The Ballad of Soapy

Well, friends, after two years of masking, various variants (hah!), vaccines, boosters, and social distancing, I’ve finally caught COVID. That’s right, I’m coming to you live from quarantine in my apartment. I’m very lucky—since I’m vaccinated and it’s probably Omicron, the symptoms have been super manageable. But I’m not here today to talk to you about COVID.

I’m here to talk to you about the cat in my wall.

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Two weekends ago, I started noticing meowing and scratching in my bathroom. Christmas had just come and gone, and I had only just arrived back in Texas a few days before, so I didn’t think much of it at the time. Maybe the family in the neighboring apartment had gotten a cat for Christmas? More power to them. But after a few days I started noticing that the meowing was high-pitched and sounding less cat-like than usual. Could I be sure that this was a cat at all? My YouTube queries from that day suggested that I thought this might be a squirrel or a raccoon.

That Monday, I talked to my apartment-mate about the animal in the wall, and she said that cats had gotten stuck in there before, so I immediately called the management office. They assured me that this had happened before and that they would send maintenance to take care of the problem. This should have been enough, to be honest. There was no need to meddle.

But I did meddle. Because I am an animal lover, an Enneagram 2, and an empath. In my entire career as a licensed driver, I have hit one rabbit on my way to a bachelorette weekend, and I was wracked with guilt for at least six hours. You can’t just slap a cat in my bathroom wall and expect me to do nothing.

Later that night, hearing the cat cry and cry, I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed the tool kit, plunked myself in my bathroom, and started unscrewing everything in sight to see if I could catch a glimpse of the cat. My flashlight was too big, but thank God for low-quality booklights given as summer reading prizes. As it turned out, there was not a cat behind my bathroom wall.

There was a kitten.

A very small black kitten, meowing at the top of his tiny voice, with one green eye wide and staring at me and his other eye streaming discharge. My new mission in life was to get the kitten out of my apartment wall.

Of course something like this would happen to me. And of course my immediate response was this:

Listen. Google told me that cats can eat salad greens. It’s fine.

The next morning, I called the front office again to let them know that there was a baby cat stuck behind the wall, and they assured me that maintenance was coming. Maintenance didn’t show up until the following day, and when they did, they said that they couldn’t cut through the tile in my bathroom wall and would need to cut a hole in the adjacent apartment. This had happened to other cats twice in the past year. And those cats had died. Against my better judgment, I named the kitten Soapy, definitely because that’s the name of the cat in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and definitely not because he was stuck behind my tub. Where soap is.

The family in the apartment adjacent to mine was travelling, and maintenance couldn’t just cut a hole in the wall without their permission. So they cut a hole in my closet instead and, apparently, proceeded to spend two hours sitting on the floor of my closet meowing.

Feel free to pause and imagine this. The dedication. The mental image this produces. Truly second to none.

For those of you tracking, it was now Friday, and I had a friend from college coming to visit me that weekend—no time to rescue little Soapy, but maintenance came at least twice that weekend, with no luck. After my friend left, the rest of the week passed by, with the mews getting weaker and weaker. Twitter was giving excellent advice, and I tried all of it—tuna, cat food, recordings of purring cats. I glimpsed Soapy through the hole in my closet that maintenance had made, but he never got close enough to grab.

I woke up on Thursday, 1/19, feeling pretty crummy. I had bought a COVID self-test off of Amazon, and I ended up testing positive, so I holed up in my room. I had opened up the hole in my closet, as I did every day, so Soapy was able to hear me chatting and existing in my room a lot more than usual. I checked on him every few hours, cooing and meowing and offering chicken broth. By the end of the day, he was closer than he had ever been before, and I could see that his nose was crusty and his eyes were gummed shut. Poor baby wasn’t doing well.

The next morning, when I checked on Soapy, he was sitting right next to the hole in my closet, but not at an angle where I could grab him. I heated up the chicken broth and went about my day, hoping he’d come out on his own. Maintenance started cutting through the wall in a different apartment, trying to reach him, but Soapy got spooked, ran right past my outstretched hands, and huddled out of my grasp.

This is going to sound so dramatic, but all hope felt lost in that moment. I had spent almost two weeks trying to get this kitten out of the wall, and I had been so close. He was fading quickly, that much I knew.

But I grew up watching every dog movie with an evil dogcatcher antagonist known to humankind. I had a basic knowledge of animal-catching tools that might be used. So, as someone with an imagination and a literal Master’s degree, I decided that the best thing to do was tie a bandanna in a loop to the end of a broom and try to lasso this kitten.

Soapy did not like this plan.

But he did start batting at the bandanna when I started pulling it back towards me in despair. Instead of using the bandanna to snatch the kitty, I used it as a lure instead, showing Soapy how to get out. Finally, after two weeks, Soapy came to me of his own accord. I scooped him up, wrapped him in a dishtowel, and immediately let everyone on Twitter know the glorious news:

(This moment made me think about naming him Dobby.)

Now, what to do with a dehydrated, hungry, sick kitty when one has a positive COVID test result? Lucky for me I have local friends who were as invested in the Soapy saga as I was. One of these friends came and picked baby Soapy up in a kennel and brought him to a local animal hospital. They said he was super dehydrated, that he was definitely a male cat, and that he was probably between 3 and 4 weeks old. Which, yes, means, that Soapy spent half his life in my apartment wall. Brave kitty.

For those of you wondering, no, I did not keep Soapy. I cannot afford a pet right now, and I’m about to make a bunch of life transitions (again), which means that I need to just take care of lil ole me for right now.

And that’s how I had the most productive quarantine ever.

I know that this story has a really happy ending. But in all honesty, living through something like this is really scary. I spent so many nights sobbing that I couldn’t just tear the wall of my apartment down, reading through the prayer “For the Loss of a Living Thing” from Douglas McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy. Being powerless to do much, doing whatever I could, and knowing that it could potentially not be enough hummed at the back of my mind all the time. I had to convince Soapy to trust me, that the person at the other end of the hole was okay. I don’t want to moralize this story too much; it’s mostly just for fun, but I do want to say something quick about trust.

If I had tried to snatch Soapy too quickly, he would have just run away and been even more afraid. Maintenance actually tried this, and I think that’s part of the reason he continued to be skittish for so long. Cats have built-in boundaries—claws and teeth, but Soapy was also just a baby, and I knew that I would have to gain his trust to get him out. He didn’t know really anything about the world; he was a small, vulnerable animal doing the best he could to figure out what to do. And ultimately, he decided that coming to me was better than freezing and starving in my wall. But I had to prove to him that I was trustworthy. And I think people are like this too. There’s trust that goes into building relationships, unspoken trust that we never acknowledge. I’ve been meeting so many new people since I moved. And building that new intimacy, stepping out and showing up and asking that person for coffee, feels so vulnerable, like crawling on my belly along a corridor of sheetrock towards a stranger.

So what Soapy has taught me (besides that cats are not so bad) is that I should never take that trust for granted. I should be gentle and patient with myself when it’s hard to trust or build new relationships. I should be gentle with others when they don’t click with me as quickly as I want them to. Life is hard, and the world is often cruel. I hope we celebrate the moments when that trust we put in others actually amounts to something. I hope we keep trying.

I hope we’re all brave like little Soapy.