Homer's Odyssey

15 • My Homer/ My Self

A second ago you were all in rags, and now you are like some god come down from heaven.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

LIGHT TRAVELS AT 186,000 MILES PER SECOND, BUT SLOWS TO ABOUT two-thirds of that speed when it hits the lens of your eye. If this didn’t happen we would be functionally blind, unable to distinguish more than shadows interspersed with vague patches of brightness. It’s this slowing down that allows our brains to interpret and relay back to us what light reveals. But our minds go even further, imposing logic and regularity, smoothing over distortions and filling in the occasional gaps that open in our visual field. It’s the reason why, for example, an object traveling almost too fast for our eyes to follow is seen as a blur. The object isn’t really a blur; the blur is simply our minds’ way of creating order where otherwise there would be confusion.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that what we think we see isn’t precisely the way things are in the objective reality that exists outside our own heads. Or, to put it more simply, things aren’t always what they appear.

I wandered around in a kind of shock for days after the break-in. (I could have died, I told myself repeatedly. I could have been raped and murdered and died!) Nothing looked or felt or sounded the way it should. Music was too jarring; sunlight grated on me like sandpaper with its too-brightness. But silence and darkness squeezed the breath out of me with the terrors they held. Familiar things offended me by pretending to be ordinary when nothing, clearly, could be taken for what it seemed. My home was not the safe haven a home was supposed to be, and unknown horrors skulked beneath the surface of everything.

Homer returned to his customary cheerfulness far more quickly than I did. By the next morning—as red-eyed a sunrise as I’d ever stayed up to witness—his attitude about the incident seemed to be, Boy, that was weird, huh? Let’s play fetch! It was as if the fierce defender he’d morphed into so breathtakingly and unexpectedly had been merely a trick of the eye. I found myself calling just about everyone I knew and telling them about what Homer did, not so much to brag about him (although bragging certainly seemed warranted) but because I felt the need to cement a memory that was hard to maintain in light of Homer’s unruffled complacency a mere five hours later.

Most of us with pets come to feel eventually that we know everything about them—that we can predict with near certainty what they’ll do or how they’ll react in any given situation. My father had famously walked some of our dogs without a leash on occasion because, “Tippi will always stop when I say no,” or, “Penny would never run away from my side.”

But my father, who understood pets better than anybody, was also always the first to say that a pet was an animal first and foremost, and that with animals—as with people—there was always room for the unpredictable.

I had thought that I knew Homer as well as my father knew our dogs. If Homer nosed around an empty tuna can—sniffing it, turning it upside down, digging inside it with his front paws in a frustrated manner—I would say to an observer, “He doesn’t understand how something can smell so strongly of tuna and not be tuna.”

I’ve already noted that Homer slept with me every night, falling asleep precisely when I did and sleeping for exactly as long as I slept. But it was more than that. When I ate, Homer trotted off to his food bowl. When I was in an especially good mood, Homer ran zanily around the apartment, his cartwheels and caperings the physical manifestation of what I was feeling. If I was sad, Homer curled in a tight little ball in my lap and couldn’t be persuaded out of his funk even when presented with a favorite toy or a fresh can of tuna. When I walked from room to room, Homer might charge in front of me or lope behind me or weave in and out of my legs. But the rhythms of our steps had so completely adjusted themselves to the other’s that neither of us ever missed a beat, never faltered, never tripped the other one up. I could walk down an unlit hallway with Homer darting around my feet and, without being able to see him, never come close to stumbling or falling over him.

But Homer was also clearly capable of things—courageous, extraordinary, heroic things—that none of us could have predicted when I’d first adopted him as a helpless blind kitten, or that even I could have predicted now, having spent three years with him. I was proud of him. How could I not be? I had always been the one to insist that Homer was just as “normal” as any other cat. But this was something else altogether. Regarding him as heroic rather than blind or even ordinary required a slight adjustment in my thinking.

A long-married friend, on the eve of my own wedding years later, would tell me, “Never forget—you’re still going to bed with a stranger every night.” By then, though, this was something I had known for a while. It was the second important lesson about adult relationships that Homer taught me.

They never did catch the man who broke into our apartment. A police report was filed and I went down to the Miami Beach Police Department to look through their big book of mug shots. I saw a couple of pictures that might have resembled my burglar, but I was afraid to identify anybody. Whenever I remembered that night, the only thing I saw in my mind’s eye was Homer; there was no way I would have sworn in court that anybody I picked out of a lineup or a mug-shot book was the right man.

Still, it was weeks before I could sleep. But where my fear and outrage stayed with me, those feelings on Homer’s part had clearly been the work of a night. Homer slept like a baby next to me on those long, sleepless nights, while my eyes popped open at every wisp of sound.

I had always envisioned myself as being the one who would make the world intelligible for Homer. I would be the eyes he didn’t have, the one who would soothe his fears in the dark. But Homer was far more comfortable in darkness, in the world of random sound, than I was. I’ll admit that, in the aftermath of the break-in, it was I who felt safer knowing Homer was sleeping next to me.

It occurred to me as I lay there, battling my newfound insomnia, that what I had always taken to be Homer’s fearlessness despite his blindness was perhaps the opposite. Homer had known there were things to fear in the dark; he wouldn’t have reacted so aggressively if he hadn’t known there was cause to be afraid. But what could you do with that fear? You had to live your life, didn’t you? Where another cat might have spent his life hiding and hissing, forever anticipating dangers that might or might not be there, Homer simply went about his business, confident on some instinctive level that he could deal with threats if and when they arose.

I didn’t tell my parents about the break-in. There was nothing they could do after the fact, I reasoned, other than worry—and if I was having trouble sleeping, who knew how long it would be before my mother was able to close her eyes again? But Homer was made much of in the following days by our friends. “No way!” they said. “No. Freaking. Way!” They, too, looked at Homer as if they’d never seen him before. He was our Daredevil, our real-life superhero, although he probably never connected his bravery of that night with the endless cans of tuna, pounds of sliced turkey, and tubs of inexpensive caviar (which he chewed so thoughtfully—intrigued by its fishy smell but unfamiliar with its texture) that he received. Scarlett and Vashti, who were given their share of this bounty, also seemed to accept it unquestioningly, content to enjoy the goods the gods had seen fit to provide.

I think the thing that drove me craziest was wondering why? Why me, why my apartment? The most maddening thing to accept is that there usually isn’t a why. Or there probably is—because effects have causes—but you’ll never know what it was. Not knowing makes it impossible to avoid having the exact same thing happen again. But it’s also liberating. The world could be dangerous and bad things sometimes happened, but there was nothing you could do except live your life. And it would be foolish if, in the process of living it, you didn’t also enjoy it.

Homer, in his own way, had known this all along.

In the end, after the shock and the fear and the anger had subsided—when Homer was once again an ordinary cat who loved rubber bands and organized daring raids on bookcases and pantry shelves—I was left with two things. I realized I had succeeded in “raising” Homer as I had long ago resolved to. Homer was, indeed, brave and independent, uncrippled by self-doubt. I had been emphatic in insisting that Homer could take care of himself—just like any other cat. And so he could. He had proven that, under the right circumstances, he could take care of me as well.

And I was also left with a gratitude so profound and solid that it was like a third living presence in whatever room Homer and I were in together. In the dark hours of four or five AM, when even a town like South Beach had quieted down for the night, thoughts of how that other night could have ended rose like a wave to drag me under. My eyes would well with tears, and I would pull Homer closer to me, murmuring, “Thank God for you. Thank God for you, little cat!”

Homer may have surprised me, but there was no denying this new, deeper symmetry between us. Once upon a time, I had saved Homer’s life. And now, years later, he had saved mine.