Cafe la Roux

On Thanksgiving, neither of us had anywhere to go. I presume Mitch the Cat could’ve gone home to his family, the Karmichaels (oh how little I knew then!), but he didn’t, and he didn’t say anything about it, either.

I of course never have anywhere to go to escape the loneliness of life, holiday or not. Mitch is my only salvation, and a bitter and unpredictable one at that.

“Everybody just wants to be liked!” he hisses vehemently, at me, tears already in his eyes.

Now perhaps you find me over-dramatic in the frequency to which I describe Mitch the Cat weeping. Firstly, I remember it true: he was such a beautiful, delicate snowflake of a flower, coupled with his personal courage and determination to absolutely be himself and express his emotion and thought, that he cried openly to myself and others on multiple occasions: dozens and even hundreds. In those days, he would cry only to me; but to my lasting jealousy and melancholy, he expanded his circle of helpless victims, those poor broken souls he ensnared like an anglerfish. I call it like a disease, and, as you shall see, there is no doubting that it was toxic.

We had slept in, tea for breakfast and boxed black bean soup for lunch and finally coffee for dinner. In the afternoon, Mitch the Cat became quite excited with the prediction that the streets will be dead quiet around dinner time.

“Like a ghost,” he said. “We can be like ghosts. Imagine all the homes, all the grand houses and dinghy basement apartments, at this time yesterday empty and silent; all the stressed out people at work--in offices and bagel shops, classrooms and airplanes--sullenly and eagerly awaiting today. All those sad empty homes now filled by those needing an excuse to enjoy life. And then the streets will be empty, and we can wander them in peace.”

I had not the heart to contradict him. I cared more for his present excitement than his future happiness. “Blind love,” he says later, after I admit to it.
When we venture abroad, the streets are quieter than usual, but still busy and noise-filled. Taxis scream and belch and fly along the streets with hyperactive impatience. The shops and stores are all closed but people still hurry from place to place, warmth to warmth. There seems little thankfulness in the air, though that is but a matter of outlook. Nevertheless, we bike about for two hours.

In addition, Thanksgiving apparently stirs all the lonely people from their emotional graves; blinking in the daylight, they flee from their hovels as though repelled like magnets from the loneliness of which they had suddenly become all too aware. The loneliness within them flees from the reflection and knowledge of itself and so they are ever running, ever broken, ever divided. We sit alongside all of the unloved and forgotten that night. Inside the Café la Roux, one of the only cafés open, there isa soft pinkness and a well-trodden warmth. Inside the Café la Roux we are but two well-maintained madmen, shunned by a society who does not care for our suffering. In each wretched soul’s hazy gaze we see our own inner selves, the ones we are too afraid to admit to. In each sorry stranger’s face we see an array of our futures. Mitch the Cat looks everyone in the eyes, always, and seeks to know them with an under-appreciated hunger; I do not want to look at our fellow patrons. I do not like to look so deeply into myself. We huddle by the fire in armchairs, for even in early October a biting chill clings to the tall corridors of Montreal streets.

“Everybody wants to be convinced they are lovable. That they are special and perfect to someone, and needed. We all need to be needed.”

“Quick to judge, tonight,” I comment wryly. I am feeling guilty for having contributed to such evident sadness in my heart’s companion. He is crying, I may remind you.

“No, I hold no malice. I seek but understanding of that which I see. And in myself, first. For I only understand in others what I find and know in myself.”

Mitch the Cat takes another sip of his coffee, another tiny, near imperceptible draught, like a rabbit patiently nibbling a leaf in order to absorb all of its nutrients. Simply, poor Ari Karmichael only wants to prod and search everything in every moment of his existence. The great tragedy is that he cannot. And this eats at him; second my day by year, the gap widens: His awareness continues to grow in a patient and implacable manner, and so does his heart, but his mind expands more slowly than both. It is why Mitch the Cat is never anxious, but sometimes very, very sad.

Now, allow me the pleasure of digression with the purpose of explanation. I realize that I am deceiving you. Mitch the Cat seems from my accounts an abominably and constantly unhappy soul, but this is not true. The happy moments, hours and days, of which there are a great many more than unhappy, I do not record. But why, you do ask? and I tell you that I do not know the why of the why, but I cannot.

There is nothing to write, or at least nothing of interest, or nothing to motivate the action. Happiness cannot be described, I find, only the lack of. There is no antonym for ‘loneliness’. What a fantastic flaw in the whole damn system! How biased our capacities of language are! I wish I could describe the happiness I experience with Mitch the Cat, and the pure joy that, more often than not, radiates from him. I shall try to keep it in mind as I write.

But, alas, you do not read when you are happy; you need nothing explained, no story to soothe. And so you do not wish to hear about happy people, those unrelatable simpletons! Come, soothe your problems in bigger problems! Feel the release of insubstantiality!

When you are happy, you need neither philosophy nor religion, neither structure nor confirmation of love, for you believe--true, uncompromising belief, this--in yourself. You unconditionally love yourself, and your world, and your god (aka: the all, the universe, life itself). Mitch the Cat, well, he is like this a lot. He is a beacon of faith in and love of humanity during these sad and confused times. He trusts in his God, just as we all lose faith watching everything we have ever been led to believe in begin to crumble. He says, “If we are God’s people, if this is God’s society and God’s culture and God’s will, and it is failing and the rot in the roots is visible for all to see, what now? We tried ever so hard, God. We did what you wanted and we were pious and humble and we prayed in your name and even we killed in your name. So where are you now? Why have you not saved us?

"We confuse belief in God with belief in society, and belief in humankind.”

He sighs mightily, and I of course have nothing to say.

He continues, staring at me and through me and beyond me: “God’s will is for us to have free will. He has worked so incredibly hard himself, look at how patiently he reared us! over billions of years of evolution. Our suffering is not His intention, but simply a consequence. He wants us to be great, to make our own heaven. He has given us the tool to transcend our sadness: he has given us understanding of mortality and of life. And because we find life so beautifully sad, we open ourselves to realize happiness.

“Nowadays, we are bombarded. We are absolutely assailed by information and outside emotions and desires that we retreat. We don’t open ourselves to either sadness or, in consequence, happiness. It is too much; the world is too big and too broken and too ill.

“It is more difficult to believe in God than to be agnostic; more difficult to believe in anything than to care for nothing.”

He turns to look at me in sharp consideration and I feel the sudden power of his will in the appraisal. “To be prudent and thorough, I have nothing against atheists: I have been one myself, and it is simply a different something to believe in. One must accept that one does not know everything, or anything, really. It is a scary thought, to be powerless in the vastness of the universe. But from that inner searching for meaning and substance, and subsequent deceiving failure of such, comes belief. Atheists, Christians, Muslims, all of us: we have found that we know nothing, and that there is something so much greater than we in motion with a boundless and euphoria-inducing intention, that all we are left with a simple choice: allow oneself to be overcome by the extreme sadness of one’s mortal existence, or choose life with an absolution of will and integrity. But this wisdom is so easily lost.”

I sit in silence. I find tears coming to my own eyes and I hurriedly harry and hamper and hide them. The eyes are too numerous in the café for my liking, I am staring at myself with far too many gazes.

Mitch the Cat claims that in the beginning of our relationship (and this instance was very early) it was quite difficult for him to open up to me and talk for very long because he was afraid I would reject him. It did not seem so to me, or at least he was not nearly so afflicted by this shyness and timidity as I was. Why, I did not--could not--even cry when I was sad, or jump for joy when happy. Do you? Can you?