The cat

They brought Christie the cat to our apartment in a carton box which was placed on the kitchen floor. The startled animal, obviously frightened by the new surroundings, stood still like a statue as the previous owner removed the top side of the box. With disturb, the grown feline examined the place without claiming any territory. The man who brought him left promptly and I sat back at the computer before my time to go to work claimed my time of leisure in order to make some space so the new member of the family could get used to his new home. Half an hour later, I went to the kitchen to see how the animal was doing. It had disappeared. I looked for him all over but since I wasn’t able to find it, I thought maybe Vangelis, Isabel’s son, entered and left the apartment and had taken the animal with him, and I hadn’t noticed. I summoned him at once: he hadn’t even seen the cat. The hours passed, and the animal was no where to be found. I wasn’t so much as worried as I was puzzled. Isabel knew that I didn’t want a living creature in the house so naturally she could assume that I had gotten rid of it. But the door was locked and I looked outside the open window from this fifth floor, looked under the furniture, behind the washing machine. I called back home later from work to ask Vangelis to look again behind the washing machine. He said he had already. Nothing, as if the whole affair had been a dream. Isabel theorized the animal had escaped our premises during a brief instance locked in oblivion when one of us opened the door. It was a childish assumption; an occurrence of that magnitude would easily be forgotten or even slipped by. It is a large, adult cat, we’re talking about, not a baby hamster running loose all over. Unexplained circumstances always bring about the best of people’s imagination. Nonetheless, I had at hand a riddle I was in no mood to contemplate a solution for; as a matter of fact, I was somewhat secretly happy about the disappearance until Isabel started crying on the other end of the conversation. “I had brought him food” she gasped. Suddenly, I saw the salt of selfishness sprinkle over my easy-going consciousness, and I turned bland. I do away with regret and guilt and exert some meaningful benevolence. One warm, fuzzy, godly human benevolent feeling overwhelms me. I baby-talked her into not crying, and promised to buy her a cat of her own, not a second-hand Houdini-style, missing in the middle of no action excuse for a cat. “It was too regular a cat,” I consoled her. This happened while I was at work, and once I got home, the search was reinitiated. Nothing turned out.
A day passed by and the mystery still puzzled me. I thought of writing about it here, but for some strange reason I hadn’t. I did make a couple of entries since then but never mentioned it. Two days later, coming back from work, I opened the door and was shooed by Isabel with a smile. “The cat” she hushed giddily. I thought it had been recovered from the outdoors, but it appeared that the animal had never left home.

It came as gratuitous to us that the feline would develop a taste for hiding and hostility. His reclusive existence under the couch paralleled the time when no one knew of his whereabouts. Several fruitless attempts to extract him from his hiding nest proved frustrating. So, after a while, we became accustomed to his invisible presence in the household. All went back to normality for a few days. We lived as usual, working our days, enjoying together our late evenings with rented movies, music, anything to thin the blood. In the middle of night, as Isabel and I were watching the last scenes of rented dvd movie in our seven hundred watts progressive scan Panasonic Home Theater, the animal suddenly popped out of his hideout and reached out to us, submissive in its stretching posture, bowing risen head exposing its neck fully, carrousel movements, sliding his body underneath our caressing hands. I was astounded by the revelation that this miniscule tiger had made such a remarkable progress in personality, such a drastic change overnight. Maybe we can, too, go out for a walk on the path of our dreams more daringly than we have. If a cat can all of a sudden become familiar with the unknown, so spontaneously, I don’t see why we can’t.