Zombie Cat: REDUX
A Eulogy for Robert Pawson
He was sitting there just staring at me as I looked up from rifling through my bag. He was a little lopsided and a little dirty, the way day-old stray cats are. He looks friendly, I though. So, in a soft voice I call to him. He doesn't move.

When I pull forward, pedaling my bike up the path with my feet, he stands up, not in the fluid way that cats do but arthritically, as if his bones were creaking with effort. I put down the kickstand and reach my hand out in greeting, how cats seem to like it.

He was just a little grey and white thing that had seen better days. And he was crooked. The tip of his tongue stuck out of his mouth, pink against the white of his muzzle, one of his yellow eyes was brown-gold with cataract blindness, and the tip of his tail was bent.

"What a funny little thing you are," I say, and beckoning him. But he doesn't move to be petted. Instead, he sits there and looks at me, tongue lolled out and head slightly to one side.

"Strange cat," I say to a passerby. But strange things are always happening along this strip of path. Like the time I biked through to find a barricade beneath a swarm of honeybees, or the time I stopped to smell the flowers and found they'd all been replaced with fakes. People come here to sit by the river and smoke, look at the moon from the pavilion, watch the fires from the kiln raze the sky.

"He just need some love," replies the pedestrian, stooping to pet the cat.

He looks dead, I think. And that's when the deja vu hits me.

Driving down 126 the day before, we passed a housecat on the side of the road, legs asunder, stiffening from the impact of his accident in the light of the midday sun. We passed right by and I cried out, in the way that I do for pets that have been run down, with a sadness and respect that I don't give to possums, raccoons, and rats.

"A kittyyyyyyy!" I wailed, in a five-year-old's voice. "A dead kitty!!!" More whimpering.

"Where?" Said Justin, who was driving.

"Back there! Someone's kitty and it was dead!!" I was now working myself up, thorougly distraught. "Someone's housecat on the road, a little grey one with white paws!" Oh, how I could bemoan the fate of a cat like nothing else. "Now he's dead and no one will know," I said sadly.

With mind for a tribute to the cat, I added, a-la-Fight Club, "His name was Robert Pawson... his name was Robert Pawson." I couldn't get Justin to chant with me so I shut up, but was still sad. We sped on, easily five miles away from the little cat body at the side of the road.

Late that night, when it was dark and clear, we came back on the same road. Thirty or so miles from home, I remembered the dead cat and said to Justin how sad I was that the poor thing had met its demise in this place. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, we passed the body and I cried out again.

The poor cat laid in exactly the same way, kicking its feet toward the road, looking as if it hadn't been bruised and crushed by a two-ton vehicle earlier that day. I wondered aloud who had taken the time to move it to the side of the road or if it had just taken itself there to die.

Will its people ever find it? Did anyone say goodbye? How would I feel if Rupert never came home one day?

I stop my bemoaning when Justin asks me, seconds later, if he should stop the car so I can give the cat last rites. "But..." I stammer. He's sincere, shockingly. He knows I'm upset and that it's something I would do. For a moment I consider it. I consider putting myself in the place of Priestess, working the amature spiritualist magik I know I possess. But the I realize that I shouldn't interefere with the way of roadside nature, that I don't have to put my mood on the line for someone's cat, one of many- and especially that taking a look at my fursome friend up close will only serve to aggrivate me further.

We drive home.

So I stand, the next morning, on the bike path through my University's contemporary art department, near the ceramics gallery and Urban Farm looking at the same cat. I realize, with creeping certainty, that the cat does not just look dead, it is dead. Its stiffness is not arthritis, it is the aching, bone creaking numbness of rigor mortis. Its eye is dead and its tongue is dry. It smells of slightly stale fish.

And it simply came to say hello.

It isn't mad at me for not releasing it (which I do, silently crossing myself and letting go the cat), it isn't evil or hungry for my mortal soul. It just is. Staring at me. Still.

Why is a dead cat looking at me? How did it walk thirty-five miles in one night to come to sit in the middle of the campus art department?

These things I don't question. I put out my hand, pet the cat, and poke its tongue back into its mouth. The little dry tip stays put for a second and then lolls back out again, a cute but somewhat grotesque smile.

"See ya, pal," I say to the grey cat, and mount my bike.

"Blork," says the cat.

I pedal on, late for wherever I'm going, as usual. I don't look back because I know when I do, the cat will be gone- off to eat mouse brains or whatever it is that Zombie cats do.

It's just another one of those things; just another day.

His name was Robert Pawson.