“I want a cat,” Topher said.
Luke looked up from the coffee maker.
“What would you do with a cat?”
Topher had been stretched across his couch, eyes closed, half listening to Luke bustle around the kitchen. Now he sat up and stared at his brother.
“The fuck kind of question is that? I would give it a cute name and feed it.”
Luke leaned against the counter and folded his arms. It was a thoughtful position, which irritated Topher deeply. He had only intended to share a thought, not open up a debate.
“I mean, how would a cat improve anything? Are you lonely?”
It wasn’t really Luke’s fault that he spoke like that. It was twenty years of family therapy sessions, meetings with social workers, and pop psychology books speaking. Topher often wondered where everyone he knew would be today if he had never been born. He consoled himself by thinking Luke would probably be slightly worse off, at least psychologically. Just look at all the communication skills and coping techniques Topher’s illness had forced Luke to learn over the years.
“A cat would improve things by being funny,” Topher said. “It would chase its little toys around and sleep on my lap. Okay, I guess I am lonely.”
Luke took two mugs from the cabinet and filled them each with coffee. He still hadn’t asked if Topher wanted a cup. It was Thursday morning, so they were drinking coffee. He carried the mugs carefully over to the couch and sat down beside Topher.
“Well,” Luke said. “I suppose we can stop by the shelter this weekend. You’ll need to talk to them about what kind of care a cat needs. You should probably get an adult. They’re easier than kittens.”
Of course Luke had taken Topher’s idea and put himself in charge of it. Topher couldn’t even complain; Luke had too much ammunition in the event of an argument. Like the fact that Topher’s disability check couldn’t cover his rent without Luke’s help. Or the fact that Luke had found this house and handled all the paperwork in the first place.
“I was thinking I could let it go outside sometimes,” Topher said. “That would be safe around here, right?”
“It should be,” Luke said.
“With the fence and all,” Topher added.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Topher’s previous house didn’t have a fence that stretched around the community, a security guard at the gate, central air, or a decent stove. But it had Chris and Nicole, two of his closest friends, and a scraggly little cat named Moxie. Sometimes Moxie would curl up in Topher’s lap when the three humans met in the living room for cocktail hour.
It was a fine life, really. Topher was angry but not surprised when it ended. It was all the storms that summer. Day after day spent lying on his bed, listening to the thunder, thinking about floods and the angry hands of God. One afternoon it occurred to him that he had never tried water. Chemicals, hanging, jumping from a roof––all thwarted, but he had never tried to drown.
Thoughts like this happened sometimes; he considered it a mere quirk of his brain. Most of them bubbled harmlessly past, but occasionally one would lodge like a bullet. He could feel this one in his chest, a dull but deep pain. The surrounding area was at risk for infection. His defenses were getting weaker. Every time, every time, this is how those fucking people got in.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Luke took off at eight. He had to get to work. Topher stood at the front window and watched him drive away. He wondered if Luke ever got jealous because Topher hadn’t worked full time in almost three years. Topher sure as hell got jealous of people with careers and children and all that, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. Luke was different, though. He always tried to hide the mean and petty parts of himself.
A psychiatrist Topher saw in the early days had theorized that those fucking people represented all the thoughts he didn’t want to admit he had. She said maybe that’s why they were so obsessed with death, sex, and rot. Like how they were always whispering about bodies decaying in the ground. Topher had rejected this idea on the grounds that if it were true, he should be able to cure himself by admitting everything.
“I’ve been in therapy since I was fourteen,” he explained. “I’ve been hospitalized three times. I’ve peed in cups. I told my parents when I lost my virginity. I’m the most open book there ever was.”
At least things had been quiet since he got settled into his new house. Topher scanned the living room, mentally placing a scratching post here, a litter box there. His doctor from the latest hospital had emphasized the importance of routine, so he had a weekly calendar hanging in the kitchen. Today there were no appointments, no library books due, and his sister Molly was traipsing through some rural part of China with no internet access, so they were skipping their regular Skype chat.
He sipped his coffee slowly, feeling the full weight of an empty day.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
On the night of the tornado warning, Chris had camped out on the couch to watch the TV coverage. Nicole was digging through the junk closet, looking for a box of candles she swore they owned. The drink of the night was whiskey and generic soda, because that’s what they had on hand. Thunder kept tearing through the sky like cannonballs.
No one would believe him afterwards, but when Topher first stepped outside, his intentions were pure. He wanted to see how the storm was progressing. Rain formed a thick wall around the porch, so he could only see the trees across the street from their jerky, violent movement. The wind shoved at him like a schoolyard bully. It would have been hard to explain why, but the whole performance tickled him. He smiled.
“Lovely weather for a sleigh ride together,” said one of those fucking people. Sometimes they were like that, just tidbits of nothing. This one sounded like a woman. He supposed it had been a week or so since they showed up again, but it was hard to say. They made it difficult to keep track of time, or anything else. They were too distracting.
“Hey,” said another one––a young man, maybe, anxious and whiny. “Do you think you would wash out to sea? Like, all the way to the sea?”
Their house was just a block from a section of the Green Belt, through which ran Barton Creek. Barton Creek eventually connected with the Colorado River, which eventually connected with the Gulf of Mexico. So he supposed it was possible.
Why had he never tried water? His last girlfriend, Anna, said water was the connection between this world and the next. She cited the river Styx. She bathed in water and sea salt before each one of her rituals. But that had been a while back.
He stepped off the porch into the rain.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
On Thursdays the local paper ran their science and technology section. Topher didn’t care much about gadgets, but sometimes they had good articles about genetics or archeology. He liked reading about those past species that were almost human but not exactly, the Indonesian hobbits and Red Deer Cave People. He thought sometimes that this might be his problem: he was a slight step either forward or back, very close to being a person but not quite there.
As usual, he had to look around a bit before spotting the paper. This morning it was half-buried in his bushes. As he moved to grab it, a soft noise caught his attention. A little rustling, a little flicker at the edge of his eyesight. He crouched down to investigate.
Hunched on the ground, just a few inches below the newspaper, was a cat––a lovely calico, with a face half black and half burning orange. Her golden eyes widened when she spotted Topher. He lifted his hand to say hello.
For a long moment, they just watched each other breathe. She had no collar. Luke would say he needed to take her to the vet to check for a microchip. Topher wished he knew more about cat languages. He gingerly held out his hand. She leaned forward to sniff.
He decided it would be wrong to pick her up. He stood slowly, straightening his body out. He would take his paper and go inside. Let it be her choice to follow him or not. He had learned from Moxie that cats respect people who respect them.
He took gentle steps towards his door, not wanting to startle her. He opened the door and paused, watching the bushes. There was another bit of rustling, then the cat darted out and ran straight into his house.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The storm that night felt like the end of the world. Topher crept down the sidewalk, occasionally sloshing through water and mud. The wind fought his every step and the rain was blinding. The streetlights guided him to the Green Belt entrance, where a miniature waterfall was thrashing down the hillside. He slipped two or three times on his way down, tearing up his jeans and drawing blood from his left shin.
It was a short walk to the creek, which was overflowing, tearing down saplings and uprooting all the wildflowers. He was drenched in mud up to his knees. He found himself thinking about Molly, who had escaped her original life at the first opportunity. The UK, Guatemala, Germany, Japan. It had been years since they’d spoken in person. He felt knocked breathless by a surge of love for her.
He waded into the water.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
“I think God may have sent you to me,” Topher told the cat.
He was half joking. He wasn’t sure if he believed in God or not. He rummaged through his fridge for something the cat might like and found a packet of ground beef. He spooned a little out onto a plate and set it on the floor.
The cat circled the meat, sniffing from several angles before she took a tentative bite. He smiled and crossed his arms, leaning against the counter to watch what he had achieved. The cat was really chowing down. When the beef was gone, she licked the plate.
He crossed to the weekly calendar and grabbed the pen that hung from a piece of string thumbtacked to the wall. In the block for Thursday afternoon, he wrote “Cat shopping.” Then, “Brainstorm names.” And finally, “Cat research.”
Above that, in the morning block, he wrote, “Get to know her.”
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
For some nebulous stretch of time, Topher was under the impression that he had died. Those fucking people were silent, and strange lights moved around him. Then a clear, electric light invaded his field of vision. He was shaking all over.
Those fucking people all began shouting at once. He took in as much information as he could: his legs were in the water. He was lying on a pile of rocks and mud. It was drizzling, and some man he didn’t recognize appeared to be waving a flashlight in his face. Later, in the emergency room, he would learn that he was covered in scrapes and bruises, that blood was streaked across his face. It would be a day or so before his injuries began to hurt.
At first it was difficult to speak at all, then the challenge became speaking coherently. So that’s how he found himself crying in another exam room. He couldn’t remember if this was the sixth, seventh, or eighth time his life had circled back to this exact point. He knew he shouldn’t laugh, that it would make him appear crazy, but it was undeniably comical.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me,” he told the social worker who came to interview him. “The people in my head are nuts, but I’m actually a pretty decent guy.”
It was a joke, but she didn’t get it.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Topher wanted to take the cat to the pet store with him, but he had no harness, leash, or carrier. So he did his best to pick out things she would like: cans of food, toys with jingle bells, a no-spill water bowl. When the clerk rang it all up, he realized he would be living on peanut butter sandwiches for the next two weeks. He was okay with that.
“It’s my job to make the sacrifices,” he told the cat when he got home. “Your job is to live in luxury.”
He stacked the food in the pantry, filled the cat box with litter and placed it in the first floor bathroom, filled the water bowl and set it down in the kitchen. All the bustling seemed to bother the cat, who hid under the couch. He sat on the floor with a notepad in his lap, watching to see what she would do.
“Chloe?” he wrote. “Matilda? Peaches?”
Eventually the cat crept out, keeping her body close to the ground. She dashed towards one of the jingly balls on the floor and swatted it with her left paw.
“Dasher?” wrote Topher.
Half an hour later, he had over twenty potential names written down.
“Am I overthinking it?” he asked the cat.
She flopped on her back and swished her tail back and forth.
“Flopsy?” he said. “No, that’s more of a rabbit name. How would you feel about being named Le Tigre?”
She rolled onto her belly and curled into a comfortable ball.
“I could call you Tig for short,” he offered.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
It was Luke who told the doctor that Topher’s “current living situation” was “unstable.”
“They didn’t even notice when you started having trouble,” he said in their first family session of that particular hospital stay. “Frankly, I think they’re alcoholics. If you were drinking as much as they do, it’s no wonder your meds stopped working.”
“Not everything that ever happens is related to meds,” Topher retorted. Although he wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that. They always amped up his medication when he was in-patient, and he was feeling severely fuzzy.
Still, he understood that he could get discharged sooner if the doctor approved of the home he’d be returning to. He agreed to move in with Luke until they figured out something “more permanent.” When Nicole and Chris came to see him, he was afraid they would be hurt.
“My brother wants me to stay with him,” he said, leaving out the parts about their negligence and potential addictions.
“That may be best, sweetie,” Nicole said. “We both work all the time, and you need someone who can check in with you. At least for now.”
“We drove around looking for you,” Chris said. “As far as we could. Half the streets were flooded. We didn’t know what to do.”
This brought on a familiar combination of embarrassment and guilt. When Topher was in the thick of it, his perspective tended to shrink and harden. One of the most painful parts of recovery was re-expanding himself to include other people’s thoughts and feelings.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking each of them in the eye.
“No, no,” Nicole said. “You were…”
Topher was grateful when she decided not to finish that sentence.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Topher found a chart online that explained how your cat was feeling based on the positions of its ears and tail. Tig was sniffing at his leg. Her tail was curled like a little cane, which meant she was feeling friendly. Topher scratched between her ears.
His next search was for the best vet in the area.
“You’re probably not going to like this part much,” he said to Tig. “Sorry. But we need to get you all checked out, plus you might already belong to someone. I hope you don’t.”
Tig made a “merrr” noise, like she objected to the idea that she could belong to anyone.
“Well,” Topher said. “You know what I mean.”
He found an animal clinic with good Yelp reviews and clicked the “Schedule an Appointment” box on their website. Since Tig would be a new patient, there was a lot of paperwork to print and fill out. He wrote “Unknown” next to all the questions about Tig’s age, vaccine records, and medical history.
“Look at that,” he said, showing her the forms. “You’re a blank slate.”
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Topher usually shut his bedroom door at night, a habit from childhood. Now that Tig was in the house, though, he decided to leave it open so she could come and go as she pleased. She remained downstairs, going about her cat business while he brushed his teeth and took his round of night medications.
He got into bed and curled on his side, facing the door. The air conditioner hummed, the refrigerator clanked. He heard a distant rattle as Tig chased one of her toys.
He didn’t close his eyes until he saw her little figure padding into the room. She jumped onto the bed and climbed around his legs and stomach, sniffing. Eventually she curled up into the crook behind his knees. Smiling, he finally allowed himself to sleep.