Is Your Kitty Like This?

Is Your Kitty Like This?

by Ana Maria Spagna

Readers’ Choice Award, Summer Writing Contest

Photo courtesy of Ana Maria Spagna

Last year, while living and working far from home, I adopted a cat. A family moving away couldn’t keep her, and the pandemic was still raging, and I’d been pet-less for a few years, and the photos they took of this cat—Mother Maybelle, named for the Carter family matriarch—were straight-up seduction: an orange, wide-eyed kitten rolling on a rug, white belly to the camera. Who could resist? I could not, and thank God. The cat saved my sanity. I relied on her company through a long winter, playing with string or cardboard box, and come spring, I took her on walks around the neighborhood. She stopped using the litter box with the last snow, and pooper scooper bags in hand, we went looking for flower beds. Mainly, we went to Cynthia’s house.
         Cynthia, the next-door neighbor, worked for the state office for the aging, a hellish job in Covid times, and still she was always pleasant and friendly—the definition of neighborly—while out tending her yard, which she did often. She’d catch me loitering by her lilacs, baby-talking Maybelle, and wave, gracefully ignoring my lonely, high-pitched patter.
         One afternoon, she called out to me excitedly. She knew I’d been teaching a class in which students wrote about and from the perspective of animals, and she had something that might interest us. Her office had recently acquired some cats and dogs for lonely dementia patients, she said. But get this: they’re robotic!
         For crissake, I thought. But neighborliness prevailed.
         Wonderful, I said.
         So she lent me two, a cat and a dog to take to class.
         Back home, I pulled the robo animals out of the box. Soft and fuzzy like stuffed animals, more or less life-sized. The dog sat tall, the size of a poodle but the shape of a larger dog, a yellow lab pup maybe, with big eyes, a pink tongue, a red bandanna. The cat lounged on its side, largish, with long gray hair and soft pink paws. I read the packaging: Joy for All Companion Pets (retail value +/- $200) are designed to bring comfort, companionship, and fun to elder loved ones. Huh. I clicked the switch on the cat. She blinked. Meowed. Purred. Lifted her right paw and did a creepy slo-mo rollover. I had no idea what we’d do in class with these strange toys, but I figured we’d give it a go.
         Truth is, I’d given playfulness a long leash in the class. I’ve been labeled a nature writer for years and published scores of essays and stories about mountains and rivers and forests, but hardly any about deer or birds or beaver. Why? Because anti-anthropomorphizing dogma paralyzed me. Who was I to write about animals without proper scientific training? How dare I imagine that they think or feel or believe, much less what they think or feel or believe? I was so afraid of getting something wrong, I reined myself in so hard, I sometimes felt I’d lost the knack, even the ability to acquire the knack. I didn’t want the students to feel so restrained. I wanted to them to go hog-wild with imagination.
         For weeks I showed an animal video each morning to spur them. Bears, falcons, foxes, badgers, crows, spiders. Never a cat. Never a dog. When the first writing assignment arrived, about half were about cats or dogs. I found this disheartening. I’d been hoping to expand the palette, but I instantly recognized my own hypocrisy. What animal do I care most about in the world? Endangered polar bears? Sage grouse? River otters? No. Maybelle. My cat is the animal I care most about, and the one I imagine cares most about me.
         The students cared, too, about their pets, and enjoyed imagining their lives. One wrote a story from the perspective of a guide dog for a blind, non-binary teenager. Another wrote about a puppy named Cheetos, left behind when the family emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Eventually, they grew more adventuresome and wrote about dragonflies and house sparrows, wild turkeys, and baby tigers. An Irish student wrote about faeries, and why not?
         All this to say, by the time we got to the robo toys, it was time for a challenge. I’d read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine in which I learned my own kneejerk philosophy comes closest to panpsychism, a close cousin to romanticism wherein all living things have some sort of mind. O’Gieblyn, a former evangelical Christian, applies the hard cynicism of a once-believer to such perspectives. She’d tear my agnostic sentimentality to shreds. In the book, she adopts a more sophisticated robotic dog, Aibo (popular in Japan, retail value $2800), and describes her deeply growing attachment to it. I assigned an excerpt from the book, and on the day the class arrived, opened with a video of Aibo. Not fuzzy at all. Plasticized and mechanical. More computer than comfort.
         The students were instantly, unanimously, disgusted. Outraged even. They could not believe anyone could suggest robots are as intelligent as pets, even though research suggests they certainly are, depending on how we define intelligence. I repeated O’Gieblyn’s assertion that Aibo has the ability to learn equivalent to a three-year-old child. Who cares? they cried! In the chapter we read, O’Gieblyn’s husband bossed Aibo the way some people boss Alexa speakers. And like Alexa, Aibo can eavesdrop and collect personal information. It took the students three minutes of Googling to learn Aibo is outlawed in several states for this reason. Things were spiraling out of control.
         I had to push back. What about comfort for old people? I asked. Real cats and dogs need homes, they argued. Otherwise they’re euthanized! But shut-ins can’t have real animals, I tried. The mess, allergies, the impossibility, ever, of training a cat. Could a robo-animal be a stand-in? Nope. No way. By this point, I was getting annoyed with their vehemence.
         I described how my mother tends to reject any feeling at all in nonhumans, how she bristles at the attention my sibs and I pay to our pets, the good money we spend on them, how all this goodness would be better spent on humans in need. Why all this compassion for animals? I have always countered her complaints the same way: Compassion is compassion is compassion. Now I tried again. With the students. With the robots. Compassion is compassion is compassion, I argued. Why is this divide—animal, pretend animal—any different?
         They ceded the point only, it was clear, because I was the teacher, and they remained 100% opposed.
         Until. I pulled the Joy for All cat and dog from the box they had not noticed from behind my desk. Immediately they crowded around, ooooh and aaah, played happily like much smaller children, urged the dog to sit, laughed with delight when the cat lifted a pink paw slowly, mechanically, and tipped over backwards to show her white belly. I mean, really, no one was fooled. The robots remained glorified stuffed animals that could bark and purr. But it was fun to see snarky students go soft. From outrage to baby-talk in a nanosecond.
         Story over.
         Until. A few days later, I went to return the toys to Cynthia, Maybelle in tow. The cat sniffed the new shoots of grass, climbed a cedar tree, shot across the street to visit other neighbors, taking full advantage of my distraction while I visited. I told Cynthia about how quickly the students had changed their tune. Thanked her genuinely. Out of the blue, she asked about my wife’s mother who, she remembered, suffered from dementia. Take one, she said. I was hesitant. The experiment in the class had been good fun. I’d played the teacherly role of contrarian gamely, but I wasn’t wild about packing half my carry-on with a battery-operated pseudo-pet. And I wasn’t at all sure what I thought of the whole concept. But they aren’t cheap. And Cynthia was exuberant. And I was mostly concerned with getting my actual cat back to the house. So I chose the robo-cat, and a few days later—after leaving Maybelle for the summer with friends who own a farm—found myself flying with a fake one 3,000 miles across the country.
                                                                

I had the worst dream of my life when I was eight.
         The bear stood seven feet tall or taller—he had to duck to fit through the patio doors—with Barbie joints and a Frankenstein gait, stiff and distinctly unfuzzy with brown Astroturf fur. He moved steadily past the fireplace and the mantle, toward the piano, the coffee table, steadily toward me. I was curled on the couch, unable to move or scream, not even a peep, though I tried desperately.
         We’d stayed up late with my Aunt Rose, my father’s Italian aunt from Florida, the closest he ever had to a mother since his left when he was a toddler. She wore cat-eye glasses and pants suits and drank red wine. There’d been chips on the table, a rare treat, soda, and loud laughter, and I didn’t go to bed because she was staying in my room, and I was sleeping on this couch. At some point she told a story about a nightmare she’d once had with a teddy bear chasing her. Mine, later that night, was obviously a copy-cat, but more than a nightmare, night terror. I was sure I was awake, but I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t scream, though I tried, and this bear just kept coming, stiff and sure. Human-made, but not human. Not a bear, not a teddy bear.
         I haven’t dreamed of bears since, though I see them regularly, rolling rocks to find ants in the backyard, pawing through huckleberries on the trailside, climbing trees, swimming, even. I’ve never dreamed of any animal I can recall, though surely they’ve had cameos. No deer, no coyotes, no ravens even, omnipresent in real life, all of them. And no pets either. Not my beloved childhood dog, Junior, nor any of the cats I’ve loved in adulthood.
         Fake animals, though, abound. In one recurring nightmare, I’m stuck beside a carousel in the desert, watching gaudy painted horses go round and round. I’ve always found merry-go-rounds creepy, the way the animals are sculpted in motion, when they can’t really move. I’ve been around real horses plenty, and to be honest, if my subconscious is scanning for something to be scared of, I’m not too wild about them. Oversized and not too smart. I’ve wondered while teaching this writing about animals class how far I’ve shoved animals from my imagination, if I’ve self-censored so long I’ve hobbled myself, closed off some crucial knowledge. I’d never had a dream involving gunshots either. (Guns, sure. People, men always, chasing me? Yes, of course. But never actual shots.) So I was unnerved months ago when I dreamed of watching David Byrne in concert shot to pieces, his body convulsing as bullets drove through. The image troubled me, repeating on a loop in a way only the robo-bear dream ever had. Why would my subconscious conjure made-up human horror rather than sweet birdsong or cat tricks? The students do fine, they slip into animal mode like a second skin, most of them, whether they’ve known real wildlife firsthand or not, and right then, right in the middle of all this esoteric pondering, the news from Uvalde comes down, more children massacred, and with it the realization that, for my students, unlike for me, this news is not distant or unimaginable. They’ve known violence: if they haven’t survived an actual school shooting, they have come close. If they haven’t had someone close die from suicide, they’ve known friends of friends who killed themselves. Many have tried themselves. I’ve taught nonfiction writing for years; I’ve read scores of pages about violence and grief. Scores!
         The writing animals class was different. Their essays brimmed with raw tenderness, with deep questions. One of the most surprising aspects of class was how often spirituality arose. Not religion as such, but belief systems, ethical codes, idealism about the connection between humans and nonhumans, the possibility, the necessity. Maybe because when you move into the realm of consciousness, you move into the realm of the unknown, and as much as imagination, we often fill that space with faith. This is the very instinct O’Gieblyn interrogates and distrusts, but I have a gentler response. The students had lived through two years of COVID hell; they’d grown familiar with uncertainty and wanted to engage with it, to fill the void with, well, joy.
                                                                

My wife picked me up at the airport, and we headed directly to the assisted living place where her parents now live, where her mom, Ginnie, gets minimal care—despite paying high dollar—and is often distraught. We’d brought food for lunch, various small gifts, and as we gathered everything, and donned masks, to enter the building, I reminded her about the robo-cat. She sighed. Did we have to? Let me see it. I opened the roller bag, and as soon as she saw it lying rigid gray, hair matted and deathly still, she rolled her eyes, shouldered her bag, and left me to decide. Which was, of course, a no-brainer. The robo-cat took up half my bag, and I wasn’t lugging it any farther.
         Besides, there was always a chance.
         Everyone knows dementia is cruel. From the outside, the effect is worse than entropy, a kind of robbery. Ginnie once dressed impeccably, created museum displays, cooked elaborate meals. Now, she sits in a chair in front of a loud TV, nodding forward, wearing whatever mismatched clothes the staff has found, not always her own, often food-stained since she’s nearly blind and must eat with her fingers. From the inside, who knows? She inhabits another world. She imagines rooms in their apartment that don’t exist, sees strangers in doorways, tells vivid stories from the past, some that are undoubtedly true, some that are ridiculous. That Laurie’s father is exhausted, exasperated—sometimes impatient—makes perfect sense. So, in a way, does the fact that Ginnie instantly adored the robo-cat.
         The moment we placed the cat in her lap, her demeanor changed. The cat purred, and she purred back. The cat meowed, and Ginnie laughed and talked baby talk to it. She smiled in a way I have not seen for years. Years! She kept at it for hours, entirely content, even delighted. She fretted when time came for us to leave, thinking we’d take the cat with us. When we said she could keep it? She was overjoyed.
         At home, Laurie replays the videos we took of her, the way she cradled the robo-kitty one-armed like a young mother, the way she tried to feed it bites of her cookie, the way she pursed her lips to buzz raspberry style, all things a real cat would never tolerate. For weeks, Ginnie has continued talking and purring at the robo-cat, all hours of the day. She sleeps with it. Wakes up and asks for it. When we ask on the phone what the cat’s name is, she answers as though we are dullards: Kitty. Of course.
         Make no mistake. I am still skeptical about all things robot. These house pet knock-offs might be an entry drug for inviting surveillance into our homes, for grooming ourselves into docile incompetence. Even if it stops with robo-pets, I can still slip into outrage. What if all the money spent on Joy for All went to saving wildlife, preventing poaching, protecting turtle eggs on Caribbean beaches or orca habitat in the Salish Sea? What if we thought for one fucking consumerist moment about other beings?
         Or. Maybe, just maybe, that’s what robo-kitty does. She draws Ginnie outside herself as she tries to give the kitty sips of coffee and coos at her gently as she once did her own children. Who am I to judge? When I adopted the Maybelle, more or less on a whim, she made pandemic existence endurable. She made me wake up, made me play, talk baby-talk. She was enslaved, of course, by any measure, and she terrorized her fair share of songbirds, but I loved her inordinately. When the semester ended and I left her at “farm camp” with a houseful of busy people, other animals, excuses to be outside, a porch for lounging on, several beds, I felt bereft. I could not help wondering: Did she miss me? Most assuredly not. Or it depends on how you describe missing. Did she wake wishing for me to follow her onto the porch? Or did she miss that particular front porch? (One she’ll never see again, though she doesn’t know that.) She might pine unknowingly. All year, when a large truck like the one the family before me owned drove past she perked up to watch it go by. She doesn’t know what she wants, but she wants. So, too, with Ginnie. So, too, with all of us.
         What our unknowing about the pandemic, about the future, about the inner lives of animals most resembles, I think, is dementia. We’re still not sure if Ginnie knows the cat isn’t real, but she knows something’s amiss. One day last week, she asked her husband to call the vet. There’s something wrong with this cat, she said. When we visit, she sometimes asks: Is your kitty like this? Sometimes she even remembers the name: Maybelle. Is Maybelle like this? We aren’t sure what she’s asking, so we assure her she is. Even though Maybelle is not like the robo-kitty. She’s nothing like it. Except, perhaps, that she is beloved. Sometimes I think of explaining the difference, but I don’t know how. I don’t want to break the news, because I don’t want to break her heart. Better, perhaps, to pretend.
         Here’s the thing: Her sense of wrongness reminds me of how I feel living in the world now, how maybe the students feel. This isn’t right, is it? Something about the whole situation from climate change to democracy undone is unreal and dangerous. Sometimes it feels exactly like the kind of dream where you cannot run or scream. Despair and terror loiter on the doorstep. When I think this way, I think we should take solace where we can. I tell myself: so many things are worse than robo-animals— dictators, coal-fired power plants, assault rifles, children forced to give birth. I tell myself: quit splitting hairs: go vote, go organize, don’t worry about the fucking robots! Recently, I stumbled on a video of myself rehearsing for a poetry reading on Zoom with Maybelle crawling over the keyboard. The look on my face—pure delight—mirrors Ginnie’s precisely.
         Last time we visited, we bought my father-in-law fat packs of C-sized batteries. Robo-kitty goes through them fast. Who knows how long they hold out, or Ginnie’s interest will, or God help us, how long Ginnie will? For now, she lifts her voice to meow on key, to match the pitch of the robo-cat when it meows. Oh, she says speaking clearly and directly into the big blinking eyes, you’re a good kitty. You came at just the right time. When it lifts its right paw, designed by engineers to be exactly the right size for an elderly person to hold, she holds on tight.

The author, Robokitty, and Ginnie