Kyubey's cage

It is not only that the day started before dawn but that I slept so little. This is never the way to make a trip whose purpose seems so small.

Amber's hamster Pico died months ago and she immediately wanted a new one, but understood it was respectful not to get one until her period of mourning was over. She needed first to get his urn and set up a tiny shelf to serve as a shrine to him, none of which is hyperbole.

Also, she wanted to completely refurbish and repaint Pico's cage so that it could belong to some new animal. Amber decorated the cage, including a popsicle stick porch and an Adirondack chair, because she does not understand half measures. She posted pictures of the new cage, under a rodent-sized banner reading "Welcome Home!" and was briefly a social media darling, more so when I reposted it and fondly called her insane.

A normal person wanting a hamster would go to the nearest pet store and pick the least sickly example of the species. Amber is not a normal person by a good margin, nor would I want this, so she found one of the few ethical breeders in the state that specializes in rodents. I do not know if this is a true statement, that there wasn't someone closer. Amber, when decisive, is immutable.

The breeder is in Long Island, a good three hours from our home each way. I implied that I would be perfectly content with a nearer hamster that required less driving. Amber just shook her head.

Sane people make hamster chairs

The first brood didn't take. "She wasn't a good mother," Amber related, which I took to mean that she ate her babies. "She's been retired." Amber did clarify that "retirement" just meant that she wouldn't be used again for breeding and not that she was executed, gangland style.

She waited for the next brood, which arrived in December. It would take two months before they would be ready for adoption. Amber remained in talks with the breeder the whole time. I doubted the breeder needed this periodic check-in, but Amber didn't want to seem ambivalent.

Last Saturday, she told me to stalk the woman's website and, precisely at 9am, the hamsters would be posted. "I want the cream-colored female," she said, "unless you think the banded male is cuter."

"No," I replied, "you want the cream-colored female. I know this game."

9am rolled around. I refreshed. I emailed the woman. The woman took under a minute to reply. I put down a deposit. Our hamster would be held in reserve. If we did not pick it up on the appointed day, she would begin charging us for the hamster's room and board.

Then came today, Saturday, when we were to drive to pick this hamster up. I would have rather done something romantic, since Amber is working on Valentine's Day. She pronounced this my present to her, one of those relational trump cards it is hard to contest.

We were fifteen minutes into the journey before she told me to check her email again, which is just asking for trouble. It is like saying, "Well, at least nothing else can go wrong!" The woman insisted that we have in hand two copies of the contract and a list of rules, which did seem like the sort of thing that could have been sent when I gave her the deposit. Also, though I had paid a deposit, she would like all the money in cash now. Amber's decision is that we should detour around an hour to her college, there to use their free printing. With more sleep under my belt, this would not have been a cause for my indignation. I might even have pointed out that the amount of gas we would use on this detour more than counteracted what she would save with her free printing of five pages.

There are few reasons for a trip of this length, but a hamster is not among them. One needs a certain weight of pet to make this worthwhile, a puppy or particularly hefty cat. This hamster falls well below.

We arrive to a tiny, suburban house an hour after we were supposed to, certainly two hours after this would have been sensible. The woman is noticeably younger than the bleach-haired, cigarette-stained, middle-aged woman I had been picturing. She is a few years out of college, if that.

"Where did you come from?" she asks before she will allow us entrance.

"Upstate," Amber says. "Red Hook."

"Then you don't have to take off your shoes."

I smirk at this apparent blessing. We are not city people. We are not dirty.

In the kitchen people - I think her parents - are eating and talking, ignoring the deal about to go down.

She leads us into a room that could have been a bedroom, sans the bed. We are directed to use hand sanitizer. All of this was spelled out on her list of rules, along with places to get ice cream in the area. Even upstate people have dirty hands. I had recently been researching the protocol of brothels for a book. Rubbing my hands with Purell, I am reminded of them suddenly.

She motions to a storage box, the front cut off and replaced with grating.

"She's in there."

Named for an anime demon

I get on my knees with my camera in hopes of taking a picture through the mesh. Her antecedent Pico was skittish for weeks after we bought him, until he realized we liked him and would continue to provide him seeds. The breeder tells me she is shy, but the hamster comes right to the mesh to check me out, until my camera clicks. The picture is not one worth saving.

The breeder scoops the hamster from the cage that Amber could hold her. Again, a tamer hamster than expected, though the breeder acts borderline terrified. When the breeder hands me the hamster, the little tan fuzzball immediately cuddles into my chest and chews contemplatively on the edge of my shirt.

We leave with the hamster in a plastic cage, one in which she will be until the end of this journey before she meets her relative paradise.

We park outside a Burger King so we can eat the deli sandwiches I bought. Amber coos to the hamster. I focus on the drive ahead and emptying my bladder. The bathroom inside the Burger King could have been a crime scene for a golden shower enthusiast. I clean it as best I can before we continue.

The lack of sleep weakens my immune system such that I begin to be fluish early into the trip home. My knees ache and I think better of mentioning it, because Amber would tell me she would take over and, having driven down, I do not want this for her. Let me ache.

When we return home and put the hamster in the cage, she chews on her wheel - Pico's wheel, scoured and sterilized - then takes to running in it. She does not sit in the Adirondack chair, though I assume she will chew through it when she does figure out it is there. She is a good addition to the lab rats, lab mice, hermit crabs, betta fish, and two cats.

It is strange to see a hamster in that cage again, even if it has been repainted and rewired. Amber says our family is complete.

She feels a way I don't about animals. Of the four lab mice she rescued when she was at vet camp, two remain. One is a healthy, seemingly happy, keen to bite. I no longer take out her of her cage. The other is a creature, hunched back, patchy furred, lame in her back legs, whom Amber took to the vet because there was no way she should still be alive. Amber showed me the mouse. She does most of the caring for our pets, aside from my occasional feeding of the cats when she is apt to be home too late. It would be easy for me not to see the state of something small and hidden in a mouse cage. I gently asked if she was going to euthanize the mouse at the vet's office or if this was something we could do at home. She said she was going to do a wellness check at the vet and maybe pay to have her euthanized depending on the result, but this seemed like a waste of resources. I contemplated how I could painlessly end this creature's blighted life, but Amber wouldn't hear of it. The mouse eats, and Amber would let her remain.

Once the hamster is settling, Amber decides our cat, who has feline leukemia, might be sick. I don't think much of it at first because I am sick, and I am sure he will be fine. Then I understand the implication that this could spell the end of his life. When she comes out of the shower half an hour later, I am openly bawling. I worry about my little friend, this creature allows me to carry him around in my arms and dance with him, who gives me kisses. I know he is sick, but it is in a vague sense, a "could be" sick and not a "oh gods, is it that time?" sick. I put off mourning for him as long as I can, having seen the beginning of it when told his diagnosis, deciding to love him as much as I can while I could. My cats now are the two animals whom I feel I have loved the most and whose loss would wreck a part of me. They are, more so than many people I know, my friends - a statement I am sure I would have found pathetic if said by someone else. They are consistent and caring. When I talk to him in absence of Amber - and I do talk to them - they listen and seem compassionate, offering purrs instead of unsolicited advice.

Kyubey captured

I understand why Amber loves animals, as they are often better people than people manage to be. They are for the most part innocents who need her, and who will not grow up to disappoint her. They are content in their roles. They are not seeking to betray her in a fashion less than openly, and she had bite-proof gloves when dealing with our lab rats.

We added another girl to our menagerie, one for whom I did not feel a need, but Amber wanted a hamster in a concrete fashion. Most of our other animals were rescued in one way or other. The hamster, whom she quickly decides is named Kyubey, is a choice.

I would be content without pets, though I love them. If they were like my parents' pets, often vicious to me but otherwise not worth the effort, I would have no trouble feeling disconnected. Instead, they tend toward fondness.

Most everything else in this house is a rescue. Even the hermit crabs, whom Amber intentionally purchased, were manumitted, bought away from a fate of being tossed into some kid's garbage can when they were no longer fed out of boredom. The cats either slept on our porch for a year before allowing himself to be an indoor cat or gamboled about outside and charmed the erstwhile outdoor cat enough that we adopted him. If we had not adopted these things, they would likely be dead. Even if I didn't want them, they needed us to survive. Without us, our kitten would have died from an infection. Without us, the lab animals would have been euthanized before Amber left campus. Any time they have spent with us counts as their afterlife. They might have otherwise been dead and are not. I prefer that the animals need us, as it justifies bringing them into the house. They are a part of this family because they would have otherwise ceased to exist. When they one day die, I can think, "Oh, what a good few extra years you had with us. I'm glad we could share them." Their continued existence is a gift I (almost entirely Amber) am giving them, and I can appreciate them for that.

The hamster contradicts this. Someone would have come along and bought her. She is a sweet hamster, but she didn't need us. In this way, the hamster is more a pet than the others because she was acquired through great effort for this purpose. She was saved from nothing. Amber created for her a great home and we will treat her splendidly, but she doesn't owe anything to us.

Amber does not always understand that I adore this about her. One of our rescued rats died days after Kyubey entered our home. I discovered him when wanting to feed him a chicken thighbone and found him upside down, his ruby eyes open. I poked him with the bone to be sure, then used paper towels to put him in a gallon Ziploc, which I put in the crisper. Amber would want to see him.

I was astounded by the honor and devotion she gave to necropsying the rat, because we had another and she needed to know he would be safe, that he wouldn't contract something terminal.

She diagnoses a maybe-sarcoma behind the liver and strangely water testicles, likely not contractible. It was a lab rat and they are not made to be long for the world.

To me, a lab rat died, two years after the veterinary college would have had that be so. I would have interred it to the earth on the edge of the woods, maybe recited a poem as to the goodness of rats, and had that be that.

Amber gives herself to them in life and, when needed, does something necessary and hard once they die. She takes their deaths as a personal failing, that she did something wrong and not that lab rats live around two years. These years could have been miserable or could not have existed at all without her. She never loved the rats, because they were not bred to love or be loved. They were not like Pico, or as sensibly mercenary as the cats in understanding that affection would result in treats. Anything she gave them - vast cages and pricy grains - is beyond what they would have otherwise had.

Soon in Xenology: Social Justice Wiccans. No Such Convention. Ken.

last watched: American Gods
reading: Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
listening: Damien Rice