Here Kitty Kitty

Will fights the urge to squint against the sun. it’s too bright and too dusty, but there are cameras around, and he needs to look completely at ease. He is completely at ease; he reminds himself; after all, this is his kingdom.

He realizes he should probably start talking, and then realizes he already is talking, and tunes back in to try to figure out what he’s saying.

“...not gonna change the way I dress,” his mouth is rambling. “I refuse to wear a suit! I’m a gay, gun-totin’ cowboy...” he looks around, wondering what he’s going to say next. His head aches. “I’m in a cage with twenty-two tigers!” he shouts, earning an exasperated look from Buster, who’s reclining with her enormous paws draped over the wood of the play structure Will had built with his own hands. “And there ain’t nobody, especially not that bitch Hannibal Lecter, who’s gonna take my way of life away from me!”

There. That’s a strong ending. But of course, there’s no end to the performance, not when you’re filming a reality show and running for president and taking care of an enormous pack of tigers all at once.

He steps forward towards the crews, carefully avoiding Winston’s tail. she’s playing with some sort of stuffed toy that Will doesn’t remember buying for her. Someone else must have brought it in. A part of him wants to just lie down in the grass and bury his face in her fur. He remembers, vaguely, spending entire days playing with the pack, feeling completely at ease. Tigers don’t expect anything from you but food, and they have no sticky, messy human feelings to press in on your consciousness like a physical weight.

But he’s surrounded by camera crews and employees and husbands, and their brains are trying to permeate the boundaries of his own like invading armies, and this is no time to lie down with tigers. Because if there’s one thing Will has learned, it’s that the only way to not allow his own self to be annihilated by the world is to go on the offensive. He can fight them off by being louder, faster, better, larger-than-life, his own ego so huge and rock-solid that nobody else’s can affect him.

He runs his thumb of over the edge of the gun on his hip. One of Rick’s cameras is still on him, and his mind is still on Hannibal. His mind seems to always be on Hanibal, these days. He’d thought that shooting an effigy of her on the show the other night would mean he could not think about her for a little while, but now he just has a blowup doll with a mangled face and even more room for her in his mind than before.

“I tell you,” his mouth is motoring, “If Hannibal Lecter sets one foot on this zoo, I’m gonna put a cap in her ass.” He points the gun at the cameraman, just to watch him flinch. He turns away to take an aspirin, hoping none of the lenses are at the right angle to catch the movement.

He imagines it for a moment: shooting her somewhere painful, watching her bleed out on the ground. No, he thinks suddenly. That wouldn’t do. It sounds better on TV to say that he’ll shoot her; but privately, Will thinks, he’d rather kill her with his hands.

***

“Hello, all you cool cats and kittens,” Hannibal intones soothingly.

Her foot catches on the bottom of the bicycle pedal and she angles her phone downwards for a moment to catch her slight struggle getting on: humanizing, as if all this were merely a whim. As if she has no idea what she’s doing by accidentally showing the landmarks of the bike trail to the sanctuary.

She gets the bicycle going, pulling the camera away from her face a little so she can see the trail and the video at the same time. “This is Hannibal, from Big Cat Rescue.”

She’s rehearsed this video, just as she’s rehearsed all the others. Facial expressions that others find charming and guileless require a warm-up, just as playing the harpsichord requires a warm-up; and like the harpsichord, once she’s remembered the shape of them, she finds the performance pleasant.

To be able to wrap an audience around your finger is a heady sensation; one that she is carefully cultivating in ever higher-pitched levels of desperation in Will Exotic. She’d found the snakes that he sent in her mailbox the previous morning. They’re living in a cage on her desk at the moment; a particularly charming memento mori. They will comfort her when he’s in jail, and she no longer has the daily entertainment of his television show and rapidly disintegrating mind.

She shows almost the entirety of the bike trail in the video, narrating the daily lives of a few of the cats and dropping a few choice pieces about Will. Her followers will do the rest.

She arrives at the sanctuary to open it for business, checking her suit in the mirror in her office: multiple cat prints, clashing in such a way as to confuse the eye and make her calm demeanour as intimidating as possible in contrast. There’s a journalist coming later in the afternoon, and she suspects he’s raring to ask her about Don. The thought puts her in a good mood as she starts the cats’ breakfast rounds.

She watches them eat, teeth ripping into chunks of flesh. She wonders if Will, will all of his certainty that she had killed her husband, truly believes that she’d fed him to the tigers.

She hopes not. He’s better than that. Allow the journalists and the great unwashed to think she fed Don to the cats; it’s a ridiculous notion. She and Will both know that such a meal would be wasted on them.