Are You There and Other Stories (28 page)

Cat in the Rain

D
aniel Porter got drunk in an Irish bar called O’Leary’s. He downed two shots of Jameson’s then spent the balance of the night drinking pints of Guinness while he watched the TV mounted on the back bar between a dusty Shillelagh and a Bodhran. A neon beer advertisement bathed everything in nauseating green light. So much for atmosphere and the olde sod. Anytime it seemed possible somebody other than the bartender might speak to him, Daniel put out his famous repelling vibe. It was Wednesday night and O’Leary’s wasn’t crowded, anyway. O’Leary’s was never crowded, that’s why Daniel liked it.

The basketball game was interrupted periodically for special reports on the potential riot situation in Pioneer Square; O’Leary’s was uptown, but riots tended to wander. Daniel watched the reports with detached interest. He was a police detective, and as far off duty as he could get. Rioting had become pandemic. One city or another igniting almost every week. Protests, anti-protests, Fat Tuesday, Super Bowl victory celebration, May Day,
Arbor Day
—whateverthehell. The Pioneer Square thing had to do with new city curfew laws scheduled to go into effect at midnight. It was as if the world had gone mad with violence. Or madder, anyway. The center will not hold, all that Yeats crap. The uncertainty factor. The impotence factor. The world seemed to have reached its ultimate crisis point at the same time Daniel Porter reached
his
ultimate crisis point. In his work Daniel never trusted a coincidence.

Daniel’s partner, Jimmy Bair, had a cousin who supposedly worked for the NSA. This cousin told Jimmy that, unknown to the public, alien satellites had appeared in high Earth orbit, and they were, as Bair put it, “Cloaked—you know just like
Star Trek
. Sometimes they’re
there
, and sometimes they’re
not
there. For all we know they’re shooting us with invisible Hate rays.”

Good old Jimmy. He was Scotch-Irish, big and aggressively chummy, with a nose like a red potato. A stand-up guy no matter what. The one guy Daniel would want watching his back.

“It’s a fucking sign,” Bair insisted. “You know, all that crap in the Middle East, AIDS, bird flu, wars, plagues, fucking terrorists, fucking
pestilence
. Plus things in the sky. Signs and portraits, right? It all adds up to the big picture. Like the Bible.”

Daniel cultivated detachment as a barrier against idiot theories, not to mention his genuine sense of impending doom. Daniel was hell on barriers. He wasn’t too bad on Doom, either. For corroboration one could consult his ex-wife. Daniel had always been an asshole, to hear Nancy tell it. But lately he had become the Emperor of Assholes. Daniel couldn’t help it. He reacted against the cesspool the world had become, the cesspool his life in particular had become. And he couldn’t listen to any more bullshit—especially his own.

The game was over (and how), the night progressed to the AM side of the clock. Daniel threw back the dregs of his last Guinness, paid, and left.

It was a hot August night. He felt sick and dizzy. Hands in his pockets, he stumbled up the street like a badly manipulated marionette. A red Toyota Echo hunkered at the corner. Daniel recognized the creased quarter panel. He stepped around a pile of cardboard and rags, staggered against his car, fumbled the key into the lock, pulled the door open, and bundled himself into the backseat. He’d rest a few minutes, regroup.

Daniel’s head expanded and contracted like a balloon nippled in the mouth of an asthmatic. Time passed. Several voices rose up, all male. Something loud and metallic
clanged
. Daniel, folded and sprawled half conscious across the back seat, opened his eyes. Yellow firelight played on the roof. A rusty sound made him wince, stiff wheels grinding on pavement. Daniel sat up cautiously, his head in deflated mode.

Across the street four or five young men were pushing a burning garbage dumpster down the sidewalk. They bent their backs to it. Flames surged and lapped over their heads. Sparks, like swarms of fireflies, twisted in and out of chugging gray-black smoke.

Sensing movement behind him, Daniel turned. The pile of rags stood next to the car. He had barely registered the rags before, avoiding them with his drunk-dar. Now he realized they constituted a derelict. As the Hellfire dumpster passed on the opposite side of the street firelight flickered on the derelict’s face. Except, below his ratty watch cap, he
had
no face. It was like a rudimentary manikin’s head displaying the subtlest impressions and protrusions, suggesting features not yet formed. As Daniel watched, the impressions deepened, as if invisible thumbs were pressing into soft wax. Shadows quivered in the eye cups. A wet gleam occurred. Daniel’s breath caught, and there was a tremendous crash across the street. He jerked around. The dumpster was now tipped over inside the display window of Talbot’s. Real manikins turned into torches. The young men capered like savages, their identities lost to a mob impulse. When Daniel looked back, the derelict was gone—if he’d even been there in the first place.

*

He steered the Toyota up Pine Street toward Capital Hill, hunched forward, both hands fisted at the top of the wheel. Behind him sirens ululated. He became confused in the residential back streets. Nancy had kicked him out of the house only a couple of weeks ago. In the dark the hulking brick building where he now resided looked like any other. Daniel hated the apartment, hated the smallness of it, the feel of other lives having passed through. He’d almost rather sleep in the Toyota. Finally, exhausted, he parked randomly, stubbing the front tire on the curb.

His balloon head carried him through shadows, puddles of moonlight. He swayed against a noisy fence, fingers hooked in the chain link. A girl gazed at him from a third story window. She was wearing a light summer dress. There was no glass in the window. He blinked and she was gone, an apparition of his mind. The building, which otherwise appeared abandoned, seemed to lean toward him. Daniel’s head drooped, balloon deflated. He felt his gorge rise for the umpteenth time since leaving O’Leary’s. Without looking up again he lurched away from the fence. The next thing he knew, he was pushing open the door of his apartment.

*

Daniel lay on his bed and stared at the dingy white plaster with its sags and cracks and stains. His ears were ringing. Sleep eluded him, his mind meandering down empty paths. His mouth had Saharan aspirations. He worked his throat, swallowed. Finally he got up and shuffled into the bathroom. Bare feet planted on the cold tile, he leaned over the sink and slurped at cold, metallic-tasting tap water. He heard a voice conducted down the airshaft and cranked the tap off. A girl reciting a nursery rhyme, that sing-songy cadence. But it was not a child’s voice. Daniel turned to the window and raised the sash. Counter-weights knocked inside the frame. A gray concrete wall faced him, so close he could almost reach out and touch it. The voice stopped. Below was a forlorn slab. He craned around and looked up. At the same time a head stuck out of the window on the next floor. A young, round-faced girl looked down at him, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. She was very pale and serious, her shoulder length black hair hanging straight down.

Daniel said, “Hi,” in a phlegmy voice.

“I thought I was all alone,” the girl replied then withdrew from sight and closed her window.

*

He slept into the afternoon and awoke with a headache. The sight of the unpacked, cluttered, and dusty apartment depressed him. Upon moving out of the Ballard house he’d taken two week’s vacation. He wanted to settle into his new life alone, to establish himself in his new environment. But the interruption of the work routine left him prey to wounded maunderings and depression. The drinking had gotten on top of him. He knew he had pushed Nancy’s last button. The button’s name was Julie. But he had only wanted Julie so long as he couldn’t
have
her. Instead he achieved what he had really craved all along: to be totally alone. He’d even given up the girl on the internet, the one Nancy never did find out about. Daniel’s isolation imperative throbbed as though infused with cosmic energy, perfectly accomplishing his estrangement. He’d felt this way before, when he was fourteen, during his suicide summer. Nobody knew about that.

*

He lay on the bed in his underwear, watching TV with the sound turned off, a Merlot bottle on the bedside table and an empty stem glass balanced on his stomach. The picture quality was bad. It was an old portable television. The antenna imperfectly snagged broadcast signals out of the air.

There was weeping in the airshaft.

For a while he pretended he didn’t hear it. Then she started in on the nursery rhymes again. He couldn’t quite make out the words and it bothered him. He put the glass on the table and stood up. It took him two tries, which is how he discovered he was drunk again.

In the bathroom he knelt on the floor, arms folded on the window ledge. Mary’s lamb had a white fleece. As white as
snow
. Go figure. The girl’s voice was sweet, trembly. There was something about that Rhyme, something he couldn’t quite remember, something important. Daniel struggled with it for a minute then gave up. As he stood, his elbow knocked a bottle of shampoo off the window ledge. It hit the slab and the cap popped off.

The girl’s voice stopped for a moment. Then she said, “Is somebody there?”

Daniel stared at the blunt, concrete wall. It was almost as though he were snug and safe inside a chimney. Safe from the anxieties that plagued him, safe from the world. He didn’t want to come out.

“I didn’t think so,” the girl said. “Just another nasty trick.”

Daniel cleared his throat.

“Hey—” the girl said.

Daniel addressed the wall: “I’m here, I’m not a nasty trick.” He had the strangest feeling he was talking to himself.

“Let me see you.”

Daniel extended his upper body out the window and twisted around. As before, she gazed down at him, her hair hanging straight.

“God,” she said.

“No, just me. Dan.”

“Eh. I’m Frankie.”

He stared at her. Frankie was the name of the chat girl he had abandoned. This couldn’t be . . .

“What were you crying about?” he asked.

“My cat ran away.”

His
Frankie had a cat, too. So had his ex. Daniel was allergic. Before they married, Nancy used to put the cat out when he came over. One night he woke up to the sound of rain. Nancy was asleep. The cat clung to a branch outside the bedroom window, miserable, fur matted and dripping. That was the night the damn thing disappeared. Who knew what happened to it. Hit by a car, run off. He had felt bad. Nancy told him it wasn’t
his
fault, of course. Sixteen years later, though, she let him know how it
had
been his fault. And how she didn’t even believe in his allergies. “It’s all psychosomatic with you,” she had said. “You don’t want anything around that demonstrates love, that might need you, or that you might need. Not me, not even a
cat
. You can’t
take
it.” Well, she had a point. He really couldn’t take it.

“That’s too bad,” he said to Frankie.

“He’s all I had left. Now they’ll get me.”

“Who will get you?”

“The saucer people.”

Daniel felt tired.

“Will you come up here?” Frankie said.

He didn’t reply. His back hurt.

“Please? I want to show you something. I’m scared.”

“What is it?” he said.

“You have to see it.”

*

The hallway seemed to tilt. Daniel kept bumping into the wall. It was too dark. On the ceiling inverted bowls glowed dimly yellow. At the end of the hallway a hydrocephalic moon leered through the broken window. Trash littered the floor. It was as though he were in two buildings at once. Which one was real? Either of them? Daniel had to haul himself up the stairs using the rail. He closed his eyes for a while and kept climbing. When he opened them again the third floor appeared normal. He found the right door and knocked.

*

Frankie was a small person, not much over five feet. She wore a faded summer dress in a flower print. Her legs and feet were bare. She was pretty, in a way. Mostly she made him conscious of his age, just as his unseen internet girl had. He was forty-nine.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Nineteen.”

The same as
his
Frankie.

“I think I know you,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” she said, taking his hand and leading him through a duplicate of his apartment, minus the clutter. He didn’t want her to touch him but he allowed it. In the kitchen she said, “Feel that?”

He did: a cold exhalation, a draft. She pulled him to the other side of the kitchen. The draft was coming out of the narrow space next to the refrigerator. He should have been able to see the back wall. Instead there was a velvet shadow, an impression of
depth
, a vague iridescence. The draft raised his hackles. There was a strange odor. It evoked slaughterhouses, the smell of wet concrete after they’ve hosed the blood away. He took his hand out of Frankie’s.

“The Sleeve,” she said. “It’s like a connecting corridor between
here
and
there
. The saucer, I guess. Like that tunnel thing at the airport that you walk through to get on the plane? It’s for people like us.”

Daniel really wished he hadn’t come up.

“Where do you think you are right now?” she said, suddenly intense.

“Uh, your kitchen?” Daniel said.

“Wrong. They mess with our minds. First they shoot us with rays to make us crazy. Make us more alone. You want to know what my theory is? To be human, to belong on Earth, you have to be connected to other people, you have to be yourself
and
part of the human web. When we lose that sense of connection we’re vulnerable. They isolate us then they replace us. It’s like an invasion. They’re
replacing us
.” (And he saw his own shadowed face in a cracked and spotted mirror, mouthing those words:
They’re replacing us.
)

Daniel rubbed his eyes. Except for the rays and invasion bullshit her words sounded familiar. Web of human connection. He’d read that somewhere.