Tails of the Apocalypse

The Poetry of Santiago ^{by Jennifer Ellis}

2015

Santiago opened his single eye and took in the morning on the piazza. The light had the strangest and faintest of orange hues, and Santiago stretched his stiff limbs still wrapped in a drowse. He ran a quick inventory—habit after years of street life. All four legs still in place. Eyesight growing weaker. Hunger faint but present; which was good, because surely he couldn’t be dying if he still wanted breakfast. As his senses came back online, his old heart began to accelerate. There was something wrong with the air. It grasped at his nostrils and forced him unsteadily to his feet where he ran his inventory again, this time checking for the man, who was nowhere in sight. The apartment stood empty and dark, and it occurred to Santiago that he did not even know the man’s name.

He came into the world the son of a stray, who was the daughter of a stray, who was descended from a long line of cats who eked out an existence on the street. After making a wrong turn as a young kitten on the piazza on which he was born, he was ushered into an overly hot home that smelled of cabbage, clinging to the sticky, clenching hands of a child.

He lost most of his tail in that home in an unfortunate incident with a door while attempting to come inside on a particularly rainy night, and although being a housecat was a much whispered-about and longed-for thing on the street, Santiago could not say that it was a particularly comfortable experience. He could not recall the final incident that had separated him from that home. Perhaps he had wandered too far and gotten lost. Perhaps his owners had just up and moved without collecting him. Possibly he had simply set out on his own, carried forward by a quiet joie de vivre and a sense that he was not especially wanted or safe.

He spent most of his younger years living in alleys and corners of Pompei, fighting, scrounging, and carousing. It was there he lost his left eye to another ginger tom, a mean and heavy scrapper twice Santiago’s size and who took no prisoners. It was there that he learned the economy of the street, the art of the grab and dodge, and the quick and inevitable slide into violence of the desperate to survive.

But Santiago got along with his smarts and knack with the ladies and enjoyed an acceptable life, as street lives go. Certainly he had outlived most of his contemporaries—the ginger tom who took his eye got run over by a lorry when Santiago was ten—and there were many handsome kittens wandering the streets of Pompei with brilliant orange fur, pronounced stripes, and a certain loft to their tails.

When Santiago crested the last few months of his fourteenth year, a sluggishness settled into his reflexes, and he could no longer zero in as easily on the precise location of mice with his single eye. His once solid and reliable bones had started to feel fragile and delicate. Life had started to get more dangerous; a cat who could not see or run very fast was an easy target, and Santiago’s escapes had become a bit too heart-pumping for his liking.

After a particularly harrowing encounter with a veritable army of spiteful and vicious rats, an antique store on the Piazza di Santa Caterina caught his attention. The crowded, dusty shop with dark corners and shelves of collectibles was manned by a gentleman with a stooped back and a tightly knit fuzz of grey hair that encircled the sides of his head. It was close to the outdoor market, where scraps and essential street gossip could always be had, and most importantly, the door to the shop sat open wide all day in the hope of enticing tourists.

Santiago cased the store for weeks, working his way up to surreptitious wanderings through the brown furniture that smelled of wood, age, and turpentine. At the end of his fourth week, he found a quiet corner behind a bureau with a small shaft of sunlight for warmth and fell asleep, though he made sure he was out before the shop closed for the evening. He came back the next day and the next, always sleeping in the same blanket of light, always being sure to leave before the door got shut for the night.

One evening he did not wake up in time and spent the night meandering through the corners of the shop, strolling over armoires, sniffing old upholstery, and trying not to knock vases off shelves. He caught a mouse that night and quietly devoured the entire thing save for the intestines, which he politely left near the front desk for the shopkeeper as a token of his gratitude for the night’s lodging.

He slipped out before the man found him the next morning, but when Santiago returned for his nap in the sun that afternoon, he caught the man looking at him around the edge of an old wardrobe. He braced to flee, his body taut and low to the ground, but the man simply turned and walked away, leaving Santiago to settle back in the pool of sunshine with a pounding heart. It took longer to fall asleep that day.

Santiago made sure to be out before the store closed that night, a practice he maintained for a while. But as the days went on, he sometimes missed the tinkling of the bell above the door—his cue to leave—as the man brought in the outside displays prior to closing the shop, his hearing having gone as frail as his bones. When he spent the night in the store, he always made sure to dispatch a mouse or sometimes a rat in payment, depositing the appropriate remains near the shopkeeper’s desk. Sometimes the best he could find was a spider or two. Delicately spitting the legs out by the desk often proved to be a challenge, and on those nights he was never sure if the man appreciated that Santiago had done his best in his nighttime patrol of the store.

The first afternoon the man set a bowl of cream by the wardrobe, Santiago bolted in fright, certain it was a trick of some sort. When he returned the next morning, he selected a different spot for his nap, a more secluded corner behind a pale blue dresser. There was no sun, but Santiago made do in his new spot, his body folded around itself amidst the heavy wooden monuments of another time.

After a week in the new location, the bowl of cream reappeared just around the corner from the dresser. Santiago had not heard the man leave it. The mice had been thin for the last several weeks, and Santiago could feel the press of his ribs against the floor whenever he settled down to sleep. He approached the bowl tentatively and drank his fill.

And so the cat and the man developed a routine. Santiago kept the store free of rats, mice, and invertebrate vermin in exchange for a safe place to sleep and a pool of creamy milk every second morning. Once he felt confident that the shopkeeper was okay with his presence, Santiago even readopted his original pool of sunlight for his afternoon naps. After a few weeks, the man started to leave a door that led to a set of stairs open at night, and on the fifth night Santiago crept up the stairs, his heart skittering like it never had in his years of dumpster raiding and nightly sparring. The stairs led to a small set of quarters with a covered deck that looked out on Pompei. Santiago spied the shopkeeper in his undershirt sitting hunched at a table. The man looked up, and Santiago whirled and bolted to the safety of the antique store.

He left the shop before closing the next day and found his way through hallways and a fire escape to the roof of the neighboring house. Then he squeezed through some slats and onto the man’s covered deck, where he spent the night under the shelter pressed against the wall, while the man sat inside in his white undershirt writing in a black notebook.

Days turned into weeks and the summer turned into fall, and both Santiago and the shopkeeper became a year older. Santiago still made his rounds on the streets for a few hours most mornings, inhaling the intricate archive of smells, calling on old cronies, and tracking the ever-shifting landscape of acrimony and alliance among street dwellers. But the stray-filled corners and casual violence of the streets felt dangerous for a one-eyed cat whose bones no longer moved with the suppleness of youth. His years and reputation as a fighter earned him a sort of respect, but always as he sauntered through the piazza, his stubby tail aloft, he felt the eyes of the other animals on him, sizing him up. And soon it no longer felt like a choice to return to the safety of the shop and the man’s deck before nightfall. Now it was a strategy for survival.

It was the man who named him Santiago. He had been called other things before: Gingie when he’d first been snatched up as a bundle of soft, orange fur in the streets by one of the children in his former home. And then more often than not—when his fur ceased to be so soft, and before he left that family—he’d been labeled Nasty Tom or Wretched Beast. On the streets he’d been known as Stubs, and while said mostly with respect, Santiago wasn’t at all sure he liked the allusion to his physical imperfection; as if the other animals might have the occasional laugh or two after he and his failing hearing had walked on past. Santiago liked his new name better. He liked the way it rolled off the man’s tongue, gently, almost reverently, as if they were both aged and hardened warriors who respected one another.

When Santiago first started spending time in the back of the shop, he discovered that the man spent a lot of time talking to a framed picture of a woman on his desk. He would speak to her for hours, his voice beating a rhythmic but gentle staccato, while Santiago snoozed inattentively on the floor.

Santiago could not pinpoint exactly when the shopkeeper started talking to him. It happened gradually in short bursts. The man would say, “Santiago, what do you think of this?” or “Well now, what do you suppose we can sell this for?” when a new piece of furniture would be brought in, or “Santiago, can you believe this weather?” when the rains came.

As time went on, the man began commenting on bits of the daily news, which he and Santiago listened to on the radio, asking Santiago’s opinion of the Pope and this climate change thing, Greek economic recovery, or the murder of Cecil the lion. The man also liked to talk about someone named Sofia. Santiago learned that Sofia took her coffee with milk and sugar, made excellent chicken scaloppine, had a sixth sense regarding the value of antiques, and preferred pieces from the Queen Anne period. What Sofia would have thought of something—everything—was very important to the man, and there were many times when the shopkeeper would go very quiet after speaking of Sofia and just run his fingers softly over a particular item.

Santiago often did not understand precisely what the man was talking about when he said something to Santiago or to the photo, but he liked to hear the man speak. He would often sit on the desk in the shop with his paws curled beneath him while the shopkeeper filled in information on an inventory ledger, paid bills, or fixed small pieces of furniture.

The man was a poet. He’d informed Santiago of this one day as the cat sat on the man’s desk watching the fan blow gossamer strands of dust into the air. Santiago was not sure what this meant exactly, but apparently this was what the man did at his table in the evenings. He wrote poetry. The man said this apologetically, as if Santiago would have an opinion on how the shopkeeper should better spend his time. Then the man announced that when this was all gone—he waved his hands through the air at that point, and Santiago wasn’t sure if the man referred to his antique store or Pompei or the entire world—poetry would live on.

A few weeks later, during a particularly dreadful heat wave that made Santiago resort to panting like a dog and caused everyone in the outdoor market, especially the chocolatier, to be grumpy, the man explained to Santiago that poetry was a dance of words, a tapestry of images, and a handful of dreams. Santiago was still not sure he understood. But it didn’t matter. Poetry made the man happy, and that made Santiago happy.

Occasionally, when he was feeling bold or perhaps needy in the evenings, Santiago would wander through the open deck door and into the man’s quarters, where he would sleep carefully at the foot of the man’s chair. The man would look up and nod at the cat, one old warrior to the other, and then he’d return to writing in his little black notebook, which he carried with him during the day in the front pocket of his shirt.

Santiago never tried to jump on the man’s lap, for he was not a lap cat, after his experience of being squeezed so tightly as a kitten by the children in his first family that his lungs and head had hurt, and then being boxed around the ears routinely by the woman of the house for unknown transgressions. Besides, the man was clearly intent on his work and did not look like the sort to sit and hold a cat. When the shopkeeper went to bed, Santiago would retreat to the deck where he’d spend the night curled in an orange ball, his stubby tail tucked around his haunches for warmth.

Poetry will live on.

The man repeated this statement, almost to himself, when he removed paint from old furniture with careful strokes of the scraper; or when he limped slowly to the market on one leg shorter than the other; or when he put the money from the day’s transactions in the deposit bag to take to the bank.

Poetry will live on.

When Santiago came fully conscious that morning on the deck, he knew immediately that everything had changed. It was the start of his second autumn with the man and Santiago’s sixteenth year of life. Each morning now arrived as a bit of a surprise. Street cats rarely lived beyond their tenth or eleventh year. But he was no longer a street cat. He was a deck cat, a netherworld of in-between that likely bought him greater purchase on the land of the living.

The world had changed in ways that were immediately observable, and in ways that beat at the back of his subconscious, where his instincts lay in wait. Instincts that had kept him alive for so many years.

For one thing, he’d slept late, his old bones slightly more exhausted than the previous day, his sight and sense of smell the tiniest bit duller. The man had already descended the stairs to open the shop, and Santiago remained on the deck overlooking the piazza. Failing to wake when the man did was a sure sign, in Santiago’s mind, that his life force was nearly depleted. For another thing, all the other animals that normally occupied the streets seemed to be gone.

From his vantage point, Santiago could make out none of the cats or dogs at their usual posts on the piazza begging or thieving for food. And yet the humans went about their days as usual, greeting each other, chattering in the streets, setting up market stalls, and traversing the narrow cobblestones on bikes and scooters. Santiago paced back and forth on the deck searching the piazza for any sign of old Pete and Fritz—the Columbo twins who ran the piazza through a combination of big bone structure, egomania, and dirty dealing—or even Nervy the pigeon. The Piazza di Santa Caterina appeared completely bereft of other animals. Where could they possibly have gone?

But the last and most troubling thing was the scent of the air. Even to Santiago’s weakened nose, it smelled of fire and chemicals. And death.

There was definitely something wrong.

He padded down through the antique store and out onto the cobblestones, sniffing cautiously. He made his rounds to the dumpster behind the grocer, the teahouse, and the maze of stalls in the piazza, uncertain of the last time he’d visited some of his old haunts. When had all the other animals disappeared? Had they been gone for weeks while he lay sated on his deck, wallowing in his new life and contemplating the inevitability of death?

A rat he recognized scurried past. Ray, as he was known, was officially the biggest rat in this quarter of Pompei. He was too big for Santiago to consider taking on, and, with Ray’s reputation as a fierce fighter, was immune to the various pressures to which rats were subjected.

“Where is everyone?” Santiago asked in Furfar, the pidgin language of the streets.

Ray paused mid-scurry and eyed the cat warily. Santiago had no doubt the rat could easily take him down, and apparently the rat agreed because he suddenly got all puffed up and cocky. “Don’t know and don’t care. The eats are plenty good with me all on my own. Don’t even think of trying to move in on the chocolate lady or the butcher.” The chocolatier’s stall was always a favorite among the animals because the woman who ran it seemed to have coordination problems. She was forever dropping things.

“When did they all leave?” Santiago said.

“This morning,” Ray said and then made a threatening chitter and lunge at Santiago, who bolted—but not before he noticed the rat had chocolate spattered in his brown fur and remembered that Ray wasn’t all that bright.

A weak tremor rumbled through the cobblestones, and Santiago froze and arched his back, hissing embarrassingly at his own shadow. Ray skittered off through the stalls of the outdoor market, his round behind swaying back and forth over his long shiny tail. A dog started to bark wildly—a snow-white poodle with a pink bow in her topknot straining at her red leash, her owner struggling to keep it under control. After he had regained control of himself, Santiago peered around. Surely the humans would take action now.

But the marketplace remained as crowded as ever with locals and tourists alike. The skinny grocer with the red nose, who took sips from his flask over the course of the day, bustled among his fruits and vegetables. The plump bread ladies, who liked to give Santiago the broom if he sat too close to their stall, bullied people into purchasing sugar-covered pastries and loaves of golden bread. Their braying voices carried all the way across the piazza. The jeweler haggled with a pair of tourists, and the chocolate fountain bubbled as it had every day before.

Santiago did a more thorough tour of all the usual places where animals congregated and found only the old, infirm, very young, and stupid remained.

The faint rumble beneath his paws came again, like thunder in an underground cavern far away.

Santiago had to save the old man. He trotted back to the antique store as fast as his tired paws would take him. The man sat at his desk with the radio on. Santiago leapt up onto the desk, a move that was costing his brittle body more and more each day. The man flipped off his radio, an ancient brown box of a thing with a dial and a big cream grating for a speaker.

“Good morning, Santiago. Stromboli had a particularly large explosion this morning. I almost think I can smell it from here. They say one of the volcanoes in Iceland is erupting as well. I can’t remember the name. No cream this morning, I’m afraid. I haven’t made it to the market yet. I have an important project I’m working on. It might be my last.”

He examined Santiago for a few seconds, then sighed as if he’d been hoping for a response from the cat. Then he rose and ran his hands reverently over a glossy armoire he was refinishing. He’d grown thinner over the past few months and spoke of something called cancer that Santiago did not understand.

The cat peered out the front window of the shop and off into the distance, where a slice of the dark cone of Mt. Vesuvius was just visible above some of the buildings. How was he going to get the man’s attention and make him understand that they needed to leave?

He jumped off the desk, the shock of landing traveling from his paw pads all the way up his legs. He meowed and wove in and out of the man’s legs and ran to the door.

The man ignored his crazy antics the first few times and then finally looked down. “I will get you your cream later this afternoon, Santiago, I promise.”

Santiago tried his meow, leg weave, run-to-the-door routine again, this time stopping to claw at the man’s pant leg and pulling the cloth in the direction of the door.

“Santiago, please. I have work to do.” The man’s fuzzy eyebrows were lowered in a way the cat had never seen before, except when a particularly brash American tourist entered the shop and tried to haggle the man down to nothing for one of his treasures.

Santiago tried simply running back and forth between the shopkeeper and the front door. But the man only started to look alarmed at the cat’s behavior, as if Santiago had finally gone senile.

“Very well,” the man said. “Is it your cream that you want? I’ll go get it now.” And the man set off with his limp to retrieve his hat and head out for the market.

Santiago ran to the front door and tried to block it with his small body. He tried growling and arching his back until his fur became bristly. The shopkeeper stepped backwards surprised, and then Santiago mustered up a rusty old purr and wound between the man’s legs to show that he wasn’t really angry. This seemed to startle his patron even more, and the cat was certain the man thought he had gone quite mad.

Santiago ran back to the desk, jumped up first on the chair, then the desktop where he sat atop the radio, hoping the man would understand. But the shopkeeper just shook his head at the cat, removed his hat from a peg and placed it on his head, then turned to leave. The cat jumped down, feeling the sting of shock once again in his bones, and loped across the floor. He darted out the door before it closed. He stayed close to the man on the walk to the marketplace and once again scanned the streets for signs of the other animals. The bad smell had grown stronger, and Santiago resisted the urge to flee to safety. He had to get the man to leave Pompei.

On the way back with the cream from the grocer, Santiago approached the man and delicately sunk his teeth into the man’s pant leg again and pulled him toward the eastern hills, away from Mt. Vesuvius. The man gave him an incredulous look and pushed him aside gently with his foot.

Santiago was beginning to feel desperate. Back inside the antique store, he cast about for something to knock off an armoire or dresser, or for the arm of a fine Chippendale sofa to shred. Anything to get the shopkeeper’s attention, to make him understand. But this would probably just get him thrown out permanently.

While the man poured his cream, Santiago bolted across the store and onto the man’s desk, slamming his paws against the picture of the woman on the wall. The frame fell to the floor, shattering the glass. The cat clawed at the photo until it came loose, then snatched it up in his teeth and shot back out the open front door. The man followed close on his heels, yelling in anger.

And so their game of cat and mouse began, except that for once, Santiago was the mouse. He drew the man out of the piazza, down streets that wound through unfamiliar neighborhoods, and eventually along busy roadways that passed through entirely different villages, always keeping Mt. Vesuvius at his back. As they went, he could on occasion sense other animals moving along with him; they were there in the shifting shadows, with flat-back ears and ridged tails, always going in the same direction as Santiago—away from the dark cinder cone of death.

Santiago was not sure how long he ran. But it was at least a few hours. The man tried to trick him sometimes by stopping the chase and walking away in the other direction, but always, always looking back over his shoulder. Santiago never relented. He pressed on, slowing sometimes to let the man catch his breath. And the man always turned back and continued following him. By the time they reached the green rolling hills at the edge of a village many villages away from their own, the man was pasty faced and flagging, and Santiago’s old bones ached and his heart felt leaden.

They were alone on a tree-studded slope, and Santiago turned and regarded the man. He still held the photo in his mouth, but he could go no further. His energy, fueled by a desperate need to save the shopkeeper, was spent at last. He was sure the man hated him now, would turn him out into the streets. But Santiago could not muster any feelings of anxiety regarding this. He was too exhausted and closer to death, perhaps, than he’d ever been, the strain of the journey too much for his aging heart. He would not be able to make the return trip. He set the picture down on the ground and drew back, his head bent low, preparing for the man’s anger.

The man came forward slowly and collected the picture. Three white strands of his hair had escaped from his wispy comb-over and fell into his eyes. “Why? Why, Santiago?” he pleaded simply, as if the cat could answer. Then he placed the picture in his pocket with his notebook and turned to look down the slope at how far they’d come.

A kaboom shook the earth, and the top of Mt. Vesuvius exploded, throwing a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris into the air to rain down on Pompei and the neighboring communities. Cinders fell around them like burning, black snow, and the heavens turned hazy as buildings went up in flames. The smoke plume above the volcano ascended into the sky where it spread and blotted out the sun.

The man sank to his knees and stared at the flames, the destruction, the utter decimation. Red sprays of lava leapt into the air and showered the already burning villages. Santiago choked on the thick air, his heart beating in dull throbs.

The man started to weep openly. “Oh Santiago, Pompei, Naples, Torre del Greco, Scafati… they are all gone. Did you know this was going to happen? How? Did you bring me here to save me? You brave cat. So brave, Santiago. But I am dying. I have only a few more weeks, maybe months to live. I was content to die. To join my Sofia. And now, I must watch the destruction of my home, of everything I have ever known. Oh, my Santiago, there is no poetry, no dance of words, that could express the agony of this moment.”

The sky grew increasingly dark, and the thin lines of rain marked the sky. Except it wasn’t rain. It was falling ash; burning, incendiary ash. It started to fall all around them, graying the air, searing their skin; burning away Santiago’s fur and the man’s clothes.

They had not run far enough away.

Within seconds, the ash became thick and unyielding, and although Santiago through his pain and failing eye thought he could see the edge of the ash storm farther up in the mountains, there was no way two old men, exhausted and dying, could outrun the blanket of ash that covered all.

2548

“There’s one all the way up here,” Zoey called to Devon. She waved to him from behind a patch of dry brush that covered the desolate hillside. “This one is really well preserved.”

Devon jogged up the hill carrying all of their scanning equipment. As he studied the figure, he said, “Hmm. A man and his cat. Nice find, Zo. I’ll have the guys come and get it. This one must have been on the edge of that rainstorm that came up just after Vesuvius exploded. The details are nice and crisp.” He tapped the stone lightly with his small mallet. “Sounds hollow. We might be able to get some good information from this one and cast it.”

Devon moved on, as he always did, in a hurry to find the next specimen, in a hurry to collect their data and get home and away from this blackened no man’s land of beetles and scrub, back to their home in the green north.

Zoey paused and glanced back at the man. She’d become an archeologist because she’d wanted to know how their ancestors lived before the United Colonies of the North became one of the last remaining outposts of civilization. She was curious as to how human populations had operated when the earth still supported over seven billion people, with countries on all continents. She could hardly imagine—seven billion people. Surely that was an exaggeration.

She’d read all the accounts by the elders, all the stories of the 753 people who’d survived because they were in Arctic outposts or on research vessels in the north. But the historical record had so many gaps, so many varying stories, and there were so many deniers. Even now Rainy Armestan was gathering people around him to build his case that the elders had lied about the relative equality of the races and women, about the seven billion people. Because, after all, if the predominantly white colonies had been placed on earth by the divine God of the North only a few hundred years ago, if the seven billion people had never existed, if the races had never been equal, then that would justify the extermination of the wastrel clans to the south. Call into question one element of the elder accounts, and they all became suspect.

But now that the atmospheric ash layer had dissipated and the ice had receded, colony archeologists were beginning to find hard evidence to back up the claims of the elders. The ruins around Vesuvius were particularly special. In most parts of the world, the supervolcanoes had incinerated everyone and everything in the surrounding area; and the subsequent famine and ice age had eradicated much evidence of human civilization.

But Vesuvius’s ash fall had preserved many people and buildings in stone, allowing their dress and customs to be studied. And here in a pocket to the east of Vesuvius, a heavy rain right after the ash fall had cooled the stone sufficiently that the artifacts were encased and mummified, rather than petrified, which allowed for even greater opportunities to collect DNA, and actual objects from the epoch of the explosion. The researchers yesterday had even discovered a small cache of intact books—a gold mine of cultural information—in a house at the bottom of this hill.

Zoey looked back at the ash-formed statue of the man, his arms cradling the small feline with a stubby tail, and his head bent over the cat as if to protect him; as if he might be talking to the cat as they both sat, waiting for death to take them together.

She fluttered away a tear on her eyelash that discovering and recovering bones had never caused her before. At least they knew one thing for sure now: their ancestors had loved animals.

Specimen 4938; Mt. Vesuvius: Extremely well-preserved specimen of older man with cat. Exposure to brief rain subsequent to ash fall hardened shell without fully destroying clothing and other items on body. Man was carrying a small book entitled Le Poesie di Santiago by Alberto Rossi, and a picture of a woman with “Sofia 1979” written on the back. No other information was found. Man and cat have been removed to Vesuvius Warehouse 1 and are to be taken to the Colonies for further study. TBD if the ash-fall outer mold is strong enough to cast a life-sized statue.