Old Guy

This was Mystery when the Engineer brought him home almost nineteen years ago. He was the runt of his litter, eternally struggling with seven other siblings to get at the teats of a mother who really wasn’t interested in the job. (The Engineer had negotiations with the feckless college kid friends who hadn’t gotten their cat fixed, but that was another story.)

At the time, the Engineer didn’t live with me, but I got to watch Mystery grow up, all the same. He liked my hair.

He arrived here in 2015, along with two of his sisters. He’s the only one left now. Big, derpy, shamelessly greedy for food, to the point that he’d butt other cats’ heads out of the way to get at a dish; passionate about the juice off water-packed tuna, a mighty hunter of crocheted cat toys, around which he would utter that deep-throated cry of triumph with which cats celebrate the capture of wily prey. Both sisters learned that a perfunctory lick on Mystery’s forehead would be rewarded with a full-scale grooming session. He became Mr. Ferguson’s dopey bowling buddy, the only other cat Nickel the Bengal would tolerate; eighteen pounds of blond doofus, rapidly learning that a leap to the back of the couch facing the entry door would garner petting and attention from my clients, to the point he became something of an attractive nuisance (feature me waiting patiently through ten or fifteen minutes of firehosed baby-talk while a triathlete Amazon kisses and skritches History’s Greatest Attention Slut).

He weighs about eight pounds now, if he’s slightly damp.

Old kitties get dicky kidneys, and for a couple of years now he’s been getting infused fluids, a by now choregraphed ritual involving a towel wrap and me seated on the commode lid holding him while the Engineer pops a #18 needle under the skin of his scruff — first three times a week, then every day, and now twice daily. He sits patiently, rarely uttering a sound. Afterwards, there are treats.

Over the winter he stopped eating the treats. Gradually he stopped eating much of anything.

He walks haltingly, the arthritis supplement no longer helping because he won’t eat the food it’s mixed in. He’s taken possession of a cat bed next to the heat register, a location that’s been a fan favorite in this house since before he arrived. Last fall, when we rebuilt the screened porch off the kitchen into a full-glass enclosure, he gravitated into the sunbeams that strike the pedestal of a cat platform out there for most of the day; when we pick him up to give him his fluid treatment, his fur is toasty even when the porch is cool.

Sometimes I stand there looking down at him until I can tell he’s still breathing.

He still loves the Engineer’s head, which he uses for a pillow at night, and the sealed-oil radiator in the bathroom, which he communes with every morning. I haven’t heard his deep, almost subsonic purr for a while now, though, and being petted doesn’t seem to make an impression. The last time I saw him get up on the sofa back was a few weeks ago. He doesn’t groom to speak of. When I see him stumble, or take a few steps and then sit down; when I see him leave his heatybed, look around with a confused demeanor and then hobble back, I wonder if there’s anything left for him, and if it’s time to make that call that you eventually have to make.

But then I see him like this — this morning, when he jumped stiffly down from the bed and went to the top of the stairs, announcing in no uncertain terms that it was time for him to be carried down. He went straight to the porch.

I see him like this, and I still see joy.

It’s not time yet.