Getting Back to Bobby

Bobby and the Bitter Water is a book I began writing during Covid. It is a story about what happens in a small town after the country’s water supplies are dosed with LSD as told through the eyes of a black cat named Bobby who can walk through walls. Though incomplete at the moment, it is my favorite thing I’ve ever written.

One need not look too far to find the seeds of inspiration for this. The societal upheaval and resulting paradigm shifts that accompanied the pandemic are certainly present, though the vector of change is more acute and dramatic than what we experienced. The whole idea sprung into my head after my dear friend Anna told me about a childhood cat of hers whom she swears, without a hint of doubt, could walk through walls. I was smitten immediately with Bobby, who seemed too delicious a character to not tell a story through. Ultimately, it is a tale about hope, and I think that’s why I wrote half of it in a frenzy and then put it aside to work on other things.

Now, two years later, I feel like I have undergone enough change of my own to develop the vocabulary to express what I truly wish to say. The events of the book are either a devastating terrorist attack or humanity’s last chance to drag ourselves off the path of self-destruction, depending on whom you ask. Regardless of any apocryphal associations with the Chinese language, I believe that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between crises and opportunities, both on the personal level and for society as a whole, but that people are often too self-absorbed to see what is right in front of them.

In this sense, I believe cats make the perfect foil for humanity, as no other species can even approach, never mind exceed humans when it comes to arrogance. However, unlike people, which must engage in a significant amount of cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics to maintain their sense of superiority via a baseline state of delusion, cats seem secure in their perfect self-image, but who could bland them? Infinitely adaptable, with senses that border on the supernatural, and so close to indestructible that we don’t say that they have two or three or five lives, but nine, we must forgive cats their haughtiness, or at least understand why they feel entitled to act as they do.

Please understand that I am biased. There were cats in the room when I was born, and they were my first friends on this earth. Over a lifetime of interactions with them, I do not think it is too much of a stretch to believe that part of the attitude cats approach humans with is because they remember the past better than we do, and credit themselves with responsibility for the whole of human civilization, which they gifted to us by allowing the development of agriculture as they initiated the process of semi-domestication millennia ago.

This past year, I lost my writing mentor, the incomparable Judith Marks-White, and so my New Year’s resolution to finish this book is not just for me, but for her and all the people I love who have made their way into this story in one way or another.

I thought I’d use this opportunity to breathe a little life into the project by attaching the first little bit to this piece. I have toyed with the idea of publishing it as a serial on Vocal, but that remains one of many options I’m open to. Well, enough getting bogged down in a meta-analysis of the situation. Here is there very beginning of Bobby and the Bitter Water:

April 19, Year 0

Bobby the black cat knew right away there was something in the water. 3.5 million years of perfect evolution had blessed him with the unparalleled senses of a feline, making him an object of envy to every blind and lumbering brutish species his glorious race was cursed to share the earth with. Born on the street, Bobby had learned young to approach all food and water with apprehension. Through human malice or negligence, a feral cat’s life was one of danger, and more than once he had walked away with an empty belly rather than take a chance on slightly tainted sustenance.

The tongues of cats are precision instruments that make the most finely-wrought Swiss watchmaking tools seem like clumsy clubs, and so Bobby strove to lap up merely a few molecules of anything he was offered. He remained wary out of habit, though it had been a long time since he’d lived on the streets. The water was bitter, but not in the harsh way of cleansing chemicals left on the bowl, but bitter like the skin of a human if you lick them after they’ve been making love.

It wasn’t bad, this slightly metallic tang, in fact it had pleasant similarities to the juice that squirted out of a mouse or bird’s brain when you crunched their skull open, but it was a change, and best approached with caution. Bobby leapt up onto the counter, something he was forbidden to do, and slinked his way to the sink, stopping to examine the omnipresent bowl of fruit, left on display by The Mom to encourage healthy eating habits in her family.

The Dad had been known to grab a banana on his way out the door in an act of appeasement, but largely the fruit in the bowl would shrivel and brown until The Mom would announce “Sunday Smoothies” and use a positively demonic, terrifyingly loud machine to create a paste they’d reluctantly slurp down, which to Bobby smelled worse than spoiled rat guts. Each piece of fruit in the bowl had been replaced with a single bite taken out of it. Even the unspeakably foul citrus fruits had bites taken right though the rinds. Bobby gagged, looking at the lemons and thought about how The Mom was going to be furious. The same thing had happened when a woodchuck had found her vegetable garden last summer and she’d yelled so loudly that Bobby had to hide under a bush. Passing the bowl, Bobby opened his mouth wide, which was his way of smiling, gleeful that he wouldn’t be blamed.

The water dripping out of the sink had the same tang as the water in his bowl. Bobby yawned a sigh of relief. It had only been a small part of him that suspected someone in The Family had been trying to poison him. He felt loved most of the time, but you never could be too careful. That was something else he had learned on the streets. Bobby sat behind the sink and looked out the kitchen window. He saw a naked man running down the street yelling and thought it a bit odd, but put nothing past The Humans. Predicting their unpredictability had kept him safe more than once.

It was odd that The Girls weren’t home from school yet. The younger one, Eve, always dropped a slice of deli turkey on the floor for Bobby before heading upstairs. Then he’d usually follow the older one, Dawn, into the backyard where she’d smoke cigarettes and talk on the phone while Bobby prowled through the grass. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but he liked catching bugs and loved pressing his face into plants and dirt and smelling the bugginess of it all. The Girls were late.