Nyx and Kali

our two black cats

Nyx purrs like her namesake the void does. She’s a reminder that the void is not to be feared, that, when the time comes, nothingness will come and cradle you in its arms, at the last moment its touch will be like velvet and it will vibrate your every molecule apart with stunning gentleness.

Kali, the destroyer, is generally considerate, except that she doesn’t bury her shit—she’s just like, here you go, here’s my poop. Perhaps she is trying to give me a helpful parasite—cat scat famously contains toxoplasma gondii, which, when it infects humans, increases adventurous and entrepreneurial behavior, an effect which would bring me closer to Kali’s independent nature.

Nyx can jump extremely high at the feathered wand I dangle in front of her, even higher than Kali, but Nyx mostly prefers not to—she knows that once she makes the actual kill, the joy of the hunt is over, so she enacts it, instead, in her mind, preferring the bliss of capture over and over again in her mind’s eye.

Kali takes care of love quite efficiently, unlike the rest of us, who labor with the question of whether we give and receive enough affection. She aggressively seeks close proximity at the beginning of the day, and then, mostly, for the rest of the time, sits poised a little away from you, watching you like an Olympic judge—it is under her watchful eye that I write these words, and any truth they possess is her responsibility, and any inaccuracy is mine.

Nyx suckles a little white blanket as if it would give her milk. I wonder if she remembers her mother and is reenacting this memory, or whether she simply associates a certain posture of the mouth with peace and companionship, as we all do.

Kali stands fearless at the glass door when her rival approaches, a hulking black-grey cat of the neighborhood, who is almost like a warped mirror. They gaze at each other for minutes at a time, conducting some sort of territorial negotiation, before the grey cat suddenly bolts, and Kali, seeming satisfied, returns to clawing familiar things.

In one view, they are powerless, unfree, captives of greater intelligence than their own. And yet while they stalk the wilderness of our darkened corridors, we sit insensate looking at our laptops, obliged to earn our food by feeding yet greater intelligences—algorithmic, societal—that keep us, in a sense, as house pets.

They are in deep and intimate contact with sensation in a way that we will never know—they can detect the scent of crumbs, the new slight skew of a recently trodden-on patch of carpet, the twitch of a robin fifty feet away. We, it’s true, can dissect the world into abstractions, theories of psychology, prophecies of the future—but this makes us lonely inhabitants of our own abstracted environments, nested worlds each our own, laying atop sensate reality but never quite fully within it. 

Last night I rubbed Nyx’s belly for half an hour while reviewing some of the chess games of Anatoly Karpov. She remained motionless and blissful as the Buddha, and I thought that, if I died right then, I would’ve had a good life. 

Kali woke me in the morning from a dream, where I ate Mexican food in a flooded restaurant where Olympic wrestlers tackled each other in the mossy water. She has waters of her own, in her own dreams—in midday, I see her horizontal, with closed eyes, twitching with her claws out, skimming the moss off her private biosphere.