Catboy

In the dankest corner of a 7-Eleven parking lot I met the cat. He slunk out of the dark and tossed a butt over the curb, tucking thick furry paws into his jeans and pressing his spine against the brick wall to itch that spot, just about the left shoulder blade, where loose skin collects on a cat. I waited and sniffed the smoked air. One eye opened halfway and he peeled off the wall into the yellow of the nearest streetlamp to take me in. Inside the gas station, where a low flourescence hovered over a beanie-topped teenager muttering to the counter, a floor cat scraped its way out the door, waddling out to join us. It stared up at the standing cat, whose two back paws pressed to the asphalt and two others hidden in the cuffs of his jacket.

Cameron Cat has gotten into denim, said the floor cat.

Cameron Cat is going for a nondescript sort of look, said Cameron Cat, who always referred to himself in the third cat.

Junior mint? asked the floor cat, weaving between Cameron’s legs.

No, said Cameron.

You look hot in denim, I said. He grinned.

You look same as ever.

Let me see the letter, the floor cat said.

I shook my head. Cameron, cupping a lighter, breathed out smoke. It dripped over his jacket and down onto the floor cat.

Those are disgusting, it said, scampering out into the open lot and craning its head back to lick the affected fur. I’ll need a bath.

It’s time anyway, said Cameron as the still-lit cigarette joined the butt in the ditch. He ushered me before him out of the parking lot. My boots scraped on patches of sand as he daintily avoided them, his long white legs unstained by mud. By the road he looked both ways and stepped across, head scanning the ground to avoid stepping on a crack. Down the block on the corner a traffic light changed and a car sped past us, briefly catching Cameron in its headlights as he dropped to all fours to hide, though he still wore jeans and a letterman jacket, besides being six times the size of a normal cat. It didn’t slow, and the tail lights never turned around, so Cameron dusted off his front paws glaring at me, daring me to say something. I shrugged. The floor cat stepped over the far curb and started poking behind a dumpster.

You’re embarrassing our guest, said Cameron.

Fuck off, Cameron, said the floor cat.

It was a few blocks to the alley, past a pizza joint that still called itself a parlor and a padlocked cash-for-gold storefront. The floor cat’s dappled grey fur wove in and out of invisibility in the incidental light, pale reflections off streetlamps on the other sidewalk. Cameron kept pace with me, waiting for me to speak first. I didn’t.

Not more than a few steps into the alley was the familiar door under the sagging fire escape. I waited. The floor cat sniffed around, looking for the keyhole.

I didn’t know they were sending you, I said to Cameron.

You’re too important to entrust to a bodega cat, he said. The floor cat paused its work to glare at him.

It’s not me that’s important, I said. Cameron shrugged.

The floor cat pressed a claw into an imperceptible hole. The door clicked and creaked, opened and breathed, and the clear mountain air on the other side spilled into the weed-laden Ohio town. It was always dark on the other side. The floor cat slipped through without a glance back. I felt Cameron’s paw on the small of my back as I walked, bowing my head under the doorframe, holding the letter safe in my breast pocket.

We stumbled into an atrium lined with tulips. It was high summer here, and the heat lingered even at night. The air was thinner, sour with a citrus, and despite the season snow drifted outside. Cameron grinned at my unsteady entrance.

You okay? he asked.

You do this more often than me, I said.

Cameron Cat always lands on his feet, he said.

A pair of silent burly toms waited on the far end of the room, where the floor cat sat with its bushy white tail batting the air. It hardly waited before disappearing down the darkened hallway. We followed it towards the west wing. During the spring a cool mist would blow in from the east and float through the open windows to conceal the worn cobblestones, hobbling down staircases and under the crack at the bottom of doors. The castle during the day was bright, light parading in through high narrow windows and brushing the ashlar pale even in the deep rooms hidden in the hill. But mostly what I remember was just like this, the clear nighttime air, wandering through abandoned stone hallways with Cameron, not quite going somewhere.

Cameron lead us, the tail of the floor cat occassionally flashing behind a blind corner, and though I recognized every hallway I couldn’t have found my way out. The torchlight gave out for a while and his pale yellow eyes glowed in the dark, guiding me with a paw on my shoulder, my ringing footsteps making pace with his gentle padding.

Is it strange to be back? he said.

I used to know every inch of this place, I said.

Do you remember it?

Everything.

His room had looked over the mountainside. That last spring purple flowers bloomed all over the slope that only blossomed once every four years. We watched the wind draw the pollen into the valley below, stroking the thin petals and dancing through the castle corridors.

It was beautiful, I said.

Cameron scoffed. Beautiful?

I spent years missing it, I said. Didn’t you?

He shook his head in the dark, the soft skin of his ear brushing against my cheek. We were silent after that, until a spiral staircase and a series of low archways landed us outside the burser’s office, where the floor cat waited. The light and smell of a kerosene lamp wafted from inside.

I haven’t eaten supper, said the floor cat. So make it quick.

The burser was a bespectacled calico sorting through files in a teak desk drawer. She had replaced the previous burser, a beady-eyed bastard who kept mouse tails in that same drawer. I had heard vaguely that he had taken a job at a distillery. Cameron closed the door to leave myself and the new burser alone.

Fantastic, she said. Have you got the letter?

I withdrew it, still crisp, and handed it over. She drew her claw cleanly down the side and opened a single page of fine stationery with tightly printed text. Skimming it, she dipped a pen in ink and signed a looping signature at the bottom, then turned it to me. I signed in a stilted hand. I passed it back, and she folded the letter again to drip hot wax, pressed a seal into it and dropped it in a lockbock behind her desk.

Is that all? I said.

That’s all, she replied, and I was dismissed.

The floor cat, relieved, trotted off to find supper. Don’t be late for the return trip, it said with its back to me. I don’t want to miss breakfast.

Cameron was smoking out a window. He’d laid his jacket over the wide stone sill, resting his elbows, his right paw hanging over the edge.

So you finally sold out? he asked.

No more than you. He handed me the cigarette and I held it, watching it burn, watching it shake between my nervous fingers. Cameron’s paw moved to take it back but instead laid on mine to steady it, letting the smoke fall over the edge as I suddenly relaxed. His touch was just the same as it had always been, though I thought I’d forgotten. Like it had never left. He leaned out into the air.

Will you be visiting often? he said into the void.

No, I said. I had to be here in person to sign, but we’ll mail everything now.

You’re all done here, he said.

What’s left?

Duncan — and that’s how he said my name, like that, Duncan —

Duncan, he said, do you miss this place?

I don’t know how to answer that.

You miss it.

I used to, I said. Now I just remember it.

I remembered everything. The way the rough stone felt on my hands while leaning over a windowsill, talking quietly in the dead of night like we had a thousand times before, the waning moon, the invisible valley in the middle distance. I remembered looking at him, wide ears and narrow eyes, black streaks shooting down his jaw where I kissed him, burying my lips in his fur and holding his head back as he purred. His legs pinning me against these stone walls, my hands running up his back under his fur as he stripped me in the heat of the summer, when it wasn’t so uncommon to tell someone you loved them. It was summer again, but I’d stopped loving since.

Do you want to stay here? I asked him. He shook his head.

Cameron Cat doesn’t want to stay anywhere, I think, he said.

I thought you loved this place.

Cameron Cat only loved it when you were here.

I did too.

Now he almost hates it, Cameron muttered. His voice was resigned rather than bitter, and I wondered if he still painted.

Just because of me?

All the places we were happy are lonely now, he said.

I’m sorry, I said. He fiddled with a string on his jacket.

Where do you live? he asked.

I have an apartment. Some friends. It’s called Cincinnati.

It’s beautiful there, he said.

Not really.

But you miss it already.

More than here.

Cameron Cat missed you, he said. The words brought him inside again, out of the wind, to look me in the eye and try to remember a speech. I began to pity him.

We both left, I said.

And you stayed away. Cameron Cat came back and stayed back.

You’re unhappy.

I am, he said. Cameron Cat is alone here.

Don’t guilt me, Cameron, I said. It played again, those words, Don’t guilt me, Cameron, their shape familiar in my mouth. They came out too easily. He let himself simmer and cool, then finally spoke again.

Congratulations. Cameron Cat ought to have said so sooner.

I signed some paperwork.

You always minimize yourself.

Okay.

That was the last of the paperwork. Most of it had been sent in increasingly large postal envolopes over the past months, stacks of it binder-clipped together winding their way through offices with nothing more interesting going on, being marked up and signed off on and finding their way back to where they came from. The burser’s office was the last signature, because money is always the hardest thing to sort out, and as such had to be witnessed. A firm partner had of course intended to come but soon learned that he would have to cross through the door. When I told him I had spent a year here in an attempt to ingraciate myself to the position of liaison, he said I got the job only because I probably wouldn’t vomit from the travel.

How did you get this job? asked Cameron.

I asked for it, I said.

Cameron Cat is glad you did, he said.

I won’t be back.

I know, he said.

They put me up in a spare dorm room. It was in an old hall, part of a building they’d intended to close off but opened again when there wasn’t enough space for the all the new students, Cameron told me. Hardly any stayed over the summer, even fewer than when Cameron and I were here. Maybe because there were fewer prodigal sons or maybe because the people were different. It’s changed, he said more than once. It’s not the same. There were no sheets on the bed.

Do you want to sleep in my room? There’s a couch, he said.

Okay, I said.

We turned around and the hallways were familiar again. I pictured them in my apartment, trading whitewashed walls for the dappled stone, the faded tapestries for the my paintings of the seashore, the leaky faucets for ancient cobwebs and well-loved staircases. It had taken time but I’d grown to like it, the middle floor of a converted house with a spare bedroom and a new washer/dryer in the basement. We turned a corner and saw the white bathroom tile and a warm bath to lay in. Up the thousand-year stone stairs to a simple landing where I hung my yellow coat, worn so much it was beginning to fray at the sleeves. We walked to Cameron’s room, the same mountainview room he’d had when they put us in the spare staff quarters over the summer, each footstep like finding my way to an old home. He didn’t have to lead the way anymore, only glancing at me as I stared down hallways that I used to love every edge of. I remembered them all.

The room was different, but only Cameron and I could have noticed. The cleared coffee table, the emptied wastebasket, the couch pillows fluffed instead of stained. I drew the curtains and pulled them back again, pretty yellow linen that used to be a ugly yellow.

Do you still paint? I asked. He was already on the bed, washing his feet with a cloth.

On good days, he said.

I fished in the closet for a blanket. He got up somewhere behind me and opened an ottoman.

Here, he said, and pulled out a set of sheets. He slipped the white fitted sheet over each of the couch pillows, tucking it under and smoothing the surface, then the top sheet that he folded underneath at the bottom and a knit grey blanket, just the right temperature for the summer night, that he lay across the back of the couch, followed by a pillow that he covered in grey stripes and fluffed, and a second pillow just in case. I waited, my hands resting on my thighs. He stood and turned to me.

Cameron Cat knows you get hot, but there’s another blanket in the closet if you need it, he said. I stood because I didn’t know what else to do.

Duncan, he said.

The blanket we used to sleep under was on his bed, a red one, still more than a little ratty. He watched me stare. I ignored the couch and reached out to touch the blanket, holding it in my hands and around my arms. I used to wrap myself around this blanket to hold him. I opened the nightstand drawer and found nothing.

I don’t drink anymore, he said. Cameron Cat doesn’t drink anymore. He closed the drawer for me, letting his paw rest on the handle as he tried to breathe regularly.

Thank you for hosting me, I said.

It’s only a night, he said.

It’s so good to remember, I said, and I kissed him.

We tumbled into his bed as he drew back my hair with the tip of his claws, scraping my scalp as I gasped and pulled him onto me, the downy fur on his chest rippling with his breath, his deep thighs settling over my hips. He kissed my neck, the ribs of his tongue pulling at my skin as I held his head in my hands again, his delicate skull buried under his snowy white hair. I let him lick my collarbones before I pulled him back to me to find my tongue in his mouth. As we kissed I pulled his shirt up to his neck, and he pulled out of our kiss to strip me of mine. His paws pinned my shoulders as I ran my fingers over the bumps of his spine, arching with pleasure as he purred like he used to, just the same. I watched him shiver and return his gaze to me, holding me down. His thighs burned and trembled. I touched his ribs above me, each of them so delicate, as they spread and contracted. I kissed his chest, buried my lips in his fur, as his grip on me broke and we lay beside each other. I fell into a dream I’d had a hundred times before.

He spoke softly.

I want you, he said. Do you want this?

I did.

So he turned me over and splayed my hands across the sheet, keeping them there, and pulled down the waistband of my pants to show himself my underwear. His jeans only came down to his calf but he struggled out of them and I felt his thighs on mine, his hips keeping me down, his arms on me and his mouth at my ear, whispering terrible things I desperately wanted to hear.

Fuck me, please, I whispered back, like I always used to. I felt my words in my mouth, knowing they would never be there again, savoring every moment before letting it slip back into memory.

I was almost late to meet the floor cat, but I wasn’t. Cameron didn’t come. He was there when I first woke up, then gone later, when I didn’t have any time to find him. I left him a note good-bye.

The floor cat met me in the atrium after a cursory greeting and a bit of mumbling about my energy this early in the morning.

Are you really so thrilled to go back? it asked. To an Ohio finance shithole?

I miss it, I said.

It was midmorning when we came out the door and there were people on the street, narrowly avoiding the cat that plodded between them. The one kind of cat, a normal cat. We came back to the 7-Eleven while two pickups were filling their tanks. Some high schoolers stood outside with slushies. The floor cat blinked at me once and then retreated into the flourescent lights of the brick building.

Twenty minutes later I stood, emptyhanded, in a too-heavy jacket and day-old clothes, in the living room of my apartment, surrounded by white walls and seashore paintings and leaky faucets. The hallway was ten feet back to my bedroom. I ran my hand over the smooth paint until it stopped at a painting Cameron had done, back when he did them for me, a little one no bigger than a postcard of the violets in bloom. I had almost forgotten about it, behind its glass, in the corner of the hallway. It vanished into the shadows.