished them to lick faster before it melted and rivulets stained their wrists, was it a picture of simple pleasure? Or of perishability, which she should start steeling herself to endure?

*

Once, when I awoke to my cat missing and a snowstorm and ran searching for him through the trees at night, I imagined that he had become the white suspended all around me. (On that occasion, I found him sleeping by the heater in the morning, but that is not where I feel the spirit of him, in perpetuity, resides).

My grandmother left instructions that I was not to miss class to attend her funeral and a poem that was unusually, conventionally sentimental: Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I preferred her own, original writing, but I obeyed. And I have yet to go back to visit her cold resting place. After all, she is not there. Or it does not matter where the physical remains lay.

*

Mine were sins of omission—another comment in my grandmother’s correspondence. Weren’t those sins—emotions she had not explicitly stated—less grave than the alternative of active transgressions made?

I wish what I have to say was larger, mattered more, and concerned those beyond my own relations.

*

I wonder about the events and moments, changes and routine things that the man may have been locked up for, and were thus omitted from his days.

He quickly settles on stock drawings from posters on the parlor’s walls for his tattoos—glad to be able to make any choice, I’d venture. But I shouldn’t presume.

*

My tattoo design is custom, commissioned and readjusted several times to better represent the angularity of the cat’s head, the remarkable length of his body. And something of his vigor, how he’d soak up the heat stretched on my Carolina porch, climb the drapes of cheap interstate motels, sharpen his claws on the fir trees in the wilderness of the West Coast when we reached there, though what I want to capture is an impossibility: wildness. And a fearlessness that, at the time, had made me feel like I, worrying over my suitcases and what I couldn’t manage to bring, did not live experiences deeply enough.

The man and I exchange only nods and don’t speak directly. I overhear him say that, when he’s able to afford another tattoo, he is going to get the entire ocean—waves and sharks and the creatures farther down—covering him. He won’t be around here anymore when that happens (I won’t get to see). But I observe that talking of this future is when he looks the closest to happy.

*

I never met my grandfather. But he never seemed like a stranger, thanks to the letters. My grandmother’s comments on the mortuary trade were not macabre; they were a defense of what my grandfather did, an expression of loyalty. They were written in the style by which I knew her like some children know the feeling of their grandmother’s warm hugs. And, of course, my grandmother could not stuff and mount my grandfather’s body as requested, retain his physical presence in the house. But what she could convey, which is a variety of keeping, was a sense of his humor, his stories.

The subject matter to which I am drawn is not so grim. The maudlin poet, that stereotypical role, is not one I want to fit in.

*

Though perhaps you think that I am struggling to braid together the different strands of my topics, to assemble them into pieces that are companionable.

Animals do not share language with humans. But we owe them for it, Berger observes, and reference to them is in whatever we say. They were the first things we painted on cave walls, not images of ourselves. Animals were the source of symbols and led to figurative expression. Figurative, not direct speech, which he argues was our original kind of expression.

*

All day the writer making metaphors describes objects that are not exactly the subject, or her only one.

I tell the tattoo artist about the next tattoo I want done—a simple band of two lines around my left forearm. She tells me straight lines are the least simple element of a tattoo to execute. And to make lines run parallel is harder still.

*

The artist practiced her craft on a substitute—by tattooing grapefruits.

I trained to give my unprofessional medical care—the subcutaneous injections my cat required—by stabbing needles through oranges’ peels.

*

My grandmother would have never come into a place like the tattoo parlor. If I am trying to memorialize her, how did I let my lines of writing end up here?

The tattoo artist says that if I want one of the two lines around my arm to be thicker, as I have suggested, if I want to give the one more emphasis and weight, she will actually have to tattoo that line once and then circle around above it again. She would actually have to tattoo three lines. Aligning even more pieces is even more difficult to achieve.

*

The cats in today’s tattoo are not so technically challenging. The overlapping sketches of the animal moving through different poses—climbing, standing, stretching, lying down—are flowing, more suited than symmetry to the natural inclinations of the hand.

My grandmother, by the way, quit keeping pets after my father went off to school and, though she may have admired cats’ aloofly regal attitudes, I am not aware of her having a particular affinity to the breed. I acquired my cat soon after her death and had him about as long as I received letters from her, but that’s not a clear congruity either. There are figures that aren’t themselves so defined. Yet, by brisking at the edges of another’s life, give it shape.

*

I tell the artist that, when I return for my next tattoo, I will settle for the sparer version of two thin bands. I don’t really care what’s on the second arm. I just want something on the left side to balance out the right. After all, the design I’ve come up with primarily frames an area that is un-inked, between.

The pharmacists at Gallagher Prescription Druggist were said to have dispensed placebos, sugar pills and syrups, to those whose illness they did not deem true, or more than could be withstood. Sometimes giving people what’s not real (in conventional understandings) is as effective as giving them a substantive thing.

*

All I can do is look down at my book and try to grant the man privacy as he explains his situation to the shop owner at the register.

He needs the tattoos now because they will be to cover over symbols inked on him while he was incarcerated. When he says this, the owner, understanding the associations from which the man needs release, concedes. The man and I are both taken to booths and, on the other side of the divider, he stays silent, never exclaiming at pain. As I am glad I am able to do too, throughout the guns’ whirring.

*

The cat was a weight at the end of the bed, the feeling of whose landing I knew down to the gram. A presence I waited to leap and return when he went exploring the night in which I could not see, whose absence I felt until then. And will feel as a reminder forever now.

My grandmother asserted her presence in my life on bone white—or, no, less substantial—ghostly, see-through paper. So, I barely knew her as a body to mourn or learned to care much about the flesh.  What we didn’t have couldn’t be lost. 

*

If my view is negative, let it be so in the way that space is.

Soon, the man will be able rise from the synthetic leather of the chair and disappear, out into what is—in the limits of my narrative, the perspective from this window—the anonymity of the crowded street.