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Placing Mr. T

J.G. Walker

    Mr. T has been stalking me for three weeks now. He watches from the hallway when I sleep, peeking in through the crack in my bedroom door. When I shower in the mornings, I don’t have to pull back the curtain to know he’s standing in the bathroom doorway, waiting for me to finish so he can take his turn. He’s behind me when I open the refrigerator. On garbage day, as I roll the can down the driveway to the road, he parts the living room curtains to monitor my progress.
    I’ve often imagined that Mr. T comes from a large family. On those occasions, I’ve arbitrarily assigned him three brothers and one sister, all of whom died before my wife found him. This is preferable to believing he has living siblings who love and miss him, but I know nothing of his actual history: where he was born, his travels, dreams, romantic liaisons, things like that.
    Not long ago, I saw a program on The Discovery Channel about dogs trained to sniff out cancer. Canines with the keenest senses of smell can be trained to detect rogue cells in the urine of people with bladder cancer, but what I was unable to gather from the program was whether or not the dog understood the implications of the differences between the samples. Did he recognize that something was actually invading the host body, transforming it into something new? Or did he simply know there was a difference, one he’d been conditioned to sniff out?
    Mr. T’s not a dog, but I think he knows.

    At the first interview, a sprightly waitress shows us to our table. I’m more nervous than I’d expected. The waitress looks down at me and gives me a tight, reassuring grin. Then she flips her tray like a huge coin and heads back to the kitchen.
    The woman across from me has a pleasant face, but her lips are pursed as if she’s about to whistle a tune. This isn’t a problem in and of itself, though it could be distracting. It’s slightly less pronounced when she smiles.
    Her gaze drifts to the top of my head, and I wonder if she suspects something. The last round of radiation ended six weeks ago, so my hair’s grown back a bit, though with a male-pattern baldness I never had before. I considered shaving, but that would have created just one more mindless routine to demand my time. Instead, I decided to never cut it again.
    “Do you have a picture?” she asks.
    I slide Mr. T’s photo across the table, and the young woman, Rhonda Nesbitt, thirty-one, physical therapist with no children, picks it up and smiles. The bow of her lips widens, and her eyes flicker up to me and back down again.
    “Handsome fellow,” she says. “I love the stripe on his head.”
    The picture was taken two years ago, before Jess died. Mr. T is sprawled on our couch, his body contorted into what might easily be mistaken for a botched sit-up. His mesmerizing stare is directed up, at where I know Jess was waving at him from behind the camera to try and make him smile. Or whatever it is Mr. T does instead of smiling.
    “He’s quite a guy,” I say. “He meant a lot to my wife.” And to me, I almost add, but that would raise the inevitable question: Why are you giving him up?
    Rhonda Nesbitt doesn’t ask about Jess, about my use of the past tense, but she nods, pushing the photo back to me. Again, she glances at my hair. Difficult not to, I’m sure. The hair that returns after radiation therapy, I’ve noticed, is rarely as robust as it was before. It looks sheepish, like it feels a need to apologize for itself.
    “I’m a music producer,” I say. “A friend of mine is starting a label in Australia. He’s signed a few new artists, and he’s asked me to partner with him.”
    Her eyes light up. “Have you worked with anyone I might know?”
    “Doubtful,” I say. “Mostly New Age, ambient pieces. Soundtracks.”
    “Can I meet him?” she asks. “Mr. T?”
    She seems nice, and I think Mr. T would like her. But I still have six more appointments.
    “Okay,” I say. “How about Monday?”

    From the start, my relationship with Mr. T has been complicated. This was never more apparent than three days ago, when he walked into the bathroom and caught me dropping one of his turds into a sandwich bag.
    No matter what you say or how you try to explain it, that kind of thing is going to put a strain on any friendship. But Mr. T had been having some gastric distress lately, and since he wasn’t going to drive himself to the hospital, I was forced to consult in secret with his doctor.
    “Get a stool sample,” Dr. Miller said. “Bring it in.”
    After thinking about it, I agreed. It gave me a chance to do a little stalking of my own.
    When Jess brought Mr. T home, the first thing I noticed about him was a dark stripe running down the top of his skull, like a Mohawk haircut.
    “He looks like Mr. T,” I said. “From the A-Team,” I added, as if the name needed explanation.
    Jess reached down to touch him, and his head rose to meet her halfway. He appeared to be as content a cat as I’d ever seen, already at home despite his recent arrival.
    “I think it’s just grease,” she said.
    The cat considered me from the kitchen floor, swaying under my wife’s touch.
    “Yeah,” I said. “But still.”
    The mohawk actually was grease, as Jess confirmed a moment later when she drew her hand up, but the name stuck.

    My third interview, David Bentham, nods. He shakes the photo of Mr. T, the way we used to wave old Polaroids at Christmas. Something about Bentham makes me uneasy, though. Maybe it’s the way he keeps looking away at the pigtailed waitress, not as if he appreciates the way she looks or wants to attract her attention, but rather as if there’s something else unfolding inside his head.
    “I’m an editor,” I say. “Freelance, for the most part.”
    Still watching the girl, still nodding, he asks, “Is he fixed?”
    That word has always bothered me, particularly in this context, and my standard reply to such a question is that he wasn’t broken to begin with. If what you mean is Have his balls been cut off? why not ask that? After considering my circumstances, I let it go. What’s the point in causing trouble?
    “No,” I say. “He was too old when we got him.”
    A week ago, I ran a classified ad on a local animal rescue website: Middle-aged, graying male looking for a good companion. Sizeable endowment will accompany to help defray costs of healthcare, etc.
    Seven people responded, and David Bentham was the third.
    Bentham shakes his head and finally looks at me. “He has to be fixed. I don’t want him pissing on my walls.”
    “Ah, well.” I try to sound regretful. “Guess he’s not the cat for you.”

    According to my mom, the mole was on my back the day I was born, between my shoulder blades, about three inches down. So that means I had it for forty-three years. I say ‘had’ because at some point—while I was asleep one night, sitting at a red light, or checking the mail, for all I know—the mole became something else.
    Jess should have seen the mole when it stopped being a mole, and she would have if she hadn’t died three years before it made its grand transformation. As it was, I only noticed it when I caught sight of my back in the bathroom mirror one morning, after the spot had already grown to the size of a quarter. Even then, the dermatologist assured me we’d caught it in time. It was atypical, as he said, but a scan revealed it hadn’t yet spread far. They removed it, along with two of my lymph nodes. Very common procedure, they promised.
    A nurse called me a week later to set up a six-month appointment. This was also routine, though it was possible I’d have to do it for the rest of my life.
    Turned out she was right.

    The initial plan: Irradiate brain for eight weeks, follow with a brain scan to check the progress, regroup, assess. After that, chemo. If necessary.
    The radiologist, a man who looked more like a linebacker than a doctor, fashioned a helmet for me, made out of a plastic mesh and fitted to the precise dimensions of my head. A red crosshair was drawn on the forehead, scrawled there as a target to show technicians where to zap me.
    Since I had to go to the hospital every day for eight weeks, I got in the habit of leaving the helmet in the car so as not to forget it. I’m pretty sure it’s still in my trunk.

    A few of the things I’ve learned over the past few months.
    One: I probably won’t have to pay another utility bill. That makes me feel better than I’d have expected.
    Two: Jess and I are both going to be outlived by a cat she rescued from a KFC garbage bin.
    Three: If the radiation doesn’t kill you, your doctors can always try chemotherapy.

    My fourth interview, Sylvia Carter, is nervous, but she seems nice.
    “It’s time for a change,” I say. “Ten years is a long time to teach math.”
    She nods, as if she can identify with the ups and downs of teaching math and chemistry to narcissistic, sex-obsessed teenagers. She might actually be able to relate, for all I know, but it’s not like that would make any difference to me.
    Why am I lying to these people? Because it sounds more plausible that a music producer, an editor, or even a teacher would feel the urge to pick up and move away on short notice? But why should I care what sounds conceivable? It doesn’t matter whether or not these people like me.
    She’s still nodding—the same way the third guy, David Bentham, did—but hers is different. The frantic motion of her head is fast enough to suggest a twitch, but her gaze is fixed on me, like I’m the most important thing in her world. Were it not for the thick lenses of her eyeglasses, I’d believe I was looking through her eyes and into a private part of her reserved for a lover.
    That’s awkward.

    Eight weeks passed between the morning the driver hit Jess and the night she died. She wouldn’t regain consciousness, but during that time I watched for any sign of expression, stared at her for so long that her face started to look like someone else’s. Sitting next to her bed each night, I’d occasionally nod off and wake with a start, sure I’d missed something.
    Ever since Jess had been absent from the house, Mr. T took to dragging her pillow into various rooms of the house and setting up camp there. Normally, he slept in our bed, sometimes between the two of us, most often balanced on Jess’s right hip when she inevitably rolled onto her side. But on the nights I came home from the hospital to shower and change clothes, I neither heard nor saw any signs of life, other than the wandering pillow.
    Close to the end, I wrangled Mr. T and took him to the hospital, smuggling him into her room in a canvas kennel. Once I let him out, he climbed up onto her stomach and inched on his elbows toward her face, stopping on her chest and looking over at me, though not for approval. That wasn’t the way Mr. T operated. He was telling me something. She belonged to him, too.
    I eased myself up onto the bed with them, taking great care, as if I might accidentally wake her. Mr. T hunkered down as the bed shifted, lowering himself even closer to her, and blinked his great owl-eyes at me. Then a deep, amazing rumble rose up in his chest.
    For that short time, we were at home in bed again, the three of us, awaiting the dreaded alarm clock signaling the start of another day. Work for me and Jess, and a vigorous round of self-cleaning for Mr. T.
    She died while we slept that night.

    When I was a boy I believed in God, though I sometimes wonder if I ever had a chance to do otherwise. No one ever offered me faith. It was issued to me before I left home, like a clear plastic school box to hold my nubby pencils, dull scissors, and glue.
    There’s no moment I can point to where I lost that belief. In fact, I’m still not sure that I did give it up. Maybe it’s with me forever, like a tattoo. However, I do remember when I realized the difference between knowing something and merely wanting it to be true.
    From that point onward, I scrutinized the hope I’d long mistaken for certainty, measuring every situation against my new yardstick to see if it fit. In the back of my mind, I still knew there had to be a God. Somehow it just made sense. After all, my life had a movie-like quality, giving the inescapable impression that someone was watching along with me. Could that observer be God?
    I entertained the idea of the over-the-shoulder-God for a while, but this eventually led me to another notion, one I was unable to shake once it came to me. What if that feeling, the nagging idea that some voyeur was peeping in on me, was nothing more than an instinct designed by evolution to assure me I wasn’t alone?

    After Jess died, two more months passed before I returned home, so Mr. T stayed with my parents while I rented a hotel room. It was expensive, though necessary. I went back to work the day after the funeral, but I couldn’t bring myself to reenter the house we’d shared. My mother said the paralysis was temporary and caused by fear, but I preferred to interpret it as weakness. That house, and everything inside that belonged to Jess, was like kryptonite to me.
    While Jess was in the hospital, I’d left everything in the house largely untouched, coming and going in a rush, staying only long enough to feed Mr. T, shower, maybe make a sandwich. From those trips, I knew that her cellphone awaited her on the living room coffee table, its battery long depleted, an issue of Marie Claire lay untouched next to her side of the bed, and her packed gym bag still occupied the neutral zone in the middle of our closet.
    Twice a day I drove down our street—on my way to work in the morning and again after—but it was a week before I was able to look at the yard, yet another before I could bear to look at the house. There were too many reminders. The hummingbird feeder outside the kitchen window, the flowered curtains Jess sewed during our first weekend there, the water hose I’d stepped over during all those frantic trips home, her bicycle leaning against the fence outside the garage.
    Six weeks after her funeral, I pulled the car to a stop in front of the house. Parking in the street, I made a slow scan of the yard and realized the hose was gone, as was the birdfeeder. My dad had been coming by to cut the grass, which explained the hose, and I figured the neighbor’s cat had at long last succeeded in bringing the feeder plunging to the ground.
    Jess’s bike was still there, though, with that look all bicycles have, like it was on a short break, ready to spring into action should the right rider come along.
    Two weeks later, I got out of the car and walked the length of our front yard twice, staying on the sidewalk, imagining myself as a prospective buyer. The following day, I walked up the drive, but I had to stop halfway when I saw the bike again.
    I’d been hoping someone would steal it.

    A few more things I’ve learned:
    Four: There’s often no pain when cancer moves into your brain.
    Five: Except for the occasional numbness in my extremities and problems with balance, the rest of my body feels okay. At least since the radiation ended.
    Six: It’s quite common for radiation therapy to bring about a refractory effect in cancer cells, causing them to multiply like deadly little fruit flies.
    Seven: Every thought that occurs to me could be my last. Or if not that one, maybe the next. At any rate, it’s going to come soon.
    Eight: The person watching over my shoulder has always been me.

    Brenda Dawkins’ appearance suggests a healthy lack of self-consciousness. Looking to be in her early sixties, she seems comfortable in her own space and generally unconcerned with the way she’s perceived. She dresses like a woman twenty years younger, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a black skirt, and bright yellow tennis shoes, though I don’t get the impression she’s out to prove anything. More importantly, she strikes me as someone who could be overrun by cats and find the experience quite enjoyable.
    When she gets up to sweeten her coffee, I notice her skirt is adorned with gray and black-blonde hairs. She probably runs a lint roller over her clothes on a regular basis, so I guess from the number and colors of the hairs that she has at least a few cats. It’s easy to imagine Brenda Dawkins reclined on a couch as she watches a home shopping channel, a cadre of felines vying for her attention, their heads and backs springing to life under her hands.
     Living in harmony with a cat does require a certain amount of compromise. Since there is only a finite quantity of self-admiration that can exist in one space, a cat person, in order to make a happy household, must surrender a good portion of her own self-esteem. The advantage to this is that, while perhaps becoming somewhat awkward socially and suffering a bit in the appearance department, this person tends to be content with the rest of life. This is something I learned from Jess.
    Brenda Dawkins would ordinarily be an ideal person with whom to place a cat, but Mr. T is jealous of his territory and prefers to live in a feline-free space. Despite having written the ad to appeal to cat lovers, I know Mr. T has to go to a cat-free house.
    Smiling at the woman, my seventh and last interview, I realize I’ve made my decision.
    “Thanks for coming,” I say. “I’ll call you early next week.”

    Three hours ago, I called my oncologist and cancelled my first chemo appointment.
    I have no idea what will happen when my brain stops working, and most of the time that thought doesn’t bother me. What can I do about it, after all? But on the odd night, I awake gripped by a terror that goes beyond the alien life form that’s taken up residence in my skull.
    I’m afraid I’m forgetting something crucial.
    Maybe I’ll see Jess. It’s entirely possible she’ll be the first thing I see when the time comes. If I’ve been wrong, and there is a God, or at the very least there’s something more than this, maybe she and I will be together again.
    That’s not why I’m doing this, though. I’m not giving up in hopes that when I die I’ll see her again. I already accepted the fact that she was gone, and I can’t take that back now.

    The plastic cat carrier still sits perched across the rafters in the garage, where I stored it after the last time I drove Mr. T to the vet. Retrieving it from overhead, I shake out the dust before taking it into the kitchen.
    He’s waiting for me there, his expression dispassionate. Overjoyed to see me, in other words.
    Mr. T is all I have left connecting me to Jess. Everything else is negotiable. He’s the loose end I have to secure before I sweep up, turn off the lights, and shut the door.
    Dr. Miller called day before yesterday and said that the test on Mr. T’s turd turned out fine. He probably ate a lizard or frog during one of his outdoor excursions. Just continue to keep an eye on his bowel movements, the doctor said, and let him know if anything else changes.
    I’ll explain this to Rhonda Nesbitt on Monday.
    Disassembling the carrier, I arrange its parts next to the sink, readying them to be washed.

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