The cat walked by while he was trying to have a shit. It sat in the hall outside the bathroom and looked at him in a way that seemed quite human and made him feel ashamed and vulnerable.
“Am I on stage here?” he asked and it didn’t answer. It just went on looking at him with a detached air of disgust.
“I don’t watch you when you’re crapping,” he said and this was an out and out lie. She was a fastidious cat and her excretory rituals fascinated him. She had an elaborate dance she did around her litter box – jumping in then out and testing every corner to make certain the litter was clean. It sometimes took a half an hour. That cat had a square dance ballet, while he just read the idiot gossip magazines his wife left in the bathroom for that very purpose. They were all about the scandals of this actor and that actress and illustrated with absurdly ugly photos of absurdly beautiful people. The mucking up of filth on celebrities was, he thought, some sort of elaborate cultural ritual not unlike the litter dance of his cat.
His bowels opened finally. A great rush of last night’s Indian food roared into the bowl. The cat trotted off startled by the sound, or revolted by the smell. He was going to be there for a while, reading the dirt on Hollywood.
He imagined a time in the future when every magazine would be part of a sort of two way t.v. cell phone device and while you were reading about the hollywood actors, they could be looking at you having a dump and you could talk to them:
“Angelina, you should be ashamed of yourself,” You’d say.
“And you should never eat Indian food,” she’d say back to you and most likely the whole thing would end there, because no matter what marriage she’d ruined, or drug she’d taken, or movie she’d screwed up, she would never be as ashamed as you were for shitting Indian in front of her.
“Imagine if you could only read the dirt, while making dirt,” he thought. Then he figured the culture would simply adjust and evacuation would become highly eroticized and ceremonial and people would dress up for the occasion like they were going to the theater and the toilet would become even more elaborate than the newest Japanese models. They would become self contained laboratories and exchange all sorts of technical, biochemical information over the network.
“Oh your cholesterol is good,” Angelina would say. “And you ate figs?!” she’d giggle in glee.
“Maybe we wouldn’t be like cats, but like dogs and the whole society would move to a culture of high tech ass sniffing,” he thought.
The cat came back to check up on him.
“You don’t like dogs,” he said and there was another intestinal contraction and another splash, but this time the cat was unmoved. She lay down on the bath mat by the tub to be comfortable.
“You see?,” he said to the cat. “You can get used to anything… anything except Indian food.”