Banzai Suite, Part 2:
Too Quiet

5 August 2001—We always knew when Banzai was nearby.

He was a championship purrer. Though he never liked to be picked up (I suspect somehow that he was afraid of heights), he loved to cuddle himself up with people. Well, women, to be more precise. The purring would begin instantly, more motorboat than feline.

And he was a talker. As a kitten he talked endlessly, sweet conversational sounds. He spoke to everyone. He announced himself as he entered rooms. He made happy sounds almost all the time. (A notable exception: one time, when he was very young, Banzai jumped up onto a stool in the kitchen to watch me wash the dishes. Like the moronic teenager that I was, I put a drop of dishwashing liquid on the back of his neck. I have no idea why I did such an idiotic thing — not out of malice but sheer stupidity. In a minute he was in a complete lather, both literally and figuratively. Banzai made extremely unhappy sounds during his first bath, right there in the kitchen sink.)

When we got our first microwave, the Nukifier II, the beep the machine made when it was finished sounded so much like Banzai that we got out the label maker and produced a red plastic strip with raised white letters and stuck it to the machine. It was now the Banzai II.

When he came to live with me again in 1994, he still talked a lot. His vocabulary was down to one basic sound, though it was still cute: ra-rao. The second syllable sometimes got stretched out depending on his mood. We used to think it sounded either like “right nowww” or “not nowww.” Most of the time it was a friendly noise.

In his last years, his tone became decidedly sharp: dinner was no longer requested but demanded, the minute any one of us came home at the end of the day. And if one person came home before the other, fed him and then went out again, he usually tried to fool the later-arriving housemate into thinking that he hadn’t yet been fed. (He even succeeded a couple of times.)

The last year he turned even more ornery. Unable to eat anything but a strict low-protein diet, he was no longer obliged when he begged for a piece of whatever someone was cooking. As a result he became more vocal and demanding. We nicknamed him Señor Crankypants.

And yet, once he was sated and there were no longer smells of any other food that he wanted, he would climb into someone’s lap, or burrow under someone’s sheets, and he would start to purr. It was a sad sign that in his final weeks he stopped almost all of his vocalizations, but the purr remained: even receiving fluids nightly through a needle, he still purred as I stroked his head.

When the vet came over and gave him his final sedative, the purring wound down slowly until it faded out completely.

The house has been too quiet ever since.