Sometimes Knowing Doesn't Matter

He was staring at her, that's all?but that was enough. Her first low, metallic growl forced my eyes open, and I knew immediately what was happening. I lifted my left arm, snapped my fingers a couple times and patted the bed next to me. A moment later, a massive, furry head was shoved beneath my fingers, the way a dog would do it.

It wasn't a dog, though?it was my very uncatlike cat, Guy (the retarded one). Guy falls into patterns sometimes, the way too many of us do. He'll break them eventually, but once they're started, they're around for a while. One he developed two years ago is this staring business. At night, when I go to bed, I usually end up with one cat on either side of me?the retarded one on the outside, the evil one on the inside. And at some point most every night (usually between 2 and 3), some bad, ticklish thing will get into Guy's head. He'll get up, trot to the foot of the bed, step over my feet and head up the other side. Then he'll drop to his haunches and stare at my other, still-sleeping cat. Well, this drives her nuts. She'll snap awake, start to growl, and if I don't coax him back to the other side, she'll start hissing and spitting and swinging.

Thing is, even after I coax him away from her and scritch his head for a bit, it's only a matter of minutes (sometimes seconds) before he's at it again. He's persistent that way. Sometimes he'll only do this two or three times, then go back to sleep himself. Sometimes, like last Saturday night, it can go on for hours, or until the alarm goes off.

If I had a place to put him?if I was able to lock him in the kitchen, say?I would. But the way the apartment's designed, I can't do that. It's all very frustrating.

He'd been at it every night for nearly a week now, and it was starting to get to me. I threatened to kill him. I dumped him in that basket he loves so. Nothing worked, and I rolled out of bed Sunday morning hating almost everything.

The days prior, I'd been besieged by a cheap, maudlin and unbecoming dose of self-pity. And while that may have still been there under the surface, it had mostly been drowned, by the time the alarm went off, with a simple hatred. A wide-ranging hatred, aimed at people in general, typing, computers, books, music, movies, television, jobs, the light and the darkness, everything?and especially cats.

There was something else there with the hatred, too?something I was too pissed to notice while I was lying sleepless in the bed. It only became clear when I got into the shower, and noticed how badly my hands were trembling. My jaws were at it, too?snapping open into a soundless scream, or chattering the way a cat chatters at a bird just outside the window. My brain felt hot and swollen, pressing tight against the inside of my skull. It felt all bunched up in there, like those times when you suddenly become aware of your tongue. I could feel mild tremors tracing down my spine. All the hallmarks of an oncoming seizure.

The second neurologist in a string of 12 physicians of various sorts was the one who finally diagnosed my brain damage some 13 years ago. Hooked me up to several different machines, placed me inside a few others, until he was able at last to point at a dark smudge on a colorful map of the inside of my head.

The seizures certainly didn't go away after his diagnosis and subsequent prescriptions, but they did diminish considerably. It had been a long time since I'd had one?the small ones were down to one every three or four months?and it had been nearly three years since I'd had a serious, full-blown Whoa Momma Incredible Hulk fit.

While the tremors I was feeling could very easily explode on me at any minute given the proper stimulus (a fork clattering in the sink, for instance, usually did the trick), it didn't always happen. In a way, it would be worse if I didn't explode. The fits in which I bang my head and bite myself and bark loudly and hiss obscenities are usually over in less than a minute. Usually, anyway. These quieter, low-level jobbies, they can hang around for a while?hours, even?always threatening to blow until the moment when they at last fade away, leaving me feeling dried out and worn to the weft.

Sometimes they come out of nowhere, these little seizures. I could be walking down the street, or eating lunch, when my head begins to quiver. Often I have no idea why they're happening?only that they are. This time, at least, I could point directly at a cause.

One of the first tests that second neurologist ran on me involved my staying awake all night while my then-wife poked me with objects and called me names, all in an effort (I'm presuming) to trigger a seizure. If I was suffering from some level of sleep deprivation, the doctor explained, I was much more susceptible to having the electricity go astray in the gray matter.

Sometimes, however?this is something Morgan pointed out to me recently?sometimes knowing the "why" of a situation simply doesn't matter. It doesn't change a thing. You have cancer because you smoked three packs a day for 23 years. Knowing that doesn't make the cancer go away. It's no comfort at all. In this case, I was all bunched up and twitchy because I hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a week. And I hadn't had a decent night's sleep because one of my cats is retarded. It's no comfort either, and there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do about any of it.

I tried smoking it away, but that didn't calm me down. I tried walking it away, but the more blank, identical faces I saw and voices I heard on the street, the worse it became. Sitting in front of the television only screwed things down tighter. All I could do, as with so many other things in life, was sit there and wait for it to pass, and pray that I didn't drop a fork in the sink.