More cats and angst

You'll never come back to my blog if I write only about cats and angst, and this entry is about both -- maybe sit this one out if it could cost me you as a reader.

Around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, during my habitual insomniac's rounds, I noticed that Grover -- the brain-damaged, squirrel-tailed, 11-year-old cat we got from an animal shelter in Broward County, Florida -- seemed not to be feeling well. Over the next 48 hours, his condition deteriorated, and I began to panic. I consulted with our kind and brilliant vet in DC via telephone. I made several visits to the chemist, who supplied me with bags of medications available only with prescriptions in the States. I tried, at any cost, to avoid a trip to the vet here; expat cocktail party conversations often veer into the sorry state of veterinary care in Islamabad, and I've already, in just over two weeks, heard enough to know that entrusting a cat or dog to a veterinarian here is a dangerous act.

Late last night, I suspected that if he stayed at home he would die. And so this morning, I took him to the vet. When we left he was able to walk and purr. He died swiftly, within an hour of our arrival. I don't know why he died or what happened or what I should have done instead (aside, of course, from the nagging question of whether I was negligent or wrong to bring him here at all).

The loss is a difficult overlay to the otherwise very normal sense that I have not yet found a comfortable space to inhabit here: our house's interior has that depressing, hollow tenor of a cheap motel (though not for long!); we've made friends, but unless you're on a camping trip or a reality TV show, it's hard to achieve a satisfying level of intimacy with anyone in two weeks; I'm far away from all of you; and I am acclimating to being a woman in a conservative, Muslim country.

There has been a raw, startling quality to this experience. On a superficial level, Islamabad is America Plus. We live in a McMansion. We have a driver, guards, and a housekeeper. We go to DC-esque parties with journalists and State Department employees. And yet, perhaps it's presumptuous and problematic to impose American meaning and American identity symbols on the scenery.

The vet told us he had seen several very sick cats who had been eating the same food Grover was eating, but there is no recall here. Why? Functionally, there is no FDA or USDA. No amount of money can buy you even a mediocre veterinarian (fortunately, thanks to the embassies, this is not true of physicians). The onus is on us to create limits, to weave safety nets, to do our research, to investigate behind the scenes; no agency is performing this service. And while I intellectually knew this before, I didn't really know it until now, when I watched a completely unqualified vet in a dirty office try to save my cat who had possibly eaten commercial food containing poison. In a job interview two days ago a professor told me she observes a strange innocence in Americans, and perhaps that is exactly what I am confronting in myself, though innocent seems too polite. Naive, perhaps.

This speaks, maybe, to the ways the progress narrative might be inextricably woven into American identity. When people tell us terrible things in the U.S., we empathize and then search for happy endings, for progress, for ways to improve and overcome. And yet here, people have told me terrible things, and there is little more to do but just agree that whatever it is is truly terrible. And that is all. There is no insistence here that things will work out, that there is a recourse, that there is some official entity to ensure justice, that there are limits and checks and balances. In the U.S., we often believe the cat won't die because someone highly skilled and certified will swoop in and perform a miracle. And so we live almost cavalierly with this knowledge. But here, unless you keep your house very clean and buy imported food and watch your cat vigilantly, you put your cat at a very real risk.

I don't intend to pass judgment in this assessment. I don't even know what that judgment would be. I do not mean to be authorative, or to claim these thoughts for anyone else. What I am saying is probably not true, by any absolute definition. I am just trying to begin to work through these ideas, to understand the larger implications of what happened, to understand who I am as an American and what that means. And all this, of course, in an unreliable, overwrought state.