[Los Angeles, 1991]
You are still in your bathrobe. You’ve been tired, irritable all morning, avoiding thinking or thinking about thinking, wandering around staring at the undone dishes in the sink, the hairs in the bathtub. Wishing it would all go away, picking up a sponge and putting it down again, trying to force yourself to decide: what should you be doing right now? You should do some real work, writing or studying, but you’re so disengaged from everything that comes to hand, everything that comes to mind. The sort of mood where simply being awake seems pointless, where all your actions threaten to lead to the sourness of minor problems and unreturned phone calls, which will grow in small, cruel ways into various traps and disasters unfolding over long periods of time.
Of course, it’s mostly the stupid accident the other night, the dreadful crushing impact in that long, empty, passionless moment, and then slowly rolling the car into a nearby parking lot, and you and he looked at the damage, each of you occupied with edgy reflections about repairs and money and not thinking, definitely not thinking, about how much worse it might have been. Driveability and insurance and right of way. Well it wasn’t your fault, you point it out to yourself for perhaps the ninetieth time. Not that he ever questioned that, no, it was quite clear, though his mistake was perfectly understandable, and his car was the real wreck; but nobody’s going to pay to fix your car, and the hood will never open again. The man at the body shop wouldn’t touch it, said it was a write-off, suggested you give up, though you’d already guessed that the night before, lying awake trying to figure out what to do, who to call.
Don’t think about the damned accident or the repairs. Or everything that needs to be done, all the work that’s due and that’s overdue, the several long, complex degree exams that will take a lot of preparation. And there’s that unbegun script that you’ve already been paid for. You keep trying to put it all behind you, to become unworried or somehow un-irritated, to achieve a sort of poise or at least a certain detachment, a relative calm. Sitting, looking out of the window, you see the little gray and white cat from next door lying in the middle of the lawn, her head tucked into her stomach, utterly abandoned to the predictable pleasures of sleeping on the grass in a full blaze of sun. Good to see.
You keep trying to relax, clear your head, find positive things to focus on. Perhaps if you do some of these dishes, just a few. Things aren’t really going badly at the moment, it’s just a few frustrations right now, just over the last couple of days. You look through the window again and the cat is still there. You chuckle softly to yourself, then call out greetings in those mysterious chirrupings that are the instinctive and universal form of feline communication, as though cats themselves taught it to humans on some ancient evening around the fire, and your tongue still remembers, and the roof of your mouth. But the cat is at least fifteen feet away through the open window, too deeply asleep to heed any odd noises you might make, and you don’t have any food to offer anyway.
It’s good to watch these things, the cat and the grass, the sun. The dishes are nearly done, and you go to make a phone call, and then another one, setting up the times and logistics of tomorrow’s tangled network of necessary actions. You have to pick up one other person to go to the dinner, but you don’t need to bring anything. The warm voices on the phone and the kind invitations, no, just bring yourself, everything else will be ready. Yes, that will be perfect, you can just leave after dinner and you’ll be in plenty of time.
You finally push yourself headlong into the shower, into scrubbing heat mixed with a glorious drowning in all that cool, rich water. Yes, you do feel better. The skin cream feels so good, and your hair, it wasn’t particularly dirty but now it feels so much cleaner, the lightness of silk that falls into separate translucent strands. You think of the cat sleeping, her head at that funny angle, her fur warmed by the sun, her relaxed muscles: a link to your own muscles and a message to them from that distant point, to relax in a possible internal sunlight. And, as you often do, to the despair of the neighbors, you wander through the apartment naked, put on a good record, relax and read a few pages, get some paperwork out of the way, write down addresses and phone numbers so you can go and do errands after you put some clothes on.
When you finally do get dressed, it is in warm, clean jeans, and now you’re glad that you did all the laundry last night, even though it kept you up so late, and you grab that rough cotton shirt you bought last week. You’re so comfortable, it’s great, you feel entirely different than you did two hours ago, you can even think about the damned car with something that might pass for equanimity. There are the quiet, open rooms of your apartment, the yard with the cat in it, and you’ll be able to buy a new car in January when you get the loan. Meanwhile, this car will survive for a month, and everything will turn out just fine.
You go back into the living room to get one more phone number, and you look out of the window into the yard. The kids from next door are picking up the cat, the young gray and white cat who’s always so feisty, dancing towards your legs and leaping away, curling up erotically when you rub its ears. But they’re picking it up in a dirty white blanket and putting it in a box, it’s stiff, and it is obvious that it wasn’t sleeping, you can see that the cat is quite dead, just like your cat, when was it, nearly two years ago, and you can see that fragile stiffness that seems like it could never have been alive, you feel it, hold it in your arms, it is still linked to your body, and you wonder if they’ll put the cat into the trash or try to bury it in the hills, illegally, as you did, and you watch their still, careful faces as one of them takes the little body away and the others follow slowly, and you remember carrying your cat in a dirty white blanket and crying in the dark and pulling the shovel and blanket back into the thorny, brittle bushes when the police helicopter buzzed back and forth, flashing glaring spotlights across the dug-up ground, and you abruptly sit on the couch facing away from the window, away from the yard, and you stare at the wall above the desk and you try to think, you try to remember: what should you be doing right now?
[Los Angeles, 11/28/91-4/19/92]
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