Bono

Chapter Twenty-one

ALONE, NOT LONELY

A feline sees beauty in every day.

I woke the next morning with a pompom in my face. As my eyes cleared, it became clear it was not a pompom, but the fluffy tip of Bono’s tail. He was curled up on the pillow next to mine. His owlish eyes fixed me with an unblinking stare.

Repressing the urge to cry out and throw grateful arms around him, I closed my eyes again and pretended to sleep. After what seemed several lifetimes, I felt something flicking leisurely across my nostrils. Bono was using his tail as my wake-up call.

Much as I longed to reach out and run my hands through his scruffy mane, the cat had made it clear what the dynamics of our relationship were. He was the rock star, and I was the humble fan.

“Good morning sir,” I said. “How long have you been sitting there?”

He blinked and dipped his head the way I’d seen him do with Lydia when inviting her attention. Smiling, I slowly raised a hand to scratch his forehead with my forefinger—anything more would have been presumptuous. I couldn’t help noticing how flat and broad his head was compared to Jonah’s.

As Bono raised his chin and allowed me to stroke his scraggy neck, he emitted something I hadn’t heard before—a light but unmistakable purr. Compared to Jonah’s throaty rumble, Bono’s was a tinkling music box melody.

Without thinking, I sat up and reached out to stroke his back.

His fur was dull and wiry. The addition of fresh fish and chicken to his diet had done little to improve his coat. Bono sprang off the bed and flitted into the shadows underneath the mattress.

Though I missed Lydia, it seemed that her absence had allowed Bono to offer a tentative paw of friendship. And in the days that followed, I discovered it could be liberating to experience the city without the blur of another’s wants and perceptions.

Wandering the streets of New York, I became reacquainted with someone I hadn’t known for decades. She was older and less naive than the last time we hung out together. I didn’t mind her company, and I learned some things I’d forgotten about her, too.

In a field of sunflowers, there’s always one bloom facing a different direction from the others—not surrendering membership of the group, just taking a different perspective. That’s her.

She was the person an overzealous store detective would decide to shadow because she hadn’t paid neurotic attention to her looks. She wandered aimlessly about the store with her mind on other things, which the store detective interpreted as suspicious behavior. When she reached her hand into her pocket, the detective would approach to offer help. This would be pointless because unless he’d like to discuss the morning cloud formations and if he also thought they looked like nudes painted by Ingres, she wasn’t interested.

When people were piling onto a bus or train, she was usually the last anyone sat next to. She didn’t know why—perhaps it had to do with her size or her distracted expression. Perhaps she looked forbidding. Though she paid attention to how she dressed, she sometimes wondered if she was mistaken for a bag lady. She didn’t care—she reckoned street people deserve more kudos than they get.

She was also the person in the wrong seat at the movie theater. It was quite usual for an outraged woman to accost her, and demand she get out of her seat. If the other woman was calm enough to inspect the tickets, usually they would discover she was in the right seat all along—but if that woman wanted it badly, she’d let her take it.

She had more than a passing acquaintance with grief. The fissures in her heart were permanent, but they were not a deformity. They were the spaces into which she could invite others who wanted to unburden their sadness. To share another’s sorrow, whether it was a close friend or a reader from the other side of the world, was one of life’s great privileges.

She liked silence. There was so much to hear in it.

If forced to choose, she’d be a cat rather than a dog. Not because she wrote about cats. Dogs were straightforward. They revealed everything about themselves in exchange for a bowl of meat. A cat, on the other hand, shared what it thought you should know, and reserved the right to disappear.

Flowers affected her. They were a reminder of the beauty and fragility of life. Whenever she carried a bunch along a street, whether it was in New York or Melbourne, cars would slow down to let her cross. A person with flowers was signaling themselves as a lover or a beloved. They could be caring for a troubled friend, or the focus of someone else’s concern. With flowers in your arms, you walked in a halo of love.

People at the beginning and end of life interested her. She loved it when a baby stared up from his stroller and raised his chubby fingers in salute. Or when an old man’s eyes blazed with recognition in exchange for a passing nod. Those on the edges appreciated the miracle of being here. Their priorities were straight. They savored every moment. Animals had a similar approach.

She liked watching the way a mother’s lips open and close as she feeds small pieces of bread to her infant. The faces of small children were fascinating. Some were already middle-aged in expression. Familial similarities intrigued her. The way a set of ears or eyes gets carried through generations was fascinating.

Though she’d lost a child, a breast, a brother, parents, and a number of close friends, she didn’t dwell on what life had taken from her. Life gave far more than it took away, and continued to do so every day.

In an age when so many people were fixated by the hyper real world inside their phones, she found the sight of lovers reassuring. It would be a long time before two robots fell in love with each other.

The danger, she felt, wasn’t so much that robots were becoming people, but the other way around. Watching commuters on the subway, she was saddened by how everyone in the car lowered their head over a phone. Their eyes glazed over as they switched off and sank into states of semi-hypnosis. The last thing they touched at night was their cool sliver of technology. When they woke in the morning, the first thing they reached for wasn’t the warmth of another human, but their phone. It made her wonder how long it took to forget how to be human—one generation, or two?

She understood why pets had surged in popularity. People needed the comfort of warm fur, the gleam of a trusting eye more than ever. In many cases, it was all they had to stay connected to their animal selves.

Though she relished the company of friends and family, she was equally content sitting alone in a diner listening to others try to make sense of their world.

That was the woman I came to know again. So, while I was alone in New York, I was far from lonely. I had myself for company, and I quite liked it.

I also had Bono. Whether I was bathing my senses in a Wagner opera at Lincoln Center or munching on pizza at Lombardi’s in Nolita, I knew that on the third floor of a not very elegant building near the UN, a small beating heart was waiting for me.

One morning, as I rifled through my underwear in search of one of my new bras, I came across a furry pink cat toy I’d brought from Australia. I placed it on the floor beside the bed and went out for the day.

When I returned that evening, Bono was tossing the thing around the apartment as if it was the best pet toy that had ever been invented. And to my elation, he’d started doing number two.