The Mortal Winter. — Touched with Fire Media

1. On Winter.

The days are short here. It’s hard to believe that we’ve already passed a month since the solstice, because the sun still fades in the afternoon, and it’s hard not to walk around the city feeling absent, as though your winter clothing has insulated your very being from the world. Thin. When I was a kid, that was the word I used to apply to these dark midwinter days, and I believe I found le mot juste way back then: Portland in winter is thin. Day upon day of it and you starve.

I missed a plane this weekend, and have had to spend a couple of extra days, stolen days, here in my hometown, in its thin afternoons. I don’t mean to complain: there is often no place I’d rather be than here, and at the very least the sun has not spent its time hiding behind an impenetrable sheet of clouds for the last few days. But it has been strange, the way it has affected my mood. I feel slightly hungover all the time. I realized just now that I haven’t spoken a word aloud since yesterday. I kind of like it that way.

2. On Phoebe.

They tumbled over one another in a wood crate outside the neighborhood market, a half-dozen kittens who had been born of a surprise litter. Gray, with phantom black stripes down their haunches, white jaws and chests: to look at, indistinguishable. A basket full of kittens is almost certainly the most adorable thing in the world, and of course we wanted to take home all six of them, but my parents were just regular cat people, not Cat People. We could take one home.

My brother Andy squatted down to play with them, and one immediately latched onto his arm. He gnawed harmlessly on his fingers, and then climbed his way up towards his shoulder. The others were cute and friendly, but this one: this one was obviously special.

“I like him,” Andy said. “He’s feisty.”

So we took this kitten away from his brothers and sisters and named him Archimedes. It was a dumb choice — nobody could pronounce it, and there was no convenient diminunitve form to help people out — but I liked the idea of naming a pet after a scientist, I think because I had watched Back to the Future too many times. Archimedes spent his first night in my bedroom, prowling. He was unafraid. He also didn’t have much interest in letting me go to sleep.

When finally we took “him” in to be neutered, we discovered that “he” was, in fact, a she. Cats, in this sense, are both complicated and simple: it’s hard for the layman to tell what their gender is, meaning that a lot of cats get misidentified and some live years of their lives as boys until one day they turn up hugely pregnant; but they also don’t carry with them the gender complexities that people do, I guess because they can’t talk — your female cat can’t tell you if she feels like a tomcat in the wrong body, or what have you. Anyway, Andy, who was eight, decreed that we couldn’t have a female cat with a boy’s name. We tried out a few different things, but finally landed on Phoebe, after Holden Caulfield’s younger sister in Catcher in the Rye. It fit her. It’s hard to say why: it just did.

Phoebe, in her youth, was beautiful, regal, majestic. One of her parents had been a Maine Coon, which is just about the largest domesticated breed of feline there is, and she grew to be quite long and tall. Her favorite way to get attention was to wait until I was doing my math homework, and then wander into my bedroom and stretch her body across my calculus book and gaze up into my face as if to say, Who are you to deny me? She ruled over our other pets with the ferocity of a warrior queen, and her combination of size and quickness made her dangerous to my mother’s dog as much as she was to my dad’s cat. Suffice it to say, I loved her immoderately, and though in theory she was a family cat, she belonged to me much more than everybody else. She slept in my bed at night, after all.

3. On Mortality.

An aleatory collection of things I remember about Phoebe:

One night I snuck out of my parents’ house and went for a walk with a girl. Phoebe snuck out of the house with me, and then tagged along on my date, as though chaperoning us: she owned me much more than I owned her, that’s for sure. She was the adult in our relationship. Eventually, however, we got separated, and when I snuck back into the house having failed to pluck up the courage and kiss the girl, Phoebe didn’t come with me.

She was gone for days. We thought she was dead. In a panic, my brother Mickey and I ran off a thousand fliers with a photograph of her and my parents’ phone number on it, and stuck them up all over the neighborhood. I’ve never been a good sleeper, but I don’t think I slept at all for those few days. I stayed up all night, staring out the open window of my bedroom, hoping she’d jump through it soon.

Then one day I came home to find a message on the machine: someone had found a cat that looked an awful lot like the one of the fliers I had been putting up, but much, much skinnier. I called her back, and it soon became clear that this was, indeed, Phoebe. Mickey and I drove over to the woman’s house — all of three blocks from home — and collected Phoebe, who looked like a detail from a danse macabre painting: bony, gray, strange.

A lot of things have happened to me in my life that have made me happy. Athletic triumph, academic accomplishment, even falling in love. I still think I’ve never been happier than the day I got to take my skinny cat home and feed her for the first time in a week.

She grew quite enormously fat after that incident, and though she retained her queenly air, there was more privilege than power in it. I don’t know if she grew fat because we overfed her in guilt or if she just ceased to believe that there would be food around all the time, but either way, she came to resemble the middle-aged Henry VIII, corpulent, happy, dangerous: she could still beat up any cat on our block, even if she couldn’t climb to the top of the dogwood tree in our backyard anymore.

Another time, I thought she was lost again, this time on the coldest night that Portland had seen in a decade. By the standards of other places I’ve lived, this was nothing, but it was all I knew at the time. I wandered the neighborhood, snapping my fingers and making the strange clicking sound with my mouth that she liked, but she never responded. I remember finally getting home and sitting down on the back porch, freezing cold, and imagining her out there somewhere. I cried. I was eighteen years old, and crying wasn’t the done thing at the time, but nobody could see me and my cat, as far as I knew, was out in the winter night, dying.

The next morning, I got up to get dressed, and when I opened my closet she came sprinting out and immediately headed for her box. While I was being maudlin in the back yard, she was just wishing that she could find a place to take a leak.

Her knees went bad. We put her on a diet, and she lost the weight. Her knees never recovered.

When I moved to New York, I had to let her move in with my brother. She had always been, and would always be, a cat who lived for her time outside. As she aged, her personality softened, and she came to love people — all of them, really — a great deal, but she was never happier than when perched in a shadow, surveying her domain. She was a cat who owned the world, even as she began to limp and complain, and her life was incomplete without lording it over her serfs.

I used to call her Gimpstein.

She used her feces as a form of protest sometimes. When I had the house we were living in together remodeled, every morning she very carefully found her way right into the middle of the construction area and relieved herself. For this reason, I began to call her Turd Bucket.

She loved to be carried around.

She slept under the covers with you, and when she wanted to be fed in the morning, she politely poked your nose with her paw.

If you talked to her, she talked back.

In the end, she lost control of her bladder, as cats do. I was 2000 miles away, and she was living with Mickey.

The night she died, I was at a concert with my girlfriend, and I received a text message. It was from Mickey. It read, “It’s done.”

I excused myself, and went outside. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. It was hard to imagine a world without Phoebe in it. After a few minutes I sat on a bench and allowed myself to break down. There’s a difference between thinking someone is dead, and knowing it. Here it is: one encompasses hope, and the other destroys it.

4. Ashes, Ashes.

Mickey had her cremated, which is good. She lives inside a little oaken box now. The box is tiny, given how big she was. This afternoon I sat in the car with the box in my lap, and tried to imagine her in there. I didn’t know whether to be terrified, amused, or devastated.

It had been a long day. A thin one. I spent most of it in search of an Andre Dubus III book: I had walked up to Powell’s on Hawthorne, but they didn’t have it; I drove down to Wallace Books in Sellwood, my old neighborhood, but they didn’t either. My last-ditch effort was to involve going up to the old Looking Glass Bookstore, a few blocks from where Phoebe & I lived together for years. I moved away from Portland four years ago, and I’ve found that I have difficulty remembering how to get around it sometimes these days. Too much has changed.

The Looking Glass Bookstore was housed in an old caboose, painted candy red and planted in a little urban shopping district between a sandwich shop and a Thai restaurant. It used to be that I could walk there with a blindfold on, but as I tried to find it this time, I found myself peering at the streetsigns and businesses, trying to remember where it was. I kept passing things I thought I knew, only to find that they weren’t where I thought I remembered them being. Memory — mine, at least — isn’t a map: it’s a dream.

Finally, I saw it, the little red caboose, and I pulled over and plugged in my headphones. I mounted the steps, thinking idly about how the day had been strange and melancholy and how disconnected I felt from my actual life at the moment. I didn’t really look at the caboose other than to see that it was there. When I opened the door and stepped inside, the first thing I noticed was the smell: not paper and ink, not dust, but curry, and tea. Alarmed, I looked around to find nary a book: the Looking Glass had become some tea shop. People sat at tables and tapped at laptops. I wanted to say: What are you doing here? How could you possibly be here? What’s wrong with you people?

They weren’t sitting in the carcass of a bookshop, but I was standing in one. It was a little bit hard to fathom. I walked back outside, vividly feeling that thing that we all become more familiar with as we age: death, tripping along beside me, slowly wiping the slate of my life clean, one bookshop at a time.

When I got into the car, I found the box with Phoebe’s ashes in it sitting on the passenger seat, and, being in my old neighborhood, I thought: Let’s scatter these fuckers. It’s hard to explain. Did I, or didn’t I, believe that Phoebe was in there? Was I angry or sad or what? I can’t say. I do know that I drove back to the house where she & I had lived for years, parked the car, and examined the yard for changes.

There was a tricycle on the lawn, and an SUV in the driveway. Some of my vegetables had been ripped out of the garden and been replaced with flowers. And Phoebe wasn’t parked in the shadow of the rosebush, in total possession her surroundings. I held the box in my lap, and tried to yank off the top.

It tuns out that they don’t just cremate a cat and put her in a little box with a removeable lid on it: that thing was screwed shut. I yanked, pulled, cajoled, but I didn’t have a screwdriver and there wasn’t going to be any way to get it open. So I set it in my lap, and put my fingertips on the lid: she was in there. Is there an inflection point at which something becomes so sad it can’t be funny anymore?

Aw, fuck. Things change. Pets die. People die. The days are thin, and my life is a million miles away.