I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal when I realize Mr. Whiskers hasn’t climbed into my lap. This may not sound significant to somebody unfamiliar with our morning routine, but Mr. Whiskers operates according to a remarkably dependable schedule. I sit down, he appears. I eat breakfast, he occupies my lap. I attempt to stand before he’s finished, and he somehow increases his body weight by approximately forty percent through a biological mechanism science has yet to explain. Today, however, he’s sitting several feet away near the doorway, staring at me. I pat my leg and call his name, but all I get is a slight movement of his ears, confirming that he has both heard me and deliberately chosen not to respond. That’s different. Pandora is making tea at the counter, so I ask whether Mr. Whiskers seems strange to her. She glances at him, says he looks fine, and goes back to making her tea. I explain that he isn’t sitting with me. “Maybe he doesn’t want to,” she says. Technically that’s possible, but it would represent a fairly significant change in policy. Mr. Whiskers and I have an understanding. He provides warmth and companionship; I provide food, shelter, furniture to destroy, and approximately seventeen opportunities per day for him to walk through doors he immediately wants reopened. It’s been a stable arrangement.
I get out of my chair and approach him, expecting the usual little chirp he makes when he thinks I’m about to scratch his head. Instead, Mr. Whiskers watches me coming, stands up, and walks into the living room. I stop halfway across the kitchen and look at Pandora. “Did you see that?” She takes a sip of tea and says yes. “He avoided me.” Pandora points out that he merely walked into another room, but I know what I saw. I follow him into the living room and find him sitting beside the couch. When I sit down and pat the cushion beside me, he looks at the cushion, looks at me, and remains exactly where he is. Usually I don’t even need to invite him; merely sitting somewhere expensive is enough to summon him automatically. I tell Pandora something is wrong. She tells me nothing is wrong. This is exactly the sort of reasonable explanation that makes investigating anything around Pandora unnecessarily difficult.
I’m not suggesting Mr. Whiskers is attempting to warn us about an imminent threat, but cats are observant animals, and this particular cat spends most of his life watching the rest of us make questionable decisions. Maybe something changed overnight. A sound, a smell, a person outside, something in the apartment. Animals supposedly detect earthquakes before humans do. I’ve read that somewhere, although I can’t remember where and I’m not entirely sure it’s true. Before I can investigate further, I hear faint footsteps outside the apartment followed by a scraping sound near the door. Mr. Whiskers’ ears immediately point forward, which is exactly the sort of reaction I was talking about. I quietly approach the door while Pandora asks what I’m doing. I put one finger to my lips, which she doesn’t appreciate, and look through the peephole. Mrs. Jenkins is outside carrying a small bag in one hand and maneuvering a planter with the other. I open the door, she says hello, and I discover that the suspicious scraping noise was nothing more than the planter shifting against the floor while she adjusted her grip. She asks if everything is okay. I tell her everything is fine, and after a slightly confusing moment in which both of us appear to be waiting for the other person to explain why we’re having this conversation, she continues on her way.
Fine. The footsteps were Mrs. Jenkins. That’s one mystery solved, except Mr. Whiskers still won’t come near me. A little later John Mercer stops by, and within seconds the cat walks directly over to greet him. Now we have a control group. I watch Mr. Whiskers rub against John’s leg while John scratches him behind the ears, and I can’t help feeling personally betrayed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. John looks up and asks what’s wrong, so I explain that Mr. Whiskers has been avoiding me all morning. John looks down at the orange cat currently leaning into his hand and says he seems fine. “Exactly,” I tell him. John doesn’t understand why that’s important, although Pandora does because I can hear her laughing from the kitchen. The cat isn’t withdrawn, frightened, or uninterested in people. He’s avoiding one specific person, and unfortunately that person is me.
I ask John whether anything unusual happened recently involving Mr. Whiskers. John says no. I ask whether he’s given him anything unusual to eat, brought anything strange into the apartment, or changed any scented products recently. John stops petting the cat and asks why his deodorant has suddenly become relevant. Pandora tells me to stop interviewing him, and I explain that an interview would be structured; this is preliminary information gathering. John sits down on the couch, and Mr. Whiskers jumps up beside him within thirty seconds, which does nothing to improve the situation. I begin reviewing the previous twenty-four hours in my head. Nothing unusual happened last night. Pandora and I watched television, Mr. Whiskers spent part of the evening on the couch, and everything seemed normal when we went to bed. This morning I got up, showered, got dressed, poured myself some cereal, and discovered I’d been socially exiled by a twelve-pound orange mammal. Somewhere in that sequence, something changed.
John suggests that maybe Mr. Whiskers is simply being a cat, which is the sort of thing people say whenever they don’t understand cats. I get up and approach him again. This time I watch carefully. Mr. Whiskers doesn’t immediately move. He watches me coming, and when I’m about three feet away his nose twitches. Then he gets up and walks to the other end of the couch. I freeze. His nose twitched. That’s new evidence. I smell my shirt, then my sleeve, while John asks what on earth I’m doing. Nothing seems unusual, but then I remember that after my shower this morning I used the new body wash Pandora bought. I turn toward her. She immediately knows what I’m thinking. “The body wash,” I say. Pandora’s expression changes just enough for me to notice. I accuse her of knowing, and she says she didn’t know anything; she merely wondered whether the new scent might bother him. That’s close enough to prior knowledge that I feel she could have mentioned it earlier.
I retrieve the bottle from the bathroom and bring it back into the living room. Pandora immediately warns me not to put body wash anywhere near the cat, which I wasn’t planning to do because I’m conducting an investigation, not poisoning a witness. From several feet away I open the cap. Mr. Whiskers’ reaction is immediate. His ears turn sideways, his eyes narrow, and he jumps off the couch before leaving the room with an urgency he hasn’t demonstrated all morning. John starts laughing. Pandora tries not to, fails, and joins him. I stare down at the bottle and read the label. Apparently the fragrance contains cedar, citrus, and “smoked amber,” which sounds less like something designed for human hygiene and more like the description of a forest shortly after an evacuation order. “This is why he won’t cuddle with me,” I say. Pandora points out that I simply smell different. I tell her I smell offensive. “To the cat,” she says, as though that distinction somehow improves things.
Everything suddenly makes sense. Mr. Whiskers wasn’t sensing danger, reacting to Mrs. Jenkins, detecting something hidden in the apartment, or attempting to warn me about an unseen threat. He just thinks I stink. John helpfully points out that I was technically correct when I said the cat had noticed something before I did, and I appreciate his willingness to acknowledge that. Pandora doesn’t seem nearly as impressed. I go shower again using my old soap, and when I return Mr. Whiskers is sitting on the windowsill. I don’t approach him this time. I sit on the couch and wait because trust has clearly been damaged and rebuilding relationships takes patience. After about thirty seconds he jumps down, walks toward me, and sniffs my leg. I remain perfectly still. He jumps onto the couch, climbs into my lap, turns around twice, and settles down as though the entire morning never happened. I look at Pandora with what I consider a justified expression of triumph. She smiles and says, “You smelled like a candle.” I tell her that’s still something.
With Mr. Whiskers purring in my lap again, I decide I’ve learned something valuable. Not every unusual behavior is evidence of a conspiracy. Sometimes the simplest explanation really is the correct one. Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t involved. John wasn’t involved. Pandora wasn’t hiding anything. The neighborhood wasn’t communicating through cats. I changed one small variable in my morning routine, Mr. Whiskers objected to smelling like he’d been trapped inside a cedar chest during a wildfire, and everything returned to normal when I corrected the problem. It’s perfectly logical, and I’m actually proud of myself for accepting the explanation without trying to connect it to anything larger. That’s progress, especially considering some of the conclusions I’ve reached lately.
Then Mr. Whiskers suddenly lifts his head. His purring stops, his ears point toward the window, and a second later he jumps off my lap and races to the windowsill. I follow his gaze and see Mrs. Jenkins standing near her plants while Karen talks to her. Neither woman appears to be doing anything particularly unusual. Then Mrs. Jenkins looks toward our window. Mr. Whiskers meows. I lean forward. Pandora sees me and immediately says, “No.” I remind her that I haven’t said anything. She tells me I don’t have to. Mr. Whiskers meows again, looks toward Mrs. Jenkins, and then turns his head toward me. I look at him. He looks at me. I’m not saying that’s communication. We’ve just established the dangers of jumping to conclusions, and I’m taking that lesson seriously. I’m merely pointing out that Mr. Whiskers is cuddling with me again, which means whatever he’s concerned about now clearly has nothing to do with the body wash.
That’s a completely separate matter.