Phantom

Lakshmi Sunder

Right now, her cat is older than her. Before she died, he wasn’t.

Today is his fourth/twenty-eighth birthday depending on how you look at it. I’ve been asked in advance to give him the good meat and get him high this morning to celebrate, so I peel open a can of “salmon paté” for his breakfast, the brown juices dribbling disgustingly down my elbow, and sprinkle it with catnip like a garnish. Ten minutes later, the cat is on his back, licking his chops. He paws the empty air and jolts at the house’s blank white walls, hallucinating something I cannot see.

“How are you holding up, Aishwarya?” It feels odd hearing this question through a work-issued laptop screen, the face of my manager Rebecca porous with pixels, and it feels doubly odd hearing this question from said manager who pronounces my name wrong, saying the middle of it like the English word war, which blends with the following ‘y’ to make a sound like worry.

“Just fine, thank you.” I take a sip from my mug of coffee. Like oil — rubbery taste, fueling. “I’ve finished up the benchmark and copied you to the email.”

“Yes, I saw that, thank you.” Her white skin flashes whiter, so that it’s clear she’s switching to another tab, her eyes following a horizontal line as she probably reads a text message before switching back to me. Rookie mistake. “Though, you should know that you still have five sick days left for the quarter, and we’re willing to offer more given the — ” She looks down so that I can see the staticky grey line of her scalp, not willing to make eye contact, even virtually. “ — circumstances.”

“I don’t mind the work,” I quickly affirm.

“I understand that, but it’s possible that the work could mind you,” Rebecca parries with a line she’s probably said before, her lips flattening. “It’s common for an employee’s work to take a dip in quality after a grief episode, and we try to do our best to avoid that by giving you the space you need to process.”

I want to tell her that grief is not like the rigs we manufacture, not an assembly-lined emotion. There isn’t one station for denial, one station for anger, one station for bargaining, etcetera, each producing a part that fits into the next. It’s more like the wind — sometimes it just raises the hair on your arms, other times it uproots your home.

Instead, I decide on, “For me, work is a nice distra…” but I am interrupted by the feline putting the entire weight of his body on my back and sinking his talons into my shoulders, and deciding not to retract them. He’s even heavier after this morning’s paté.

“Oh! You’ve got a furry friend.” My manager’s face immediately brightens, and it’s not like when she was switching tabs, the look of it warmer this time around. Ever since remote work started becoming part of the normal rhythm of things, I’ve noted this pattern. A pet shows up on the screen and instinctively one’s brain will blare with, My coworker has a life outside of this Zoom call? I’m not exempt from the epiphany: in my head, a dog barks and suddenly Tom will morph in my mind from his signature polo to shirtless and sweaty, jogging on the sidewalk to keep up with his goldie; Dick becomes less dick and more likeable when I see a cat loafing on his swivel chair; and gay bear Harry becomes less hairy in comparison to the Pomeranian who runs circles around him.

I try to knock the cat off me as a breath oomphs from my mouth with his weight, saying, “I don’t know if friend is the word I would use.” More like furry fucker.

A pause. The nice thing about Zoom is, when you don’t know what to say to small talk jokes that don’t land, you can just pretend your Wi-Fi got slow all of a sudden. Rebecca responds quickly enough, years of experience with math genius employees who lack basic conversation skills: “Sorry about the lag. I was just going to ask, what’s the kitty’s name?”

I swallow more coffee, though it’s more like a current of liquid this time than a little sip, nearly rushing down the wrong tube. “Phantom.”

“I love the name, me personally. It’s so Phoebe Bridgers.”

Phoebe Bridgers this, Phoebe Bridgers that. The singer had begun to outnumber the words I was more interested in hearing about: education, employment, engagement.

“Because she’s white too?” I propped the phone against my shoulder while rinsing possible bugs out of a pot of rice.

“No mom, that’s psychotic.” I strained my ears into the screen to hear over the faucet sound. “She’s dressed as a ghost on the Stranger in the Alps album cover. And there’s literally a dog behind Phoebe, too. It’s perfect.”

“But Phantom is a cat.”

“No yeah, we’re like a DEI spin on it.”

“How are cats any more DEI than dogs?” I didn’t expect the word I hear on so many Zoom calls to make its way into a phone conversation with my daughter. My question wavered with laughter.

“Because cats are women-coded, and dogs are men-coded. Pussy, crazy cat lady, scaredy cat. Meanwhile, it’s all, dogs are man’s best friend, top dog, dog eat dog. And you’re telling me all dogs go to heaven, meanwhile cats are the spawn of Satan? It’s sick, really, the double standard. I think men should go to hell.”

“Right.” I watched the water get milky with uncooked grain, wondering where my daughter got her man-hating tendencies from. Probably the liberal arts education. “And how are you DEI? Because you’re Indian?”

“Exactly,” she affirmed. I got a warm swell of pride at getting the joke correct despite our generational gap — the kind a mother gets when her daughter shows her the lyrics to a dirty rap song, or lets her onto her Instagram. “White girl ghost becomes brown girl ghost.”

I don’t eat rice anymore. I want to think it’s because the grains are too similar to the texture of kitty litter, even if the aversion is from something else I can’t place. Something feels absolutely wrong about being Phantom’s elder and having to stoop over his litter box every morning, inhaling the hospital scent of odor-masking baking soda. Frequently I wonder if I’d prefer the organic, earthy smell of fecal matter — nose-wrinkling as it is — to this sterile chemical stuff, the residue of which settles on my house slippers and wooden floors like ash. What I’d really prefer is for Phantom to go back to being a wholly outdoor animal, but now that Aditi got him accustomed to cat trees and air-conditioning and watching birds from the safe distance of a window-sill, I don’t think he’d survive the street life.

Most mornings, he watches me labor for him, humming to distract myself as the litter-studded logs slide into a repurposed takeout bag. When I’ve raked the shovel through the box once, twice, making sure there are no runaway grey crumbles of urine, I tie a knot on the plastic bag like I’m wrapping a present. Phantom lopes over to me then — in the initial days, I thought, to thank me for my work, brush against my leg, maybe — but I know now that it’s to give me a present in return. Without fail, right after the litter box has become so clean the powder looks like pearls, the cat will squat in the dead center of it. Today, his birthday shit is bigger and less solid from the wet food, a brown nugget worming slowly from his asshole. The whole time, he stares at me with his piss-yellow eyes.

Alexa is like Aditi whenever her Airpods were in, in that it takes her three times to hear me before the mesh metal ball finally flares to life with a pulse of lavender light. I tell Alexa to play Houston Public Media, quickly tacking on a thank you, just in case AI takes over in the next decade and I need to have been on their good side.

In a voice not unlike AI, the weather woman speaks of Andrea — like all of America’s hurricanes, named something small-syllabled and White-sounding. We used to joke about how there would never be a Hurricane Aditi or Hurricane Aishwarya. A hurricane named after an Indian woman would be even worse, I think, with all the anger that’s winding up inside us ready to spring. The hurricanes are already bad enough as it is.

I can listen to the radio while I cook because I don’t need the television’s psychedelic weather maps to see what’s coming. The bayou spilling over, carting sewage onto the sidewalks. Boats where boats shouldn’t be. Drivers who, for once, will wish that their windows could break easy. My Trader Joe’s naan heats up in the toaster oven, inflating into the breadth and browning into the burlap color of a sandbag. The woman reporting on the radio goes from the raw numbers of weather — wind speeds, feet of rainfall — to climate. The Gulf of Mexico is not only rising, she says in an even, paved sort of way, pushing against Galveston’s seawall, it is also getting warmer. Meteorologists predict that Hurricane Andrea will unprecedentedly inundate streets and intensify wind speeds. In Houston, at least, we can localize this blame to the refineries right in our backyards.

It will be fine where we are, me and Phantom. A little water under the front door, the gutters drumming constantly, maybe an hour-long outage just to say we suffered, too. The worst part will be having no White Lotus to watch, no fresh-voiced lady to listen to on the news, no new emails bobbing up to the top of my screen. So why do I think I would take being underwater in my car to that kind of stillness?

Like a soft strip of Bounty, Phantom snakes his white tail around my leg before biting down on my ankle matter-of-factly. That means feed me. That means we’ll be eating dinner together, as with every other evening.

To keep her sane during an outage, all I needed was oil and a story. I’d sit Aditi between my legs, her little frame rattling like a shack weakened with rain, and tug coconut oil through the dark and tangled gulf of her hair.

“The rain won’t get you, Adi, because water hates oil.” She wouldn’t believe it until she could see it with her own eyes, so I placed a strip of her own oiled hair in front of her face, sprinkling sink water on it with my hands to show her how it beaded up. She stilled at the sight of it, just a little. “Do you want to know why Egypt is a desert?”

She nodded against my knees. I tried to make my voice louder than the thunder, than the wind knocking palm fronds against the tall panes of glass. “Egypt used to be an ocean, but the water ran away because there were tons of precious oils building underground — and, like I said, water hates oil. Now, all that’s left of the place is sand.”

“How do the Egyptians find water to drink, then?”

This had always been her, a small voice asking the kinds of questions that could silence a whole room. Ironically, I had to be more careful weaving my answer than weaving her hair. The strands were so slick that I could see them shine without any light.

“Well, the Egyptians could get water from the Nile River, but it’s very polluted from all the oil spills. So the people buy water from other countries by selling off their own oil.”

“But what happens if other countries don’t want their oil anymore? How will they drink then?”

I stopped plaiting for one moment, turning that possibility over in my head. It was something I had already been afraid of for my own American livelihood — how to pay my daughter’s college tuition if most cars turned electric in the next decade, if every roof in the country became shingled with solar panels? I had forgotten which of the three hair segments was next to be crossed over and had to fumble up the pattern with the pads of my fingers. There was a long silence as I tried to think of an answer to Aditi’s question, in which everything non-human could be heard: thunder knocking the sky, trees gulping the wind down.

“People will always want oil,” I decided on.

As parents, there will always be something that we don’t want to make it into the stories we tell our children that does, anyway. Why Cinderella’s father isn’t around anymore, why a man and woman in love means that a baby is on the way. Or the fact that, as much as water hates oil, oil hates water too.

Year by year, Adi built up a whole country of knowledge inside of her. When I was lucky, I would get to see just a piece of that land, broken off from the rest by the force of Texas storms and our need to be louder than that chest-beating roar of rain.

“There could never be mummies in Houston, Mom, because the heat would make the bodies rot. But they’re perfect for Egypt because Egypt is so dry.”

 I scrunched up my face, trying not to think of worms tunneling into flesh, of the corpses that buoy up when it rains too hard over in New Orleans. “That’s gross Adi. This is why Hindus do cremation. There’s no mess to it.” The coconut oil had greased up my hands, slightly grainy as I laced it through her hair. “When I die, all you’ll have to do is throw my ashes into the gulf.”

Adi flipped around, the rope of her oily braid thwacking my knee. “But you can’t take any pets with you if you’re cremated, Mom.” At this time, Adi had a little betta fish that looked like those colored swirls inside marbles. I think she would have been more sad if she saw the fish belly-up one morning than me. “Egyptian mummies got to bring their cats with them when they died, and that’s how it should be.” She crossed her arms resolutely.

The thought of a feline-shaped mummy dug up and loaded into a Smithsonian museum case, with its woody eyes and wraparound fabric flesh, made me want to crawl under the covers. As I shook my head clear, about to tie off the little tassel of her hair with an elastic, we got one of those cinematic chevrons of lightning I sometimes see when driving back home from Clear Lake on site visit days. Anyone driving by gets purely stunned by the perfect perforation of it, made powerless in that sort of happy way, like the bills we have to pay don’t really matter against something like that.

Adi’s braid slipped from my hands like an eel, her little palms pressed against the window to get nearer to the hurricane.

She flipped around to look back at me. “A nature god is mad at humankind, Mom. Shu is tearing Geb from Nut to punish us.” Her voice was fast and frantic. “Shu is ripping the earth and sky apart!”

I couldn’t help laughing, forgetting my general parenting attempts to affirm. “Baby, I think you’re the nut,” I said, snatching her into my arms.

I was proud of myself because I had remembered those three gods from the Egyptian mythology lecture Aditi gave after following me into the bathroom a couple days back: Nut was the sky goddess, Geb was the earth god, and Shu was the wind. In my head there were two giant hands with skin of the wind, cobwebby and always shifting, and those hands were wrenching the sky from the earth. I unraveled Adi’s hair so I could have a reason to braid it again, and tried not to think about the things I’ve done that could make a god mad.

With no work due to Wi-Fi outages across the city, all I can do is over-prepare for the other things that might go out too, water and electricity. The feline’s hydrophobia allows me some God-given solitude as I fill up the bathtubs with water. But my Alexa also evidently has the day off, NPR not reaching me without any service, so I have nothing to listen to. I do a little game theory in my head, a prisoner’s dilemma: me a prisoner to my thoughts, and my thoughts a prisoner to me, to the sweatbox of my skull. To leave the bathroom and turn on the cable TV downstairs could cause the tub to overflow, which would be wasteful, yes, but would more importantly make me have to spend even more time in here mopping it all up. So I decide to take the route of confession, of a shorter sentence: sitting in the small, sunless damp of the bathroom and hoping both me and my thoughts can get what we want. As long as I pay attention to nothing but my body, I’ve learned it’s possible. I dip my finger in and out of the lukewarm water, not letting myself stop until my index finger prunes up, and I look ahead of myself like I’m on the highway. I can see my own fallout hairing the shower tiles. Some scraggles are white, but most are black, like someone tore up the night and this is what’s left of it. The cat scratches at the bathroom door, wondering why the hell I’d want to be holed up in a room where the water rushes so loud.

Sometimes I imagine my life like a babushka doll, hollow and hard and all my little selves still inside of me. When a set of hands cracks me open, you can see the younger versions come tumble out. After Aditi died I was briefly three-years-old again, pounding the walls and throwing my food and wanting my mother. Adi has always been the opposite of me, over-aging when the bad things happened, a newer, larger doll eclipsing the old one. She refused to accept my help with the cancer until the cat got into one of the many bouquets sent to her and she was too weak to hold him down to clean him, chemo filling her body with something like moon sand.

 “The soap is above the sink,” she had greeted me when I opened the front door, voice hard but brittle, breakable. “You have to use Dawn, Mom. The other stuff isn’t good for animals.”

“I know that, Adi, I was there for BP.”

“Okay, let’s be real Mom, you like, caused BP.”

With my hands straightjacketing the cat sprawling in her lap, Adi dragged her hands through Phantom’s fur, fingers coated in chemical blue Dawn. He thrashed at the feeling of soap and water, froth netting the clumps of soil on him. I had been thinking that this isn’t half bad, no bites or scratches, but then we got to his eraser tip nose, stained with pollen. As I held down Phantom’s head, the cat dragged his claws across my wrist. A little thread of blood trickled down.

Instead of consoling her poor mother, Aditi stroked the white oval of her cat’s head, rubbing off the nose pollen at the same time. I couldn’t see her eyes anymore, but I could see the globe of Adi’s head — a brown desert planet with no signs of life, no thickets of black hair. A desert that could only last on external help for so long. This odd tableau was the closest I would get to becoming a grandmother, a babushka, a complete set of dolls. My dream of a braid train — that stunning collision of generations — would never come to fruition, me braiding Aditi’s hair braiding her daughter’s hair.

When my sad thoughts float up and separate from the rest, like a child, I try to crack a joke or make someone mad. Both if I’m lucky. “You should declaw the fucker,” I tried this time around, brandishing my wrist like a battle scar.

Aditi didn’t whip her head around like she would have if she was younger, stronger. She had moved on to picking out the dirt from under each of her cat’s claws with her fingernails. She kept on doing so as she retorted, sour-voiced, “Declawing is illegal in California and legal in Texas. That should give you an idea of how bad it is.”

I shrugged my shoulders, but it felt like someone else was doing it for me, like I was playing a part. “I don’t know, Adi. It sounds like I’m on the right side, then.”

She paused, hovering over one of the claws on his hind feet, before sucking in a deep breath. “You know how soldiers can still feel their legs after they get blown off in war? Well, it’s the same for cats when they get their claws taken out.”

A laugh rustled my words. “How would you know that?”

“Like I’ve said, cats and women — two sides of the same sad coin. They feel the same pain men do but just can’t talk about it.” Her voice was like decaf coffee, bitter but without any of the energy — limp and liquid.

“How can women lose their limbs if they don’t fight in wars, Adi? It’s not logical.”

She looked up at me, eyes steely, some of that old energy resurging for a brief moment. No matter what stage a daughter might be in — of life, cancer, or both — she will always want to argue with her mother, and secretly, her mother will rejoice at that.

“You’re acting like limbs are the only body parts you can lose, Mom. I still feel the hair on my head, and there’s not a single fucking strand left.”

The cat was clean enough, so I asked Adi to scooch over on the floor to sit between my knees. I dunked my fingers into the jar of coconut oil, trying not to flinch as I rubbed it over the nakedness of her head. Then, I began to braid the air.

 Adi looked over at where Phantom was, drying off his damp fur in a patch of sun, before sighing and turning to her old comforts, the baby blanket kind. “You remember the Egyptian goddess Bastet?”

I winced. This would have been a great time to remember. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, she has the head of a cat and the body of a woman, and she’s supposed to protect women and children from disease.” I scooped more coconut oil into my fingers, though there was no reason to. “Guess Bastet didn’t spare me.”

When the hurricane comes and the lights go out, I sit cross-legged right outside the door to the attic, high up where the water can’t reach me. I can see the whole world of my house from here, the floating staircase like cliffs in the dark, the charging cords veining the hallways in white rivers, my farmhouse sink filled with water. If the rain somehow did get this high, some system shock of climate change, I’d have no one to call for help except my manager, and it’s definitely not business hours right now. There is only one other being left in this little world of mine, and it’s that damn cat yowling downstairs, scared of the sound of thunder.

“Come upstairs, kitty,” I call, my voice echoing into the open architecture. I shake a bag of treats, beckoning, because it’s not me he wants. He springs deftly up the stairs at the sound. I lead the little brown pebbles up to my lap, patting my thighs hooker-style, trying not to think about how I’ll need to use the lint roller on my pants later. In this dark, all I can make out of the cat are his spoon eyes. When I pull him in, at first he jolts, before settling with the realization that I too am a warm body. Even from inside I can hear the wind. It makes a loud yawning sound, but I hope that means it’s getting tired, too. I stroke Phantom’s head, his white hair. Like a generator, his body hums from purring and his eyes glow up at me, shining with no light other than their own.