The Other Moroccan Immigrant In The House
[Previously: Our 14-year-old cat Layla died last August (and litigation ensued on the anniversary…), then a month after her death Ozzy randomly started showing up and wouldn’t leave our house.]
1. Five Months of Denial
What went unmentioned in Ozzy’s story is that we actually tried to find someone else to adopt him. Layla’s absence and the inevitability of death were too fresh on our hearts, blanketing the future no matter how distant, and souring the present. How can anyone enjoy life when everything is destined to die anyway?
But we suddenly had a lot of empty space, and Ozzy could hang while we found him a new home. And so he did, for a while. And a while. We kept updating his adoption page over the next few months, and the foster charity we worked with gave us final say on whoever was vying to be Ozzy’s forever home. We were very picky — what’s the rush?
Five months after Ozzy showed up, we finally received the perfect adoption application, free of any blemishes we could use as an excuse. Our immediate reaction — internal NO! dressed in external sobbing — made us confront the denial we had been desperately caching away all along; we didn’t want to let go of this little guy. His origin story was simply too good to walk away from, and as a storyteller, that would be a narrative sin I could never atone for. The timing of it all was just too surreptitious — our beloved Layla dies and just a few weeks later this doofus shows up from out of nowhere? Had he shown up when Layla was still alive, she was insanely territorial and would’ve immediately yowled him out of the neighborhood, but this lucky idiot happened to escape his mentally ill owner just in time? Too much chance even for fiction.
So of course he stayed, for good this time, and his sheer idiocy continued being a hilarious spectacle. He was a playful chaos gremlin — part lovable meathead, part furry linebacker, and all energy. An Olympic high-jumper who could launch himself to absurd heights chasing feather wands, but who also produced the most pathetic “wah-waaaa” plaintive meows. Ozzy hated being petted yet would follow us from room to room, even rousing himself from slumber and sleepily ambling to wherever either of us went.
He was such an odd duck — self-serious and goofy in equal measure, and we absolutely adored him. Where Layla had been elegant and demanding, Ozzy was clumsy and needy. Where she commanded worship, he begged for attention while simultaneously rejecting it. He made us laugh constantly, and he made it easier to remember joy through the fog of grief.
At the same time, holy fuck was he a handful! His relentless playfulness translated into an exhausting reality. He constantly asked us to chase him, trotting by our legs and taunting us with his signature breeee war cry before galloping off. Or demanding more feather wand play even while visibly panting. Or just beating the hell out of Lauren.
We knew we had to get him a fellow feline playmate, or else we’d be beholden to that (exhausting) role for life. Introducing cats to each other is a giant pain in the ass because they’re such prima donnas. You have to build the equivalent of a Berlin wall partition inside your house and keep them completely separate and out of sight of each other for at least a week or two before you could graduate to some light sniffing through solid opaque barriers. It’s agonizingly slow, and you have to be mindful of every door latch.
Our first matchmaking attempt lasted almost a month but ultimately didn’t work out. Ozzy tried playfully ambushing her, but she reacted with genuine fear, and that only reaffirmed a steep downward spiral. Within days she imprisoned herself under the furniture, and Ozzy saw any sortie as an invitation to torment her.
Ozzy needed a playmate who could handle his intensity, someone with street smarts and stamina to match. We’d have to keep fostering, but it would have to wait until after we came back from our trip to Morocco.
2. The Cripple & The Mob
Speaking of Morocco, our good times were drowned out by a pervasive landscape of relentless misery.
The ‘patriarchy’ indictment had been diluted into obsolescence in the West by the world’s most privileged humans crowing about the sexism of workplace air conditioning. And yet the stark severity of actual patriarchal systems is on full display in the present day and just a transatlantic flight away. Whereas American homelessness is overwhelmingly male and ravaged by drug addiction, Morocco’s homeless are overwhelmingly women, frequently accompanied by famished young children, panhandling on the streets.
While Morocco is culturally relatively chill, it has enough traditional Islamic vestiges such that women’s social standing is heavily predicated on male guardianship and adherence to strict codes of female propriety. Step outside those codes through premarital sex, pregnancy, or even fleeing domestic violence, and the punishment is sadistically total — permanent economic and social exile with an expectation to publicly display their ‘moral failures’ through visible and atoning destitution. A grave warning to others.
Human despair dominated, but the urban landscape was also overrun with sick and grotesquely injured stray animals. It was overwhelming to be aware of how much of an impact our comparatively vast wealth could’ve had — a pittance to us would’ve been life-changing. But what was even more overwhelming was realizing that we could be wrung dry and still barely make a dent in a country of 38 million, where scenes like this repeated ad nauseam. It was the clearest confrontation of the abstractions behind effective altruism.
Lauren had managed to stay restrained despite the misery pastiche we strolled by, relegating her efforts to scattering cat food on the ground every few feet, charting our path like a modern Hansel and Gretel.
Late one night, amidst the endless parade of street cats, one little dude stood out purely for how uniquely pathetic he looked. He was hobbling around on an injured front leg, radiating resignation to whatever fate awaited him.
Lauren’s restraint couldn’t hold any longer and finally shattered — she demanded that we take him to a vet first thing in the morning. I was dreading this scenario. I knew that once the empathy dams burst, the flood would be unstoppable. I started rearranging tomorrow’s itinerary like a high-stakes game of Tetris, and went into the bodega next door to ask for a cardboard box for the crippled cat while Lauren stood vigil over him.
I was gone barely three minutes when I saw the bodega owner staring out his door with grave concern. He pointed down the street, turned to me, and said “They’re talking to your wife”. I step out and see Lauren completely surrounded by eight young men. One was shaking her hand and leaning in to do the traditional kiss-on-the-cheek Moroccan greeting.
Street harassment is an obnoxiously pervasive problem in Morocco, and it’s policed according to a strict, tiered hierarchy. Women who wear a hijab are considered “protected” to a sacrosanct degree. Unveiled Moroccan women are potentially fair game, but they tend to know enough variants of fuck off in darija to ward off predators. The ones who have it worst in this hierarchy are single white female tourists, who get absolutely swarmed by incessant attention. No one would have dared approach Lauren while she was at my side, but by momentarily stepping off screen, I accidentally turned her into a lure.
I knew the corrective machismo role I had to perform. I walk towards the mob with unhurried confidence and a wide smile. Then, with a booming voice void of anger and with flawless street Arabic, say “Hey! You’re talking to my fucking wife?”
Each one instinctively steps back, hands up pleading exculpation. My accent tagged me as a local son, and now they were scrambling to undo the unforgivable breach of talking to a Moroccan man’s wife.
But my belonging came with a trap: they naturally demand whether I’d had Lauren convert to Islam, the near-mandatory expectation to anyone marrying outside the tribe. My ‘no’ provokes sharp displeasure. Kehal tiha, their reply is spare but full: a sweeping all-encompassing indictment of the disaster, doom, and catastrophe I’ve brought upon myself. If I can’t bring a white woman into the Umma, am I even a real Muslim?
The assumption my accent so effortlessly established — born-and-bred, so surely a brother — was now a liability. I can’t admit to being an atheist apostate, not here. The energy sours. We’re not safe.
Lauren had been standing quietly to the side watching me negotiate in a foreign language, watching over the crippled cat that had anchored us here in the first place. I turn to her and say “Let’s go”. Her body pivots then halts, unsure about leaving the cat alone with a mob of frustrated dudes. One guy demands that I remedy my deficient commitment to Islam by reciting the Shahadah. He even opens a bottle of water and brings it up to my lips, waiting for me to say the magic words. Everyone else in the mob presses closer, eager to witness the miracle of reconversion.
I abhorred what was happening and resented Lauren’s complacency. Our physical safety was predicated on my uninterrupted machismo performance. Expressing any frustrations to Lauren risked dispelling that mirage — if a woman refuses to listen to her husband, why should any man fear him? Balancing that tension and with a sharper tone now “Lauren, get your shit and let’s fucking go”. The mob had absorbed enough English language culture to divine the meaning of what I said, and they start echoing it back. I grab her hand and yank us forward with steady determination, not looking back once, since wariness would’ve been a sign of weakness.
Safely back at our hotel, what followed was the biggest fight we’ve ever had.
I hated the archetype I was forced to play in such a patriarchal milieu, but still resented not having her unquestioning obedience. Morocco’s gender code demanded I play out its pageant of authority; authenticity here wasn’t optional. I had to boss her around for our own good.
I barely slept, and she woke up early the next morning to engage her quest, hopeful that the crippled cat wouldn’t have wandered far. I was frustrated at her insistence, and at one point I said “You think you can save every cat in the world?” As angry as I was, I couldn’t let her go on her own into the wild without a male chaperone. So I dragged myself along. Fucked up culture.
The cripple was exactly where we had left him the night before, as was the bodega cardboard box. We presented it to him and he wearily dove right in without any resistance. By the time we arrived at the vet, he had fallen asleep in Lauren’s arms.
They asked for his name. Without thinking, she blurted out “Chris”, in honor of a cat rescuer who had tragically died in a fire along with 100 of his cats that exact same day.
Street cats have a torrent of dental problems in part because they so frequently eat food off the sidewalk and invariably bite down on tiny pebbles. The first thing the vet did was pull out three horribly infected teeth out off “Chris”. The limping on the front paw wasn’t the result of a broken bone as we thought, but a heavily infected bite wound that likely was from another cat. Without Lauren’s intervention, “Chris” was absolutely destined to suffer a slow painful demise.
We did all we could anyways. He was in good hands and we had Italy to go to. Ciao!
3. No Sane Person Would Do This
We eventually returned to the US and “Chris” stayed cooped up in a tiny cage at the vet. Sure, all his immediate health problems were addressed (including the malady of having testicles) but it felt like a waste to just release him back out into the wild. Lauren was absolutely determined to find him a home but the problem is that anyone in Morocco keen on “owning” a cat passes over a dozen bedraggled opportunities every single day, and those with means would rather opt for a purebred showpiece. No sane person was going to choose an ugly toothless hobo off the street.
She was undeterred, devoting several hours a day towards this mission, connecting with various folks running informal cat rescues in Morocco. Ok, maybe Morocco was off the table, but what about a nice European tourist family? Higher demand pool for sure, except now you also have to jump through the EU’s insanely strict import restrictions. Again, no sane person would suffer through that paperwork barrage for this cat.
Ok ok ok, Morocco is out, and so is all of Europe. If we could somehow get him anywhere within the US then Lauren could easily tap into a robust and familiar network of animal rescues. Now the problem shifted into transport logistics. Pet transport companies quoted thousands of dollars, and cats couldn’t fly unaccompanied anyway. She joined every ‘flight angel’ group she could find, desperately seeking out anyone already flying back to the US who wouldn’t mind hauling a shrieking street cat alongside their own baggage chaos, only to get inundated with spam and scammers. Meanwhile, updates from the vet showed “Chris” growing increasingly frantic in his cage.
This was going nowhere, obviously. We were both thinking it, but I had to finally say it out loud: “It’s ok if you want to go back and get him.” Lauren crumpled in affirmation, but was also aghast at the thought. I thought about that night in Casablanca, her body pivoting toward the exit but halting, unable to leave the crippled cat alone with the mob. That same paralysis was happening again, just slower — a month-long version of the same refusal to walk away.
She was seriously going to endure another round-trip halfway across the world just to take in a street cat with god knows how many health or behavioral issues? Yes. Yes she was. My perfectly insane wife was really going to try to save every cat in the world after all.
Lauren wasn’t going to waste the transatlantic opportunity, and so she stuffed an entire suitcase with 50lbs of desperately needed veterinary medical supplies.
Her carry-on had Feliway spray, collapsible water cups, a disposable litter box, pee pads, and a printed 16-item checklist that included reminders like “ONSSA office??” and “small towel or blanket”. The import paperwork was byzantine — microchip documentation, state veterinarian endorsement (required within 24 hours of departure), international health certificates in French, and an anthology of bureaucratic stamps.
This trip was going to be a quick and easy exfiltration: go in, secure the package, and get out. She stayed at a hotel right next to the airport, where the owner loved animals and had a bunch of them roam around, including a peacock.
At the vet, she found “Chris” frantic inside a cage he’d been cooped in for almost six weeks at this point, screaming whenever she stepped away. Back at the hotel, she made sure to absolutely exhaust him before their arduous journey the next day. He played with a feather toy for probably the first time in his whole life, stared at his reflection in a mirror for the probably the first time in his whole life, and laid on textile for probably the first time in his whole life. Following that barrage of nascent experiences, he fell fast asleep curled up in the crook of Lauren’s leg.
The flight back was going to require some chemical assistance courtesy of Gabapentin. “Chris” held it together well enough through the 17-hour journey, and he didn’t vomit until right at the final descent! What a guy.
All that fastidiously compiled import documentation was apparently for naught. The border control agent apparently had no interest in the screaming cat inside the pet carrier Lauren was holding, nor in the meticulously prepared vaccine passport. All he asked about was whether she had brought any food from overseas. I waited for them at the airport with this sign:
Lauren didn’t even notice the sign. “Chris” was yowling and she was sobbing after an exhausting flight, begging to be taken home.
4. Fall of the Berlin Wall
His journey demanded a more fitting name. He was christened Ziggy in honor of another alien immigrant (and also because it paired so nicely with Ozzy as a glam rock duo).
We didn’t know quite what to expect from him. Stray cats in America tend to be relatively feral, since the most effective way to avoid the TNR dragnet is to be far away from human civilization. Moroccan stray cats have no such concerns; they grow up passively surrounded by throngs of humans, most of them kind, some sadistically cruel.
Ziggy’s medical history gives us a few clues to his origin. His jaw was fractured at one point and healed crooked giving him his signature look, and this was most likely from getting kicked in the chin. His inner eyelid sat askew, a remnant of an old upper respiratory infection. He has AIDS, or rather, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (in fairness, everyone has AIDS). He got it either from getting bit or fucking some street hoes — which also means there’s little Ziggies running around, aww!
Our house was once again the site of the Berlin wall partition, separating Ziggy from Ozzy until they could cool off. Ziggy didn’t seem to mind going from the wide-open cacophonous urban landscape of Casablanca to being cooped up in a single room. Yet he carried an anxious frantic energy, one that somehow surpassed Ozzy’s extreme.
Anytime he heard the telltale kibble shake, he’d go into a desperate tailspin. He’d force himself to shovel as much edible mass into his tiny stomach as possible, frantically devouring as if he was still warring over street scraps. He had no idea he’d never go hungry again.
Anytime he cleaned himself, he did it with obsessive pathological gusto. The griminess he was previously caked in absolutely wasn’t from lack of effort on his end. He didn’t know he’d never be that filthy again.
Anytime he fell asleep, he would violently explode into alertness at the slightest sound — showcasing a hypervigilance that was as fundamental as his pulse. He had no idea he would never be threatened again.
Anytime he was left alone, he’d let loose with piercing shrieks, a reliable method of garnering attention through a dense auditory fog. He had no idea we would never abandon him.
Ozzy was cautiously wary of this foreign immigrant coming into his house, and would give a pathetic hiss the equivalent of an exhale. Ziggy meanwhile could play all the cards. After a week of sniffing each other through door cracks, they finally saw each other through a gate. Ziggy arched his back, rotated his body, and charged diagonally towards a terrified Ozzy — full cavalry abandon, pure You wot mate? energy.
But as soon as Ozzy bolted, Ziggy immediately relaxed and took on a much more submissive posture, getting on his back and exposing his neck. Compared to Ozzy’s relative autism, years of ruthless street socializing gave Ziggy a remarkably flexible social rolodex, ready to deploy on demand no matter the circumstances.
The partition saga was miserable while it lasted. I couldn’t leave my home office to pee without ensuring I had at least one arm free to navigate the layers of barriers. The other difficulty was Ziggy’s relentless ferreting desires. We taped up cardboard barriers but Ziggy would find whatever leverage and wedge his head through any opening, famished to interact with a terrified Ozzy. Each added layer compounded the traversal difficulties, and Lauren and I had to live on opposite sides of the house. The boys had moments of calm and would touch paws through barriers, like frat boys afraid of being called gay.
Three weeks in one morning, I just got fed up. Ziggy once again burst through the latest barrier and I finally gave in and said fuck it — you two can roam free and settle out your imaginary beef yourselves.
I braced myself for the screeching and hissing but heard none. Silence. Then, movement. I watched them slowly circle each other around the giant bean bag. Ziggy crouched flat against the ground, and Ozzy’s tail lolled in the air. And then — chase. Ambush and counter-ambush. Holy shit, they’re playing.
We couldn’t believe it actually worked. At last, we tore down that wall and reunited Germany’s Federal Republic.
5. The Lottery Winners
The Cold War was formally over, but Ziggy had no idea what defeating communism meant for him.
Over time, I watched his sleep getting deeper, his lounging pose getting longer, and the noise he’d ignore getting louder. I’d catch myself watching him sleep, thinking about all those nights he had no safe place to close his eyes.
The frantic desperate energy surrounding the sound of food finally abated. It helped that he knew enough Arabic to appreciate the severity of yelling Tseb! (the Moroccan version of Shoo!) and my native accent wasn’t a liability here. He probably heard that plenty of times from angry Arab men, so I offered verisimilitude. He stopped frantically jumping up on the counter during meal time, and somehow learned to patiently wait.
We somehow lucked into a cat that could surpass Ozzy’s intense athleticism. They would chase each other around the house relentlessly, until both of them are lying on the floor panting. Their twice-daily play-fights turned the house into a Wrestlemania cage match. Ozzy initially lacked technique and could only leverage his size to tank hits, lying on his back and pushing Ziggy away with his legs in a move I called “The Mechanic”.
Ziggy meanwhile pulled off slick street fighting moves he acquired through survival-stakes alley brawls. His mainstay was pinning Ozzy down then executing a 180° roundhouse kick, and the coolest was an ambushing parkour wall jump where he’d feint right only to materialize left. I wondered if he remembered his training, if those memories ever surfaced when he was curled up on the bean bag.
The two acted like such dudes together. We couldn’t believe our luck at how perfectly matched they were. I felt the first flicker of something I couldn’t name yet. Relief, maybe? Or wonder at how improbable this all was.
Ziggy adapted to the good life with suspicious ease. He didn’t showcase awe or wonder — just stoic resignation and stirring indignation bordering on offense, as if insulted by the very suggestion he might want for anything. I assumed it was trauma wiring: when his life was blanketed by perpetual threat and deprivation, his tiny walnut brain had no reason to keep records beyond the last forty-eight hours. So he just carried on in the moment, as a living embodiment of mindfulness forged through sheer necessity. The fucked-up part is that while he moved apparently unburdened by his past, I couldn’t stop replaying it.
Months later, the boys managed to push on a window screen while we were out legally defending murderers. Ozzy, the notorious escape artist, uncharacteristically stayed inside. We found Ziggy three yards over, screaming his heart out, darting frantically between fences — and most disturbingly, looking through us as if we were strangers, abject panicked fear multiplied by heat-induced exhaustion.
As Lauren and I frantically kept pace, she instinctively announced to a neighbor “He’s not from America, he doesn’t know this area!” matter-of-fact, like a mom declaring a peanut allergy. A lifetime of Moroccan street smarts were suddenly useless in this strange foreign landscape.
She caught him through claws and fangs, and once back inside, his amnesia cycle initialized. The screaming stopped. The wild-eyed panic vanished. His memory limit did exactly what it was designed to do, and he somehow forgot that he forgot, grooming himself on his bean bag with disturbing normalcy.
One day Ziggy was in the backyard staring up at the sky, towards nothing in particular but simply drinking in his environs. Bombarded with unprecedented stimuli — his eyes capturing a pervasive green canopy he’s never seen before in Casablanca’s concrete sprawl, a quiet stillness he never before thought possible, and bird calls he’d never imagined existed.
I appreciated just how precarious this timeline is. I was watching a Moroccan immigrant who won a lottery against impossible odds, mirroring my own path to America, as the only reason I live in this country was because a computer randomly picked my name out of a giant hat.
How many butterflies had to flap their wings in exactly the right way. How Layla had to die. How Ozzy had to randomly appear at exactly the right time against our wishes. How his energy had to overwhelm us. How we walked down that exact Casablanca street at that exact time. How that mob pressed closer and Lauren’s body halted. How her unrelenting pathological obsession refused to let go. How Ziggy getting bit during a random street fight was the greatest thing to ever happen to him.
How fragile this entire reality lineage is, compared to its alternative. The one where Ziggy is succumbing to a slow and painful demise, famished, covered in grime, delirious with pain; afraid, unknown, unloved, and so very alone. Finding his final refuge within the crevice of a long-abandoned building, and exhaling his last breath, never ever knowing the soft embrace of a Big Joe brand bean bag chair.
That joy turned sharp in my chest. My gratitude for Ziggy was perfectly proportional to the misery he miraculously slinked behind. My heart catches thinking how close we averted disaster. I can’t look at Ziggy without deeply appreciating how much joy he brings, but also without being overwhelmed at how much misery is out there that we couldn’t do shit about. The only solace I have is to avert my eyes; focus on what we did save, rather than dwell on the vast universe of what we couldn’t.
Such is life. Such is Ziggy.
The Boys and their antics has its own Instagram page @gardenoflay.
Special Thanks
Wiam (@loveandsavecats): None of this would’ve been possible without Wiam, who coordinated everything — vet appointments, discounts, translations, and constant hospital visits. She’s doing extraordinary work with zero institutional support so please donate here, even $20 goes incredibly far in Morocco.
Clinique Veterinaire Almassira: Provided excellent care for Ziggy at heavily discounted rates and went above and beyond with logistics, getting the state veterinary paperwork approved the day before the return flight. They work with Wiam and help her with many of her rescues at a discounted rate.
VIP@Home Vet (@vipvetseattle): Donated nearly $1,000 in veterinary supplies, including medications otherwise unavailable in Morocco.
The Yass House (@theyasshouse): Another Yassine, another cat rescuer, and Lauren’s male chaperone in my stead. Provided much need emotional support, advice, and signal boosted for help to his many followers. Has many cats he is trying to adopt out to America and Canada if anyone is interested.
Riad Hamdani: A rare pet-friendly hotel near Casablanca airport run by an animal-loving owner planning to open a dog sanctuary. Highly recommended.
Fallen Whiskers Jewelry (@katieteix): Makes pet keepsake jewelry using whiskers, fur, ashes, teeth etc. She was working on Layla’s memorial piece using whiskers and flowers from our backyard when all of this was happening with Ziggy. She bought every item off Lauren’s Amazon wishlist made for the trip, and really helped signal boost to her large followers.
About Morocco’s Animal Crisis:
Morocco has virtually no animal welfare infrastructure — no TNR programs, no shelters — just scattered volunteers operating on their own dime. Ahead of the 2030 FIFA World Cup, authorities are mass-killing street animals through shooting, poisoning, and starvation (@iawcp documents this). The recent death of a British tourist from rabies brought international scrutiny, and their inane solution is proposing a law that would criminalize feeding stray animals (more info).
How to help: Donate to Moroccan rescuers like Wiam and Yass House. Adopt a Moroccan cat if you can, they’re remarkably well-adjusted. If you’re traveling to Morocco, contact local rescuers to ask what they need or volunteer as a flight angel. Small actions can matter enormously.
That fight was fun to watch. The way dogs and cats play fight is so different. Ziggy definitely using the street skills! It seems maybe Ziggy thought the stakes were a little higher. I have never heard of a trans-continent rescue! Congrats on your new family member!
Incredible story!