I got Gauge about four years ago from a coworker’s litter, back before Marcus, back when it was just me and Denny and a guy named Pete who’s since retired covering nights. I named her that as a half joke, plant humor, the kind of thing that only lands with people who’ve spent a stretch of their life staring at dials for a living, and it stuck before I’d even really decided it was going to. She’s an orange tabby, not particularly large, and she has opinions about my reading habits that I did not ask for and cannot override.
The main one is that any book thin enough to hold open one-handed while lying flat on my chest is an acceptable book, and any book thick enough to require two hands or a proper table is somehow a personal insult to her. Blood Meridian, for instance, a smaller paperback, got approved almost immediately, she curled up on my stomach for most of that read and only occasionally swatted at the corner of a page like she was trying to help me turn it faster than I wanted to. The Master and His Emissary, a genuine brick of a book, got nothing but cold judgment from across the room for two straight weeks. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think she’s tracking book weight the way I track flow rate, and forming conclusions accordingly.
She comes to the plant with me sometimes, which I’m not sure is technically allowed but nobody’s ever said anything, curled up in a cardboard box in the break room while I do my rounds. There’s something about having her there on a slow three a.m. stretch that makes the whole shift feel less like an empty building and more like an actual place I spend my life. I’ve caught myself narrating instrument readings to her out loud more than once, which I recognize is a little unhinged behavior for a grown man, but she’s a good listener in the specific sense that she never disagrees with my chlorine residual numbers.
I don’t have a big point to make here, honestly. This is just the kind of thing that ends up in a logbook of a life, a cat who judges my reading choices by weight and thickness, who somehow makes a graveyard shift feel less solitary than it technically is. Denny asked me once if I got her specifically so I’d have something to talk to during the quiet hours and I told him no, absolutely not, and then thought about it for a few days afterward and wasn’t so sure I believed myself.