Celeste and Penelope

Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror.

It’s been cold in Detroit lately. (Cold everywhere, really. They got deep snow in New Orleans today.) Single digits, into the negatives overnight.

This gave my wife and I cause the other night to try to trap (and so rescue) the two feral cats who’ve cautiously befriended—or maybe begged from and so tolerated—us over the past few months.

Celeste and Penelope, who might be a mated pair or just boyfriend¹ and girlfriend, are survivors. No other way to put it. Celeste is missing one eye and is going blind in the other, and the tip is gone from his left ear. Penelope looks whole and healthy and is preternaturally cautious, which is not the same thing as timid. We met them through our friend Audrey, who used to live next door, and was the person that everyone in the neighborhood called when a stray animal was in trouble. Audrey used to leave food out for Celeste and Penelope, and coming home on warm nights we’d see them under her porch light, snuggled up together but alert, watchful in their quotation mark arrangement.

When Audrey moved out we weren’t sure if we’d see them again. They’re fast learners and maybe can’t afford to wait around for a meal out there in the urban wild. But they started to appear again a month or two ago—Celeste, in his boldness, occasionally coming right up to our front door to chat; Penelope, in her infinite wisdom, keeping to Audrey’s old porch in case of danger.

Maybe they knew what was coming. Maybe they have an animal sense for deep winter the way they do for earthquakes and cancer. Just ahead of this bitter cold snap they turned into a nightly presence on our stoop—both of them, which is how we knew it was serious. Celeste was meowing up a storm, so we put out food and water, plus a little makeshift shelter they could both disappear into if they wanted. And after a few nights of this routine (nights not without their hiccups; in their caution and toughness they are extremely reactive, and a twitch of my leg earned it a four-claw stab from Celeste), with sub-zero temperatures coming, we borrowed some traps from Audrey, baited them, and hoped that what little trust we’d earned would be enough.

It was an anxious evening, waiting them out. No: it was a terrifying evening. What if they don’t take the bait and they freeze out there. What if one takes the bait but that scares off the other and we can only save one—what if we, in our bumbling good intentions, split them up forever through forces they can’t understand. What if the shock of capture kills them and the cold actually wouldn’t have. What if what if what if what if.

We had been given cause to learn again, by surprise, one of life’s most basic truths: that fear is always born at the same time as care. They are symbiotic, enemies, mirrors, shadow selves. No care can exist without the sheer and simple terror of that care ceasing to exist, or (worse) that care, through error, causing its own end. That was the drama that played out in miniature on our front porch as the night deepened into a killing cold.

And yet. Not taking the risk at all, turning from that care, would have been even worse. (“Here’s the truth,” says one of the immortal antagonists of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. “Who is spared love is spared grief.” Yes, and what an awful fate.) We sat there in half-mute distraction until we heard the sound of metal: Penelope, against all odds, had been first to take the bait. We whisked her inside and down into the basement in her little cage beneath a blanket. And then the waiting went on. And on. All those terrors of what our intercession might have caused fighting their way to the surface. We’d look out the window from time to time and there he’d be, Celeste, waiting us out as we waited him out.

Click. My wife rushed outside. He was in. We brought him in. She brought them both to Audrey’s. They are adjusting, maybe. They are warm. They are inside. We don’t know what’s next for them yet and that’s alright.

Celeste, his 2nd day inside at Audrey’s.

I don’t know what to with all of this except to say that as things continue to get worse, everywhere, in ways we never thought possible, we will need care and luck in equal measure. We will have to learn to keep extending our care, our love, with all its accompanying holy terror, wherever we can. To each other. To the people being drowned by this fucked-up world. To the little animals out in the cold. “Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke. “Beauty and terror. Just keep going.” That might be all we can do. That might be everything there is to do.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. Celeste got his name before he was first TNR’d (trapped, neutered, released) and was revealed to be a boy. It fits him, though. His remaining eye is the color of the night sky being drawn toward morning.