To brace myself for the doctors’ phone calls and the hospital visits, I began to develop a distancing mechanism which would reduce the shock of whatever new horror was awaiting. Some part of me heard and saw everything, but before it could register emotionally. This allowed me to cope with the doctors and the fear for my mother’s life; and to hold down my job by keeping a separate place inside myself from where I could draw out the music.

What began as a mechanism became a reflex and a mindset. Always on high alert, nerves in extreme tension, I waited to ward off the next blow. The distancing between myself and events as they were occurring was active constantly. Like the time delay on a radio talk show, everything was screened out and censored before it reached me

And when my mother died, this mechanism did not disappear. If anything, it got worse. No longer aware it was there, I thought this was life. No experience was happening in real time. It was being displayed on a screen for analysis. I had set up a DEW line, an early warning system around myself, which I could not shut off.

An invisible wall surrounded me, impermeable to the world. But a wall has to be pretty high to keep a cat out.

***

Alice and I began to live beside each other. Imperceptibly, as we shared the same time and space, she infiltrated my life. No matter that I was distracted or brooding; Alice insisted on my attention. I could not avoid her. Before I knew it, we had habits together and my days became her days as well.

While I showered, she always waited outside the bathroom door, calling to me or shoving a paw under to remind me she was there. Her body would be so tight up against it, her mouth pressed to the opening, that I began pushing the door open cautiously, slowly, not to bump her – a habit I still have.

She visited me in the basement music studio, leaping onto my lap and lying under my hands while I played, sometimes even taking a stroll across the keyboard in an atonal mode. Or if I was stuck indoors at my desk, making endless phone calls and sorting through bills and files, she brought the news from outside.

First, she announced herself from the doorway and I, inevitably engrossed in some picayune detail, would mutter, “Just a minute, Alice.” Then she sat down in the office, waiting just at the corner of my vision, while I continued to struggle with my banal tasks, all the while trying to ignore her.