y boyfriend's kitty cat used to drool. Whenever you scratched his ears, which he loves, a little drop of saliva went splat on the ground. Drip, drip, drip, like a leaky faucet. I've always hated cats, but the drooling endeared me. It had a certain eccentric appeal.

The kitty cat had been going outside and returning with scratches on his nose. We didn't think much of it. The scratches increased, slashed across his pink nose. He stopped drooling. One evening, my boyfriend pressed down on the cat's cheek, and it gushed a milky red liquid that stank of rot. A geyser of blood and pus. When we cut away his fur we found two perfect puncture wounds, the size of cat teeth. As we washed the spot, he wriggled wetly in our hands and meowed. Not a real meow, but a pathetic, half-tone plea. Brrrrrraaaw.

"I want you all to look at this," said the vet, her fingers prying the kitty cat's mouth open. His tongue darted around helplessly as the vet assistants peered in to see. In the corner of his mouth, on the side of the bite, a salivary gland had ballooned to the size of a small plum. It was quivering and translucent and veiny, like a heart that pumped no blood.
"I'm glad you brought him in today," the vet said, drawing up an estimated cost of surgical procedures that did not appear optional.
"Don't worry," one of the assistants said to me. "We've seen this once before."
Once? It had never occurred to me that the cat had it so bad. We'd blown off this trip to the vet for weeks -- "Did you call the vet?" / "No, I thought you were going to call the vet," etc. etc. - and only bothered to make the call when the cat's tongue began lazily sticking out the side of his mouth. When I was a kid, that's how I used to draw everyone. With raised eyebrows and the tip of their tongue poking out the side of their mouth. Like, "Look at me. I'm a-crazy!"
It turns out one of his salivary glands scarred over when he was bitten. The vet explains the cat's situation by using the analogy of a water hose. If you clamp down on a water hose, pressure builds up on the other side. The bite created the clamp, and now the vet needed to open the passageway.
"He has a drooling problem," I say, but no one finds it relevant.
"I had a big, orange kitty like this when I was a kid," the vet tells me, picking the cat up gingerly and taking him back to surgery.
"He'll be okay," the woman at the front desk assures me.
"This isn't my cat," I start to say. But tears slip down my cheeks, splatter on the bill I am signing.
"Don't cry, or you'll make me cry," the woman says, handing me a box of Kleenex.
I go back to my car and call up my boyfriend at work. "The cat peed in the car on the way over," I complain. "Do you know how much it stinks in here?"

I don't like cats for several reasons. One, they are boring. Two, they cling and cajole at the exact moments when you don't want them around. Three, they have such little personality. When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than a blond cocker spaniel with two pleading brown eyes and an interest in catching balls at the park. The landlord wouldn't allow dogs. My mother asked nicely, but they wouldn't allow it. She hung up the phone crying - crying like I do now, big sobs that make the veins on her neck taut. We got kitty cats instead, and maybe that's the fourth reason that I don't like cats. They weren't what I really wanted.

My boyfriend and I picked up the cat a week and a half later. By that point, he had gone through a series of three surgeries - two unsuccessful - to fix the gland.
"Could this be right?" the woman behind the desk said when she rang up the bill. My boyfriend sighed with dread and flicked his credit card impatiently on the desk.
"God, what did they do to your cat?"
The vet clinic waived the cost of the third surgery but still, the total was astonishing. A suckerpunch. I probably shouldn't tell you how much. Can you guess?
I'll say this: He could have bought a laptop. A nice one. He could have taken us both to Mexico. In luxury. He could have fixed the car stereo, which badly needed fixing, and then gone on a cocaine binge and had enough afterward for dinner and a movie. Best not to think that way, but that is how we thought.
"All right, kitty cat," my boyfriend said when we got home. "Time for you to start earning your keep around here."

It was only a few days after returning, though, that the cat wanted outside again. He stood by the door and plead with us. Come on, guys, just for a little while. He looked at us uncomprehending, glancing from the door to us and back to the door. What part don't you guys understand? He meowed in the middle of the night and early in the morning. We would have hated him if he hadn't looked so pathetic and vulnerable, the right side of his face shaved absurdly, stitches running along his jaw like barbed wire.
But it bothered me that he had no understanding of his plight. Stupid cat. Didn't he know he had narrowly escaped death? I started noticing how many tomcats prowled our neighborhood, waiting for the cover of night to sink their fangs into the sweet unsuspecting jaws of kitty cats. These were lean and battered cats that squawked when you passed. Our kitty was big, but docile. "Boy, your cat sure is a pussy," our neighbor once said. It wasn't a pun.
So there was no question the cat wasn't going outside. Ever, ever again. But keeping him inside didn't break his spirit; it broke mine.
"Don't you know," I would bellow to him, "that the other cats will bite you and eat you?
Rrooow.
"They will suck on your brains and pick their teeth with your tail."
Rrrooooooooow.
"You are the most selfish, ungrateful cat I have ever met! You have no idea what you've put us through."
Rrrrooooow. Rrrow. Rrrow.

One afternoon - the most crisp and cool summer day I can remember - I opened the windows. We'd had them closed all summer long, the old air conditioner units pumping as fast as they could, and nothing was better than opening them mid-day, the breeze spilling into our apartment.
We live on the second floor of an apartment building, and when I open the windows, the cat likes to sit out on the ledge, letting the air cool his fur, getting sleepy in the sunshine, which is just what he was doing that afternoon.
Until he decided to jump.

But that is a whole other story.

Tomorrow: The incredible, flying cat.