Ari Figue's Cat

Book I On a Winter’s Night

1 Girl on the Train

Journal Entry

Frankford El

Standing in the isle—a girl—a suppurating sore on her upper arm. She peels the band aid off. Squeezes it, blots the drainage with a piece of brown paper towel

I know this girl. I've watched her walk across the parking lot from my bedroom window. Leans her head on her companion's shoulder, stares at her hands, follows his gestures when he talks. Doesn't look at his eyes. He leans to kiss her. Lips just touch, brush. She touches the end of her nose with her finger where his nose pressed against hers, a little twitch at the corners of her mouth—never parts her lips. The train sways and rocks. Their bodies press together. She whispers in his ear. Her eyes grow dark.

When I look up from the page where I've been writing they're gone.

2 The Voice

When he was a child it would come to him like that, a voice generated out of common white noise, the sounds of passing cars (especially tires on wet streets), a ceiling fan, voices—a radio from the 1940's playing in another room. Sometimes like the voice in his head when he read as a kid or the voice of a real person—Mrs. Erickson snatching him out of a daydream by his ear in the third grade. Pay attention! she'd say, pointing to figures on the blackboard he couldn't quite make out.

Somewhere in adolescence the voice faded, but the feeling that had gone with it never left him, this sense of accountability, of living in more than one world at a time. If anything, it grew stronger. It would come over him like a seizure. Any little thing—a squirrel running up a tree, a bubblegum wrapper floating in a puddle on the sidewalk, a snatch of conversation overheard, transformed into an enigma, a rent in the fabric of the world.

3 Cicadas

After seeing the girl on the el, on the way home, it happened again. A chorus of cicadas making a great ruckus in the trees. A sharpening of his vision. The leaves, no longer a dark undifferentiated mass, but each one distinct, some yellowing around the edges, a few already brown. The sun pulsed low in the sky through a latticework of branch and foliage. And the flush of late afternoon heat, the sound of passing cars, leaves underfoot, the smell of mown grass, exhaust, the smoke from someone cooking in their yard, the weight of his own body, the hardness of the pavement beneath his feet told him. He won't remember coming to a stop or how long he stood there, motionless. Probably not more than a few minutes. It felt like hours. It had been years since the last time this had happened.

In the basement, his journals. Time to be rid of them.

On the way up from the basement, the box split open and they tumbled back down the stairs shedding pressed leaves ticket stubs notes and letters, photos and newspaper clippings. He gathered everything up and packed it into two new boxes and left them on the curb to be picked up with the trash in the morning. But the trash trucks didn't come, and on his way home, the cicadas still in his ears, there they were, on the walk where he'd left them. It was her. No question in his mind.

Later, after washing and putting away the dishes, sitting on the back steps with a glass of iced tea watching the sky fade from molten yellow to red to mauve, the street lights blinking on over the parking lot, he took the boxes back inside.

4. The Name

Late Winter

1995

I'd been lying in bed for hours, half asleep half awake, when I heard as distinct and real as the rattling of the windows in the wind and the knocking of the heating pipes in the walls, a woman's voice calling out the name, Jacob, like it was my own.

Was that the first time?

Yes.

How did you feel?

Like it was my name.... but I was someone else.

What else.

Lights. Lights from passing cars. Windows white with frost. Shadows. Branches of the dying willow at the edge of the parking lot fall in tangled silhouettes across the walls. A girl asleep beneath the snow gazing up past the clouds at the stars.

It's been snowing for three days. There've been no plows and the wind has piled drifts across the streets.

You go outside.

I want to crawl under the covers and wait for morning.

But you don't.

No, I can't. I can't sleep. I feel for my shoes in the dark, slip them on. The window's covered with frost.

5 Ice

He pressed his finger to the glass, melted a spot the size of a dime, moved his finger across the pane. Figures.

He tried making a circle but couldn't. Couldn't make the ends come together. Melting rivulets formed a sort of web.

Before the snow there was rain, then a cold front moved through and the rain turned to ice. Everything covered with ice. Sidewalks streets trees — blades of grass frozen and gleaming like little glass knives. The late afternoon sun through a rift in the clouds. The trailing branches of the willow, sheathed in ice broke into light—countless prisms radiating the colors of the spectrum: blue, violet, electric green, vermilion. The clouds closed over the sun again and it began to snow.

6 Snow Angel

Someone is standing on the far side of the parking lot.

Yes?

Even before my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I knew.

What do you see?

She's turning around. Her back toward me, her feet at the edge of the unbroken sweep of white on the lot. Hands braced to catch herself—she falls backwards into the snow. Spreading her legs, closing them again like a scissors while her arms sweep up and down at her side.

Then?

She pushes herself forward to her knees, stands up, turns to view the impression she's left. For a long while, she just stands there—arms at her sides, dark hair clung with white snowflakes, watching her image fill slowly with snow.

She's gone, but there are footprints. I stare at the dead willow on the edge of the lot, its bare branches black against low clouds.

7 Snapshot

I open the closet for a clean towel, thinking maybe I'll shower, make a cup of tea, but something falls on the floor. I'm staring at it. A coat has slipped off a hanger. This is a sign, I tell myself. This is a sign.

Like in your dream.

Like in my dream, but this is no dream. This is real. A sign. What was I going to do? I get dressed, pick up the coat, put it on, tug a black watch cap over my ears, shove my bare feet into a pair of boots and make my way over the crusted snow of the empty parking lot.

In places, the lot has been swept almost clean by the wind, but there's drifts by the fence. Stepping through them, I feel a sharp chill around my ankles and feet. Snow seeps over the tops of my boots. It's so cold. My breath in little puffs—snatched away by the wind. I want to turn around, go back to bed.

But you don't.

No. I hold the collar of my coat closed against the chill, step over one last drift.

Is she there?

No. Not her, not yet... but the snow angel—so fresh I can make out the impressions left by the belt and buttons from the back of her coat. There are the prints of her hands where she'd lifted herself when she stepped free from the image left by her body. The footprints I saw from the window. A reflection from a passing car falls across the snow, particles of light.

You find something.

A snapshot—a faded print mounted on construction paper or light poster board.. The corners bent back like tabs pressed into the snow in the center of the figure. Like an offering.

What do you do?

What anyone would do. I pick it up.

And then.

Slip it into my pocket and go back to my room. In the heated house, starved, for sleep, I craw into bed, pull the blankets over my shoulders.

What do you see when you close your eyes?

Snow falling outside the window.

8 A Man on a Train

Flakes swirl around passengers on the platform; wet footprints mark the walks on the streets below. I watch him leave the train, pass the still locked carts in The Gallery. A girl with a black head scarf is spreading dough on a marble counter behind the window of the Cinnamon Bun kiosk. She watches him as though she knows him, knows what he has done. He climbs the stairs to the street, passes three men veiled in steam and falling snow huddled around a vent, their blankets and plastic bags piled near-by. Each image is succeeded by another, drawing him on like the opening scenes of a film. There is a feeling that it should lead somewhere, to some revelation around the next corner waiting to happen, someone ahead of us, just out of sight, leading him on. But it is a film where the camera men have forgotten to show up, and around every corner there is only another corner, each vanishing in turn beyond recall, and then he is on the train where he first saw her. He turns to where she was standing—but there is nothing there. As though looking through a frosted glass, the passengers are frozen, like drawings etched in ice and at their center a space, neither white nor black, neither dark nor light.

9

Journal Entry

This Morning He woke…

…& there were these men there & people he knew even to hear their voices on the telephone in a way that doesn't happen in dreams not even in those dreams where you say—it was so real when the truth is there's never anything even remotely real about dreams except for the fact that when you wake up what you remember or think that you remember though he couldn't be sure it's really a memory but this is what it felt like but this dream-fear isn't real falling down the elevator shaft head over heels fear, it’s the woman on the bus with her aleph bet and the girl on the el and even Sorrell—as though they were all one all of them falling into that space in the snow or rising out it—the question is how does one know, in a dream making up what has never happened what does it feel like to fall to one’s death when it hasn't happened unless it really has or like in a movie or maybe in another life and you've forgotten only you really haven't, like those Marines in the real war not the movie at all who wake up and not for the first time on a spring morning far away and long after in a ditch running with human filth and the smell of burning hair and the mortars keep falling and whistling and falling and whistling as they come and you're still waiting years later never knowing just which day just which morning will be the one when you hear the voice...

... Jacob

... and he awoke and was amazed...

10 The Raptor

The landlord's sister had shown up at the door demanding money. Not rent—money I was holding for her. But he sent it in the mail, she said—and showed me a receipt with a signature in his hand. I spent it, I told her, and pushed her away from the door—her pounding my chest with her fists and screaming for the cops.

Later that morning, on a sheet of paper shoved under the door, a single telegraphic command:

HAVE BUYER. USE CHECK SENT LAST MONTH TO SELL SHIP STORE TRASH FURNITURE. EMPTY AND CLEAN HOUSE. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? URGENT—CALL ME

In the stack of unopened mail that'd been piling up for weeks, I found—not one, but three notices to vacate the premises.

* * *

This afternoon as I’m getting ready to leave the house, I hear crows, crows in a state of high excitement. They’re flapping overhead looping around to the back of the house where the racket is coming from. Curious, I go to the back door, look up to see where the ruckus is—all these crows circling and swooping and circling.

There appears to be something at the other side of the tree over the parking lot. I crossed the yard, ducked through a hole in the fence—like on that winter night when I saw the girl in the snow. There perched on the top of a utility pole is a large hawk—or maybe a falcon (I read they've built nests on City Hall). This one hawk or falcon, he's holding a pigeon in his claws making a feast of it while the crows circle and scold all around him.. Now and then one will brush the hawk's crown with its wings ruffling feathers on its shoulders. The hawk pays them no mind, tearing a shred of flesh from the pigeon and a little cloud of feathers flutters down like snow.

11 A Visit with Naomi Nacht

The blackbirds of debt, I think, ringing the night bell. This is the address on back of the photograph. Shivering in the late winter cold. A second front blew in as I was leaving the house, already puddles from the recent rain have begun to freeze over. Excited, nervous with my newfound resolve, standing on a stranger's doorstep this February afternoon, my seasonal predisposition to gloom easing, lifting, rising in and through and out of me. This new body forming around me, the old one peeling away. Skinned. Set for transport. Keeping watch.

* * *

What happened when she opened the door? What did you see?

A woman standing in the doorway.

A distinctly literary experience, you said.

Yes, as though I were about to be introduced to a character in a book.

It wasn't her, then?

No. I never expected her. I was there to play the game. See where it led.

You must be Jacob, she says.

Is she, then, the woman in the dream? The voice that you heard?

Jacob. I savored the sound of it. Jacob. I had this ridiculous urge to look in a mirror—to see if, staring back, would be the same face I saw that morning. Or none at all.

And you must be... Mrs. Nacht?

Naomi, please, she says, and holds out her hand. Palm down, flexed at the wrist. Like it expected to be kissed. There are faint marks above her knuckles. A small white scar. Bluish veins. She takes me by the hand and leads me like a child out of the cold and into the house, points to two chairs with a small Chinese table between them. She's not short, but thin... can't weigh much over a hundred pounds. The face, mask-like. She doesn't seem to see me. Seems to be something wrong with her eyes. She turns and makes her way to the kitchen, taking small, careful steps—like someone walking in the dark. Please, she says, allow me to bring you some tea.

Book shelves, books in half a dozen languages. In the center, a large antique bookcase with glass doors, shelves filled with leather-bound