December 10, 2004
Elvis the Cat
1994-2004
In our hearts, always.
TO BE CONTINUED
The man and the boy stood in the examining room. The man stroked the cat.
“Why are we here?” asked the boy.
“I thought you would want to say goodbye.”
“What are they going to do?”
The man looked up at the veterinarian, who answered slowly and clearly, with studied professional calm. “We’ll give him a shot. He will feel a little prick, and then he will fall asleep.”
“And he won’t wake up again?”
“He won’t wake up, and he won’t feel any more pain.”
“He feels pain now?”
“Your cat is very sick. All of his systems are shutting down. He’s in a lot of pain. He is going to die anyway, but if we don’t give him the shot, the pain will last for several days.”
The boy nodded. He looked pale.
The man put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “I got you out of school for this because I thought it would be good if we were the last thing Elvis sees.”
The boy nodded. He moved slowly, so that he was directly in front of the examining table, took a deep breath, and looked into the cat’s eyes. “We’re here, Elvis. We’re here, and we love you.”
The man rubbed the cat’s ears.
The doctor jabbed the needle into the cat’s shoulder.
The cat relaxed.
He was gone.
“That’s all,” the vet said. “Do you want me to leave you alone with him?”
The man and the boy looked at each other. The boy was gripping the metal exam table. “He’s not in there anymore, is he?” the boy asked.
“No. He’s gone.” The man answered.
“We don’t need to stay,” the boy said. The boy and the man walked out of the building, hand in hand.
“So why are we here?” the boy asked as soon as they had sat down in the car, and buckled their seatbelts.
The man sighed. His son was very intelligent, but sometimes he had trouble with simple concepts. He explained it again.
“So that’s why you picked me up from school. To watch the cat die.”
“Well, yeah. I guess that’s one way to put it. I thought it was important. But I can get you back to class now so you don’t have to miss out on too much. They’re probably covering the ever-exciting, life cycle of the monarch butterfly. You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, would you?” He tried to sound hearty to cover up the fact that he was disappointed in the way this was going.
“Dad, I’m sick. I want to go home.” The boy’s head was all the way back against the seat of the car. His eyes were closed.
“That was rough on you, wasn’t it? Maybe I should have done it on my own.” He was just a little boy, after all. Plenty of adults wouldn’t want to watch their pet be put to sleep. They would have thought it was morbid. But he didn’t think so. Elvis had been their cat for a lot of years. He had slept on the boy’s pillow at night, right next to his face, every night. The man closed his eyes, trying to squeeze back a tear. “It’s just that I thought you would feel better in the long run if you had something final to remember. I didn’t want you to just come home and have Elvis be gone forever. Like -- ” He couldn’t finish.
“I know. I miss her too, Dad. But I threw up on Olivia in the lunch line today. Didn’t the school call you? They said they were going to call you.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t hear my cell. So I shouldn’t take you back to school?”
“I want to go home. I want to lie down on the couch. I want you to wrap me up in a blanket, and take my temperature, and bring me root beer, like Mom used to.”
“I know. I miss her too.”
“Home, Dad. Please.”
“And the school knows about this?”
The boy’s head was still back against the seat of the car. His eyes were still closed. He breathed in, and out, slowly. “I threw up on Olivia in a crowded public place. She had to call her mom to get new clothes. They know. Lets go home.”
The man started the car. “Let's go home”
* * *
The man sat at the computer. He typed “December 10”. He stared at the screen. It was blank. There was nothing there. All he could think of was the cat.
His soft, black fur.
His yellow eyes.
His crooked tail.
The way he used to pounce on the little circle the flashlight made, when it shone on the wall.
The way he used to purr.
The mostly dead snake he had brought home once.
The way he had gone away once for three weeks, and everyone had thought he was dead, but then they had found him, meowing and pitiful, trapped in a construction site down the street.
He would miss that cat.
He looked at the three plastic mice that his son would pull out of the box when he felt up to it. He didn’t know what the mice were supposed to do. He didn’t know why they were in the story. He had written about them yesterday. Just their voices. He hadn’t identified them because he wanted the boy to still be surprised when he pulled them out of the box. Unless he remembered from last year that December 10 was three mice. Last year, when the plastic animals had been enough. Last year, before the story. He wouldn’t remember. Probably not. But he still didn’t know what the mice were supposed to do. The story was getting stupid. He was writing himself into a corner. There were too many characters. How was he supposed to include so many different characters? Something new every day?
His wife. She had been the creative one. This story had been her idea, back when they first bought the set, half a million years ago, last October. First an advent of just the plastic toys, then the next year, a story to accompany them. She should be the one writing it.
* * *
Pete was still trying to follow what he thought was Mr. McAllister’s advice. What was he going to do with the story? What was he learning from it? It would be good if he could learn who the author was. He finally had something concrete to go on. Whoever was writing this had a dead cat named Elvis. People wrote about their animals on the Internet. People had home pages, and blogs, where they mentioned their animals. Maybe the author had been one of those people. He got on the computer and Googled: “Elvis the cat.”
Wow, there were a lot of cats named Elvis. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be alive. Well, not unfortunately for them. They would probably prefer to be alive. Pete stopped this train of thought before he made himself feel guilty about being disappointed by all the live cats, and brought his attention back to the task at hand.
He found one cat who wasn’t dead, but who had suffered a terrible accident involving a truck, where he had lost two legs, and now he used a little robotic device to get around. That was cool, but not especially relevant.
He tried again with “Elvis the cat, 2004, dead,” but it wasn’t any more satisfactory. It seemed like a lot of people liked to name their cats Elvis. Some of the cats named Elvis even had facebook pages, which just seemed a little too weird. Clearly, these people didn’t have enough to do with their lives. Maybe they could do some of Pete’s homework.
He learned that Elvis Presley was sometimes called “The Hillbilly cat.”
He saw a cute picture of a cat named Elvis sitting in what looked like a bathroom sink in 1999.
He learned that you could submit a picture of your own pet for a “cuteness evaluation.” Why would anyone care what some stranger with a website thought about how cute their pet is? Wow, people could be idiots.
He began to read a long article giving minute details about Elvis Presley’s early years. He wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the article when he threw up his hands, and closed down the Internet.
This was completely ridiculous. What was he doing? He had homework. What did he care about Elvis the cat who had died in 2004? The cat was dead. Its owners had surely moved on by this time, and this wasn’t the way to identify them. Investigating on the Internet clearly wasn’t his calling. He had homework -- pages of geometry, an essay for English, and reading for history.
He wasn’t like George. George could get away with blowing things off. George was satisfied with mostly B’s and a few A’s. George could just drift through school, and not try very hard, because he didn’t really care. He pretended to care because his parents cared, and Pete cared, and most of their friends cared. It was sort of the thing to do. Their school was very high powered, and academically oriented. People from their school got early acceptance to universities like Harvard, and Yale. But George had never really been all that interested in school, even before the zombie phase.
And Brittany seemed to be able to get straight A’s by doing nothing. Of course, she was only in seventh grade, but Pete remembered having to work hard even in seventh grade. Academics had never come easy to him, but he still needed to get straight A’s. It was important. He didn’t know why it was important. It wasn’t like he was planning on any particular college, or even any particular career, but he knew it was important. And it was hard.
He opened his math book. Time to explore the wonders of the Pythagorean theorem. Wahoo.
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