It was late in the house, and the cat had not let up in hours. rswfire had the camera in one hand and Oliver everywhere else — at his ankles, on his arm, at the edge of whatever he was trying to do next. He started recording anyway, narrating into the lens the way a person narrates to someone who already knows the story: this is Oliver, and he is in a mood today. The address was direct, continuous, aimed at the cat rather than the audience. Oliver was the subject and the interlocutor both.
The camera changed things, briefly. Almost the moment it came on, Oliver went still — the sudden performance of innocence that rswfire clocked out loud, calling it what it was: you see the camera and you're like, nah, I'm a good boy, I'm a good boy. Not really. His hand was already stinging from the small claw marks accumulated over the last hour. He said so plainly, the way he said everything else, registering the physical fact and moving on. The truce lasted seconds. Then the biting resumed, and the following, and the refusal to concede any square foot of carpet between them.
In the middle of it, he turned the camera toward the recliner. It was new, oversized, bought for the outside of the RV — a chair for being out and about, chosen deliberately even though it ran a little large for what was coming. Oliver had already claimed it, had been sitting in it quite a lot. rswfire noted that, and in the same breath noted the leather couch, which he did not expect to survive this cat. The two pieces of furniture sorted themselves in real time into what transfers and what does not. He was doing inventory with a cat attached to his forearm.
That was the through-line of the whole recording. Every behavior Oliver produced — the biting, the pursuit from room to room, the flop and drag across the carpet that rswfire remembered from the very first day he got him — got read twice: once as the thing happening now, and once as a projection into a fixed-volume space he had already decided to move into. Can you imagine this cat in a little camper. I won't be able to get away from him at all. He said it as observation, not complaint. The measurement was the point. He was sizing a known variable against a smaller room and getting an honest number back.
He tried, several times, to leave. Do you mind if I go do something without you. All right, I'm out of here. Each exit announced, each one answered immediately by Oliver reappearing in frame, matching whatever pace rswfire set. He laughed at it every time. Oh my God, this happens all the time. Somewhere in there he mentioned that Oliver had only recently started taking naps — that it took roughly six years for him to act like a normal cat about rest — and then, when Oliver settled for a moment, asked whether he'd woken him.
The last stretch was negotiation with no expectation of compliance. He asked for bedtime. He asked for the mouth to stay closed, for nothing to be bitten or scratched, for a good boy. He got bitten once more — ow, that hurt, Oliver, you're mean — and then declared his departure again, still filming, still narrating. The recording closed on the same figure it opened with: a man with a sore hand, an oversized chair bound for the outside of an RV, a couch that wouldn't make it, and a cat who would. You are so much work, he said, and then, without any change in tone, that he truly could not imagine what it was going to be like with him in a camper. Both statements were affectionate. Neither one was a reconsideration.