Why I Am Not a Storyteller
My cat wasn’t lost but everyone in the neighborhood kept calling me. “I found your cat,” they said, and then they would describe my cat to me. I got it: he was 19 years old and weighed less than a carton of milk. He was fur and bones, he was needy and nudgey and lived to insinuate himself in other people’s lives. “He has bad boundaries,” I’d say, and offer an apology if the person on the line seemed to need one.
The people who called knew my number because my cat now wore a collar. Before the collar, neighbors kept taking him in thinking he was a stray. We’d gotten two calls from the Humane Society, a post on Nextdoor. Though my cat was skinny and needy, it should have been clear to any would-be rescuer that he was far from feral. Some people live to be heroes, instead of trusting what they see in front of them.
We were new in the neighborhood, which made it worse. I didn’t want a reputation, or that reputation. We had moved to the neighborhood mostly because it abutted the Bluff, a steep descent of canyon brambling down to Swan Island, which was not an island but an industrial park and shipyard that had once been free-floating and was now connected to our side of the river by landfill. Sometimes, from the rim of the Bluff, you could glimpse a strip of river beyond the smokestacks and cranes.
Anyway, I know what you’re thinking: Bluff, bramble, overgrown semi-industrial wasteland. Yes coyotes did live there, or go there, but weren’t they everywhere now? And wouldn’t it be, in a way, more generous to allow an old cat to be killed by a coyote than to keep him inside and eventually sentence him to die a chemical death on a vet’s table in the throes of kidney failure after we’d done all we could or would to save him?
The phone calls generally came during the day, when I was working remotely in my basement office. Though I felt the strong urge to send these calls to voicemail, my guilt usually got the better of me. “I found your cat,” the voice would say, from a local area code or one from Salem, Missoula, Chicopee, anyone could be anywhere these days. “Thanks,” I would say, from my own across-the-country number, “he’s not lost.” Sometimes those calls made me feel as if we—the caller, the cat, and I—were three small dots on a block-long line. Sometimes we were all on separate satellites, floating.
Most callers more or less left it at that, reluctantly or relievedly setting the cat back down on the sidewalk. “He’ll come home,” I said, to the uncertain ones. “He always does.” Once, the caller insisted that he was standing in front of a flyer with a photo of an orange cat that looked just like mine. “It’s not him,” I said. “Besides, isn’t the number you just called to reach me different from the one on the flyer?” He admitted I was right. “Do you want the number from the flyer?” he asked.
If up to this point you’ve been reading with even a swab of attention—tuning in to the shape and scaffolding of the narrative, as it were, the tones accumulated—you’ll sense that we’re about to land on a particular day, a particular call, a call that was substantively different from the others in some way, a call that changed everything. Attuned as I am to the pressures and pleasures of narrative, the extent to which a seasoned writer can anticipate and “play with” reader expectations, the sweet swerve of anticlimax, the gassy hiss when the air’s let out…
So let’s go with it. Say it’s October 7, 2023. Better, make it the 8th. The 20th. Say the narrator—the one with the cat—I guess, me—has a remote job writing emails imploring recipients to give money to a global wildlife conservation organization. (Dear Friend, It’s Elephant Week! Time to stop illegal hunting in Congo!; Dear Supporter, Don’t miss out on Gorilla Day! End habitat destruction now!) Each email in the series states the same threats with mounting degrees of intensity. This time it’s Sloth Week. As the world’s slowest-moving mammals, sloths in the Amazon take their time getting from point A to B, I write. Just as I’ve finished loading the email into the CMT, a call comes through. Mid-Oregon area code. I know what they want and I don’t fucking care. The sloths are vulnerable, my cat’s not lost. I come so close to letting the call ring out.
“I found your cat.” Man’s voice, older, street noise.
“Thank you,” I say, “he’s not lost.”
“Ah,” says the man. “I was sitting on the porch drinking my coffee.”
“He’s friendly,” I say. “He’s needy but he’s fine.”
“I could tell,” says the man, “that this cat is well taken care of, but curious. Bony, but fed.”
“Those things are true,” I say, itching to get back to my email.
“Sweet, but he’ll let you know when you don’t do things his way,” says the man with a chuckle. “Are you Jewish?”
“What?” I say.
“The cat’s name, on the collar, it’s Jewish,” he says. “A Jewish name.” And he pronounces my cat’s name with a thickly accurate accent I hadn’t placed sooner.
Though it’s obviously none of his business, I let the “Yes” slip out before thinking it through. This city where we live isn’t heavy on Jews, especially here on the rim of the Bluff.
“Brave answer,” he says. “What with everything.”
“Oh we’re fine,” I say. “We’re totally safe.”
“Are we?” he says. “You see what they’re saying at those protests?”
I’ve been at those protests. I’ve been safe there, just as I am totally, unquestionably safe now, on the phone, in my house, with its Free Palestine sign in the window. I feel a rush of relief that my cat’s collar tag is too small to include our address, though could this caller, my fragile cat nestled on his lap, somehow know where I live?
That’s got to be why I don’t hang up. I’m not one to believe in the power of “talking it out” across difference, the having-hard-conversations industrial complex. The power of storytelling, blech. I push send on the sloth email and attempt, against judgment, to find common ground.
“The thing is,” I say, “we Jews are addicted to being victims.”
“Of course,” he says. “For good reason!”
I make myself say “Sure,” and then try to reframe. “The thing is, we Jews have been victims, serious victims, a lot, and we’ve gotten used to it.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Like an itch we keep scratching or a razor we keep pulling over a rough spot even though it breaks the skin. Because it’s kind of cool you can make yourself bleed.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I use an electric razor,” he says. “Your cat has bad breath.”
“It’s his chicken-flavored Prozac,” I say, regretting it. “Look,” I say. “Let’s take the whole ‘land without a people for a people without a land’ thing. We can agree that the whole project began with a horrifying premise.”
“That’s metaphorical,” he says. “It’s a translation from the Latin: Terra Nullius.”
I guess at the spelling and do a quick google, trying to keep my typing quiet. “International law term,” I say, “Meaning nobody’s land! What else can it mean to think of a people as nobody!”
I feel him shrug, the I-hear-you-but-I’m-not-listening kind. I wonder if my cat shifts with him. “Well you people say ‘from the river to the sea’ is metaphorical,” he says.
“I never said it was,” I say. “And show me where ‘from the river to the sea’ is about erasing anyone.” I know it makes this terrible kind of conversation worse to get into ideological arguments, or or to attack someone else’s way of thinking as ignorant or ill-informed. But that’s why the premise of these conversations is morally corrupt, they’re not meant for alleged neighbors who share nothing but proximity. “Where exactly do you live?” I say.
I hear what may be a hearty purr from my cat. “Jews will not be erased,” he says. When I say nothing, when I feel I have nothing I can say that will replace the metallic skin of victimhood with something porous and softer, he says, “Look. What do you do for a living?”
I freeze as if caught. There is no way I’m telling him about Sloth Week. Or Gorilla Day. Or 2X match ends tonight at midnight, just kidding, our special match has been extended. “Put my cat down,” I say.
“I’m just asking because, if you’re one of those work-from-homers, you should come get your cat and bring him inside. There are coyotes out there, any hour. You know?”
I hear myself telling him to set my cat down and go back in his house. I manage to say that the cat is a tough one, a genius, he’ll find his way home. I hang up and silence my phone. When a few minutes later my cat shows up at my glass sliding door, I let him in, give him water, slip off his collar, and
the number grows to 6,000, then 13,000, then 30 and who knows how many by the time I finish writing. And I make myself stare for five seconds at the photo of Yazan Kafarneh, taken while he starved to death. And I make it to the protest at the county offices but not the huge one downtown. And I call my Congress members Tuesday but not today. And when I was a kid I dropped coins in the Hebrew School Tzedakah box for trees to be planted on what they called empty land. And I listen to Democracy Now while stretching. And in 2007 I stood at the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto. And we shut down the bridges and the speeches and the Oscars and still Biden says there is no red line. And my kids have food, whatever they want. And I wish my house were papered in posters, and that someone, offended, would knock on my door. And I pause when deciding which pics to repost. And south of Rafah there is nowhere to go. And as much as I rail against resolution in fiction, all stories are granted the relief of an ending.
Sara Jaffe
Sara Jaffe is a writer, educator, and musician living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy is her second book. Dryland, a novel, was published by Tin House Books and Cipher Press (UK ). Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in publications including Joyland, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and Maggot Brain. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata. She is a proudly anti-Zionist Jew working for Palestinian liberation.