Everybody has cats now! My tenure with Kitty naturally grants me O.G. status. But after years of stubbornly holding out against the yearnings of his apartment-mates for fear of mind-control parasites, Tom caved and Jill adopted Bug, a small, unpredictable black cat with a clipped ear and oddly prominent genitals. Eve and Jon, cohabitating in advance of their marriage in the fall picked up two mostly-white kitten siblings, Sam and Sasha, who promptly doubled in size and now effectively run the apartment. And Ted and Cat took in Lola, a former stray tabby of indeterminate age and fairly inscrutable disposition. Lola died unexpectedly earlier this year after a rapid deterioration in her health caused by kitty lymphoma. But Ted and Cat were undeterred, and they got back on the horse with Prez, a friendly kitten with a penchant for biting fingers and whomping sleeping faces, and whom they named Prez, partly after President St., partly after Jim True-Frost.
When they went on vacation to Italy, they charged Jill with Prez's care and feeding, and assigned me the few days that she wouldn't be able to make it. And so on Thursday I went over to their apartment to administer kibble. Except that I didn't see Prez when I opened the door. And he wasn't in the living room or the bedroom. Didn't respond when I called. He turned out to be in the bathroom, lying puddled on the bathmat under the skylight. He was awake but seemed unwilling to get up, and when I put my hand on him and he turned to look at me, his eyes were rheumy and unfocused. Oh no, I thought. I have strong urges, people, to avoid addressing problems head-on. Have you noticed? If there is a way I can just hang back and let someone else discover and deal with a thing, then that is what I vastly prefer to do. Oh, was that like that? I didn't realize. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Thanks for dealing with it so quickly. --That is the way I like to play it. But Prez was putting out strong vibes of being a Very Sick Animal, so I called Jerry. "Was he, uh, like this the last time you saw him?" I asked. Which was, come to think of it, really just a minor variation on my core strategy. No, she said, and suggested that we car him to the vet right away. So while she brought over the vehicle, I made preparations over the phone with Animal Kind, where I take Kitty but also the only place that I knew would be open at 11 o'clock at night.
We hefted Prez into the fabric cat-carrier Jill brought. That operation is one that I dread when it comes to Kitty -- hissing, feet braced against the edges of the carrier -- but Prez was too sick to make a fuss. Or maybe he's always just that easy. We got him into the car. Hanlon drove. At Animal Kind, the woman at the front desk buzzed us in and summoned Dr. Salas, the vet on duty for the evening. She escorted me and Jill to an exam room in the back, where, with the help of a vet tech, we scooped Prez out of the carrier. They took his temperature in the customary way; this was the only part of the ordeal about which he complained. It turned out he had a high fever and that something was restricting his breathing. They'd have to do an x-ray, Dr. Salas said, before knowing anything further.
So we sat and waited, the four of us, in the bright front room, watching people cross back and forth in front of the big windows -- Thursday-night revelers returning home, maybe, sneaking a wary peek at us as they passed. It was a dynamic one mostly gets to enjoy, so to speak, from that other side, and less often from the one we were on: Skirting a sidewalk assembly in front of a funeral home, for example; the guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt you see walking down the street as you are leaving the funeral home. It's fairly impossible to shake the relief that you feel when, having sampled a stranger's private tragedy for a few seconds, you can go away and leave them with it -- as Jerry Seinfeld used to say, "Good luck with all... that." But being on that other side, we were all pretty bummed out. Tom pointed out all of the funny little plaques on the wall thanking the vets for their kindness and patience with, say, Muffy, some poodle with tear-stained fur and red eyes reflecting a camera flash; and how implicit in their presence was the fact that all the animals were dead. "This isn't a doctor's office," I said in a stage whisper. "It's a tomb!" Nobody laughed. Hanlon brought out his iPhone and dug into his curated gallery of inscrutable New Yorker cartoons, but it didn't cheer us up much.
Eventually Dr. Salas called me and Jerry into the back, into the little hallway that connects all the downstairs exam rooms, where she had an x-ray up on a fancy Apple Studio Display screen. She walked us through the anatomical details, pointing out areas of accumulated fluid in the thoracic cavity, and how the fluid was compressing Prez's right lung and part of his esophagus. And she showed us how there seemed to be a kind of mass, only negatively visible on the x-ray, in some of the connective tissue right around his heart. "Until we do an ultrasound, there's no way to know exactly what that is," she said. "It could be an infection, but it's possible that it's a malignancy, maybe lymphoma, which is common in young cats. Obviously, that's not a great diagnosis."
"Fuck," said Tom, when we returned to the waiting room. "I really don't want Ted to have another cancer cat." I didn't, either. And while, having done my part and delivered Prez to the doctor, I didn't feel anxiety over his care, there is something awfully metaphorical about an absent friend's pet. Because the pet is a proxy for the friend, isn't it? Or a proxy for something about the friend; I don't know what. But there was nothing else for us to do, and so we piled back into the car and drove home. I ate one of the cookies that Jill had bought us for dinner.
A bright spot, lest you think this blog-thing a downer: I found a voicemail from Dr. Salas on my phone after getting home. She'd drawn some of the fluid out of Prez's chest, and it seemed like it was the product of an infection ("yucky," she said) rather than a tumor. Accordingly, she had started him on antibiotics. He's not out of the woods yet, by any means, but things are perhaps less dire than they seemed.