Egg is small, much smaller than before. Boney. She doesn’t fight much when I put her in her travel bag, a worthless black leatherette shoulderstrap doohicky with pink trim, a pink inset paw and the monogrammed letters C, A, T, in case I forget what I’m carrying. She meows, something she doesn’t often do. I would like to have slept longer but I have to get back by noon to start working (overtime). The cab ride is jerky and strange. I’ve never been in a cab with my pet before. Poor Egg, clearly I am overreacting.

At the ASPCA, the elevator opens to a room filled with dogs, cats, almost every seat occupied. Barking, talking: it’s noisy and I can feel Egg squirming beneath my arm. The receptionist takes my information. What’s wrong with your cat? She’s not eating enough, she’s lost weight. Has she been spayed? Yes. How did you hear about us? I’m a member, but not now because I didn’t have money to renew. You’re a member then. But I’m not right now. That’s okay, I’ll just put Member. Is there anyone else who might seek treatment for Egg? Parker. When was she born? December 1, 1993. Did you get her at the ASPCA? Yes, but in Richmond. Breed? Her mom’s Siamese, but she’s black. Black DSH. Okay, here’s your card, sit down.

My card lists Egg’s birthday as Sept. 30, 1993. This bothers me.

I only wait about five minutes when somebody comes to take Egg. He’s a bigger guy, in scrubs. Asks me what’s been wrong. “She’s not eating. But she could be okay, I mean, it could be stress, I’m not sure.” “Best to check, be safe.” “She eats some. She ate this morning, better than she has in a week.” “Okay, well, we’ll take a look. He grabs the bag from me, doesn’t ask me to follow him, just takes her off, bag and everything. “We’ll be back.” This seems horribly, horribly wrong. I brought a book, but I can’t read. I remember after he left that I forgot to tell him about the fire. Is it smoke damage? I try to tell the receptionist that I forgot to tell him about the fire, but she says, “Don’t worry, he’ll be back.”

And then twenty minutes after that, he is back, with Egg, her collar off and tossed in her bag. He says, “It could be 10 minutes, it could be 4 hours, we take whoever’s sickest first.” As much as I want to get this over with, that’s the sort of contest I don’t want to win.

10:30 am. I’m supposed to work at noon. I will stay until Egg is seen, though I’m nervous, because if I can’t pay, will they patch her up and keep her? Will she become one of the adoptees downstairs at the center? I imagine Egg in a stranger’s home, by some other name, such as “Jinx” or “Blackie” or “Inky” or “Midnight.” No, she is Egg. There’s a song written about her, which I sing to her like so:

I don’t care what they say
I’m gonna keep her anyway
I won’t let them stretch their necks
To see my little black egg with her little white speck

I found her in a tree
Just the other day,
Now she’s mine all mine
They can’t take her away

I knew nothing of that song when I named her, but she has a white speck on her chest, not big, just a dot.

Sort the other pets into two columns: “less sick than Egg” and “more sick than Egg.” All other pets qualify in my head as more sick, even though most are jumping around just fine. We’ll start with the loudest: Precious, a little shih-tsu type thing (if you name your dog Precious, it’s bound to be a yappy biter, which it is). Puddles is a Maltese. Ginger is a shepherd mix, she’s not eaten, she’s weak, old, having a hard time walking. I feel very bad for the woman holding the leash. Do you get points for feeling bad for other people’s pets? Doesn’t that make me a good person, and doesn’t that up Egg’s chances? No you fool. Christ, be a human. A white maltese, Benji, is running up and down the bench. Across from him, a calico cat, Ludacris, seems sleepy in his carrier. A rottweiler named Brandy is around the bend, Precious is barking and ready to tackle it. Puddles. Eenie and Meenie. Gucci and Versace. Fat Cat. We look up every time a vet open the door and calls out a name, and then back at the room to identify the pet.

Four hours? It could be six. A preponderance of the other pets seem to share Egg’s symptoms: lack of appetite, except they won’t eat at all. I shouldn’t have told him she ate today. I should’ve said she doesn’t eat at all, just to get this process going. But if I did that, the cat gods would punish me.

People show off their pets as extensions of themselves, they just do. Me too. But my instinct here is to keep this a private moment, to shield my cat from anyone trying to see her, to shield us both. I hold the bag such that the see-through parts face me. I reach in, I rub her nervous head. She doesn’t argue. But the little girl, owner of Ludacris, sitting kitty corner, becomes less timid, more curious, stretches her neck to see Egg. What can I do? You can’t refuse an 8-year-old with a sick Ludacris. Egg, in turn, stretches to see the girl. Egg doesn’t know what to make of children, generally, having spent no time around them. She sticks her head out, gets a paw through, is about half way to clear. The other visitors turn, look. “The blackest cat for the whitest girl,” some woman says, chuckling. Egg is unusually, inkily black, blacker than her very black sister, black like you could swim in her fur, like an oil well at midnight. I have skin like the inside of a Spanish onion. So yeah. We make a fine pair.

In NYC, its not unusual for me to be the only white person in a room, on a train, in a neighborhood, and I don’t much notice or care. And anyway, it’s not like we don’t have a broad array of races in this room. Still, I am a little self-conscious that everybody seems to already know the staff, that I might be an outsider here, that everybody else is reading InTouch and that I am reading the Virginia Quarterly Review, that my abrasive whiteness and hopeless introversion might hurt little black Egg’s chances for empathy and compassion, or mine if I can’t pay the tab. When a young even whiter couple appears, I am, well, sort-of happy about it. It’s not that I want anything to do with them, they look rich and in love: I hate them. They coo over a kitten in an ASPCA carrier. Sometimes they do. Othertimes they page through a home design magazine, pointing at things together, planning. They are ten years younger than I am, in love, not married. They look like people I’ve known, not friends of mine but the kind of people I saw a lot around my university. Preppy, moneyed, straight in every sense of the word, not just the sexual one. She’s wearing a T-shirt from a sorority reggae festival. I try to imagine a sorority reggae festival, but can’t conceive of attending. Or buying a T-shirt. Or wearing the T-shirt, four years later, in East Harlem. He looks like Dave Matthews, has short legs. After a while, I realize why they look like the people I saw a lot around my university: they went to my university. Her Chi-O shirt reads, “Charlottesville.” I try to think of ways to be nice, to say, “Hey, I’m from Charlottesville too,” without seeming creepy or like I want to be friends. Not because I want to be nice, but because I want to score karmic points for Egg. I stare at them thinking this, until I realize I’ve been staring at them for like ten minutes now, which happens when the girl whispers into her boyfriend’s ear and they both look over at me, with concerned, unpleasant expressions.

The waiting room greets the announcement of “Egg” with a glossy-eyed moment of confusion. When I stand up, the audience nods to one another as if to say, “Figures.” Except the preppy couple, who don’t look at all. Their cat, by the way, is named Champ. That’s so preppy.

***

Buying shampoo in a drugstore after our visit, some dude decides to tell me that he also has a black cat. Two in fact. Yes, I have another one at home as well. He starts to talking to the cat. “Hey guy! How you doing there, little guy.” Dude looks like his natural habitat is an office cube. “But I can’t take them out in stylish shoulder bags. That’s cool! My cats don’t travel well.” I explain that we were just at the vet, that she’s never left the house before. “So you bought that bag just for this visit?” Well, no, I bought it when I took them up to a condo in the Catskills...ugh. My eyes are red I’m sure, I’ve just bawled my head off in the privacy of a payphone, tried to dial Parker four times but couldn’t manage to finish it. I do not want to talk to this man. He doesn’t notice. “Yeah, that and they’re not really my cats, they’re my roommate’s cats. She probably wouldn’t like that too much.” Yeah. She wouldn’t. “Hey, do you live around here? Want to get some coffee?” Egg starts to make throw-up sounds. We leave, no coffee.

Nobody ever hits on me, and then this asswipe chooses this fucking moment.

***

I swear, I think cab drivers hate it when you have pets with you, and they do their best job to be the worst drivers in the entire fucking world. Start, stop, start, stop, weave, brake, start, rev, brake, nudge, shift, weave, HALT! I think I’m going to throw up. Little black Egg is green.

***

If I were a different person, I’d pray. I think about praying. I think about the kind of person that prays, wish I were the kind of person that derived some comfort from that. I pray. God, make my cat better. But I think that’s not what I’m supposed to pray, I think I’m supposed to pray something like, “God, give me the courage to change the things I can, the strength to accept the things I can’t, blah blah blah.” God, give me strength. But to be honest, I’m so not interested in a god who only passes out strength. Strength is like opening up your birthday gift, and finding out that no, you didn’t get the electric train set you wanted, but you did get a new dictionary to help you improve your grades this year.

If I’m going to believe in God, I want him to be a better gift-giver. Otherwise, there’s nothing in it for me. Anyway, I have nothing to promise back. If God grants Egg’s life, will I go to church? No. Not because she’s not worth a mass and a communion wafer, but because, honestly, I just won’t. I’m not the kind to pick up on Jesus, and if there is a god, I resent him for making life difficult. Which it is. I can promise I will take up my own cross, but I won’t. I’ll just feel guilty about it. And there is no god, so fuck this. Unless Egg lives, and then maybe, maybe.

Shortly after college, I wrote some snarky theory called “Love Is for Suckers.” There were three principles, and I forget what they all were, but the basic idea was that it’s a loser’s game, because you can never win. I know, I said it was snarky. What an asshole I was.

In high school, I got in a fight with a nun on the subject of love. “God is Love” the class was called. I told her that love is stupid, because in the end you always cry. At some point, if you love somebody, they make you cry, even if they don’t mean to. And what kind of God would start that up? And then we argued and argued and argued, in class, after class, and, when I got too testy to talk anymore, via--I swear--handwritten letters. I think she thought she was strengthening my faith, giving me a voice, turning me into her girlfriend, helping me, healing me, but I finished the class thinking, “Sister Joanne is dumb; God sucks.”

***

Egg pees on my leg on the way to the ultrasound. I don’t notice, when it happens. I just think, what smells? And then see that my pants are wet. Try as I might, in the bathroom, I cannot get the smell off of me. I didn’t like her when I got her. I only took her because she was so close to the other one, the one with the blazing white chest and belly, the one that mewed and meeped and cuddled and was so generously friendly and likable. Play the Beaches theme here. For a long time I thought we’d just sort of put up with each other for the sake of Esme. Because she didn’t like me, and I like to be liked. But I--I know this is horrible--I wish it were Esme I were bringing to the vet instead. Esme’s the pushy cat, the boss, the numero uno, the alpha. Years ago, when Egg disappeared once for a week and a half, Esme howled and moaned until she returned again.  But when Esme was trapped in the neighbor’s for a day, Egg spread out across the sofa beside me with the satisfaction of someone who has just laid out cold hard cash for new real estate. If Esme went first, then Egg would finally get her Alpha time. I wanted at least a year of her life out of Beta mode.

At the vet, as you know, I learn that it doesn’t look good. Its a weekday, and the cacophony of Saturday is gone. There are two dogs, a black and white pitbull mix answering to Emily (formerly a resident here and named by the staff) and an ownerless dog brought in by ASPCA officers because of the tumor like a bag of jelly beans hanging between her legs. Emily is one of those dogs you see on Animal Precinct who are socialized by hanging in the office with the staff members. Today, she is aggressively, obnoxiously social. And fun. And cute: half her face is black, the other white with a black spot over the eye. Adorable. But owner dude is not social. He takes her off to a corner where I can’t see her, because he doesn’t like me or my sick cat getting near his dog. Not that I blame him.

After the bad news, they want to extract some cells, which will, for whatever reason, take hours. The vet tells me there’s an ice cream shop a few blocks up. Ice cream? I look like I want to gorge myself? But she has a point. After Saturday’s news, I laid around and didn’t eat all day, until 11:30 when I ordered delivery from an area diner: curly fries, two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and the worst slice of cherry pie I’ve ever tasted.

The loneliest feeling in the world is leaving a Vet Hospital with an empty pet bag. This time I’ll go back and get her. Next time ... Parker’s phone rings, but nobody answers. I walk over to where he lives, ring the doorbell. I can’t remember his work number. I could call any of my other friends, but I so can’t speak to them right now. They will express grief, compassion, pity. He has lived with Egg, doted over Egg. He will be heartbroken. I need to hear that somebody else is heartbroken.

Back at the hospital, the staff is suddenly very gentle, warm, understanding. Not that they weren’t before, I mean. It’s just now, now there’s this, “Do you need some water?” and “Do you have any questions, anything you want to talk about?” En route to the train station, I buy her a hot dog at a Papaya King. She’s woozy, but more comfortable on the subway. Nobody looks at us. I stare at people’s shoes and talk openly to Egg.

“Where did you like living best? Florida? Yeah, Florida was nice. And you didn’t get eaten by alligators. You were so smart, when I taught you to avoid the creek you listened. You don’t want a hot dog? You love hot dogs. I’m sorry, I just threw hot dog pieces at you, and now you’re going to stink like hot dog.”

When they were young, so small that they could both fit in a hand, I remember thinking (awed by the power of life, death): my god it’s so tiny, how easily I could twist its neck. I’ve always been a bit cowed by the responsibility factor, the notion that I--who was at one point not expected to be ever capable of taking care of my own pathetic self (and I mean that in the most serious way, speaking of the time after my head injury, not of some parental “you’re screwing up” rationale)--should be responsible for their lives. But that’s the easy part. Now I am responsible for her death. She looks so fucking miserable. I know this is the worst experience she’s ever had: the subway, the taxi, the vet, the dogs. I’ve always imagined that I would clearly choose veterinary-assisted euthanasia, because I won’t draw it out and watch her suffer. But now I’m thinking, no cabs, no subway, no crowds, no barking dogs. Perhaps the most valid option is letting her live out her life at home, until the time comes to it, when I--in the living room, on the couch, in my lap--twist her neck.

You know the scene in the movie where the dog’s owner says, “No let me put him down. I’ve got to do it myself.” And he grabs the gun, and he cries? And he shoots his dog? I never understood why he had to do it himself. I always thought it was some macho bullshit. That the dog’s last thought would be, “You? YOU?” But now, I totally, completely, wholeheartedly get it.

At 51st street, we transfer to the E train. She shifts in her bag and I adjust at the shoulder strap, weaving a little as I do. Some upper-east-side type woman who has consequently walked into me from behind says haughtily, “Excuse me.”

“I have a cat.”

The woman turns and stares at me, horrified. “A cat?”

“Yes. A cat. In the bag.”

She looks disgusted. I mean, like she smelled ... I was going to say a rotten egg, though it’s an unintentional pun. She scurries forward, weaves past a slow walker to get away from me. Allergic?

“She’s sick,” I shout. “She has cancer, I just found out.” I’m so angry.

She heads down the stairs, to my mind oblivious. But then halfway to the underpass she turns back and looks at me. It isn’t a glare, like I’m expecting when she turns, or the finger: she looks like she’s sorry. Horrendously sorry. Mortified, regretful, torn up. I want to tell her, it has felt so good to say that. Somebody else knows. You’re not Parker, but you’ll do. Sorry to heap all my anger at you, stranger. Then I look away, and the train pulls up. “Almost home, Egg. No cabs this time. Good girl, you’re such a good Egg.”