Rabid

When he came home from work on Monday he had with him a cat, a kitten, a little dollop of fur and rumble. He had the heavy plea in his eyes, all that, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry...’

I don’t deserve this, she’d been thinking just before he arrived, and just before that, and just before that, into the morning and all through Sunday. I can do better. She’d thought of ways to be rid of him, to leave him, hatched feeble escape plans. Still, the cat was a sweet gesture. She took it without a word and went into the bathroom, letting him stew, as he deserved. She showed the kitten her bruise and asked it, “You’ll be my friend, won’t you?”

Ryan was in the kitchen: a clunk, a creak of cupboard, the rattle of a pan. From the bathroom, kitten in hand, she yelled out, “There’s noodles in the oven!” ‘Moron’ was, more or less, left unsaid. A while later the television volume went up and the channel changed.

“See?” she said to the kitten. “See what I mean?” It licked her hand, pebbly warm tongue as if something of the earth had brushed her skin.

As usual, time settled itself out, shook off the moment like a straightened bed. The reasons for the fight were left behind, replaced by other grievances.

Ryan and the cat had lately taken to rougher and rougher play. The cat would stalk his hand, pounce, bite, flip over under his palm, back legs snapping away at his wrist. Ryan loved it, the little scratches all along his arm, the tiny points of blood where the cat’s teeth went too deep. It was, for both of them, a play that lay just the other side of pain. He bled - not in great fountains, but a series of small streaks, thin lines that rarely even dripped, just crusted up or faded altogether in withdrawal.

Ryan had his hand over the edge of the sofa this evening. The kitten stalked just below, tail twitching, staring straight up with the peculiar focus of cats. It swayed its little head to and fro, in time with the casual swing of Ryan’s arm, then catapulted straight up the fabric, claws out for purchase, and latched an index finger. Ryan nearly came up off the couch. “Shit!” he said, and sucked the blood from the little slice the cat had given him.

She’d felt a moment of fear when he grabbed the kitten in both hands, swallowing it in his palms, but then he actually laughed and held it to his face. “You got me,” he said to it. “Oh yeah, you got me that time little fella.” She knew then, or realized soon after, that the cat wasn’t really hers.

“You shouldn’t tease it,” she said.

“Why’re you always tellin’ me what to do?” he asked.

“I was just saying.”

“Well, don’t. Just keep your mouth shut.”

And on it went for a while, back and forth, back and forth, like a toy between the paws, until, while she was in the kitchen pouring another glass of wine, he came in to freshen his own drink. By this time she was up to her neck in it, up to her mouth, desperate to exhale. “You’re such a fucking loser,” she said.

“What have I ever done to you?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said and he gave her a palm to the back of her head. She dropped her wine glass just for the sound of shattering. “Nice,” she said to him. “Real nice.”

Twice before, bats had blundered into the house, always from the little spare bedroom, though from there they’d caroom through the rooms, flitting through the hallway, bedroom to living room to bedroom. She’d searched for their entrance with no luck, and had heard that they could fit through holes as small as a coin.

Such a little thing, a bat. By this time the cat was a teenager, gangly and moody. He went back and forth between kitten and full-grown, sometimes playful, sometimes just plain mean. More than anything, he was no longer soft. She supposed he’d get soft again, as an adult, but in the meantime he was all bony angle, like some loosely wrapped tinkertoy contraption. Cats, she now remembered, were so damned needy, always underfoot, rubbing up against the legs, rumbling away in ceaseless demand, ‘Give me, give me, give me.’

He had the bat held to the tile floor of the bathroom between both paws. She took a sharp little breath when she saw it, then shooed the cat away. He crouched in the doorway, hunched down a bit in a manner that said both wait and attack.

She approached the bat. Hideous was an accurate word. Its face was difficult to get past, something in all those black wrinkles, the smashed nature of its nose, the sneer of its mouth. It shuddered, but there was no blood. The bats that came into her home, out of the wildness, always surprised her with their size; somehow she anticipated them to be bigger, as if the notion of bat, all that midnight horror, black cave, blood thirst should make them large. It was tiny, a mouse with wings. Only one wing would move, and it flapped around the tile in a tiny circle. The cat was back, against her leg, and when he pounced on it she let him go ahead and have his fun, watching from the doorway.

He held the bat down for a moment, then stepped a foot away and watched intently. The bat did nothing but breath, so quick she thought the movement of its chest might be heartbeat. The cat reached out a paw and the bat, perhaps desperate, bit. He pulled back his paw and leaped on it and it was all soon over.

There was never really a single moment when she put two and two together. There were no clear signs in the bat, no white foam at the mouth. What could be seen of the bat’s eyes was crazed of course, but that just seemed a natural part of being a bat. In retrospect she supposed activity in the day, a certain touch of weakness, an unnatural aggression, such things were not bat. So it could be assumed the animal was ill. She thought this later, after gingerly picking the corpse up with old newspaper and stuffing the bundle in the trash.

One morning the cat did not move. It slept, past all prodding, all poking, all the little ‘kitty kitty kittys’. He never woke up, just...drifted away. She never knew when he actually died. One hour he slept; several hours later when she checked again it was no longer breathing. She briefly considered a burial, then wrapped it in newspaper and together with the rest of the day’s garbage took it out to the canister at the curb.

It was easier in the end to do nothing, to wait it out.

So little to do but wait, as the afternoons ticked forward, the days slid off each other as if time was a slope.

“Where’s the cat?” Ryan asked one day.

“I don’t know,” she said, annoyed. The cat had been gone for weeks. “Disappeared. Haven’t seen it in awhile.”

“You let it out?”

“It was a cat,” she said. “Cats go out. They go places.” Unlike us, she thought.

“I can’t believe you lost your own cat,” he said. “I gave you that cat.”

“Well it’s gone,” she said. “Like everything else you’ve given me.”

They were on their way to one of his league softball games. She didn’t play, just watched from the side. The guys--all of them company co-workers--were for the most part gone to shit. Pale, hair falling back, hauling forty pounds below their breasts, self-consciously high spirited, as if there’d be a quiz later on their performance. Her husband over there on the bench waiting his chance for bat glory, wife hitter, project co-coordinator, in his team tee-shirt and cap, waiting his chance to finish the game and start drinking in earnest.

Next to her, Sharon clapped perfunctorily, several beats, then settled back.

“He wants kids,” Sharon said.

She considered again, from yet another angle, her own situation. They’d never actively not tried for kids, but none had come. It would have to be looked into eventually, but it was too soon to start down that road. They’d only been married a year and half, after several years of dating. And now she was waiting for something else to happen. “We won’t be having kids,” she said.

“You breaking up?” Sharon asked.

“What gives you that idea?” she said.

Sharon shrugged, said vaguely, “Oh, you know.”

What was she supposed to know? Was there some secret? She couldn’t really imagine what she’d do on her own, without Ryan. He paid the bills. “If he’d just leave me alone sometimes,” she said.

Sharon laughed, though she hadn’t intended it as a joke. Opposite them, along the first base line, were the other women, the ones with kids, looking bedraggled and exhausted, eaten alive. “That’s what it’s all about,” Sharon said, which made no sense at all.

In her previous life, before the infection, she’d have sensed Ryan’s impending mood without understanding. Now, she had a patient, unfamiliar wisdom, a fearlessness. Before the virus--she could trace it all out so clearly now, all the way back to her own father’s rage--each moment would tally. And the moments were building recently.

He came home from work one night with that vacant quiet. She knew that in the past she would have averted her eyes, tucked her shoulders, pocketed her hands, bowed her head. She’d have backed to the kitchen and made a food she thought he’d like. Then, when he ate just a little, or, as now, said, “What the fuck is this shit?” she’d have come back at him with, ‘It’s your favorite. I made it just for you.” Right into the old cycle. In a way she now saw she brought it on herself.

So he said, this time, “What the fuck is this shit?” over a macaroni casserole she’d planned even before he came home angry.

“Italian casserole,” she said blandly. “Don’t take your day out on my food. Eat something else. Order a pizza.”

In this stage, he would not look at her, and any attempt to get near him brought anger, but he looked up and muttered, to her endless shock and perhaps even love, “Sorry.”

It must be hot, she thought. It got in and just kept turning up the thermostat, like someone with the chills going back again and again to the controls, shivering, cranking up the heat.

Virus was such an odd little word. For a long time it hung out in the back of her throat, rolling back and forth across her tongue, unsaid, rolling and unrolling in a vaguely reptilian way, uncurling. She could taste the word in her saliva.

But while the word was caught in her throat, she never quite believed he was actually ill. Only when he came down with a fever did she truly, deeply understand that it could actually happen.

Finally he slept. His hair had grown longer than he usually allowed, and now a sweaty clump hung thick as a thumb over one eyebrow. Under the lids, his eyes were twitching and jumpy. He dreamed, in fever, helpless, of things she knew not what, of animals tooth and claw, pursuit, screaming, cats perhaps, large as cars.

There were bruises under his eyes, dark as shadow, and an oily sweat of fever on his cheeks, and a feeble tremor to his lips. There was spit at the corner of his mouth and when she saw it all the lurking legend of the disease finally emerged.

Not long after that she called the ambulance.

The doctor was nervous. He had a secret she already knew. He hesitated; she watched him choose his words.

“Have you had a pet?” he asked. “Any wild animals?”

She feigned ignorance, concern. Then, “We had a cat awhile back. He never came in one day.”

The doctor nodded, ‘I see’ all over his face, as if the discovery were his alone.

“Why?” she asked.

“Your husband has rabies.”

There. It was said. Official.

“Rabies,” she murmured. Again, “Rabies.” For the doctor: “From the cat.”

“I imagine so, yes.”

“And.”

“And it’s fatal at this stage. There’s little we can do but provide comfort. It could be a matter of hours.”

“Hours,” she said, shocked.

“You’ll have to get shots,” the doctor said.

“We haven’t been close in a long time,” she told him, thinking quite the opposite. It was too late for shots for her. She was already infected.