In vile confirmation of all my worst fears, I seem to find myself, once again, in purgatory. This is not a metaphor. It is a whole truth that spans eons and stops only when the very basic parts of the thing start to break down. The cell walls of all involved would have to crack and spill their atoms and protons and neurons all over the floorboards in order to erase the truth of what I'm about to tell you. So bare with me as I relate to you this horror story with the fear and reverence it deserves, lest I shatter anymore bones, lest I pop my other Achilles' heel, for contrary to popular belief, pain and purgatory are not mutually exclusive. In fact, pain is increased seven-hundred fold in the land between. The moment of inception repeats over and over again, stuck mercilessly in a groove. Imagine stubbing your toe every five seconds for a billion years. Imagine drowning one-hundred times a day, forever. Imagine that while you listen to my tale.
I was sitting in my room in a large decorative chair that I bought for twenty-five dollars at the Salvation Army. When you enter my room, the smell is familiar. It smells of burnt corn tortilla shells and floral perfume. It smells of a leaky gas oven and of cigarette smoke, and occasionally of sex, cat hair, and basement. This conglomerate of smells gives it a sort of character. It's not the kind of place you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in due to its low ceiling and its oppressive, postage-stamp size. Sad that we found it charming once. Like a tomb of ancient Egypt it is stocked floor to oppressive ceiling, with cheap, worthless belongings. Neglect coats them in much the way that a greasy head leaning against a train window coats the glass with oil and sebum. In some cultures the objects inhabiting this room would be burnt for fuel or used to test catapults. The chair for example. The chair is a monstrosity. Probably liberated from a funeral home or the lobby of a motel or gentleman's club, half of its weight is most likey sweat and dust mites alone. And that was before the blood.
In it I sat, smoking a cigarette, blowing my exhale past the African Violets and out the window. That's where I was the night I got my last visit from Saint Peter. I can't exactly say I was happy to see him, or him me. Contrary to popular belief, Saint Peter isn't a kindly old man in a white robe with a ledger, he usually wears a black suit spotted with suspicious stains. His nose looks as if it has been broken several times over, and his skin is all leathery and scared. Still, he has a kind of animallistic charm that makes my heart flutter ever so slightly in it's ribby cage when he shows up in my room. This, in turn, makes my breasts swell and all the other pertinent parts of me light up like a ping-pong machine after a perfectly deployed ball. Sometimes we make love. He likes to talk dirty. But tonight he came by to snap my Achilles' tendon and send me to purgatory.
I knew it was coming. Usually, when acts of such intentional violence are coming at you with a scythe, you can narrow them down to a specific set of circumstances that put the whole bloody thing into motion. I was thinking about my transgressions as he leaned into me and reached down, grabbed me between the legs, and lifted my whole body onto the bed. For a second I thought he might want to be intimate, but with one quick move he grabbed my right leg out of its sock monkey slipper, hugged it to his chest and with a small, curved, silver blade, pressed with all his might against the rubbery tendon. I felt it sever and snap, and blacked out immediately from the pain. When I woke up he would be gone.
Bobo roused me what must have been just a few minutes later, because I was still bleeding profusely. He was doing his best to wrap my foot with paper towels, but without opposeable thumbs he's pretty much useless when it comes to first aid. His white fur was soaked with blood and the mother in me was immediately worried. What if Saint Peter had hurt him after I passed out.
"Monkey, are you okay?" I gasped through the most intense pain I have ever felt.
"I'm fine. Jesus. Why didn't you call me?"
"You're a cat. You never come when I call."
"Yes, not usually, because all you want to do is fuss over me. When it's important I know." He shook the bloody paper towel from his paw and wiped it on the bed. "This is madness, you know that right?"
"Maybe you should go get help. I'll be okay."
"Go where exactly?"
"I don't know, Giselle's house. Remember that time I sent you over to help her change that light bulb?"
Bobo rolled his eyes, jumped down off the bed, and pulled back the curtains using the top of his head.
"We're not in Echo Park anymore, ma."
I lifted my head and looked out the window. He was right. We weren't in Echo Park anymore. We were somewhere else. We were in a place that over the past few weeks Bobo and I have dubbed "Limbo."
"It looks like a Salvador Dail painting out there," I said, but I was just being pretentious. It looked more like Palm Springs. Or Mars.
Bobo jumped down and started pacing, leaving little bloody foot prints on the floor. I was going to tell him to watch the rug, but what did it matter now? The bed and the chair were soaked through and the pain in my leg was starting to send me off again into the soothing nothingness of the unconscious.
"Don't you pass out on me," Bobo snapped, "you know I can't open those cans myself."
"I'm bleeding to death and all you can think about is your stomach?"
He jumped up onto the kitchen counter.
"I can't turn the faucet on either and I'll be damned if I have to drink from that bowl, I swear to..."
He got all quiet for a moment.
"Are you thirsty?"
"I wasn't. I was just proving a point. But now that I'm up here... Yes. Sorta."
"I'm sorry, kid."
"Well, you should be. I knew you shouldn't have gotten mixed up with that guy. He was bad news from the start. You had me fixed when I was a kitten, maybe you should have taken some of your own genius advice and tied that mess up before it was too late."
"I didn't declaw you."
"If you had, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"We've never had a conversation. You're a cat. I'm assuming this is all a pain related hallucination."
He jumped down from the kitchen counter like a flash, up onto the bed, and perched on my chest.
"Listen to me and listen good. I'm all you got right now and I think we can get out of this but I need you to do exactly as I say, okay?"
"Sure."
"Don't be sarcastic."
"Yes. Sure. Okay," I said with enough conviction to get him off my case. "Why don't you ever sleep on my lap like a normal cat?"
"You smell weird."
"Fair enough."
"Now get your laptop out. I need you to set the cursor on scroll so I can go through all the emails you exchanged with Saint Peter just by pressing my paw on the mouse."
"You can read?"
"Just do it. Then do your best to wrap that foot as tight as you can. We're gonna have to leave here eventually and I need you mobile."
I did as I was told. I assumed without saying that the pain had caused my personality to split in two. The rational leader in me had taken refuge away from the pain and manifested itself in my cat Bobo, while the passive part of me stayed put and took orders. It sort of made sense. Now if I could only figure out why the sky outside was dripping purple, I would be one step closer to figuring a way out of this.
Bobo stared at the screen, pressing his little paw down every few seconds as months of emails with Saintpeter_101 went scrolling by.
"People amaze me," he mused as I carefully wrapped my foot, "he told you who he was. He told you what he would do to you if you told, but you did anyway. Why?"
"Um, I don't know Bobo, because there is no Angel of Death and cat's can't talk, maybe?"
"Maybe. He says here, that if you ever tell anyone what you know about him he will 'come to your house, hobble you,' which I assume is what has happened here, 'and throw you into the land between, which is neither death or living, just a sock hanging on a clothes line in the unfathomable infinite.'"
"I thought he was putting me on."
"How about when he says, 'this is real. I'm not putting you on. You don't know how lonely it can get being immortal, I have a hard time finding someone I can trust,' etc, etc, how about that?"
"Whatever. Now what?"
"Well, it's his realm and I don't think you can die... we have to go find him and you have to beg for forgiveness."
"He practically cut my foot off! And I have to beg forgiveness?"
Just then the walls started to shake and rattle like an earthquake. Glass began to break and plaster to crumble.
"Come on, we have to get out of here!"
Bobo lept out the bathroom window just as it collapsed in a pile of rubble. I dragged myself to the door and hopped up on my good leg to open it. The rush of blood to my foot sent my head reeling and I almost passed out again.
"Come on, mom! You can do it!" I looked out the glass panel in the door to see Bobo sitting on his hind legs waving me over. He looked so cute I wanted to wear his little face as a hat, so I reached my arm through the broken glass and opened the door from the outside, swinging my body around and hopping 10 or so feet to safety. I looked back and saw my room standing crypt-like sans the house it once was part of. It was being demolished by huge yellow trucks being operated by little girls in party dresses. One of them saw Bobo and approached with eager trepidation.
"Is he friendly," the little girl asked?
Bobo instinctively rolled onto his back, a move which seemed vulgar now that he could talk. The little girl took his cue and rubbed him to the point of purring.
"What's her name?"
"Bobo. He's a boy. Why are you and your friends destroying my house?"
"Uncle Peter told us to," Bobo was drooling now, off somewhere in kitty euphoria, the girl's words were lost on him. "And we need more stuff to test the catapult."
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