The Cat is Dying

The Cat is Dying

Week 155
The house is clean!
The cat is dying. She smells very very bad. A sweetish, revolting, bacterial smell.
Yelling sounds coming from the street. The wish that “something” would happen. Today is the anniversary of my parents’ wedding. Without that day there would be no me. And now there is no longer any them. Where is the continuity? What is the continuum? Who am I? Who were they? Machi’s cat is dying and maybe she’ll die without him seeing her again and I don’t know where he is to tell him. But maybe he wouldn’t care. She’s not exactly his cat. She’s the cat I got him, us, after Ori went away, was taken away. The cat didn’t replace our old cat who slept with him in the crib, nor the cat who shit on our beds whom he picked himself and whom I took back to the pound. Another betrayal. I’m still paying the price for it.
The cat’s dying smell is repulsive and fascinating. My mother’s dying smells were repulsive. I don’t ever want to be still soulfilled but a long way toward being a carcass, parts of my body rotting, unable to smell the pus myself.
Hellish at work. I caught a glimpse of Solly and Xiomara looking human, radiantly smiling. How can they be the same two who are scapegoating Lucha, wanting to fire her?

I’m home today. I had an unscheduled holiday I would lose if I didn’t take it before the end of this month. So I did. Although I was afraid, afraid to be alone in the house without Ori, without Machi. Afraid to have time and be reminded I no longer can remember what I wanted the time for. I’m still haunted, acid bathed, by the dream I was having when the phone rang and woke me this morning I had hoped to sleep late. My ear tuned to listening to the phone, my mind always hoping for word from Machi. I was at my parents last apartment, the one they were living in when they started to die. In the dream the apartment is empty and somehow belongs to me. I am responsible for it but I have forgotten about it. I walk on the carpeted floor, stand in the tiny kitchen. Who has been paying the mortgage? I lock myself out but then I find another locked door. A man appears and whispers in my ear that I must know a secret code in order to be allowed to leave. I’m desperate. I tell him I don’t know the required numbers. He whispers in my ear that the numbers are a crazy rule imposed by a coven of Christians. He lets me out just as the phone is ringing. Of course it wasn’t Machi. I lie in my bed curled up in a ball repeating over and over the prayer I read in a Buddhist book and used to comfort Machi after Ori was gone. I picture Machi behind my closed eyes and I repeate, “may you dwell in the heart, may you be free of suffering, may your heart flower, may you know the joy of your own true being. It doesn’t work against the terror this time. I wake up, get dressed and go outside to buy the newspaper. Looking to see if paso algo. Por Dios que pase algo. The bbf’s face on the cover of a scandal sheet…The impunity! This sea of unreality carrying along the islands of corruption, like the pus blooming inside the dying cat. And still the cat isn’t dead. So it is with capitalism. What an immune system on this pus filled carcass.

At work it’s insane. In one week the vendor was at last selected. Two years later than projected. But now the vendor’s subcontractor isn’t playing anymore. Somehow they thought it was a line item contract and don’t want to risk a performance based contract when the per head payments are miserably low. Almost funny if it wasn’t tragic. And so boring.

How did it come to pass that this false world is what passes for real? And what is real is buried.
You get to see it in glimpses in dreams (locked in the old rooms of my parents’ homes by Christian conspiracies); in the violent images of films.
As a child, I grew up surrounded by bolas, everybody spreading the rumors that spiced up the tedium of oppression. In the Venturan mountains, today, the rebels….They found the body of the neighbor’s son, eyes gouged, nails pulled, tossed by the road to the aeropuerto…Traffic was stopped for hours because the rebeldes strewed the intersections with tacks and punctured lots of tires….
Que pase algo por Dios
Something to break up the tedium of oppression. Something to unlock the door inside the door inside the door of my parents old homes inside my head.
Que pase algo to release my mind.