Rat Catcher's Yellows by Charlie Jane Anders: Dementia, Cat Empires, and What Love Cannot Save

A heartbreaking story about caregiving, connection, and the strange places a fading mind can still go

What is it about?

“A crippling disease has made the body of Grace’s wife a prison for her erratic, reclusive brain. The only hope for their marriage? A video game where she rules over kingdom of cats.”

Rat Catcher’s Yellow

The first thing I thought of when I finished “Rat Catcher’s Yellows” was the Hamlet quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The premise of this story hits home on two levels. First, Anders gives us the perspective of a caregiver. The exhausting, never-ending task of caring for someone is fueled almost entirely by the love you have for them. It is like a gas tank filled with memories and small shared moments.

You love them, so you manage and protect them. But that same love also ties you to that person, and you have to watch the candle of their life slowly burn down. Being a caregiver is one of the most painful things a person can do. In this story’s case, the illness is dementia, specifically a disease colloquially known as Rat Catcher’s Disease, or Leptospirosis X.

The story centers on two wives. One half of the partnership is Shary, who has Rat Catcher’s Disease and is fading a little more every day, like leaves falling from a tree in autumn. The other is her life partner and caregiver, Grace. In a desperate attempt to reconnect with the Shary she once knew, Grace gives her a toy-like video game called The Divine Right of Cats. It feels childish, and Grace hates that. As she says, “I feel like a backstabbing bitch. Giving this childish game to my life partner, it’s like I’m declaring that she’s lost the right to be considered an adult.”

The game is supposed to help those with the disease.

And then something extraordinary happens.

Shary slowly slips away, but her brilliant mind falls into the game and begins creating empires. She rules the cat kingdoms. Her mind and her gift for strategy make her one of the best rulers in the world. Even more than that, the cats have been solving problems inside the various iterations of Greater Felinia that economists have struggled with in the real world: issues of scarcity and resource allocation, questions of how to make markets frictionless.

This idea, Shary slipping into this game even as her mind is disappearing, brings me back to that original quote from Hamlet. There is much more to this world than what we can perceive.

But that does not really help.

Shary may be building empires, but those empires are being built without Grace, except as a memory.

In a lot of ways, this is a painful story to read. I have seen the effects of dementia. I have been a caregiver, I currently am a caregiver. You want everything, a spark, just one moment with the person you love, something you would do anything to get back. I have read a lot of Charlie Jane Anders, and her stories all carry this same heart, this human connection buried beneath the science fiction.

Because at the end of the day, that is all we really have.