Like Cats & Dogs

When hunger strikes in the mind, the ticking clock of the fatal injection is pricked into motion. The body is offered as a self-sacrificial offering to keep the brain alive. It can only withstand so much deprivation, before all cogs become infected with disease. All the mind can do is rally the body with ever-depleting resources, to instil just enough promise to maintain the flow of vital energies that power its desperate schemes and guarantees, even if they are but an imaginary carrot dangled mesmerisingly, torturously before its own eyes.

And slowly, finally, both body and brain fall. This is how a starved society also falls. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Eyes that are tired and fallible. Eyes that are scarred yet keen. Eyes that are hazel, soft brown in certain lights. Eyes that you will have to trust as your own. I can understand why you wouldn’t. This short life has taught me that I cannot readily trust anyone. I have been taken into confidences and secrets, and there is not a doctor skilled or patient enough to heal the wounds sustained. I have endured a world that claims in places to be objective, but the only objective fact is that there is no such thing as objectivity. There is only subjectivity. You subject me to yours, and now I subject you to mine.

Maybe there is one objectivity – photographs. They tell the camera’s story. Truths that simply exist, exposed by the flash of stilled time. The only objectivity I may ever know is inside a heart-shaped locket, about 5cm by 4cm, that I’ve had as long as I can remember. I look at it every night, and I still don’t know what it is telling me, what truth is ensnared in that shiny filmic cage, crumpled under countless attempts to escape within. I have never managed to flee this world, never yet devised relief from lies, from human diseases.

My parents would read out loud when there were books to escape into, and I remember so clearly the words of one particular, forgotten author.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still function.”

I have held onto this most honest solidification of the human experience. We are gifted, cursed with the ability to process life. How much simpler if we could just follow nature’s script, read lines written according to the imperative to sustain the race. Like a cat or a dog. They do not question why, they just do. And we became so like them. We were like cats and dogs, and the twisted tussle for dominance and survival is this story. The victor tells the tales of history, and you’ll just have to trust that I’m one of the good guys.

We were at a far corner of the killing fields, the barren stretch of desertified land outside of the compound, spanning several kilometres in all directions, surrounded by wild, dark forest. The trees had been burned in the fires of yesterday, man-made and meteorological, along with all books, to keep that strange mutant society crawling forward, if it moved at all.

I don’t know what the year was. I remember that I was born in 2033. At that time I can’t have been any older than 25, or any younger than 19, so it was somewhere in the 2050s. I believed in it all then, in our shared fantasy. I toiled in the produce pens, to eke something out of the scraps of natural life that were left to be scavenged for. I bowed to the hierarchal system, that began as opportunistic improvisation and morphed like mould into horrific cacotopia. I jeered at those who tried to escape, or collapsed through exhaustion, strung up like Christlike figures on crude metallic crosses, and left to be picked at by the Rats.

Was there another choice? Blind acceptance or death, those were the options catered for. I could’ve mounted the seemingly impossible – I could’ve escaped. But what then? I knew nothing of the world outside the compound. Were the stories to be believed? Rebels resisting the tyranny in an ever dwindling wilderness, working to reclaim natural stability from the abyss of ecological collapse. Or was that just a desperate dream of our own design, and they were just what the Cats told us they were – anarchic, cannibalistic marauders intent on profiting from our hard work. That’s why they called them Rats. Anyone living outside the compound was a Rat. Raticalisation was the word used for any idea or action contradicting what was ordained by the system. They were hoarding food out there in the forests – our food! They were stealing from the compound at night – profiting off of our work! It was they the Cats would leave you for if you tried to leave the compound. It was they who would emerge in packs from the forest, faces covered, to brutally, silently eat you alive.

There was an older man in my section who claimed my parents had been Rats. It didn’t seem an insult, though I took it as one when I found myself behind him, queuing for our daily ‘meal’. “Your parents didn’t die from work exhaustion,” he mouthed almost soundlessly, gazing towards me as if to look at the sunset. “They were Rats. I know you will do for us what they couldn’t.” And then he was gone, to collect his bowl, and I didn’t see him again. Hunger does strange things to people, even more so desperation. Maybe he said that so I might find him, and, with the promise of more information, offer him something in return. I shudder to think what that might’ve been, but he never sought me out again, so whatever the motive, it can’t have been urgent.

“Jem! Eyes on the ground, back to work!”

I turned in fright. The Good Boy was staring at me angrily. He slammed his stick onto the ground beside me, and then moved along the line of workers, all crouched low, eyes firmly rooted earthwards. I know he held something approaching trust, because of the secret I concealed. I had found him copping with a worker Dog in a storage closet, whilst cleaning up late in the officers’ quarters. Good Boys and Good Girls, GBs or GGs, weren’t supposed to mix with worker Dogs. That was against the hierarchy rules, a flagrant insult to the logic of the system.

If you wanted to become a Cat, you had to exhibit leadership, the kind of leadership that cooly strides over another dead body on the path to victory. Any of the Dogs, me among them, working to sustain the compound, could become a Cat. But Good Boys and Good Girls couldn’t. They were merely useful for maintaining order. They were obedient, diligent, able to perform whatever cruel trick their leaders instructed, without question. Consequently, they simply lacked the kind of leadership that would be of merit to a Cat. They were of value, without threat. They would keep chasing that carrot, though it was kept mercilessly out-of-reach. They enjoyed the power, the sense of usefulness.

The system worked. Lopsidedly it worked, like all systems. You pursued the luxuriant mirage of freedom projected from above, trying not to perish through exhaustion, falling foul of the system or going mad. One, perhaps all three, befell one of our section that day.

“Why have you stopped?” cried the GB, striding gingerly over to a break in the line, where half a dozen Dogs were clutched around a figure hunched on the ground.

“He just fell backwards,” one of the Dogs blurted out, “and started rocking.”

The GB hunched slightly, refusing to crouch down to the level of the others. He saw a young man, aged by hunger, increasingly pointless labour and volatile weather, no longer able to contain the putrified thoughts that spewed without sense from him.

“Arghahahaha….JUniPER! Sa-rah! Rah-rah-rah! Mmm-mm-mysteRY! Got-ta-ta-ta-ta cat, ugh…cat-TA-ta! Cat! AhahaHAha…”

The other Dogs looked up at the GB. He smirked stiffly to conceal his horror.

“Leave him,” he barked, “Anyone who is fit to work, works! You know what happens otherwise.”

All hands returned heavily to their labour. With no-one to support him, the poor Dog fell backwards in a cacophonous heap. His legs and arms became limp, and he writhed as if pinned to the ground by an enormous weight. 10-15 minutes passed, the section working in deathly silence. The sun began to power down. We’d return to the compound soon. The babbled cries continued. The GB knew that he would not stop. The concentration of his workers was disturbed. I saw his stick tap harder and harder onto the ground. I felt sure he was going to hit someone. He was permitted, and wouldn’t be held accountable out here even if he wasn’t. He came to a halt at the head of the line.

“I need you, you and you – pick that dog up, take him back to the compound immediately! I’ll be sure you get a little something when that wretch is strung up. The rest of you keep working. You, Jem!”

He pointed at me, and motioned to come beside him. I hurried over, and he took me aside.

“I need you to go into the forest. I’ve been assured that a crop, probably left carelessly by thieving Rats, was sighted in this area. You’ll need someone with you for protection, and you’ll need to be quick.”

He looked back at the workers, all trying to conceal their distressed glances towards us. These instructions were highly irregular, and his words barely bridged the short distance between us.

“Take Gale. You two go through into the forest edge immediately, collect what you can find, and come straight back here. Understood?”

I nodded readily. “Yes sir!”.

His desolate eyes stared at me, and I could sense both desperation and gratitude in there.

“Go,” he said, “you’ll be rewarded for what you bring back.”

I know now, no longer unquestioningly aligned to the system, that he was improvising his way out of danger. There were no crops. Duty and fear encouraged me to believe otherwise, despite a vague sense of peculiarity. No such chance treasure had ever been found. He was reducing the weight on his shoulders, terrified of further upheaval or dissent, perhaps trusting in the murky mystery of the forest to deliver the unexpected. Meanwhile, the Cats sat in comfort, hoarding whatever food there was to keep themselves overweight, symbolising their superiority. All they needed was the power of thought to keep us locked into this insidious arrangement. They knew there was little outside the compound to harvest. But reason is no friend of power. If you convince the citizens they are Sisyphus, that the work is never quite good enough, that the perceived mountain peak is just another outcrop, they will senselessly keep climbing and climbing. That was us. We were the lean masses, the body of the system, and they the keen brain drawing all the sustenance upwards, to maintain dominance long enough to devise an exit strategy. But there didn’t seem to be one, so the system rattled blindly onwards.

The GB was sending me and Gale into the realm of the heretic, the usurper, the outcast. He likely told the rest of the group we were guarding against any Rats who might’ve been attracted by the noise. On our return, maybe we’d all be rewarded with a few extra scraps. A Good Boy couldn’t be seen to enable raticalisation. No harm to buy a few loyal worker Dogs for himself either. But there would be no such reward for Gale or I. We were being sent on a fool’s errand.

Emboldened by dutiful fear, I took Gail’s hand, and strode across the perimeter, out of the fading light of the only world I’d ever known, and into the domain of the Rat.