Clyde is the cat that paces. He starts at the top of the bed, near my head, and begins to walk slowly toward the foot. Once there he turns and trots to the far end. He then circles around quickly, always turning away from the bed toward the left and heads back the way he came. He paces slowly and softly at first, all you can hear is the soft thud of the pads of his feet against the hardwood floor. After a bit his pace begins to quicken and his steps become harder, you can hear the click of his nails against the floor along with the thud. Thud, click, thud, click, thud, click. Clyde paces when he is nervous. For example, whenever his guardian and one true love, my wife Jen, is in the shower he paces furiously back and forth, back and forth, until she completes her bathing and returns to the bedroom. No matter how much I try to coax and console him, he will not stop his pacing until the very moment she walks through the door. Clyde paces when he is bored. I hear him sometimes in the middle of the day while I work at the computer in the living room. Those times he paces slowly, methodically, almost without purpose it seems to me. Clyde paces when he is afraid or uncertain. Sometimes though Clyde paces for reasons that I cannot understand. Many times I will awaken in the middle of the night at 2am or 3am, or who knows when, and I will hear him, and then see him, pacing back and forth, back and forth, over and over and over again. These times his pacing strikes me as mostly protective in nature. It is as if he is watching over us, guarding us while we sleep. Our cat protector walking the perimeter, chasing away and demons or ghouls of the nite who might seek to breach the walls of the bed and potentially bring us harm. But always when I hear or see Clyde pacing it brings a tinge of sadness for it reminds of the times before he paced, and the origin of our cat Clyde’s strange, obsessive behavior.

Clyde didn’t always pace. His habit only began at the death of his housemate and best friend for life Phoenix. It was the night Jen and I returned from the vet after taking Phoenix for the last time. Clyde knew immediately something was wrong. Of course he had to know that Phoenix had been ill. He had been battling a mysterious and chronic kidney disease for months and with each passing day he grew more tired, less able to play, less the leader of the pack of cats in the house that he had been. Less of a mentor and teacher perhaps, but not less of a friend to Clyde, who loved him with a fierceness one rarely sees in humans, let alone animals. Within moments of walking through the door Clyde began to mew, very softly at first. He was looking at us, and walking around us in circles, and looking at the empty cat carrier we had brought home with us, and sniffing at everything furiously. When Phoenix did not appear he began to mew even louder, and then louder, and he ran up and down the stairs, and he ran into every room of our small apartment, and he did this again and again. Running back and forth and crying for Phoenix, looking for his best friend in a frenzy of pain and sorrow. It is impossible to forget the sounds that Clyde made that night. Only twice in my life have I heard a human being make sounds of grief so agonizing, so sorrowful, so full of pain and anguish and heartbreak, as Clyde did that night. I did not think an animal capable of feeling so much pain, let alone expressing it with such emotionally devastating force. All night Clyde mewed and cried and ran back and forth between each room looking for Phoenix, mourning for him. At some point both myself and Jen fell asleep with tears streaming down both our faces. I awoke around 3am and heard Clyde downstairs, his movements had slowed considerably and his terrible mewing had reduced to pitiable chirps. He was now simply pacing back and forth, his footfalls plodding and slow and tired. He must have fallen asleep at some point because they next day we found him, curled up into a ball inside the empty cat carrier we had brought home from the vet, Phoenix’s cat carrier. That site filled me with a sorrow so great that just the memory of it now opened a floodgate of tears from my eyes which stream down my face as I write these very words.

From that night until the present day Clyde has paced. He is much older now, a mostly happy, if obsessive-compulsive cat. The musculature around his thighs and calves disproportionately large from years of pacing for hours on end. I believe he still thinks of Phoenix when he paces, and I think that Clyde believes that if he just keeps pacing, eventually Phoenix will return, or he will find him somewhere. Perhaps I don’t give Clyde enough credit. He must know Phoenix is gone forever, at least from this world. And maybe that’s one of the differences between ourselves and our feline friends. This world is our only world, but I am not so sure about them.

Author’s postscript: Clyde is no longer in this world having died two months ago. I miss him dearly and sometimes think I hear him pacing around the bed at night exactly as he did when he was alive. Hopefully he has reunited with his best friend Phoenix and I imagine them snuggling and playing together like they did long ago.