Story: ‘Chat Perdu’
Chat Perdu
for Lilla
In Brooklyn, a girl sleeps. It’s a fitful sleep, made of tosses and turns. She is wearing a black t-shirt four size two large silkscreened with the crumbling white remains of a forgotten eighties punk band logo — a chain of progressively larger fish about to eat one another. A few bands of moonlight that have somehow made their way down from the sky above the shaft-like inner courtyard of her building and the LED on a power strip are the only light. Outside a car honks close by, and she sits up, pulls the shirt (which had ridden up and tangled around her belly) down over her red underwear, and unknots herself from the sheets. It is the third night like this.
She sits back against the headboard and picks a smart phone up from the night stand. She types “CAN’T. EFFING. SLEEP,” and sends it off to everyone following her, then stalks across the dark bedroom to an old wooden boudoir table, stumbling once on a pile of books in her path. She switches on an old lamp with a fringed shade and opens a drawer. She takes from the drawer a red velour slip case, and from this she pulls an antique silver mirror, slightly tarnished. She looks into the mirror and frowns.
“Of course.” She blows a lock of hair out of her eye, studies the mirror for a moment longer, and puts it away.
There is a stray gum wrapper on the table. She wads it up and flicks it into the waste basket, which already contains the envelope from an electric bill, a few dust bunnies, a plastic bottle that hasn’t made its way to the recycling yet, and a printout of an airline itinerary that she purchased but then canceled.
She curls back into bed and lays there, not expecting to sleep.
• • •
In the Lower Haight, something like a dense whorl of smoke with four legs and firefly green eyes stalks a rooftop. She prowls through a puddle of moonlight, briefly revealing herself as a small, slender cat, then disappears again.
Her goal is a pile of white bones near the center of the roof, not far from a ramshackle dovecote. The bones lay white and glossy in a large rectangle of moonlight. The cat slinks around its periphery, letting only the tip of her nose be illuminated as she sniffs at them. The cat crouches back into the shadows and sniffs the air. Her prey is close.
She circles the dovecote. It is cylindrical, built of wood bleached gray by sun and rain, with a roof of crumbling asphalt shingles and rusty metal shutters. The cat finds a wide crack between wall slats at the bottom and slips through. Inside are row upon row of pigeonholes stacked atop one another. In many of them are sleeping pigeons, their heads tucked down into their breasts.
The cat leaps onto the nearest shelf, and begins creeping up on the nearest pigeon, but she knocks loose a clump of guano. It hits the floor below, and the air explodes in a cloud of flapping wings as the pigeons awaken and fly away, disappearing through the walls and rusty shutters. A single feather drifts down, which she catches, but it dissipates like a twist of fog even as her mouth closes on it.
The cat hops down to the floor, slips out through another crack, and begins the hunt again.
• • •
The girl is finishing a light meter reading, wiping sleep from her eyes for what seems like the fifteenth time that morning.
“Where were you at breakfast?” the stylist asks, “Thomas was pissed. You know he has a thing about having breakfast before a shoot.”
“Yeah, and then disappearing for the actual shoot. Look, I’m doing Thomas a favor here.”
“Well, you’re not getting sick, are you?”
“No, just… tired. Couldn’t drag myself out of bed until almost ten.”
The stylist chuckles, “What, are you on West Coast time?”
She gives the woman a neutral look. “Something like that.” She turns to the model and tosses her a pair of shiny steel police handcuffs, which she barely catches without dropping . “Cuff yourself to the radiator.”
“Um, since when is this a fetish shoot?” The model shifts uncomfortably.
“The name of the label is Kidnapper,” she lies. “Don’t worry. I have keys.”
The stylist mouths the word, “What?” at her from behind the model, tightens the cuff around her wrist with a satisfying series of clicks, then returns to primping over hair and folds in the dress. The model is distinctly uncomfortable at first, but to her credit it, she figures it out and relaxes into the shoot. As she shoots, the girl wonders if the model’s display of indignity over the handcuffs wasn’t a bit disingenuous.
“Less, um… It shouldn’t be so, ‘You know you want it,’ okay? Look a little scared.” She tries to smile, help the model stay relaxed, but her lips feel wooden. The model pulls it off anyway, giving her the pose she’s looking for. “Gotcha,” she whispers.
As they’re packing up, the model already off to another appointment, the stylist says, “Dude, what was that?”
“It was fun. I was playing with the space. Thomas will love it.”
“Well, I think he’ll hate it.”
The stylist leaves, and she finishes packing her gear. “Fuck Thomas,” she says to the empty room.
• • •
The ghost pigeons are bathing in a shallow fountain on Mission Street. When finished, they shake spectral droplets from their feathers and preen on the fountain’s edge before flapping up to perch on the sculpture rising from the fountain. To most eyes it’s a brushed metal abstract, but the hazy appendages on which the pigeons roost form a splendid astrarium.
The cat can see it. Relative to where she is crouching in the shadow of a newspaper box, the ghostly mechanism shows an annular eclipse of the sun. It is early afternoon, and one of the pigeons is still finishing its bath. She cranes her neck, peering up at it, then steals forward, keeping the lip of the fountain between her and the bird. There are people walking through the plaza, but none of them pay her any mind.
The pigeon finishes its bath and hops to the edge of the fountain. The cat springs, but the pigeon turns its head just in time and takes wing, spraying her with a cloud of water droplets that, fortunately, leave her wet for only a moment before sublimating into the empty air. When she finishes shaking them from her eyes, the pigeon is on the astrarium with the rest of its flock, cooing contentedly.
• • •
At La Guardia, the woman at the counter glances over the passengers at the check-in kiosks, says, “Decordova?”
A tired-looking girl with red hair in chunky shoes and a black overcoat covers a yawn, then turns it into a wave. “Here.” She has startlingly green eyes underlined by dark circles. The woman wonders if she wears contacts.
“Just that?” The woman looks a little confused. The girl has only a purse and an empty cat carrier.
“Yeah.” She puts the carrier down on the scale. It still has the tags from the pet store on it.
“You might be able to take that apart and carry it on, you know. Save you $35.”
The girl fumbles through her wallet, looking for her credit card. “Honestly… Not sure I could figure that out right now.”
“Have it your way.” The woman tags the cat carrier and puts it on the conveyor, finishes some business with the computer and hands her a receipt. “Your gate’s B6. Have a nice flight.”
“Have a good one.” She walks away without her receipt.
“Miss. Miss!” But she is already half way to the security line.
• • •
She has never tried for a seagull before. They’re bigger than pigeons, and they smell of low tide and diesel. But she’s far from home and feeling the change of pace, and the wharf district teems with them. They’re smarter than pigeons, too, and the first three times she tries to prowl up on one, its mates let go a chorus of raucous cries, and all of the gulls lift off, alighting tauntingly close by in the water.
This will be a challenge.
• • •
On the way from the airport, she manages to nap for a few blessed moments, but just as quickly she’s awake again. She takes a cab to a place near the center of the unfamiliar city and begins walking its streets with her purse under her right arm and the cat carrier in her left hand. It’s cool and foggy, and she’s glad for the thick wool coat. She has no set goal in mind, but a search pattern in the back of her head. If the street grid weren’t making her go square corners, it would look like a spiral whirling outward from the point where the cab dropped her.
• • •
The cat is hungry. After getting soaked in a bucket of sea water on her final attempt at pouncing a gull, she’s given up on the birds of this city. But the wraith of a mouse she caught once she dried off wasn’t satisfying. She stops in an alley to clean herself. As she contemplates tangling with a ghost rat she can hear rummaging through a nearby bin, her ears perk up. Someone is calling her.
• • •
Leaving the carrier out of sight, she crouches at the mouth of an alley, puckers her lips, and makes a quick series of kissing sounds.
Finally, a small charcoal cat wearing a dark red collar steps into the alley mouth, having slinked up close in the shadow of a wall.
“There we are. You know, it isn’t much fun chasing after you like this.”
The cat trots up and rubs against her knee, not looking at all penitent. The girl sighs and scratches her behind the ears.
“Right. You don’t care.” She picks the cat up and carries her around the corner. The cat mews in protest when she sees the carrier. “Nope, in you go. Whatever we’re looking for, it ain’t here.” She closes the door behind her, picks the carrier up, and walks downhill into the fog, looking for a taxi.
• • •
The woman at the counter in La Guardia sees a hundred thousand faces go by every day, but for some reason that morning she notices the girl from yesterday, the one she assumed must be wearing contacts. She’s coming up the stairs from the baggage claim, and the dark circles are gone. As she heads for the cab stand, she leaves the empty cat carrier she checked the day before on top of a garbage can by the exit. The woman watches her for just a moment through the glass automatic doors. She steps out onto the curb, lights a cigarette, and is gone.
Chat Perdu by Jack Graham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.lonesomerobot.com/.
