Mayday
The first time I met my neighbor, his face was covered in my blood. Before we’d even made full eye contact and put-er-there, I had painted his forehead red.
Won’t You Be My…?
The Clifton Place gardens and the Greene Avenue gardens were a patchwork of Brooklyn brownstone back yards, making the folks with garden access more relevant neighbors than those along your actual street.
Our particular cluster was separated by eroding concrete walls and updated wooden fences. A handful of these dividing structures featured a double whammy perimeter defense system. In case you’re not familiar with perimeter defense systems, here’s the Cliffsnotes: barbed wire is used for cattle, barbed tape (aka razor wire) is used for convicts. We had both, an accordion of jagged steel stretching three gardens deep. It was a relic from harder times in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, when prison-grade deterrents were a commonplace prophylaxis against home invasion. A time when a sun-glimmer off of a metal thorn was a beacon of safety - a ray of hope - and not an omen of treachery for residents on an otherwise beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Apart from the coil of rusting concertina razor wire, the block was idyllic. Sean and I were of Greene Avenue stock on the South side of the property line. Directly next-door to the West were our beloved neighbors, Mia, Eric, and Serafina Galvez-Laughtner. When the Galvez-Laughtners bought the bordering brownstone and razed our shared kelly green chain link fence to build a modern-yet-understated wooden slat fence, we joked with them that we’d approve of the demolition so long as they built a door for us to come and go as we pleased. Two weeks and a hundred thousand hammer swings later, the new and improved wooden fence was erected. Along with our door. We didn’t know them well enough to understand their intentions. Were they calling our bluff with some strange game of Intimacy Chicken, or signaling a premature trust with this standing invitation? But as time went on, it became clear that the door signified the latter - a vote of confidence and a commitment to closeness. Nowadays, we do indeed come and go as we please. And that’s how we came to learn that if good fences make good neighbors, then two-way doors on those fences make gooder neighbors.
Just East of us were the Frenchies. They weren’t all from France, but it was enough for a quorum. Enough for us to lazily refer to them as, ‘the Frenchies.’ They were an intelligent bunch of youth living la vie boheme - twelve bodies to a three story brownstone as a chosen family. We liked them well enough, but they had each other.
Across from the Frenchies was a youngish couple with a baby on the way.
Directly across from Mia, Eric, and Serafina was a dusty white-haired man along with his wife, toddler, and a few dogs who lost their damn minds every time a feral cat taunted them from the fences. Which was most of the time.
And to complete the map, across from Sean and me was a brownstone we’d assumed to be vacant. I based my guess on the fact that I not once saw anyone enter or exit, flip on a light, or open a blind, which weren’t so much blinds as they were stained bedsheets. Aside from the zero signs of human life, the building was about one crusty window pane away from condemnation. The place looked to have suffered decades of disrepair. If it were a house in suburbia, it would be the haunted one. But it was a brownstone in Brooklyn. Nothing is atypical here, or else everything is.
You Say My Nose, Sir, Reminds You of a Dachshund?
When it came to introducing ourselves to the cross-the-yard neighbors, in particular the dusty white-haired man and his family, we didn’t. Mia, Eric, and Serafina were enough for us. And besides, knowing your neighbors has its drawbacks. Suddenly there’s pressure to say hello and maybe even make small talk every time you see them. Then there’s the pressure to keep the noise levels down because you’ve developed an outsized empathy for their experience now that you know their names and their children’s names and their children’s naptimes. And worst of all, there’s the pressure to wear full-coverage clothing and stop treating your back yard like a private island. I succumbed to none of these neighborly pressures. My tits were out, and my volume was up. It’s not as though we were positioned to have a meaningful connection anyway. Recall the barbed tape and the concrete walls. To get anything neighborly accomplished, we’d actually have to walk out the front door and all the way around the block. If we needed a cup of sugar, it would be easier to buy it at one of the two bodegas we’d pass on the way.
When I stopped to wonder why I was so resistant to knowing them, or when I’d start to feel guilty about my cold distance, all I had to do was remind myself that they weren’t in any rush to meet us either. The disinterest was mutual. And anyway, they didn’t stick around for the worst of the pandemic. I can’t blame them for skipping town at the dawn of a natural disaster, but I do. They were defectors. Wealthy ones at that. From what I could see, they owned this home and apparently others, and they could afford to let their several million dollar brownstone sit empty for a couple of seasons while they burned out the viral clock from safer pastures. Meanwhile, Sean and I spent the beginning of quarantine on the phone with the Department of Labor to get on pandemic unemployment assistance. And in between being disconnected mid conversation and holding for a representative, we were fighting our bridgetroll of a landlady to forgive us a portion of the rent. We stayed. We endured. We grew closer to the Galvez-Laughtner crew, bonded by survival and our two-way garden gate door.
The more we dug our heels into riding out the tempestuous mix of apocalyptic elements - the virus itself, the toilet paper shortages, the closures, the protests, the riots, the curfew, the hell fireworks, the helicopters, the fear and uncertainty - the easier it was to nurture a resentment for those who could afford to evacuate. The nerve of these people, I thought, when they finally returned from their urban escape. I was too jealous to try and bridge the gap, and I was too proud to admit that I was jealous.
I spent the Spring Season varying my acts of engagement between pretending I didn’t see them and waving briefly from the patio. And I only felt the need to do that much because the dusty white-haired man became harder to avoid as my desire for a sunbath seemed to match his desire for a smoke. So I’d give a nod and a quick salute when I’d see him on his deck in the mornings. And the mid-mornings, the afternoons, the evenings, dusk, and dawn. I worried that our frequent waving was becoming absurd, but the man insisted on ripping cigs with the fervor of a recovering alcoholic. I would watch him stare into middle distance while he filtered his frenetic energy through about 17 Marlboro Lights a day.
Or maybe he was merely surviving too. Maybe he was sucking ‘em down with a completely natural level of preoccupation. After all, he was the patriarch of a three-hound-tantrumy-toddler-stay-at-home-wife household in the second year of a pandemic. In these brief moments of compassion, I fantasized about checking in on his mental health one day. Sincerely, and with a hand on his shoulder, I’d lean down to catch his shoe-gazing stare and say, “Are you okay?” I’d mean it. And he’d understand me. And he’d feel seen. And most importantly, I’d feel good for seeing him.
Now the time had come when we were close enough to share an intimate moment, but this was more intimate than either of us would have ever wanted. True, I was asking if he was okay, but it wasn’t the heroic mental health check of my dreams. It was more like, “Are you okay… with my blood all over your face?” As if I could take it back…
Recently (and reluctantly), I’d met his wife over the fences. Mia and I wanted to confirm a murmuring that they were the Abelman’s Bagels people. She was sure to let us know (too proudly I think) that Yes they were, AND they’re opening a slice shop nearby.
“We’re gonna do a great salad,” Rachel mewed over the fence. I suddenly understood the clouds of smoke and anxiety that wafted my way morning noon and night. He was a restauranteur.
She pointed to her strawberry-headed toddler and said, “This is Charlie.”
TMI, I thought to myself. But she didn’t stop there.
“Do you wanna be mosquito buddies? The mosquitos were so bad last year. I’ve heard geranium oil might help, but we should dump out any standing water.” Last year?? I wanted to scream. WE?!
I was incensed. What does a traitor know of last year’s mosquitos? And what in the fuck is a mosquito buddy? She was in violation of so many unspoken rules, many of which I was making up on the spot just to avoid connecting with her.
“Is that your kitty? The gray and white one - Charlie is so curious about her.”
Damn. She got me with the one topic I couldn’t resist: cats. Specifically, my cat.
“Yes, that’s Wooshka. The others are feral, but she domesticated herself almost two years ago. She lives with me and my husband, Sean, now,” I said, maybe too proudly.
What I wanted to tell her, but would never have the time to convey so completely, is that one day in September of 2019, Wooshka stuck her paw in just as the door to my heart was closing. Earlier that summer, I had euthanized my cat of 15 years. The entire process - from setting a date to feeling her draw her final breath into her terrified body - was excruciating. You can try to prepare yourself for it by consulting everyone around you. They’ll tell you it was the worse day of their lives. You’ll think to yourself, impossible. Arrogantly, you’ll think, it’s probably because they weren’t able to be present with the moment, like you know anything about being present with the moment you end the life of an animal that practically raised you. Righteously, you’ll think, I’m different, I’ll handle it gracefully. And then it turns out to be exactly your least favorite day of your entire existence. Just like they said it would. Even though you’ve experienced a smattering of devastation and tragedy, even though you’ve even strongly considered euthanizing yourself before, this will remain the day that you might spend the rest of your life wishing you could unlive. It will keep you up at night. It will add to the pile of dread when you’re grieving something else. It will even cause you to secretly resent your husband, because he’s the one who decided that July 19th would be the day to do it even though you know he only picked that day to protect you from the horror of having to pick the day yourself.
A few short months after I’d had Miss Moneypenny killed, a scrappy little kitty with crust in her eyes showed up in the garden. I was attracting yard cats with Moneypenny’s leftovers (I had mistimed a bulk food purchase with her scheduled passing), but I intended to cultivate only casual relationships with the ferals that attended the estate sale. But she was different. It felt like, “Hello again,” and not, “Nice to meet you.” She had a communication system that was more sophisticated and consistent than most people I know. Hiss, growl, attack. It’s basically a traffic light. If you don’t stop fast enough at yellow, you’d better buckle the fuck up for a head-on collision. So clear was her language that I had total confidence when I had the green light. As long as she didn’t hiss, she was happy to be picked up, carried around, and cuddled. For those first few weeks of recovery from life on the streets, she’d melt unconscious in my arms. She was ferocious and independent, but she chose me to rest her gray and white whispy-eared head upon. Eventually I started keeping a window open so she could come and go as she pleased. She made herself at home, and I didn’t stop her. Once she started to recognize us as subjects in her kingdom, the attacks ceased. She redirected her instincts toward casing the perimeter and fending off intruders. Instead of trying to protect herself from us, she started protecting us from the world.
I didn’t expect anyone to understand the significance of Wooshka, least of all Rachel. And anyway, there were still a hundred things I didn’t like about her. There was a distance in her voice that had nothing to do with the fact that we were shouting to each other through dogwoods and construction racket. My back yard was a sacred space. It wasn’t a place to pedal your pizzas. It was meant to be protected from commerce and liberated from the social procedures of the outside world. She only acknowledged Mia directly, and I didn’t like that either. I felt excluded from a club that had something to do with motherhood and being in your 40s. She seemed overly formal and afraid of her body, like someone who covered up a little even when she was naked in her own bedroom and wore clothes to the beach.
They were the kind of people who unironically name their dumbass basset hounds ‘Arthur,’ ‘Conan,’ and ‘Doyle.’ So what if Sean and I called the two black feral yard cats ‘Edgar’ and ‘Poe’ and kept our fingers crossed for an ‘Allen?’ So what if I supported my parents in naming their wire-haired weiner-dog ‘Cyrano’ all because of an obscure dachshund reference in the 19th century stage-play, Cyrano De Bergerac? My resistance to the Abelman Baglers was so potent and unexamined, that I was willing to find fault even in our commonalities.
I couldn’t see a road to friendship with these people. I was content to put our stilted conversation out of memory and return to never getting to know them. And I knew it wouldn’t be too hard. Neighbor relations in Brooklyn were odd that way. You could run out your entire tenure on any given block and never learn the names of the people you’re practically shitting in front of. This was not a cup-of-sugar kind of town unless you worked at it. And most people didn’t see the point - it’s transient, it’s competitive, it’s over-crowded. But if you needed a little neighborly inspiration, you need not look further than Mia Galvez. She was a Jello-mold Queen. She had everyone’s contact, she asked about your family if you crossed her path, she called each face on the block by name even if she didn’t get the name quite right. She called me Cathy for about a year, and I didn’t even mind. It didn’t hurt that she was a beautiful trilingual half Cuban half French New York Native. She was obviously not a tourist, nor was she a mindless millennial pushing the locals off of their newly trendy land. Almost everybody found her at least a little relatable. I was in awe. I knew that at least a chunk of her buttery care and concern was strategic, some consciously so, some not. But that appealed to me even more once I got over my suspicions that I was being taken for a ride. I really don’t give a shit how manipulative you are as long as you’re not trying to pull one over on me.
The Fête
The night before, the Frenchies had thrown another one of their ragers that didn’t get started until 1am. I awoke to a discothéque throbbing in my pillow at 3. I weighed my options: address it now and sacrifice some sleep, or wait until my frustration turned to fury and… sacrifice some sleep. It seemed like a good opportunity for me to grow out of some shitty habits and prove to myself that I could be the kind of neighbor I thought I was. Direct, honest, respectful, capable of stating my needs instead of screaming them. So I threw on Sean’s plaid robe, drowsily shuffled down the stairs, went into the back yard, and climbed the wooden slats that separated us from the Frenchies. Straddling the fence, I gesticulated wildly toward their living room window until someone finally came outside.
“HI! PLEASE DON’T LEAVE. Can you grab someone who lives here?”
“I live here,” he said, though in my half-conscious haze I didn’t recognize him at all. The cast of tenants was constantly rotating. I’d only been able to keep track of the mainstays - young power couple Etienne and Mariel, and sommelier Jean-Luc.
“You do? Hi I’m your neighbor, Callie, and it is WAY too loud.” He turned both palms toward the ground and lowered his head in a genuine gesture of deference and said, “No problem, we will turn it down.” I continued to explain my case despite his already having agreed with me. As though my own dislike of the situation wasn’t enough to justify my request, I starting listing off bonus reasons. “I have to be up early tomorrow, Mia is pregnant, Ms. Odette had a fall recently, Sean can’t see in the dark, and Lauren is an introvert.” Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to involve them, but they would thank me later.
“Absolutely, I will go turn it down right now.”
Of course I didn’t fall back to sleep immediately, but the music did fade after a few minutes.
I awoke a little ragged but optimistic. We’d recently returned from a two month road trip out West to an avalanche of issues. We came home to find about 40% of our house plants dead as doornails. A few days later, my training partner tweaked my neck when he dumped me on my head (which is not a jiu jitsu technique). That weekend, our landlady raised the rent a staggering amount. Then I confronted my mortality when I hydroplaned the Honda Fit into the wall of the Jersey Turnpike on my way to try to make some cash to pay the landlady. I walked away unscathed, but I lost more money to car repairs in 5 seconds that I’d planned to make the entire work trip. Then I confronted my father-in-law’s mortality when we got news of his cancer. These painful surprises were cruel to not spread themselves out over multiple seasons rather than crowd the one. I quickly developed a habit of looking over my shoulder, clutching my phone, and bracing for bad news. I quickly internalized that I must be doing something wrong to be the recipient of this much fall out. I quickly started expecting the worse. I quickly got used to it. How quickly we get used to anything. I thought about adjusting my settings to sunny optimism - it’s all a matter of perspective anyway - but it felt safer to not feel safe. I didn’t think I could handle having my hope dashed by another setback beyond my control. But that morning I turned a corner. I thought to myself, Then quickly too will I acclimate to the calm, which is surely on the way. So I put my phone down and joined my beautiful husband downstairs for an easy Saturday morning.
Mayday
When I heard Maya rapping on the back yard door, it didn’t compute. I’d never seen her angry, but she’d warned me in the past that she was a fiery woman.
The knocking turned in banging.
I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to trigger her. She would know that the party last night was at the Frenchies. And anyway, I’d saved us from that. This must be a warning. Someone’s apartment must be on fire.
Or worse…
“Wooshka’s stuck in the razor wire,” she said as I swung the door open.
Before this moment, the tangle of war-zone border controlling elements was little more than a dormant eyesore. But in its reawakening, it had become my nightmare. I rushed past Mia, looked across to the Abelman Baglers and saw them pointing and shouting “OVER HERE” to the Northeast corner of my garden. I knew I’d find her behind the concrete wall, but I didn’t know in what condition, and I didn’t have time to guess. If I had fully comprehended how volatile the material was, it probably would’ve caused a hesitation she couldn’t afford. So I covered my tits, tightened my robe, and ran.
I threw my phone against the deck chairs in a barbaric battlecry. And like most battlecries, it was dumb - I would definitely need that later - but what I needed now was to feel unencumbered. I leapt up my garden plots to meet the height of the wall. I grabbed the nape of Wooshka’s neck and was instantaneously stabbed by the spines of the razors. I’d never seen blood leave my body so quickly. It danced out of my skin with pizazz. Suddenly the smell of ash tray filled my nose. I looked down to see a shock of dusty white-hair. There was my neighbor hoisting Wooshka’s hind legs up from below in order to stead her body while I attempted to untangle her right paw from the razor tooth. She hissed, she twisted, she screamed.
The wind ripped through the gardens that May 1st morning, flourishing the capes of the dogwood trees, sending early blooms to an early death in our hair and at our feet.
“It’s bad. It’s really really bad,” I yelled to Sean, who was just joining us. He appeared by my side with a pair of wire cutters that had materialized in the scramble. The man and I were maintaining decent control of Wooshka’s body, and I was optimistic that her rescue was underway. But as Sean hacked and jimmied, my hope melted - the cutters didn’t even leave a scratch on the galvanized wire. We might as well be taking scissors to a railroad track. It wasn’t until I needed to coordinate our next maneuver that I saw where all my hemorrhaging had landed. I finally looked at my neighbor below who now had a name.
Our eyes met, and I knew Cameron was a good man. He didn’t have to climb into the haunted lot from his perfect castle to triage an animal he’d never met nor cared about, but he did.
I saw that my sanguineous fountain had spewed from my punctured wrist and hit squarely between his eyes, execution style. The blood pooled in the canyon of his brow and forked at the bridge of his nose, tracking his tear troughs and hugging the contours of his orbitals to meet either jowl, stopping just short of his neck where it wobbled and threatened his cable-knit cardigan. Between the shock of salty hair on a mid-forties face, the green eyes I wouldn’t have guessed were green from my side of the property line, to my crimson innards that accentuated his bone structure, I stared like an admirer before a Grünewald masterpiece. My dominant thought amid the carnage was, Beautiful.
“You don’t have covid, right?” His attempt to lighten the mood threw me, but I played along.
“Negative and vaxxed,” I confirmed. But his question brought about a self-consciousness that wasn’t present in my mind even a moment prior. Suddenly I could see how ridiculous it all looked. I’d soaked this man in my blood, I’d sustained open wounds, I’d involved 4 different adults who weren’t my husband, all for a cat. I guess the least I could do was not transmit a deadly virus to him. I realized that while we all shared a goal, we did not share the same concerns. I would have bled on all my neighbors, I might have even drawn their blood if it meant saving my cat. It became clear that while everyone was there to help me, they weren’t united in a devotion to Wooshka. Their worlds didn’t turn on the axis of her survival. Shame flooded me. I was embarrassed by my commitment to her safety. By how willing I was to spill my fluids on a neighbor. And while I didn’t cause the problem, I was dragging these people into a pretty heinous situation for a feral cat. If it were a child, or even a dog, I doubt I’d feel the same way. People love children and dogs. But street-born cats are polarizing. To some, her kind is no better than a psychopathic mongrel, and to many more, a disinterested pet in whom your family can be mutually disinterested. It wasn’t just the neighbors I was inconveniencing. Early on when she first started coming around, I’d made promises to my husband to not care about her to the point that it inhibited major aspects of our lives like travel or finances. And here I was, in the middle of something that would definitely put a major dent in both. I was throwing phones, gushing blood, banking recovery days with every slash and bite, letting others risk their health, demonstrating exactly how thoroughly I’d failed to not love her.
But these sentiments were background noise. Front-of-house Me remained robotically focused. I channeled every ounce of my energy into keeping Wooshka’s body as still as possible while the men tried to separate one sharp part from another to create enough space for a safe extraction.
“Someone get the number of an emergency clinic,” I dictated. The razor tooth had penetrated her right paw all the way through. It gleamed between her toes like a single wolverine claw. She growled in agony. She went for my hand. I clenched my jaw and ate the pain. Then she switched from my hand to the razors, hoping to chew her way to freedom.
“FUCK!” I shouted into the morning dew. This was becoming more, not less, chaotic. The concerns were spiraling from a mutilated paw to a mutilated face all while her thrashing body dared the grim reaper to slice a femoral artery. So I offered her my hand. If she was going to try to gnaw something off, better my flesh than razors.
She looked me dead in the eye, gathered the skin of my index knuckle with her fangs, and tore it open. Time slowed, and I watched my capillaries thrust and bloom into her mouth. Her white teeth became obscured by a cocktail of saliva and blood. Her maw pinkened with the new fluid. Her peridot green eyes held my gaze. Beautiful, I thought.
“I need gloves!” I shouted. Within seconds, rose-pruning gloves appeared. Where the fuck were these five minutes ago? I slid my sticky wet hands into my new armor one by one, careful to maintain a vice grip on Wooshka’s neck. My blood was glueing the goat suede to my skin, but with my arms protected from further damage, I could go to work disentangling her with total abandon.
By this point Eric had already jumped the wall to the Clifton Place side to attack the problem from a different angle.
“If I can cut the barbed wire that’s keeping the razor wire fixed to the wall, you might have more room to pull her out.” New hope. Cameron and I held Wooshka tight while Eric worked on the wires.
“GOT IT!”
Now we were back to mitigating damage and solving one final problem - her paw.
“I think you might just have to yank it!” Rachel eeked, visibly biting her nails, “I think you’re just going to have to do it!” She said it like she regretted to inform me. She might’ve been right, but I wasn’t ready to make the switch from finesse to brute force, and her wincing and emoting was not helpful. Eric nudged her paw up toward the sharp end of the razor tooth while I pulled the rest of her body toward me. I felt less resistance, the way a glass jar gives you a hint of relief before it liberates the pickles. We continued the tandem push and pull for a few more seconds until her paw twisted in a way it shouldn’t, fell limp, and slipped free. I bolted inside with a fist full of cat.
Time and Urgency
I am told that the entire ordeal from Mia’s door-bang beginning to Wooshka’s delivery from purgatory took less than ten minutes - inconceivably short compared to how it would live in my head. If you told me we were there all morning and into the afternoon, I’d believe it. Crisis, flow state, sleep, childbirth - all time benders. Sometimes we choose them when we decide to get lost in a process. In some cases we have a gestation period to prepare for it. On other occasions, we are unwillingly sucked into a psychedelic focus that obscures time, space, pain, and panic until all that’s left is doing and being. Things sped up once I got her upstairs and into the bathtub for a quick assessment and temporary asylum.
With the help of my internalized Hand Messiah, I performed a preliminary examination. Patient is alert and ambulatory (she seemed weirdly fine, ready to get the fuck out of the bathroom). Majority of hemorrhaging is foreign (mine, most of that blood was mine). Right forelimb has corrected from prior deformity, but patient is expressing non-weight-baring lameness (she stumbled and flopped when she jumped out of the tub). Subcutaneous laceration on inner left thigh, otherwise presents mostly superficial wounds (the gash in her thigh was concerning, but she didn’t seem to be bleeding out). Carpal puncture on right forelimb, possible distal metacarpal fractures (there’s no fucking way she didn’t break at least a few foot bones).
I showed Mia where she could find a fresh set of clothes for me. She would have to disrobe me and put my feet through each leg hole and my arms through each sleeve like she had to do every morning with her 4 year old. I wondered if I could get her to brush my teeth for me as I clumsily loaded the brush with a slug of tooth paste and jammed it around my mouth with a limp right hand that was inflating by the second. Sean stuffed our crippled kitty into the cat carrier while Eric pulled the car around.
I have a tendency to minimize my injuries. When you’re raised by a doctor, the prognosis is usually, ‘You’re fine,’ and a common prescription is, ‘Walk it off.’ You start to assume that if it hasn’t fallen off of your body completely, it’ll heal on its own. My dad was a hand surgeon specifically. It’s probably the reason I’ve abused my hands all my life doing one extreme activity or another. His nickname around doctor’s circles was The Hand Messiah. Who needs healthy hands when you have Hand Jesus on speed dial?
When I was a kid, he would sound off to us about how infectious and threatening cat puncture wounds could be. It was just another thing my dad said. Kind of like how he’d tell us the same story over and over again about a young woman who came in for surgery and asked if he’d also remove her bellybutton ring while she was anesthetized. It had become so infected that she couldn’t take it out on her own. It was his way of ensuring that our home remained catless and our navels remained virgins. They were boogey-man anecdotes - tales from the O.R. that he recounted one too many times for them to really stick. It didn’t haunt me. I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t develop a fear of cats or body modifications. I didn’t consider it at all when I started retaining yard ferals. It wasn’t on my mind while Wooshka pierced my knuckle. But I knew. Somewhere in there I knew I was bartering my fine motor skills for her survival. I had to forget that fact in order to get her out alive.
But I was swiftly reminded by the vet tech who greeted Wooshka, Eric, and me at the door of Furbaby Emergency Pawspital. Though her eyes were wide with shock that I wasn’t moving with more haste toward a pharmacy full of Amoxicillin, she spoke calmly and concluded her intervention in terms that penetrated my thick skull.
“Anytime we get bit, we go to the hospital immediately. We’ll take care of her, you take care of you.”
That tracked, though I was hoping they could do it the rural way and shoot me up with cat antibiotics right then and there. Anything to avoid the horror of human hospitals. I digested her words with a deep sigh and dismissed myself with a tiny bow. Eric was already looking up local urgent care centers that took my health insurance before the vet tech even closed the door.
The urgent care doctor was brief and showed absolutely no urgency. I wondered if maybe he was my dad as he injected a Tetanus shot in the left arm, performed a wound-cleaning on the wrist and the right hand, examined the mobility of the affected joints, and wrote a scrip for Amoxicillin. I walked-it-off. To the CVS next door, where I learned only certain pharmacies are covered by certain insurance companies. After asking the pharmacist, “Are you serious?” a bunch of times, I opted to pay a premium because something told me I shouldn’t procrastinate the healing process, even if I could get it for free at another CVS a mile away. What I didn’t know consciously was that I didn’t have a mile. I didn’t have more than a few minutes before the infection would bring ruin to my dominant hand, which at the moment looked like a balloon animal.
Mama Mia
Mia insisted on driving me to pick up Wooshka. I side-eyed her pregnant belly with suspicion, my passion for having children recently killed dead from today’s events.
“How do you deal with it?” I asked.
“Your heart is outside of your body for the rest of your life. It’s absolutely agonizing.” So that settles it, I thought, no kids. “But the feeling of connection you have to that little human is more than anything you can fathom, and it’s not something you should miss.”
I believed her, but we both knew she’d left the house hours before we were due at the vet just to get away from her own child for the afternoon.
We meandered through Cobble Hill and found a dreamcatcher in a wealthy trash pile on our way to the butcher. A little victory. When we got to El Mercado de Carne, Mia was chirping and flirting and smiling and slinging Spanish at all of the carniceros. They adored her. I hung back, smiling and offering what I could in their language. One carnicero guarding the door said, “Me gusta tu atrapasueños.” I looked down at my used dreamcatcher and told him, “Gracias, ya lo encontramos en la basura.” My Spanish wasn’t good enough to explain that it was clean trash. Nor did I know the words for ‘razor wire’ or ‘healing totem.’
As we waited with our meat on the block of Furbaby Pawspital, Mia asked me in her sugary tone if my hand hurt, pobrecita. I stopped feeling guilty about ruining everyone’s Saturday and started feeling humbled at the idea that maybe they wanted to help. Images of Wooshka dangling from the wire - screaming into my face, completely inconsolable - flooded back into my mind.
“You don’t know how good of a friend you are,” I managed to say through tears.
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “I love you, Callie. I’m not a good friend, I love you.”
Final Act
Wooshka came home that day with an alternative lifestyle haircut, a pink cast up to her armpit, and a plastic cone around her neck. They had to shave her in every place they saw blood, which was most places on account of my flamboyant phlebotomy. She had about 6 stitches on her inner thigh. If she’d been lacerated even a millimeter to the left, she would’ve bled out in minutes. My injuries were strikingly similar. I now have two keloid scars on either side of my radial artery. I ultimately didn’t need surgery on my right paw, but The Hand Messiah kept me on watch for days until the antibiotics attacked the cellulitis and the swelling finally went down. We spent the month of May convalescing in a greyhound crate I found on craigslist, whining over our matching mangled hands, navigating the hurdles that come with trying to contain a feral cat.
I was quickly disabused of the notion that she’d keep her cone on. And soon to slip off was the splint. A few days before it was due for a change, Wooshka managed to slide her way right out of her hot pink cast. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Her leg was so emaciated and raw, it looked as though it had been freshly amputated. It took a minute to register that this was indeed her entire limb and not a stump. There were bald spots where her fur had disintegrated, and the fur that remained appeared gangrenous. She went at it like a hyena to carrion, growling and smacking as she licked and chewed in utter hysterics. She’d been trying to get her saliva on that wound for weeks, and now that it was exposed, there was no separating her from it. I called the vet in a confused panic, “I think her foot fell off! NO IT’S STILL ON! Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”
This would kick off a series of unexpected splint slips and emergency re-castings. They tried to blame me for not keeping the cone around her neck. I tried to blame them for not understanding the nature of their clientele.
In the hours and days following the accident, I struggled to process the whole event. As Wooshka developed a thick callous where the break used to be, I developed one on my psyche where my optimism used to be. We survived it, but the whole ordeal left me scared and angry. I was unsure of the takeaway. Was it a sign that we should’ve moved when our rent was renegotiated? Were Sean and I lucky that we and 4 other adults were home to save her life? Or were we very unlucky that she got caught in a death trap at all?
I couldn’t shake the thought that in all my years in this apartment, I’d never seen a cat so much as stumble on these fences. They’re cats for Christ’s sake. They’re the spokespeople for agility. They’re the poster children of quick reflexes. How did this spry nimble animal spontaneously fall into a patch of razors? It wasn’t adding up for me, and I wasn’t feeling fortunate or grateful.
I tried to self-soothe by researching facts about barbed tape and plotting my revenge on it. There was no making sense of how it all happened, so I vowed to never let it happen again. Perhaps you’ve wondered, is it illegal to own a throwing star in New York City? Why yes it is. NY Penal Law 265.01. Is it illegal to carry a switchblade? Absolutely, of course. Class A misdemeanor - up to 1 year in jail. Class D felony if you have any priors. You can own either, but you have to leave them at home. Basically, having anything stabby on your person is a punishable offense. You may be saying to yourself, problem solved! The City of New York will have that razor wire removed just as soon as they get word of its felonious existence. But oddly, there are no restrictions on razor wire. What is essentially a million deconstructed throwing stars is free by law to coil around your neighbor’s property and maim anything and anyone that so much as brushes against it. I would have to take matters into my own hands. But there was one major obstacle. The empty brownstone - the theatre of our traumatic event - wasn’t empty at all. It was full of Old Ms. Edna. I’d have to get past her before I could make our neighborhood safe for small mammals again. But it wouldn’t be that simple.
Every neighbor on the Clifton Avenue side of the property line chose to withhold Ms. Edna’s contact from me. They pretended they were being helpful - Oh we’ll be happy to put you in touch just as soon as she says it’s okay - but all they were doing was thwarting my efforts to get it taken care of before Wooshka was ready to be reintroduced into her natural habitat. I couldn’t tell if they genuinely felt protective of their elderly neighbor, or if they were motivated by optics and self-preservation. How would it look for a bunch of young White women to hassle a Black nonagenarian about removing the one thing she installed back in the 80s to protect herself during the the crack epidemic in the middle of the hood? Understood, but in reality, the barbed tape had only neutralized two targets in the last decade: me and my animal friend. Not exactly the threats she’d envisioned. After one week and 3 excruciatingly expensive vet visits, I nudged Rachel with a dose of her mosquito-buddy passive aggression.
“Hey Rachel, just wanted to let you know that I have a professional who can handle the razor wire as a favor to me. Maybe that would be a good thing to share with Ms. Edna so that she knows she wouldn’t be expected to arrange it herself.” She didn’t need to know that the professional was me, a set of bolt-cutters, and a pair of oven mitts I’d ordered on Amazon.
“We just got an email from the block association. Ms. Edna died.”
YATZEE!
Though it can’t be said that Ms. Edna’s passing is the reason for what happened to us that day in the razor wire, it certainly couldn’t be unrelated. Perhaps it was Ms. Edna’s final act before she expired. Maybe she hated cats. Or maybe she loved cats so much that she wanted to take one into the tomb. Maybe the process of physical death creates a vortex that a thriving thing can actually fall into. I was willing to accept any of these metaphysical hypotheses. Sometimes a wild explanation that can’t be proven wrong is better than a sensible one that can’t be proven right.
Eventually I was connected with Dwayne, Ms. Edna’s heir, to discuss our options. I quickly found myself in a real crazy-making conversation about something I thought was intuitive.
“Gosh I don’t know, I mean she put it up for a reason.”
No kidding, I wanted to say, she put it up so she wouldn’t get burgled, and now she’s dead, and there’s nobody to burgle. This one’s easy.
“Why don’t you put up a hedge?” he offered.
I was beginning to suspect that Dwayne had never heard of cats.
When I couldn’t bring him to the obvious correct conclusion (the one that served me and didn’t take anything of real value away from him) I began to regret calling him at all. He was barely aware of the razor wire until I nearly lost a cat and a hand to it, and now it’s suddenly a sentimental object? Everyone I consulted had something different to say about what the reasonable and neighborly way forward was. Obviously the Clifton Clan insisted I continue to discuss the matter with the inheritor of the land, while the Greene Gang practically celebrated the death notice. “GREAT! So you can just take it down, right?” Mia, Sean, and the Frenchies cheered. But Eric maintained that because I’d already started the conversation, I needed to finish it. I was no longer free to handle it on my terms, at least not without getting caught. I’d missed my chance to play dumb and ask for forgiveness.
When you live in a city as saturated with people as New York, it feels just as natural to ignore everyone as it does to acknowledge them. It’s a paradox we contend with so regularly, it’s wallpaper. We’re alone. Together. Now that all my neighbors had names - even the dead ones - I could no longer pretend to live in solitude on my private island. We were officially engaged in democracy. Now that I knew they would come to my rescue in a moment of need, I could no longer tell myself a story that I didn’t need them. But I’d almost rather be friendless than have to slow down and wait for everyone to come to their senses. I could either plow ahead and cut down the razor wire, or accommodate my community’s wishes. What kind of neighbor would I be?
