I’ve been married for thirteen years now, but Ittotat’s been around longer than that.
Ittotat is a cat. Ittotat belonged to a former boyfriend of my wife’s. She confiscated Ittotat because the boyfriend would leave home for days on end, forgetting to feed or water the cat, to the point where the cat would sit in the window and meow, meow, meooooow piteously until the landlord let himself in and fed the poor damn cat before she starved to death.
Ittotat, as you might expect, has … issues … about human contact and food.
The computers are in the library, the spare bedroom where we keep the majority of the books. If there is more than one human in the library, Ittotat will run in and meow, meow, meooooow until one of us picks her up and pets her.
We still don’t know what the deal is. There can be two of us in the bedroom, two of us in the living room, or two or three of us anywhere else in the house, but if there is more than one human in the library at once, *someone * must pet the damn cat before the world ends.
But this is not her chief quirk.
Her chief quirk lies in the vlork.
I have been around for thirteen years. I know the vlork when I hear it. The vlork is generally preceded by the *vuk-vuk-vuk-vuk * sound that warns you that the *vlork * is coming, and must be prepared for. Quickly! Each vuk takes no more than half a second, and there are almost never more than four vuks, and sometimes only three.
Occasionally, there will be no vuks at all, and the vlork comes spontaneously, without any warning at all. Those are the worst.
Those of you with cats – and perhaps dogs – know whereof I speak, of course. We’re talking about vomiting, here. This, in and of itself, would be no big deal. Cats hork up hairballs on occasion. It happens. You knew this when you got the cat, yes?
But it is not an occasional thing with Ittotat, the vlork. It is not quite every day. Sometimes days can go by without a vlork. Sometimes, there can be as many as two or three in one day’s time. It is difficult to predict, the vlork.
There are two kinds, though. One is the *vuk-vuk-vuk-vuk-vlork * that comes in the night, the one where I sleep undisturbed until about the third vuk, because I sleep like a corpse, but my wife has already been triggered, conditioned like Pavlov’s housekeeper, and is up and running, in midnight nudity, sweeping the room with eyeless vision, trying to figure out where the ghoddamn cat is and if she’s about to puke on something that would be difficult to clean.
My wife is amazing, like this. She can wake up, scoop the cat off the bed, have the cat on the linoleum, and be back in bed, asleep, between the first vuk and the final vlork, if she’s in good form.
The other vlork is the ugly kind, the dangerous kind, the kind that ambushes you. There is no sensation quite like getting up in the middle of the night from a nightmare where your spleen was about to explode… only to realize that your bladder is way too full… and you get up in the dark to head to the bathroom…
…only to step in cold cat hork partway there.
Aaaagh! Ick! Bladder! Pain! Ick! Do I stop and wipe my feet? Wipe my feet on what? Hunt for something to wipe feet? Aaaagh! Gotta PEE! But if I don’t, I’ll be tracking cat vomit throughout half the house… but I gotta PeeEeeE!
You see the subtle tortures of the vlork.
We’ve had the cat checked out more than once. No one can tell us why she does this. She’s in ridiculously good health for a cat her age. There’s nothing wrong with her stomach or digestive system. My daughter concluded that she’s just fixated on food because of the scumdog former boyfriend, and she eats too much, and usually, within fifteen minutes, horks it back up in semidigested form.
Sometimes as often as twice a day.
I have no idea how the cat stays alive if it can’t eat. How often does it eat? How much, in ratio, does the cat digest versus how much winds up on the floor, in the bathroom sink, in my wife’s shoe, on the rug on my side of the bed, or on those underwear I foolishly left on the floor last night?
Many would not tolerate such behavior from a cat. Some would take her to the animal shelter, to save suede shoes yet unborn from a fate worse than death.
We can’t. My wife, who is usually fairly ruthless when it comes to keeping things clean, has said that she can’t imagine leaving that poor cat in a wire cage, to suffer horribly for three days, waiting for death, wondering where her people have gone, and why they abandoned her… it’d be like a nightmare from hell, for this poor old cat who spent her kittenhood meowing piteously in a window for food. Just can’t do it. It would be too cruel.
So, instead, we have the vlork.
And I wear shoes that can be polished quickly, in the morning, before work, if need be.
That cat is fourteen years old now. It can’t last forever…
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