Jacques
In any given day in our new home, I don’t know which Jacques I’m going to encounter. Jacques is my neighbors’ one-eyed calico cat. Our neighbors live right below us, in the lower half of a house that’s been carved into two units, so we see Jacques a lot. He’s survived for 14 years in a rural environment, living mostly outdoors. He’s been mauled, poisoned, infected. His front claws no longer exist. The eye thing is congenital—he’s vied with coyotes and forest fires without depth perception.
If he were a human, you’d find him leathery and smoke-stained at a biker bar, dispensing unbelievable anecdotes with economy, occasionally taking out his glass eyeball to amuse children.
This long survival has given him something of a personality, though perhaps not the one you’d expect. He isn’t unrepentantly savage or cautious. He doesn’t hiss at strangers or bare his claws at novel stimuli.
Instead, he has modes. If you follow the guidelines, he will reward you. The guidelines are: approach him on his territory, wait for him to examine you, bring no other animals. Do these things, and he’ll praise you, accompany you, sit in your lap and watch the leaves shake in the wind. On the other hand, if you approach him in foreign territory, if other animals are nearby, or if he’s feeling insecure in any other way, he’ll bite the fuck out of you if you touch him. And when you ask, “Jacques, what’s wrong,” he’ll just yell at you like you’re an idiot.
So, sometimes, I come out to see Jacques on the landing, and he starts yelling at me. In these moments, he’s surveying our territory, making sure our cats haven’t considered going outside, where they might threaten his meat supply. I leave him alone. If I’m exercising outside, he comes by occasionally and glares at me to make sure I’m behaving myself. But if I go out to have coffee in the backyard, next to his home, Jacques will lay on me, fix me with an accepting gaze, stay for hours if I do.
I’d like to think that Jacques’ experiences have only deepened his capacity for affection. He knows better than any of us what’s on the far side of love, when relation is a hostile concept, when burning flecks of sap are alight on the terribly hot wind. The attendant personal resources are close at hand. When he sets them down, he feels the relief of their vanished weight. When he lays on the warm roof the next house over—we look down on him from our window—he regards the tile, the sun, the air, as friends. The better you know the coyote, the better you know the soft hand, the taste of fish, the mercies of a canyon that wasn’t designed for a one-eyed being such as you.
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Super into this song right now; I have never cooked noodles with such ferocity.
I agree with this too much, so I should be suspicious that it’s deeply flawed somehow, but I’m not.
Late to Peter Hessler on coronavirus because I was too mad about the state of affairs to read something so laconic; still the best living journalist?