The Flatted Cat

Two old men sat in the small living room of a small apartment in a small town that was no bigger than a period at the end of a long sentence. The blinds and curtains on the windows of the room had been drawn so that even though it was a sunny day, the only light in the room was from a table lamp next to one of the chairs in which the men sat. The lamp shade was old and yellowed.

“I understand,” said the man in the chair next to the lamp, “that with apes in the wild, when an old ape knows that it is time to die, it will wander off from the group and find a secluded place to sit and wait for death.” This man was barefoot and wore only gray sweat pants and a tee shirt. It had been more than a few days since he had shaved. “That’s where I am, Larry.”

“Uh-huh.” The other man’s tone could easily be interpretive as dismissive. He was rather nattily dressed. He had on a pair of spotlessly clean white sneakers, a pair of pressed and creased khaki shorts, and a wildly colored short sleeve shirt covered with images of palm leaves, parrots and hibiscus blossoms. His hair was neatly and recently trimmed, and his cheeks were smooth and scented with menthol. “So, can we count on you for the Senior Center bake sale?”

“I just said I was dying, Larry.”

“You’re not dead yet, Frank, and people have been asking for your oatmeal cookies.”

“I know it’s my time.”

“That’s unnatural and absurd.”

“There’s nothing unnatural about dying.”

“There’s nothing unnatural about other people dying, Frank, but at our age, we can’t succumb to thinking about death.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because for one thing, there is a bake sale next Tuesday, and people are expecting to see your oatmeal cookies there.”

“I’ll probably be dead by then.”

“Nonsense.”

“You’re seventy-five, Larry. You could be dead by then.”

“Perhaps, but I can’t live my life thinking I could die. So can we count on the cookies?”

“I’m thirsty. Do you want a beer?”

“My God, Frank, it’s ten a.m.”

“Bucket list thing, ya know?”

“You’ve drunk beer all your life.”

“But I’ve never died with one in my hands.” Frank rose slowly from his chair and went to the kitchen.

The men had worked together at a car dealership, Larry as the sales manager and Frank as the service manager. Larry was born to be a salesman -- lemonade stands as a kid, magazine subscriptions in college, Kirby vacuums as a young man, and finally cars when he married a girl whose father owned a dealership – and like many salesmen, what he sold the best was himself. He relentlessly insinuated himself into the community, at Rotary, at his church, at his kids’ school events, everywhere he might encounter potential customers, and even in retirement, every day remained filled with commitments and connections. Frank, on the other hand, worked only to make a living. He started with the dealership part-time in his teens, washing cars parked outside. He dropped out of school his senior year and went full-time detailing new cars for delivery and working in the garage stock room. He did not care much for dealing with the public, but got along well with the mechanics, and over the years learned enough to be able to work the service desk. While Larry sold people the shiny chrome and glass dreams of the open road, Frank helped them deal with the unpleasant reality of maintenance and repair.

“Hey,” Larry said as Frank returned from the kitchen, beer in hand, and sat back down. “You okay?”

“Yup.”

“I mean did the doctor tell you something? Are you ill?”

“Nope.”

“Then why do you think you are going to die?”

Frank drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He glanced up to the ceiling and squinted as if trying to see something small. “My life,” he said, “has been passing before my eyes.”

“What?”

“I’m seeing things. I’m thinking about things. Like, maybe I should have married Rosie.”

“Rosie?”

“The cute blond bookkeeper who used to work in accounting.”

“Oh,” Larry said rolling his eyes. “Her.”

“She was good looking, we got along well, and,” Frank’s gazed dropped from the ceiling to the floor. “She was good in bed.”

“Yes, well, we all knew that.”

“What?”

“What I meant was she apparently wasn’t the settling down type. After her third or fourth divorce, she left town.”

“She did? Where to?”

“Not sure. I heard that she moved, ironically, to Idaho, but I’m not certain.”

“Anyway, it might have worked.”

“It doesn’t sound like your life is passing before your eyes; it sounds like you’re just a little lost in retrospection. We all do it.”

“Yeah, well, po-tay-toes, po-tah-toes.”

“So, you just going to die here?”

“Maybe. I thought maybe I’d do the ape thing and wander off to be alone. There’s a little place down by the river. You go off the trail and down in the bushes, and there’s a spot where a couple of trees have fallen and created a kind of shelter next to the water. Very pleasant – out of sight, nice view of the river, lots of birds.”

“Why don’t you just stay here and make cookies?”

“Larry, I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation here. My entire body is about to join my tonsils, my appendix and other miscellaneous bits of me that I’ve lost over the years, and like the rest, it will abandon me. My heart will stop working, and I will be dead.”

“What I appreciate, Frank, is that you’re probably having a bad day. It happens to all of us. But you can’t let it get you down. You have got to clean yourself up, get out of the house and find something to do. Come down to the Senior Center. Hang out. Play a little bingo. But you just can’t quit, Frank. You got fight it.”

“You don’t go to an amusement park and accuse all the people getting off rides of quitting, do you? I’m not quitting, Larry, I’m just done. The ride's over.”

Death, even though it is an inevitable and universal human experience, is no better understood than life, the other universal (and it could be argued inevitable, at least for the living) human experience. One could say that there is only life, and therefore death is simply the absence of life, a hypothesis that seems to be supported when comparing a live cat with one that is flattened on the road. Larry was a Unitarian, and so, while respectful of other beliefs, he would have said that a flattened cat was sufficient evidence that there was no future in being dead.

It is true that the dead cat is broken, and indeed death is often defined as the total lack of working parts, but in the comparison to the live cat, it could be said that the flat cat lacks more than just width: something is missing. That which enabled that particular mound of material to be that particular cat is gone. This idea that death does not simply represent the end of life but rather that death is a transition where life moves on from a particular body to do something else could be a more comforting thought, especially if one was acquainted with the cat before its flattening, and it would seem that all peoples on earth have some understanding of a continuation of life after death. Egyptians could hope to live for eternity in the Field of Reeds, Jews might hope to unite with God in Olam Ha-Ba, and Buddhists would expect to reincarnate in a new form dictated by their karma. Frank was a Catholic of sorts. Although he had not been to church since he was eighteen, if asked if he believed in God, he would have said yes, and if asked if he was Catholic, he would have grimaced and said confidently “I guess.” Whether he would admit it or not, Frank’s understanding of death was largely influenced by the cartoons he watched as a child. In those cartoons, a cat might be run over by a steam roller and then its spirit or ghost would emerge from its body in a humorous and exaggerated fashion. This spirit, a gossamer likeness of the live cat, would wend its way skyward, to heaven, his sainted mother assured Frank, and that was a good thing as heaven was where Our Father art.

“I know we don’t have a lot of time left, Frank,” Larry said. “But that’s all the more reason to hold on, to stay involved, to enjoy it as much as you can while you can.”

“You’re afraid of death, aren’t you?”

Larry drew in a deep breath and exhaled. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “Afraid? No. But I believe that it is the last act, Frank, there is no ‘happily ever after.’”

“You know what I think? I think death is like rapid onset puberty. Do you remember your balls getting bigger and hair sprouting out all over the place? It kind of made you squint and wonder, but since the changes occurred slowly, it was unsettling only when you thought about what you were like before, otherwise, you had to admit that everything felt surprisingly normal. One day we’re gonna find ourselves dead, and the only startling part will be that we weren’t dead just a little while ago.”

Larry was quiet. His brow furrowed and his left eye twitched, but he said nothing.

In his understanding of death, Frank took his place -- perhaps inappropriately -- among great minds like Plato, Aquinas, and Descartes, who saw man as a being with an enduring mind and a mortal body. For all four men the mind was the missing part of the flattened cat, and in man, this irreducible and eternal mind/soul was the seat of the true self. Of the four men, however, perhaps only Aquinas sufficiently appreciated the unsettling nature of dying. Death was the unnatural separation of body and soul, he thought, leaving the soul bereft of the senses that connected it with creation. Deaf, dumb and blind, it waits for “the resurrection of the body and life in the world to come.”

“Frank, I’m worried about you.”

Frank shrugged.

“Promise me you’ll make some cookies for Tuesday.”

“Why?”

“It’ll give you something to think about, something plan for.”

“It’s futile.”

“Frank. Please.”

“Alright, fine. If I’m still alive Tuesday morning, I’ll make your damned cookies. But I’m not taking them to Senior Center. Too damn many old people. It’s depressing.”

“I personally will pick them up and deliver them, Frank.”

“If you’re still alive.”

“Oh, I will be. I’ve already got it marked on my calendar, so I’ve gotta be there. After the bake sale, how about you and I go for a drink?”

“One thing at a time, Larry.”

Of course no one really knows what happens after death. Perhaps a flatted cat is not missing anything; it is just a live cat that doesn’t work anymore.

** On Tuesday, there were no oatmeal cookies available at the Senior Center bake sale.