The Cat Dies

You see, first comes the obsession, a thought that intrudes on you and won’t leave; it just swirls around and around your brain without stopping. For example, you might be tormented by the thought “what if I go to hell?” Of course, you may have some reason to suspect that you will be damned—which of us has never done anything that might be held against us?—or you may not believe in hell at all—the afterlife is a very unpopular notion in these oh-so-wise, oh-so-skeptical days—but nevertheless, you can’t stop thinking it: “what if I go to hell?” When you awake, it’s nagging at you, and you go through your day as best you can, all the while worrying at the same thought like a cold-sore in your mind. Obsession.

Then, there might come a compulsion, something you do to make the obsession go away: if you’re worrying about going to hell, then you might pray for forgiveness. And every time the thought intrudes on you, you’re driven to make a pious gesture like getting on your knees and crying out, “oh god, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Even in the middle of your day, during a conversation with a friend, or at work, the intrusive, interrupting fear of hell will check in on you, and you have to respond by acting out the ritual. Compulsion.

So it might be that this cycle—obsession, compulsion, obsession, compulsion—eats up more and more of your time, until you begin to be late for things and even avoiding them all together lest you be forced to perform the compulsion in public. One day, you might through yourself to your knees in the middle of the street to pray, and a truck will come careening around the corner and hit you so your body explodes all over the pavement, even as the driver honks furiously and tires screech and the onlookers scream—but none of these sounds are as loud as the voice in your head that won’t go away and that forces you to repeat the ritual over and over and over…

It began innocently for me; at first, the checking was indistinguishable from ordinary conscientious behavior in response to my absent mindedness. Every so often, I’ll take something off the range without turning the heating element off (I have one of those electric stoves that doesn’t give any visual indication that it’s on. No flames, no lights, no glowing. Just heat.). Or sometimes, the fridge doesn’t shut completely, or the door doesn’t lock behind me. It is, I think, not unreasonable to double check these things, especially when one has a history of leaving them in an unacceptable state.

The first check was the door: the lock, screwed on to the inside of the door (rather than built in), is loose, so it takes a few tries to get it to latch. Sometimes, I have to tug it shut rather forcefully. This has a paired check, in my cat: I once came home and couldn’t find him. After panicking, I opened the door and found him in the hallway, where he had dashed when I came home: he was excited to see me and ran out, and I was excited to see him and ran in. Now, every time I open and close the door to the hallway, I have to check that my cat is on the right (inside) side of it, and that the lock is latched.

There is a great industrial movie from 1962 called “Telstar!” about the launch of the US’s first communications satellite. While telstar is a minute toy compared to the monster satellites that we send up today, at the time, the machine pushed at the very limits of what was possible. As Vannevar Bush observed, it would have taken the Pharaoh’s entire kingdom to build a car, and it “would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.”

The movie has the following refrain: “check, and recheck.” Telstar is a priceless baby, and before they shoot it off into space, they want to be absolutely certain that it’s working right. Every component is tested individually; after assembly, the whole thing is tested again; every time they move it on its journey from the lab to the launch pad, they check and recheck it. It took the entire kingdom to build the thing: they want to make damn sure that it doesn’t break down on the maiden voyage.

So, in the spirit of check and recheck, this is my ritual: I have to check that the windows and bathroom door are closed, that the lights and cook top are off, that the faucets aren’t running, that the electrical appliances are unplugged, and so on. Every time I step out, I am tormented by thoughts like “what if I left the lights on and waste energy?” “what if I left the range on and a fire starts?” “what if I left the bathroom door open and the cat eats the hair ties or asphyxiates on a bag?” “what if I shut the cat in the bathroom and he has to sit alone in the pitch blackness until I get back?” “what if I left the windows open, or the door didn’t latch, and the cat gets out and runs into traffic?” and so on. My brain is always coming up with new “what ifs” to obsess over.

Since I first wrote this list, I came up with the following new checks: what if the fridge is open? What if my lighter overheats and explodes? My cat watches me do these silly things from one of his observation posts around the apartment. I wonder what he thinks when I leave and come back so many times in a row—“oh great, not this again.”

What’s checked doesn’t stay checked, so even if I see and know that the oven or lights are off, as soon as I look away, I begin to doubt myself. It gets worse when I rush, so I have to slowly and carefully through all the checks so that I can’t think “I wasn’t really paying attention, better check again.” But I often get frantic when I’m checking and going to be late for something: the less time I have, the faster I go through the checks, and the more I worry that I’m over looking something; at its worse, I run back and forth hyperventilating, slamming the door more and more forcefully, as the time ticks by and I’m more and more late.

I saw a man on the street waiting for his money to come out of the ATM. With his hands, he was frantically brushing himself down. I watched him rub his hands all over his face and his head; he made sure to get the back of his neck and behind his ears. I wonder what he was worrying about: “what if a bug landed on me?” “what if I’m dirty?”

I once knew someone who was in treatment for their compulsion. The treatment was: don’t do the compulsion, and you’ll get over the obsession. She had an obsession about contamination and washed compulsively to make herself feel better. The therapist encouraged her to stop washing all together: she was “banned” (the word used by the treatment center) from washing her face and body. She became, in fact, dirty. I took to washing my face when I saw her out of sympathy. Her skin became shiny and her pores distended. But she wanted so badly to be free of her compulsion that she was willing to completely disregard the possibility that she might, in fact, become dirty.

So I have to start getting ready to leave at least half an hour before I’m supposed to be somewhere. I check the lights, the oven, the windows, the bathroom door, the lights and the oven again for good measure, the plugs, and the faucets. Then I step out into the hallway, close the door, and try the knob to see if it latched behind me (which it often doesn’t): the lock is becoming loose from all he times I open and slam the door trying to get it to shut. When it finally catches, I have to test the knob several times to make sure. After all this, I can finally leave, but before I get to far, I begin to obsess again, and I have to run back and check the door again; if it’s really bad, I come back inside and check everything again from scratch.

What torments me about these checks is that they aren’t arbitrary: sometimes I do leave the lights or the oven on, sometimes the door doesn’t latch, and I have shut my cat in the bathroom by mistake. So no matter how much I challenge the obsession, they’re always buoyed up by the kernel of truth upon which they’re based.

Yesterday I left the apartment, having checked the lights, oven, windows, faucets, sockets, doors, etc., I stood in the hallway and yanked the door shut. I felt the door meet resistance before it met the jamb. A sickening crunch worked its way through the air and into my brain. The door swung open. In the corner of the entry way of my apartment by the door, where my cat loved to sit, his body was sprawled. His head lay crushed on the threshold to a caricature narrowness, and his eyes bulged out of his skull; his blood sank slowly into the carpet.

When they loaded telstar on top of the delta rocket that was going to carry it into space, the engineers and technicians ran one last set of “check and recheck” to make sure that telstar was not damaged during the elevator ride up the rocket’s support structure on the launch pad. Eventually, though, there was nothing left to do but to seal telstar in the shell that would protect it as it ascended through earth’s atmosphere and to close up the nose cone of the rocket. As the engineers seal telstar away, the narrator says: “no more check and recheck. Telstar is on its own.”