Cat People By Massoud Hayoun

Behold my inviolable deliberate, little body. I’ll show you where it is, despite myself.

In a scorching desert, kowtow to follow me into the catacombs of my most-distant ancestors, locked away in our monumental mourning, melancholy of a magnitude that makes for the sky. Find me in the pyramids, just as you’d expect. Find me on the frescoes and in the sarcophagi of mummified pets, destined for eternal darkness, suddenly interrupted by glorified looters-as-historians, carted off to Britain and France, on display like the skinned and smashed skulls of Algerian revolutionaries, the embalmed bodies of Sarah Baartman and her modern-day daughters, and the crushed backs and bones of civilizations no longer recognizable beyond the dizzying eclecticism of the neck-bearded fetishists who run museums and academia. 

I am of the strange cat people the thieves found, anthropomorphized, when they shone a light on images that map the way through dying. A curiosity. I had been in a state that looked like power, once! Unsmiling. Who’s to say if or how our expressions changed over millennia or moments before the desecration of our sand castles of eternal sorrow, our contribution to the world’s wonders, a necropolis ghost town. Oh well; this is the face I show you, and I’ve mostly forgotten what came before. 

Still, on occasion, in the still dark, I remember. And I scream, frenzied night terrors. Tiny asphyxiations and a thousand agonizing deaths greet me by the throat, like one of Sophia’s salty Sicilian hexes, when I remember what eternity should feel like for the cat people in the pyramids. 

You know something? I won’t suffer you to behold me. Not with your hands. No, I’m not crazy. Yes, I realize I brought you down here, and now I only want for you to turn back. Respect my sudden change of plans; I’m a cat person. Don’t look into my fool’s gold eyes or behold my inviolable, deliberate, little Egyptian body, as you turn to go. And consider yourself lucky to get while the getting is good and ابعد عن الشر وغنيله.

My mother Nadia would like me to find a man, and fast. What fresh hell is this, on our way through the Egyptian Book of the Dead? A riddle of the Sphinx? 

For as long as I can remember we’ve lived at the edges of civilization on our wits, luxuriating in the splendor of our sobriety and solitude. Displeasing little creatures, all our bountiful, black hairs all in place. We are as the older and the younger witch in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the movements of our special effects flight guided only by the poetry of our Resentments. And now you would have me lay down arms and learn how to make the stuff of 1950s finger food, food for the fingers for some fucker who’d have me? And fast!

I am not a breeder, and I’m a boy, so I assumed that even at 33, which for us cat people is of course ancient, I would never hear her tell me to tie myself to a man. She knows the toxicity of that — the tailspin into spinsterhood engendered by a few well-meaning words. 

Why find someone, then? The last moment of Taxi Driver, where De Niro looks back at the rearview, irate. Some people say it’s because the previous scenes never happened at all. Others believe it’s because he sees what came before the film starts.

My mother Nadia is not one to trifle and never needed a man. Or woman. Or company. Never expected to be entertained. Sought life and dignity. Gave birth, handed me off to her parents, washed up a bit, and went back to work to support us. And when I ask if there’s any sorrow in solitude, she savors the dark chocolate in her teeth, We cat people are hard like life itself! Dignity is a solo number. Behold us, our inviolable, deliberate, little bodies. Lady gangster bad bitches like Selina Kyle could have been, had she not fumbled the ball when a bad man would have made her his bat bitch. Her cat suit was only skin-tight, it seems. 

That time at Tompkins Square Park, I moved through a balmy New York summer night, each muscle conscious of the royalty of the stride they produced in ensemble. Each muscle conscious of Nadia in LA to whom I’d inevitably return and our birthright back at the big Egyptian kennel to the sky to which we all return, we the cat people of the catacombs that set us, in this life, firmly rooted in death. 

I’d already stopped looking you in the face at that point. Good move, too; if the moonlight caught my fool’s eyes, you may have recognized me for what I am and recoiled in fear. While I lit up, your long man fingers made for my love handles. You couldn’t keep your hands off my bits of flesh long enough for a cigarette. In fact, that’s all there was between us. And that warm human touch was it all it took for the claws to come out and for me to away into the cool familiarity of the dark. 

Imagine what it is to lift a cat, the insult to its autonomy, the upending of its little world, and the wresting of control of its little cat brain and spine, all in your clumsy human hands, because in the West, it’s a common practice for the rich to commodify little lives as a convenience. Maybe you thought I was crazy to bounce, but oh well, buddy. You brought it on yourself, boy who would behold my inviolable, deliberate, little body. I’ll show you where it begins and ends, despite myself. 

In my minds eye, I see you who aren’t on the apps. We’re alone in a large warehouse in the Movida that follows fascism, holding hands while Beach House plays, a pale pink light set on a world forgetting by the world forgot. Britney says the secret to happiness is a bad memory. All these thoughts quiet, and for a moment, I forget that life separates loved ones, like leaves swept by the pale. Aie, mourir pour toi. 

My great grandmother was a madwoman, they said. Not congenital, they reassured. It was born of bacteria in the bread and water that give us life, embalmed her brain from the inside. Insidious like that. When I asked what sort of insane she was, it was that she became enraged at her husband in the oppressive Egyptian summer heat. I heard this around the same time I first saw Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern. I decided at the time that to be insane is to live beyond the cloistering courtyards of one’s historical moment. 

For us cat people, it is shameful to speak the next line in the same breath as my talk of my great grandmother — locked back in Egypt,  more stardust now than even the pharaohs, for lack of embalming fluid. Beneath all the echelons of progressivism and self-acceptance and forward-thinking Western-style agnosticism that exist in my more-waking state, here in Los Angeles, where I write. A man of letters, science, and of separation.

But like the above-mentioned and unnamed heretofore before me, every time a man touches me in the summer heat, I wriggle and claw my way to freedom.

Every generation must see itself as going out of Egypt, the Passover Haggadah says. And so it is written, so it is done. The scientists say now that experience is passed through the DNA, and not just in how the straights fuck up their kids with religion and its periphery. 

Once, it was summer, I was sitting with a French person at the Boiler Room on the Lower East Side, and with my cat powers spied his wandering eye, and proclaimed, I come from a long line of witches, patronesses of piecing together power where there is none, are you familiar? Don’t fuck with me fellas, or I’ll turn you into a nice white rabbit. The Bella Donna is in my bag. How would you like a nice bar of chocolate? The ruby slippers are of no use to you. 

My mother Nadia and I are on the farthermost edge of maps, a final frontier, in the infernal imaginary of Hollywood. There’s no further west to go — only water. My grandparents raised me, while she supported us. And now they’re gone, it doesn’t matter what for. And I am not a breeder, as you know. There’s no further west to come — only water. 

We were proud people. It didn’t occur to her until I wanted to attend an expensive college prep high school that we would ever lower ourselves to accept child support from my biological father. We are the cat people. Behold our inviolable, deliberate, little bodies. 

June 26, 2013. A landmark day for the gays, the news said. The government, like my my mother, wants to see me married — who knows why, after so long and so suddenly, since you never taught me how? I say there should be no legally clad marriages, for my sake and for all the cat people who’ve come before. But you say — like the marriage brokers of old — marry and the rest of your rights will follow. Almost a decade later, a brave man from the safety of his car — for beware my fangs — called me faggot for my short shorts and probably my tote-as-handbag at a crosswalk, because to be feminine is folly is to forgo the privilege is my penis. 

And when my grandparents died, we were all that was left. And then there were two. Two pioneer settler colonists, on the edge of the Pacific, looking out of our Alexandrine lighthouse at the deluge before us. The sun sets in the West. Two witches in the forbidden cottage on a hill. Forgive us our trespasses. And they struggled for a time to keep one another alive, in the end times of the Hayoun, because death is at once too familiar and too unknown. And because to choose either is beyond us and our Books. How long before the cut flowers recognize that they’ve got no roots? 

Nadia does not like for people to watch her while she eats. Never has. Quizzical is her grace. She hides her eating, like a small animal, afraid you’ll take from her the little she’s caught, her mother Daida mused once. And like a house cat, confined, continues to primp for its own sake, until it no longer recognizes the need, Nadia was intransigent about her beauty, to no apparent romantic or sexual end, for in the way of our cat people, one indiscretion was more than enough. Her beauty was born of what her mother had taught us was self-respect. One time, at a journalism internship in Beijing, the boss sent my colleague home to put on makeup. To do journalism. One time at a journalism internship in New York, a man commented to me that a TV news anchor was the spitting image of a porn star. Lean into your power, ladies and now ladyboys. That’s progress. 

Life is a marvelous gown, crawling with insects, wrote author Eileen Chang, who begins Lust Caution with a comment on women as cats. Crawling with insects — I’ve repeated those words  endlessly since I first read them, at a Chinese language course at a university, blocks from where she died, alone, in Los Angeles. That’s how you learn Chinese characters: repetition. How deep then in the catacombs of my Egyptian memory is the knowledge that Chang’s body was allowed to harden and expand, until the absence or the smell of her became too powerful to ignore?

In the pandemic, all there was for me in the dry sheets and sticky Purell hands of my nights was to bathe the little Nadia ate and binge watch shows like Schitt’s Creek and think on the few men who’ve understood me a bit. More than one are imprisoned now by their respective governments or married with children. Maybe it’s different on Grindr in podunk Canada.

Nadia will have heart surgery next week. The passage ways through the catacombs in her Egyptian chest are blocked, not by our simple bread and water, surely — they say we make calcium borders in our deliberate, inviolable, little bodies. I have a week to find a cat person or to get a cat, she says, suddenly. 

Last week at Passover, we left chairs empty for the Prophet Elijah and all the forgotten faces of the cat people who’ve passed. And it could be more than two, imagine, if you’d let someone hold your inviolable, little, body before you fade into the walls of gay bars, living your longing with liquor and your filthy, fetid lust. We were wrong. We sought power and are powerless. 

Deliver me from this Egypt of the spirit, the narrow of the catacombs from whence I’m known. And unto it I’ll return, for so it is written. Deliver me out of Egypt through the split sea or the monumental maze of our magnificent mourning. 

Massoud Hayoun is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He wrote a decolonial memoir of his grandparents and political theory of Arabness emanating from their lives called When We Were Arabs  (The New Press). It won a 2020 Arab American Book Award and was an NPR best book of 2019. He recently published a psychological thriller chapbook called Signs with Bottlecap Press: https://bottlecap.press/products/signs-by-massoud-hayoun.

4 August 2021