This morning I received two— count them, two— "love bites" from Kané; one on the arm, and one on my bare shoulder while I was lacing up my boots. Love bites are the acme of Kané's affection. They mean that he loves you, right now, and he wants you to love him back, right now. They're rare. What's more surprising is that Iris was in the room when he did it.
Iris is Bill's cat. At least, technically she's a cat. Kané loathes her, and I can't blame him. I love all cats, but there is something bad-wrong with Iris, and so I reconcile my dislike for her by believing that she is not a cat. Cats have dignity. I don't know what she is. Salamanders are more cuddly than Iris. Shrimp inspire more affection. She's that nasty.
Her first problem is that she's so fat that she can't clean herself. She has dreadlocks hanging out of her ass that any goateed skate-kid would be jealous of. Every once in a while, Bill takes her to the groomer to have them snipped off. That they can't simply be washed away is something that makes me tremble with revulsion. They have to be surgically removed. I imagine them falling away, twisting and hissing on the table like landed hagfish, until they're dropped in formaldehyde to die.
Bill has her on a strict diet and he tries to exercise her, but she still hasn't lost enough weight to clean herself properly. This is not to suggest, however, that she does not try, but somewhere along the line, Iris confused "getting herself moistened" with "cleaning". There is a lot of drooling, biting, and sucking going on, but not much tongue action. I've watched her. It's nauseating. Oh, and she grunts while she does it. She contorts herself into improbable positions and emits an unholy snerking/chuffing/grunting sound as she tries to suck her own saliva back out of her fur.
There is so much evil in the world.
There are other things. She has dull little-piggy eyes, set far apart so that she has that flat-headed, dumb, flounder look to her. She does not meow— she hacks. She squeezes out a raspy, epiglottal bark that can't be written in any language. The closest I can come is nyng!— but that doesn't really do it enough injustice.
Finally, she's insane. She begs for attention constantly, but if you make the mistake of petting her, she'll bite your hand and then hiss at you and run away. This, in itself, is enough to make her the disposable Bic lighter of the pet world, but Bill is devoted to her, and I have to keep my mouth shut.
I feel sorry for Kané. When he first moved in with Iris, it looked like he was going to handle himself well. He claimed his one room, and would chase her away if she entered it*. Kané usually avoided Iris if he could, but he would take a swat at her if she got in his face (have some dignity! *bap!*) After a while, though— possibly because he realized that it was wasted effort, but probably because he got tired of cleaning her smell off of his paws— Kané gave up. He usually just runs away from her now.
There was a brief period of time— after Obie and Pippin were shipped off to live elsewhere, but before we moved Kané over to Bill's house— when he was an only-cat for the first time in years. He seemed uncertain of the new arrangement, and Dan and I reassured him, in that dumb way that pet-owners will do, that he had won, that we weren't getting rid of him too. I thought this was sort of cruel, because we knew that he'd be moving in with Iris pretty soon. Dan likened Kané's situation to the lull in fighting games like Mortal Kombat— that short rest-period between the easier foe in Level One (d'Obie and The Pippinator,) and the nastier, more difficult enemy in Level 2 (Viris.)
In a month, Kané will be rewarded for his bravery when Dan comes to gather him and take him home. It looks like Kané will be an only-cat again. Yay.
I'm going to miss that little fucker, love-bites and all.
*If chase is the proper word here. Kané is much faster than Iris, whose top speed can best be described as a "waddling gallop", and if he actually chased her, he would catch her. This unfortunately would involve touching her, which is the very last thing that Kané wants to do. It's an interesting puzzle that he hasn't quite figured out yet.
Last updated 24 March 2003
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