Game for Cats

On my iPad I downloaded an app called ‘Game for Cats’, a couple of weeks ago on whim. Game for Cats has two separate levels—one free, one costing a buck. The free game simulates a large, fuzzy-edged laser pointer against a dark background. The pointer travels on and off the screen, sometimes pausing and gyrating slightly, as if waiting for the cat to attack. It varies speed, stops completely, and vanishes for unpredictable amounts of time. When the cat reaches out to catch the light, it dissipates with a soft, satisfying ‘bweep.’ And the cat scores a hundred points. That’s it. No boss levels. Just your cat’s dirty paw, your expensive iPad, and a rapid succession of slaps and bweeps.

The level that costs a dollar is vastly superior, my cats tell me (on the ‘select a level’ screen, it’s the only one they’ll go for, these days); it involves an animated mouse with a long, twitchy tale and beady eyes scampering across a cheese-colored screen. Sometimes it’ll peek out from the edges, and then dash to the other side. Once in a while it’ll linger in the screen’s center, doing whatever it is that mice do in their spare time, as if it thinks it’s unobserved.

The cats go freakin’ nuts over the mouse. Sarah, the cat that’s going on twenty-one, will rouse from her hard life of eating and sleeping on the heater vent to slap at the screen over and over, causing the mouse to scamper and squeak every time she scores. She’s the current household high score holder—over 20,000 in a single game—because she’s so determined to slap that little squeaker into submission before exhausting herself into another geriatric catnap.

Fred, on the other hand, is more crafty with the game. She seems to think the iPad is some kind of cage for the mouse; she’ll spend her time trying to reach under the device in order to get at it from the inside. Or she’ll attempt to use her nose and paws to turn the iPad onto its glass front, in order to tip out its contents. She’s also much more creative in her play. When I put the iPad onto the floor in the office while I work, in order to keep her from bugging me, she’ll sit on the desk for a while and watch the mouse from above—and then suddenly she’ll throw all thirteen considerable pounds of herself at the screen in a terrifying death pounce. Lately her favorite strategy has been to use her nose to nudge the pad over to where the office door lies open, and then to line it up so that its lip is perfectly parallel to the door’s edge (it’s eerie, how anal she is about that). Then she’ll tiptoe excitedly around to the other side of the door and bat at the mouse from underneath it.

I feel a little guilty about fobbing off Game for Cats on my pets when I’m too busy (or lazy) to get out their toys and give them some exercise. It feels a little bit like giving my young a couple of jelly doughnuts and a big box of McNuggets and muttering, “Go play with yer video games and get out of my hair, y'damn kids!” Though I can’t understand the hours of amusement they’ve both had with the thing, so far.

The worst side effect, though? They both regard the iPad as theirs. I can’t read in bed at night without Fred interposing herself between my face and the glowing screen to look for mice. When I lent the iPad to one of my friends the other day, Fred jealously hopped onto his shoulder then walked down his chest and attempted to push the iPad out of his hands.

Worse still, Fred seems to think that any flat-screen device is a potential mouse cage. I can’t answer a phone call without her running over to push the phone away from my ear. It was bad enough that she already checked her email and played World of Warcraft without me; now she sits behind my computer screen and hangs her head over the top, cocking her head so she can check for rodents. I have to hide the iPad itself when I’m not using it, because otherwise I’m likely to find it flipped over and nudged beneath a cabinet or a door. I’d even posted a video on Facebook last week of the cats alternating scoring points with the game; the sound of the slapping and squeaking will bring Fred running from the house’s most remote reaches, ears twitching and whiskers a-quiver.

Game for Cats. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s the smartest dollar I’ve ever spent, or whether the decision means I’ll have to buy the cats an Apple device of their very own.

The True and Fantastic Story of the Amazing Pepe

In the late autumn I was sitting in my den working, on a very cold, crisp afternoon. When I looked up and out of the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, I saw Fred sitting outside.

Now, I panicked immediately, because to the best of my knowledge, my cat Fred was doing what she does almost every day during the nine cold months of Michigan’s weather year—she climbs under the flannel sheets and blankets of my bed at nine in the morning, bakes herself to a toasty finish, and emerges at dinnertime, yawning. I’d gone out earlier in the afternoon, however, so it occurred to me that the little imp could’ve slipped out. Like I said, it was a frigid afternoon, and the thought of Fred out there in the cold, for hours, threw me into a panic.

My heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of my adam’s apple, I leapt up and opened the door. The cat strolled in quite calmly, tail lifted and flicking the last half-inch, and rubbed against my leg, grateful. Then it walked over to the kitchen and proceeded to start eating the dry food. I cooed and petted its cold fur and told it how sorry I was and how I’d never, ever make the same mistake and let it out by accident ever, ever. . . .

And it was only at that point I realized the cat wasn’t Fred.

Oh, they looked the same. Both are standard-issue tabbies with pretty much the same markings. Both were roughly the same size. Fred’s coloring was a little more brown where this cat’s was gray, however, and the cat making itself home by rolling around on the kitchen carpet and settling down in front of the air duct for a nap didn’t have Fred’s heft, shall we tactfully say. Fred’s a small cat, but she’s surprisingly heavy. Dense, even. She’s like some kind of Time Lord cat, bigger and infinitely heavier on the inside than the out. This cat was a lot lighter. It was obviously fed regularly, though it didn’t seem to be minding the snack it had from my bowls.

Even Sarah couldn’t tell the impostor from the real thing. She took one look at the strange cat, shrugged, and went back to licking herself.

Anyway, I did the only thing that a normal person would do in such a situation. I took a photo of me hugging the strange cat and sent it to the Mont in a text message and told him I was adopting it.

As I expected, he went ballistic. I could practically hear him explode, all the way from Connecticut. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT CAT? YOU CANNOT KEEP THAT CAT!! WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT!!! DID YOU FEED THAT CAT!!!! DON’T FEED THAT CAT!!!!!

I had already long shooed the cat out and told it to return home by the time I sent a text message back. I’ve named him Pepe, I confabulated. You’ll like him when you visit.

When the Mont called (seconds later), I confessed that I was only teasing about adopting Pepe. The fact that I admitted to my prank while giggling wildly, however, only convinced him that I was fibbing about fibbing, and that I really did have a third cat sleeping under the roof with me. It probably didn’t help that I would take photos of Fred doing her usual stuff around the house and message them to him with captions like, Pepe learned where the litter box is pretty quickly, or Look how Pepe likes to drink from the toilet!

I figured that Pepe had to belong to one of the neighbors—he was obviously too well-kept to be a stray. Besides, he visited the house at pretty much the same time in the afternoons. That told me that someone was letting him out on a routine, and that he was simply making the rounds before returning back home for the coldest and darkest hours of the day. Sarah continued to assume that Pepe was Fred; Fred would growl at Pepe through the protection of the glass doors, but if I brought the cat in for a quick cuddle, she’d quickly lose interest and go back to the rough work of snoozing beneath the blankets.

By the time the Mont came home for the holiday, the weather had gotten so cold that I’d not seen Pepe for a couple of weeks. In my way of thinking, that was a good thing. I’m always distressed when I see house cats out in the dead of winter. The scene that followed, though, went a little something like this: The Mont walked into the house and dropped his bags. We embraced. Sarah meowed and demanded to be fed. Fred walked into the room, brushed up against him, and allowed herself to be petted. It was a happy family reunion.

“Where’s Pepe?” the Mont asked, half-joking, half suspicious.

“Honey,” I said, laughing in a way that was meant to imply how silly he was to take seriously any of my pranks.

Then I looked at the back door. A little tabby was peeking in.

It was a gift from God. Who am I to reject such comedy manna? “Well hey, Pepe!” I cooed, walking over to the sliding glass doors and opening them. Once I’d slid back the screen, Pepe trotted in, tail high and whiskers twitching. He rubbed against me, nodded at the other two cats in passing, ignored the Month, and then helped himself to the Friskies.

Well. The scene that followed was pretty much like the first text message exchange. WHERE DID THAT CAT COME FROM? DOES HE LIVE HERE?? HAVE YOU BEEN FEEDING THAT CAT??? DID YOU NOT HEAR ME SAY THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT????

Honestly, there were fewer decibels when Lucy smuggled home a giant cheese in Ricky’s tuba.

Eventually, when I stopped snickering, I picked up Pepe and put him out, assuring The Mont that the cat did not live there, that I hadn’t seen the cat in two weeks, and that it was mere wild coincidence that it should show up thirty seconds after his arrival home and demand to be let in. Honestly. Coincidence. That’s all it was. Jeez, calm down.

Eventually he did. “Come on,” I told him, once his face was no longer the shade of a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. “Let’s take your stuff upstairs.”

Once we were upstairs and the bags had been thrown in the spare bedroom, we flopped down on our bed to relax and talk. I asked how his trip had been. He told me about the route he’d taken. We’d barely started talking when we heard a faint thud, followed by a faint meow.

I sat up. “Fred must be trying to attack Pepe through the glass door,” I said. But no, the sound wasn’t quite that. We heard another meow.

Then, like actors in a classic screwball flick, we both turned our heads slowly, simultaneously, to the window behind the bed. There was Pepe, staring at us through the second-story window. Not only staring at us. Pepe was affixed to the screen with all four paws and all his claws, legs sprawled in all four directions, looking all the world like one of those Garfield stuffed animals with suction cups on his feet, affixed to a car window.

Now, I’m not sure how Pepe managed to climb up on the den roof and make his way to that exact window. I’m still uncertain how he even knew we’d be on the other side. What I do know is that the look of utter disbelief on The Mont’s face at that moment is something I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life. “Well hey, Pepe!” I said brightly again, as if he attached himself to the second story window all the time. “Ready to come in again?”

The Mont watched, slack-jawed, as I opened the window and pulled up the screen. Pepe stepped over the sill and through the slats of the headboard as if we did that kind of thing all the time. Then he curled up on the blanket, squinched shut his eyes with affection, and purred.

I’m still slightly deaf in my left ear from the yelling that followed. Jeez. Honestly. It’s not like I paid the darn cat to do that. I don’t have the money for such comedy gold.

The Nascenza Conspiracy

Seven or eight years ago, I finished the manuscript of a book I called The Horns of Cassaforte. It was a young adult novel set in a fantasy world somewhat similar to renaissance Venice, where the families of ordinary craftsmen not only produced objects blessed with everyday magics, but played a major part in the country’s governance. The book grew in part out of the 9/11 tragedy, and partly out of my depression over the political landscape of the country at the time. I wanted to explore how the most ordinary person—Risa Divetri, seen by everyone as good for nothing— might react to a country that was being hijacked by political extremists striking at its most basic foundations.

Heavy stuff for a light fantasy novel, I know. When I finished writing, I knew I wanted to explore those themes even further, in two sequels. I didn’t really have any more notion of those novels in my head than the premises in their titles. The second book in the series I was thinking of as The Pirates of Cassaforte, in which an actor’s troupe would be stranded on a desert isle by pirates. The third was Pilgrims of Cassaforte, and would deal with a small group of citizens on a religious journey waylaid by terrorists.

The Horns of Cassaforte became The Glass Maker’s Daughter, of course. And The Pirates of Cassaforte finally found realization in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. And now Pilgrims of Cassaforte is seeing the light of day as The Nascenza Conspiracy, which is available this week from Flux.

The Nascenza Conspiracy has as its protagonist Risa Divetri’s younger brother, Petro. As Risa has grown into a national hero, celebrated and feared in equal measure, Petro has been walled away in the insula—a boarding school of sorts for the country’s leading families. His sister’s notoriety has guaranteed that Petro has led anything but a typical student’s life, though. Either he’s scrutinized by his instructors for traces of her talents, scorned for being anything less than extraordinary, fawned upon for his connections, or beaten up for sticking out. For someone who simply wants to fade into the background until he’s ready to find his own path, it’s uncomfortable to have such a famous relative.

When the insula’s elder decides to send him on a religious pilgrimage to the holy site of Nascenza, Petro leaps at the chance to be out of the spotlight. And when his best friend comes up with a practical joke to swap identities, Petro is happy to leave behind the name of Divetri and become an ordinary citizen for a few blessed days.

The scheme goes awry in a remote village populated with political extremists, however. Petro’s friend is kidnapped, his bodyguards are killed, and he’s left seemingly alone in a countryside populated with murderers and traitors. When he determines to rescue his friend, he finds himself embroiled in a plot that threatens Cassaforte’s throne like no other before.

I know! Risa’s little brother, all grown up and stuff!

One of The Nascenza Conspiracy’s major themes has to do with the ways that political groups will use the tactics of fearmongering and internal terror in order to get their way. It’s a theme that grew directly out of the take-no-prisoners approach to political campaigning that I’d seen during the 2008 election and the aftermath in the years following. It seemed then as if anyone with a desire to invalidate Obama’s presidency used whatever means they could to spread fear about the inevitable dangers of an African-American president—logical or not. To me it seemed like living in absolute insanity—and I drew upon it for the book. Petro’s treading dangerous ground with a party of extremists willing to do anything, and sacrifice anyone, in the name of political insanity, simply because they weren’t able to get their own way. If only real life could be settled with as much satisfaction as a fantasy novel, eh?

Oh, but the book’s real draw? Two teenaged boys making nut jokes for an entire page and a half. You won’t want to miss that.

The Nascenza Conspiracy is available from Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com, or check to see if your local independent bookstore has it in stock or will order it for you. You can also buy it for your Kindle.

If you read the book and enjoy it, won't you consider putting your review for it on the usual sites?

The Passage

At the urging of a friend, recently I picked up and read Justin Cronin’s hot new novel of vampire apocalypse, The Passage. After I was done, I wrote him back with my thoughts. “You say you liked it,” he wrote back. “But you sure criticized it a lot.”

The Passage is one of those books that plays fast and loose with its storytelling predecessors, not even bothering to disguise its sources. It opens with a bunch of American tourists being attacked by bats in a remote corner of South America, like in some nineteen-fifties B-movie. Then it cuts to a section in which the U.S. Military, astonished by the regenerative powers the tourists develop after their attack, decide to militarize the virus; they inject it into twelve death row criminals—really the wisest choice for creating invincible killing machines in this kind of story, always—and one abandoned little girl. This part of the book is very much like every science fiction movie I’ve seen in the last twenty years in which the government is doing secret research, and a whole lot like Kate Bush’s song, “Experiment IV,” because you know it’s just going to go downhill from here.

And it does. In a section not so much similar to The Stand as directly cribbed from it, the virus escapes. The country is overrun; everyone dies. Everyone save 49 million vampires, that is, and a handful of survivors who resort to one last hope to keep the race alive.

Cut to a hundred years later. The possible last handful of human survivors has been living in a tiny colony in California, kept safe by arrays of blinding lights that keep the vampires at bay every night. The remaining men, women, and children are simple folk who know aught of the old ways, living from day to day, and from hand to mouth, in a simple existence, much like the people of The Village. Except they have some really highly-skilled engineers who know all about circuit boards and other stuff that surely comes in convenient later in the story. Actually, it’s more similar to the YA postapocalyptic novel The City of Ember, because bit by bit, the lights are going out, and soon will be gone forever. So naturally a group of intrepid and good-looking youths go venturing out into the vast wilderness that is now all that’s left of North America, to search for safety.

And this is where the novel turns into Logan’s Run, in which a bunch of naifs who’ve never before seen the world escape from their closed society and run into all kinds of weird stuff. There’s a Thunderdome, and a locomotive that the engineers who’ve never seen one before are miraculously able to fix, and creepy scenes in which the party enter and barely escape from a vampire-filled Las Vegas. There are Scrappy Military Men, and The Miracle Of Childbirth, and One Child to Save Them All, and because there weren’t enough unoriginal archetypes to fill out the book, not just a Wise Old Magic Negro Woman, but also a Saintly Psychic Wise Old Magic Negro African Nun.

The reason my friend recommended The Passage was that it’s got the stink of being a classy, literary vampire novel. Cronin has those MFA and literary award credentials that make it okay and even a little ironic for him to slum in genre fiction. One of my big problems with the book, though, is that the writing is often not very good. Not always. There will be lovely page after page in which he sucks you in, describing the sad, lonely landscape abandoned by people and left for ruin. Then he’ll write a few lines of dialogue and leave me astounded by how bad he is at it. After I read the book, I went back to see exactly what the proportion of types of prose was in The Passage. Cronin appears to write about twenty pages of internal monologue or description to every page of dialogue between characters, and with good reason. No one talks like any of his characters do. They’re all turgid and wooden the moment they open their mouths.

He’s not the most subtle of writers, either. In the Las Vegas sequence, which could have been one of the most creepy scenes in the book, he throws away and suspense about what will be happening by starting the scene with prose that runs pretty as follows:

“What is that awful smell?” asked Peter The Wimpy Hero, wishing his older, stronger brother were here, the older brother who had always taken care of him since the premature death of the father he had never known. Why did he wonder that, he wondered with a wondering thought? Was it perhaps because he felt he still had to prove himself? “I have never smelled anything like this awful smell during my idyllic but oh-so-sheltered days in the Colony.”

“By gosh, it is a giant pool of highly flammable methane,” said Alicia, the tough and reckless. Whipping around with the cat-like reflexes that she had learned at the knee of the old Colonel, she pointed her gun into the shadows, the darkling shadows that rippled and pulsed with inky malice. “Conveniently enough to blow up this entire deserted hotel! Imagine what could happen if someone were to throw a match into that murky morass, whether by accident or dire last resort!”

Peter gulped. “Golly, it sure is an awful smell. I sure do hope we do not have to resort to such drastic explosive measures to fend off vampires in three pages!”

Yeah. It’s pretty much like that in parts, all the way through.

Another thing I disliked about The Passage is that when the going gets intense, Cronin finds it easier to resort to flowery literary writing than to describe what’s actually going on. This left me confused after major plot points, because frankly, I couldn’t really figure out who was being attacked, who was dying, and who was dead after. Eventually I came up with a handy legend:

Pages of prose about red flowers blossoming on an pond of scarlet = A vampire is probably sucking someone’s blood.

Mystical prose about the winds whispering names and the trees stirring in response across a vast and empty world with but one question on its wooded lips = We haven’t driven home the little girl’s magical powers enough in recent chapters, so you’re getting a damned good dose.

Folksy southern dialect going nowhere = Must be talking about that Mentally Challenged Gentle Giant Black Magic Negro from The Green Mile again.

Pages upon pages about rats = Minor character about to be offed. Or mind-controlled. Or something.

Don’t even get me started about the book’s climax. The resolution was so silly, and so easy, and so improbable, that I was a little disappointed.

But here’s the thing: despite all my crabbing, and despite spending the entire time I read The Passage making mental notes about where I’d seen its elements before (and you have seen these elements before, ladies and gentlemen, every single one), it was really quite an exciting book. A page-turner. It’s hard to put down. He makes me want to read the other two books of the trilogy, just to see what happens.

It’s no easy feat to keep an audience engaged. To make a reader want more is the ultimate goal of any writer, literary or not. And even during the parts I was rolling my eyes, or smirking, or narrowing my gaze and thinking, oh, really?, there wasn’t a single page of The Passage in which I considered putting down the book and moving on to something else.

That is not in the least faint praise. It’s almost something of a recommendation, if you’re willing to take the book for what it is, and ignore the claims of Justin Cronin being the literary savior of the horror genre.

On Chloe

We had to have our cat Chloe put to sleep yesterday. She was deathly ill from complications relating to the virus that the cats passed around last week, that led to kidney complications.

Chloe was the crabbiest cat I’ve ever, ever had. She complained about everything. When we didn’t get up early enough in the morning, she would hop on the bed and glare. When she didn’t like her food, she would scowl and hang around, giving us the vulture’s death-gaze. If she thought you weren’t paying enough attention to her, she would walk up and let you know, loudly. She hated to have her claws clipped, she pretended to hate being brushed, she disliked the cold, she disliked the warmth. She didn’t like to be picked up, and she certainly didn’t tolerate being held on anyone’s lap. If I was upset, or crying, she had no qualms about marching over and telling me to shut the hell up.

When we adopted Fred, Chloe secretly enjoyed the new cat’s company (they played and slept together frequently), but she didn’t like admitting it. Like a teenaged girl with a bratty little sister, she’d growl and sneer every time Fred approached whenever Chloe was in one of her frequent moods. Sometimes we’d go to sleep at night—or more usually not—with Chloe sitting at the bottom of the mattress, growling in a low, warning tone when she’d see Fred ten feet away at the top of the stairs.

She was a high-maintenance cat. Sometimes I’d leave the house wearing more Chloe fur on my clothing than Chloe had on herself. Her coat was of the sort that, although allegedly non-clumping, turned into mats the moment one’s head was turned. From the time she was a kitten, Chloe refused to drink any water delivered in a mere cat dish. Oh, no. She insisted on nothing but the freshest running water from the tap. Whenever anyone approached a room with a faucet, whether it was the bathroom, or kitchen, or laundry room, she would be there, meowing at the top of her considerable lungs, demanding a drink. Or rather, demanding that you turn on the tap. Whether she actually drank from it was a question of her whim at the moment. She wanted you to turn on that tap so she’d have it as an option, damn it. Failing the tap, she would gladly imbibe from a human drinking glass. Even if the human was a visiting guest and didn’t particularly want her glass invaded by a milky-white cat’s snout.

Chloe was highly vain. She never heard the whirr of an electronic camera she didn’t like. The moment someone would pull one out, she’d pose in every shot. When our relator was taking photos of our house’s interior for the ad and web site, Chloe somehow managed to insinuate herself into almost every one, forcing the poor realtor to take most of them over so that it didn’t look like we lived in one of those cat person’s house on Hoarders. She knew she was beautiful, and would allow people to oooo and to ahhh over her—but not to touch her. That was going too far.

I will say that Chloe was the bravest cat I ever knew. When we adopted her, she promptly walked downstairs the first morning from the bedroom in which we’d locked her, the night before, slapped our two cats of the time, Sarah and Emma, and made it clear that if they messed around with her, she’d chop them into Tender Vittles. When she met our dog next door for the first time, she got so tired of his barking that she walked up to him, hauled off with a kitty fist, and punched him in the nose so that he ran away yelping. She was never afraid of the vacuum, or of visitors, or thunderstorms, or any of the things that send Fred and Sarah scampering under the beds. She met them all with scorn and disinterest and a sneer.

Despite the fact that she didn’t like to be picked up or cuddled, there were moments when Chloe could be very sweet. They always came at bedtime, when she’d curl up between us and purr loudly, or lie on my chest and rest her paws on my chin and lips so that I had no choice but to notice her, or when she’d butt the book I was reading out of my hands so that I’d have to pet her.

The last couple of days of her life, she’d been completely out of it. Her problems were so pronounced that she couldn’t walk, or breathe, or raise her head. I don’t think she knew where she was, most of the time. The vet had sent her home with us for a final night, when fluids and drugs didn’t seem to be working. And yesterday morning, when she curled up on the bed next to us in a ball and finally slept—really slept, not the labored half-sleep she’d been condemned to for a couple of days—it was something of a relief to have the old Chloe back again. Even if it was just for a few minutes. We lay there with her, and stroked her gently, and let her have the last bits of comfort we could give.

Chloe was the biggest pain in the ass. But she was our pain in the ass, and I loved her.

An Epidemic of Feline Proportions

Sarah is the oldest of our three cats. We adopted her shortly after moving into our first apartment together; she turned twenty last June. For a cat, that’s pretty damned old.

She’s been deaf for a couple of years now, our Sarah. She’s adjusted her life accordingly. If we’re out of the house, she’ll position herself somewhere—the kitchen counter, the dining room table—where’s it’s easy for her to see the back door open on our return. In the mornings, rather than listen for our steps on the upstairs floor or the creaking of the bed, she’ll sit directly outside the bedroom door, nose to the wood, so that there’s no way she’ll miss it opening, even if she’s asleep. Sarah’s a sweet old thing, and like most old folk, she lives a life centered around eating, trying to stay warm on even the hottest of days, and napping. For the last several months she’s been napping so silently and motionlessly that I’ve gotten into the habit of poking her when I walk by and asking, “You alive? All right then,” before moving on.

I thought this week, though, was going to be her last.

Two days before we left for Connecticut, Sarah started sneezing pretty constantly. I was worried enough when we left to ask our house sitter to keep an eye on her; he would search her out when he visited, poke her to make sure she was still among the living, and then report back to us. Chloe and Fred both started sneezing the day we left. When we came back home, last Thursday, we had a full-blown kitty epidemic on our hands.

Sarah was in particularly bad shape. The sitter told us she’d eaten every day up until Wednesday night; she hadn’t eaten a thing when we got home Thursday evening, and I couldn’t get her to express any interest in food either Friday or Saturday. Her eyes were streaming, her nose was dry, and her breathing was so stressed and dire that I could hear it several rooms away. She’d stopped grooming herself, which made me unconsciously start humming the “Smelly Cat” song from Friends every time I was near. When she walked, she tottered around on weak little legs. She completely lost her voice, and would let out pathetic, silent mews that you just know were meant to communicate her weak despair. I attempted to feed her warm chicken broth to keep her strength up, but it was too difficult for her to drink.

Saddest of all, instead of sprawling in her usual sleeping spots on the sofas and chairs, she holed up in dark, concealed places where she would attempt to sleep through her death rattle. I’d been steeling myself for her demise for months—she’s an unusually old cat, after all—but I knew this was the end. I tried to make the breathing easier by putting her in the bathroom with the shower running on hot, for the steam. She responded with silent meows and by curling up to sleep in the sink.

And then she bounced back. Yesterday she was eating again. A couple of days of the steam treatment put her breathing back to normal. Her voice returned. She’s bright-eyed and vocal again, and sleeping on the chairs and cuddling up to us for comfort once more. The vet had given us antibiotics for the cat’s colds, yesterday but she scarcely seems to need it any longer. She’s gotten through, and is in the enviable state of watching the other cats suffer.

Fred isn’t happy to be sick, and doesn’t know what to make of it. She’s easy to deal with, however, because she simply does what I’d do in her situation—she crawls under some bedcovers, pulls them over her head, and sleeps all day.

Chloe, however, is miserable, and wants to world to know it. She walks around with a snot-covered nose that defies cleaning, meowing her discontent at the top of her voice and demanding I do something about it. Sometimes she’ll sit, sullen and cantankerous, glaring at us with contempt.

Today I gave them a bit of the steam treatment in the bathroom, because Chloe in particular was wheezing fairly badly. Fred hunkered on the counter and breathed the vapors like a good girl. What did Chloe do? Protest at the top of her voice the moment I closed the door, and then jumped into the half-full bathtub and began to wade around in it. Just because she is the biggest feline drama queen I’ve ever known.

All afternoon she’s been glaring at me, wet and miserable and refusing to lick herself dry. I think I’m supposed to gather from her offended and aggrieved staring that some reparation is supposed to be made.

Mostly I’m just ignoring her, and waiting for those antibiotics to kick in.

Housework

The last three weeks of my life have been something of a whirlwind. The only thing I've done, basically from sun up until I flopped into my bed at night, has been to work on getting our house in order and on the market. For the most part, that's meant doing every repair and renovation we've neglected over the entire life of the house.

The den ceiling came first. It was yikes, two years ago that we had damage from pouring rains leaking through the skylights there; it ran in little sluices down the skylight well and down the sloped ceiling toward the wall, leaving behind a large, torn pucker between the drywall and the tape between its joints. That I had to slice, remove, sand, mud, sand, mud again, prime, and paint.

The front garden, which I've always thought too large and unwieldy for a reluctant gardener—which is the best way I can describe myself—needed to be weeded for curb appeal. I mean, really weeded, not given the half-assed let's grab the knee-high ones and no one will notice the rest treatment. Then I had to do the same with the back garden, and the side gardens. I have a lot of gardens, apparently. One those were done, I had to tackle cleaning up the curious lot on the side of the garage. The previous owners used the area to store their trailers, to give an idea of its size. The current owners—that is, the Mont and I—have tended to use it as a place to store the sort of yard refuse that requires care and planning to dispose. Large branches, for example, or crumpled-up metal garbage cans. The branches had to be broken down and tied into bundles that the city would accept, and then I had to whack the weeds and miniature trees that had sprung up since the last time I'd ventured back there a couple of years ago.

The front lawn needed to be re-sodded, since it could have been used to stage a fake lunar landing. Then it needed to be watered. And watered. And watered some more, every day, and every evening.

The upstairs bathroom. Oh my god, the upstairs bathroom. Where do I even begin? When we moved into the house, on the first first day we took possession I walked upstairs into the bathroom and took in all the details I'd apparently missed during the couple of times I'd visited while house-hunting. I looked at the metallic silver wallpaper printed with fluffy clouds in an entirely different shade of metallic silver. I observed the Pepto-Bismol-pink countertop. And then I promptly broke down and wept. For a couple of years, the Mont and I laughingly called it 'The Disco Bathroom' and threatened to install a mirrorball, but in the end the only thing we could think of to do with it was to strip the wallpaper, paint everything a shade of blue that we hoped would pass as 'tropical,' and endure the astonished comments of visitors to the house who left the bathroom complaining about bleeding eyes from the countertop.

Plainly, none of this would do for selling the house.

I'd intended to re-laminate the counter myself. It didn't seem that difficult. The laminate was relatively cheap—cheaper than a completely new top, anyway—and it seemed like the kind of thing I could do without too much cursing. Attacking the counter meant removing the bathroom sink, however, and that proved impossible to do, as I found out after an hour spent with my head in a cupboard with a wrench in my hands and a flashlight between my teeth, swearing at the top of my lungs before finally I had myself a good cry. I came upon Plan C when we were visiting Home Depot for some paint for the walls. Apparently they make such a thing as laminate paint these days. I bought a little jar of it, had it tinted, and took it home. A few days and a lot of sweat later, I emerged from a bathroom that was not only a lovely shade of cream, but had a delft blue countertop that looked as if it had been extruded in that very color. I also installed a new medicine cabinet (we'd never had one, and were storing our boxes of pills in the hot water pipe access cupboard), and mirrors. The Mont caulked the bathtub, and I installed crown molding around the top of the room.

It's not fully updated, but I don't think anyone would cry at it.

The spare bedroom had a patch of plaster on the walls that had been ruined eight or nine years ago before we'd had a new roof installed. I replastered and sanded the area, then painted that entire wall with a new accent color the shade of a Kraft caramel. The office ceiling had stains from the same event, so I primed those a hundred times and painted them.

I mopped the basement floor, and walls. I removed the alarm system electronic pad, since it no longer works, and sealed up the circuit box for the system. I sanded and painted the railing on the front porch, and pulled little grasses and weeds from the cracks in the driveway and the patio. I sprayed down the siding on the house and the garage to make it look clean, and washed all the windows.

And then I packed. Oh, how I packed. Our realtor had made the gentle suggestion that many people in the market for a house didn't care to enter a home in which every square space of wall was covered with bookcases and tall, hulking piles of books that looked as if they'd come straight out of the dustier stacks of the Hogwarts library. I took the hint, and spent day after day buying boxes from Home Depot (sixty-seven cents apiece for the small ones, in case anyone's looking for a bargain), filling them with my books, and then leaving them in the living room. Then the next day I'd go buy another twenty-five boxes and do it all over again. Then, once I was done with the books, I did the same thing with all our DVDs and CDs.

Finally the living room became unnavigable; we had to borrow a dolly from church in order to move everything into the garage, where it could be out of sight during the house showings. No lie—this was the single most painful part of the entire month, especially as we did it on one of the hottest days on record this summer.

The last part of the process was simply cleaning everything and staging the house to make it look half-civilized, before we could let anyone inside. In a hundred-year-old house, it's not easy to make everything look new. But at the very least, it can feign cleanliness.

Not until this last Sunday, when I bravely cut and fitted a new window to replace the one on the garage that's been broken for a decade, did I realize I'd come almost to the very end of the long list of tasks I'd begun assembling on the day I learned we were moving to Connecticut. The only thing remaining—painting the upstairs hall ceiling—was not something I intended to do on the eve of a whirlwind tour to my future home. It'll wait until I get home.

It's a shame that my list is done. All the work, the day-to-day tasks and the grim realities of trying to whip things into shape, kept me from worrying too much about other things. The little short-term goals gave me a roadmap to follow. It's easier to think about how to sand something smooth, or what color to paint a wall, than it is to wonder the whys and whens of selling the house, or packing, or the unknowns of the impending move. I was happier pretending to know what I needed to do next, rather than fretting about the formless shape of days to come.