The Cats of 9/11

Do your remember? Do you?

How after 9/11, all the cats in America became sad?

Tears were just rolling down their faces. You'd see one sitting under a tree, tilting its head in that way they have, and then you'd notice its lower lip trembling. We've got two cats at our house, and one of those fake birds on a string, but back then, when you'd whip that bird across the floor, right under their noses, they'd just look at you like: Now? Are you serious?

I mean--yes, of course, we were all sad, it was a terrible time, but the cats were just over the--you'd see two or three in a group, in a field, supine, stretched out full-length, sobbing.
And the thing was, at first--well, there was a lot going on. We were all just running around, shouting, "Did you hear?" and "Jesus, Jesus!," sitting in front of the TV for hours, finding it impossible to believe, over and over. It was like a whole new world.

And as someone pointed out, okay, the cats are sad, but cats don't actually do that much anyway, and the things they do--sit on the couch exuding domesticity or whatever, sprint over when you open a can of catfood, ignore you when you call them--can basically be done just as well sad as happy.

So we went about our business. The business, at that point, being: Figure out how to go on living. By now this was beginning of October, Ground Zero still smoldering. You'd go down there and the smell, the smell of burned rubber, other smells, it was just--Jesus, remember?--the cards, the notes, from the wives, the kids, already fading in the sun--

Which is when we noticed the water. I don't mean tap water. The tap water remained fine. It seemed to be mostly the river water that was--it was, to just come out and say it: flowing backwards. You'd go to a spot where formerly there'd been a beautiful waterfall and there'd be all the water, on the downhill side, kind of surging against the rock, trying to get up. It was heart-rending. And I am not one who would normally describe water as "heart-rending." Even in your driveway, if you were washing the car, the water would run UP the driveway, toward the garage, and would kind of huddle there against the door. Honestly. Somebody--I think it was Roger K., a roofer who lives near me, said it first: That water looks sad. And it did. I turned off the hose, a few of us gathered round, and sure enough, the water looked heartbroken. It was kind of--you couldn't say sobbing, exactly, you know, "heaving in sobs," but there was a kind of, I would call it, surging thing going on, a kind of lapping thing, like it was hurling itself against the garage, in sorrow or--it was actually kind of horrible. Gave you goose-bumps. You expect a kind of neutrality from your water, and when that is not the case...I'm sorry, it's creepy.

So now it's middle of October, nobody feeling right at all.

Which is when the flesh of the cows of the field turned bitter.

The farmers weren't saying much about it at first--they have a living to make, I don't hold it against them--but pretty soon...it was a rust taste. At least that's how I experienced it. And finally the farmers admitted it: Sometime in early October, the cows had literally, all at once, dropped down on their front legs, front...knees or whatever--"as if," one farmer said on the news, "in grief."

You couldn't eat the meat, no way. And the milk--no. It didn't make you sick, exactly, but it left an aftertaste...

Christ, this is too much, we all began saying, we have to--we have to do something!

But what, we did not know.

Then it was early November and we were walking out to the car, to go pick apples, trying our best to live life, you know, and my wife says: What's with these leaves, anyway? And that was true: everything was still green. We thought, well, it happens, global warming, whatever, give it a week. So we gave it a week: Everything still as green as deep summer.

I got out my ladder, went up into the maple in my yard, saw what I saw, came down, got Roger K., asked him to come up too, and although yes, even to me, who was there, it sounds, at this distance, nutty--the leaves, on closer examination, appeared to be in some kind of torment. How should I describe it? They were kind of...crinkling up, then relaxing, crinkling, relaxing: a guy clenching and unclenching his fist.

It was then that Roger K. and I, up in the tree, heard a kind of voice. It was--sure, yes, obviously--the wind, and yet...not. Not really. I mean, not only. Because as we listened carefully--I remember that Roger, in his astonishment (I was astonished too, believe me) reached over and put his hand on my shoulder--as we listened, we heard words. Words in English, female voice, seemed to me:

Strike back, the voice was saying.

It was like a lightning bolt. I almost fell out of the tree. How do you ignore that? We called friend after friend, they went up the ladder, came down, called their friends (some of whom drove over from other towns, other states even) and so many--I wouldn't say every person, but SO many of them heard the voice, that soon--and the other notable thing was, it wasn't just us, not just my tree. Apparently this was happening all over the country. And it wasn't just trees. In Michigan a schoolteacher heard the swings in the playground saying it. The surf all up and down the California coast was reported to be saying it. On the Internet you can find--I've listened to it several times--a tape this guy in New Mexico made of Interstate 40, and it is crystal clear what that highway is saying.

Of course, of course! we all felt. What has been making us so sad is this powerless, passive feeling. That much sadness, no one can just take it. Something has to be done with all this emotion.

This thing was done to us. We have to do something. We have to strike back.

We resolved to do so. You could feel it in the air: Purpose, direction--flags appeared on car antennas, people's eyes got brighter. The cats got the spring back in their step and suddenly mice were no longer safe. Water began doing what water is supposed to do--seismologists detected the sound of thousands of first waves slapping down over thousands of restored waterfalls. The leaves changed, gloriously as I remember it, feeling to us like the miracle that leaf-change actually is. We thought: Wow, orange trees, red trees, yellow freaking trees, we are, all of us, alive again, alive still.

One night around that time, lying in bed, kids asleep, wife asleep, wind outside blowing through the trees forming, blessedly, no words at all--I realized that in our relief and excitement, no one had asked--of the wind, the swingsets, the ocean, the highway--no one had asked what, suddenly, seemed to me a few reasonable questions:

Strike back against whom? And where? And how? And to what end?

I thought about waking my wife. But it was late and we had to work next day, and I thought: the 'who' and the 'where' and the 'how' and the 'to what end?'--that is not now, that is later, that is yet to be decided, by the people who decide such things, people who are, like us, of good will, only more powerful, and know things we don't, and will proceed with discretion, in the full measure of time.

But when I woke next morning, it had already begun.

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