Jareth, days ago

When I get home from teaching, I search for Jareth. Every time I leave the house for more than a few hours, I worry that I will return to him already dead.

I check his usual roosts without success, my panic growing. I call his name, my voice trembling, as though he answer back -- something he has never done, even when vital. Enough sense wriggles into me. I check his irregular bed: on top of our towels in the bathroom. I see the gray and black of his back against the deep red of a towel.

I pet him to check if he is awake. He turns. His right eye is almost completely covered with a lymph node, pink and inflamed.

My terror hits. I bawl to him that I have no idea how to save him, that I cannot save him. If I looked like this, I would be at the hospital with every available IV plugged into a vein. He has a paper bowl of dry food and a towel.

I start pacing, asking aloud what I should do. I text Amber, but she is at work and her phone isn't on. I default to calling my mother, who has been rich in pets her entire life and may have seen something like this.

She doesn't take this as I do. Once I told her Jareth had lymphoma, that was it for her. He was a Dead Cat Walking. She tells me to bring that cat into Amber's animal hospital. It is a safer thing to do than keeping him home when Amber would have wanted him there. It is not that she thinks it would do the cat any good, but it might preserve my relationship with my wife.

I call Amber's job. Amber is terse, telling me it is probably fine and that she noticed his eye before leaving for work. I am confused. Was his eye not this bad earlier? But Amber is without a solitary doubt the expert in this and I defer to her. She tells me to keep him comfortable and open up the Chewy box that she rush ordered, so that I can try to feed him high calorie chicken gel.

I soothe the cat and try to feed him this gel, though he is barely interested in it and wants to be left alone. I pace around, but decide I am not doing him any good keeping him awake.

I go for a bike ride to clear my head and return something I had accidentally taken from work. Jareth is in the same position when I return an hour later. I try to convince him to eat, but he refuses.

I message Sarah M, my conduit to the world of pet care with whom I do not live. She tells me that the oncologist will send us home with something to make Jareth feel better, and that we will know when the time comes. That time hasn't come, no matter how his face is distorting with tumors and his vision is decreasing, no matter how prominent his bones have become. He is ceasing to resemble Jareth, looking instead like a malformed changeling. He still purrs, aside from some difficulty negotiating the sound around the engorged lymph node that makes him unable to close one side of his mouth. He still craves to be loved, but he is growing less able to respond and react to it as he normally would.

It is another hour before it occurs to me to put a water dish under his nose. For over a minute and a half, he laps it up, then stretched his legs and starts wandering around. I pick him up, cradling him in my arms, rocking him as he likes. He climbs up to my shoulders, where he perches for five minutes. I look at the two of us in the mirror: Me, shirtless from the sweat of the ride; him, scrawny, shaved belly, a distended red eye. I have almost no pictures of the two of us together, as I am almost always the one behind the camera. Even this shot, both of us looking far from our best, would be a treasure. There is no way to negotiate photography without having him flee my shoulders.

Upstairs, he jumps about, trying to climb on everything, trying to put everything that isn't food in his mouth (the sand of a dry aquarium, the soil of the plants, my new silicone keyboard protector) and refuses to even look at anything that might be food. I finish my dinner and go for a shower, bringing him with me. I told him I didn't want to let him out of my sight, not that he cares either way, except that he likes being carried. Once I get in the shower, he nestles back atop the towels. I decide that is a safer place for now.

Amber gets home forty-five minutes after I've fallen asleep, and she is up forty-five minutes before my alarm goes off. I don't know when she went to sleep, since she had to care for Jareth, who is never keen on taking his medicine even when he isn't descending into goblinhood.

The next afternoon, Jareth is running around, being a nuisance, which frustrates sleep-deprived Amber, but heartens me. A brat is something that believes he still has fight in him. His eye is worse, now red and dry. He keeps bumping into furniture, even more reason that he shouldn't be allowed to climb or jump on high things.

I feel so useless to this, but I repeat back instructions for later (feed him a quarter cup of the dry food if he has eaten the old one, give him some of the pouch of the wet food in the refrigerator). I need to do everything I can to make Amber's life easy, but I cannot do much for the cat.

She tells me that she saw the cytology report last night, but she has yet to talk to a doctor about it. I know from her tone that the answer isn't "He is peachy. False alarm!" She guesses that it is large cell lymphoma. I return to an article I had read. This is one is harder to goad into remission, more so when immunocompromised, even more so than that when they come to the oncologist already sick. But if he wasn't sick, how would we know to get a diagnosis? Small cell is slower to grow, less aggressive. Small cell is easier to push into remission.

Cats don't survive either long.

Jareth's time is dwindling. He is starting to feel the confusion and panic of being worse every day. He has no idea why this is happening, and why we aren't stopping it.

The next morning, in the ten minutes between when Amber leaves and I must, I pet the cat. He opens wide his mouth to meow at me, but nothing comes out, which upsets him. He is ceasing to be the cat he remembers. I don't know if he is in pain, but he is uncomfortable.

I tell him we are going to do everything we can to give him the best life possible, and that I promise I love him now and always will.

It is all I can do.

Soon in Xenology: Social Justice Wiccans. Jareth.

last watched: American Gods
reading: Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
listening: Damien Rice