Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 10:49 A.M. PST} In Denial

Gentle Tweeter,

The long-ago predead, eleven-year-old me carried my bundled feline corpse through Antwerp and Aspen and Ann Arbor. Like the blanket-wrapped cadaver of some expired Granny Joad, another bookish reference, I smuggled poor Tigerstripe through various immigration and customs checkpoints. I wore him strapped to my skin, hidden beneath my clothing, the way my mom and dad had so often played mule for their contraband narcotics. Needless to say, his sour odor did not abate; neither did the faithful entourage of winged parasites, primarily houseflies, but also their adolescent grubs and maggots that appeared on the scene as if conjured by some foul magic.

Whether international security was alarmingly lax, or my parents had placed big-money bribes to the right officers, my sad burden was never discovered. Occasionally, I’d mew quietly, defeated, but I kept my secret always wrapped in that original breakfast napkin. Don’t imagine that I was deranged, Gentle Tweeter; I knew my kitty was dead. No one in contact with his deflating fur coat could ignore its constant drip-drip-dripping of cold fluids. Under my sweater, lumped against my belly like a pregnancy, like a miscarriage, I felt the jumble of his collapsing bones.

In the hours since he’d passed, his furry tum-tum had begun to balloon. And, yes, I might’ve been temporarily insane with grief, but I knew that my kitten was filling with gas, the excretal product of renegade intestinal bacteria. And, yes, I might’ve been secretly terrified that I’d fed him something that had caused his demise, but I knew the word excretal, and I knew that my beloved was about to burst and that such an explosion would reduce my heart’s treasure to a bug-infested carcass. The linen felt sticky against my fingers. To my caressing hands Tigerstripe wasn’t dead, but I was careful not to pet him too vigorously.

At present, we shared a stretch limo, my parents sitting side by side with their backs to the driver, withdrawing themselves as far as possible from my not-happy circumstances. My parents’ flattened emotional aspect, their somber voices implied that they sensed the truth. Nevertheless in that car between the airport and our home in Jakarta or Johannesburg or Jackson Hole, my mother asked, “How’s the little patient?” Her eyes bloodshot. Her voice forcing a Ctrl+Alt+Lilt. “Feeling any better?”

In the limo’s plush interior, the perennial flies and rank smell proved difficult to ignore, and one of her yoga-sculpted arms flailed out, seeking the controls for the air-conditioning. Her manicured fingers increased the air flow to a full arctic blast, and she plucked a prescription bottle of Xanax from her bag and upended a few pills into her mouth. She handed the bottle to my father behind his newspaper.

Cradled in my lap, still swaddled in breakfast linen, I carried my heart, and my heart was stiff and cold. My heart was a dead time bomb drooling decayed corruption. In response to her inquiry, I could but meow flatly. Behind the murk of the tinted windows, the outskirts of Lisbon or La Jolla or Lexington fell behind us and vanished. As we motored along, I felt the putrefying juices of my soul mate migrating downward to soil my skort. Smoothed flat, the napkin in my lap would chart jagged islands and filigreed coastlines. Flecked and blotched with the stains of decomposition, the linen would trace a rambling journey in which everything you love falls apart.

This, it was the opposite of a treasure map.

My father? He hardly took notice. In that plush setting, my father was busy behind his newspaper, the salmon-toned pages of the Financial Times. Of his person, all I could see were his legs from the knees down, those creased and cuffed trouser legs. I could see only those and his knuckles holding the paper spread in front of him. There, his gold wedding band. While my mom wrestled with her sedated empathy, and I sank deeper into despair, my dad snapped his newsprint pages. He turned them with rustling flourishes. If you’ll notice, Gentle Tweeter, a businessman with a newspaper is worse than any Jane Austen heroine flouncing through life in a taffeta ball gown.

“Maddy?” asked my mom. Her words shrill with false good cheer, she said, “How would Tigerstripe like a new brother?”

Meaning: She was pregnant? Meaning: She was insane?

From within his paper fortress, my father said, “Sweetheart, we’re adopting.” From behind the scrim of wars and stock prices and sports scores, “The kid’s from someplace awful.”

Meaning: I wasn’t paying them enough attention. Meaning: They wanted to feel more appreciated.

“The paperwork took months,” my mom said. “It’s not as easy as adopting a…” And she nodded toward the sodden napkin wadded in my lap.

In response, I offered an almost inaudible tear-choked meow.

My father shook his papers angrily. My mother rattled her bottle of Xanax as she tipped back another pill. My hands forgot to be careful, and my fingernails itched at my kitty’s soft tum-tum. And at that juncture, Gentle Tweeter, in the spacious seats and enclosed interior of the limo, poor Tigerstripe’s distended abdomen burst.