three

Dolores Tremayne found herself snooting and snuffling across the cork floor in the kitchen. In her human experience, the only time she could recall nostrils being put to comparable use was when associates at college or at work gatherings—flatmates, candidate lovers, high-flying executives before the inevitable fall—ingested lines of white powder, which she declined, in part out of fear of losing control to some chemical reaction and in part out of revulsion at the global trade in narcotics that ruined lives and diverted billions from state exchequers where they might be better spent on health care and schooling and other human requirements. But now her snoots and sniffles seemed reflexive rather than recreational, as if she was questing for something she could not immediately identify, like a person looking for a light switch in a darkened room, or programming a GPS while on the move in unknown, threatening neighborhoods.

She was not, of course, a person per se. She was, physically at least, a cat. Or at least she was a human in thrall to a cat, locked into a cat, as bonded to X as Nelson Mandela to his jailers on Robben Island, from which there was never any unplanned escape. The comparison had little relevance to her since she had no means of discourse, of negotiation with her captor. X—or Dolores within—would not be freed because the world demanded it at rock concerts, or threatened punishment unless the cage was unlocked. She did not even know whether X herself could hear her captive’s Cry Freedom.

She navigated past a fragment of what her human mind knew to be a snapped-off corner of potato chip, but her feline appetites displayed no interest. (The Dolores in her fretted that the cleaning lady from the Philippines must have missed it and her family did not seem to care about this rodent-luring debris.) She moved on. She was not a dog, a canine vacuum cleaner devouring any fallen item. Cats had higher standards. She crossed the kitchen, navigating through an enormous arch that reminded her human side of the central cavity of the Arc de Triomphe. She crossed some light-colored material, amid blocks of seating arrangements for bipeds. At her level—and she knew this because it had been on her human mind for weeks—a tall mirror had been placed on its side along a skirting board until she and her husband agreed where to install it. Passing it now, she saw a faintly haughty creature—long-haired, slinky, sloe-eyed, blue-retinaed, endowed with a pelt of unique shadings: ivory, burnt umber, charcoal. Its face was dark and smoky, like a Venetian carnival mask against the lighter tones of its cranium and body. Its ears were almost black, set on either side of a wedge of pale fur extending from its blond spine. If you were human and had studied your kings and queens of England, a ruff of pure white around the neck would recall Elizabethan fashions.

The flanks were mottled with darker patches, like the markings of a parrot fish. Its paws were dark with silky hair between the pads, and its tail a great, gray brush that would outdo any fox.

That is me! That is what I have become. To be part of X, Dolores found herself thinking, was quite an honor. If she was a cat, then she was a superior version of the species.

Appropriately enough. In her human life, Dolores Tremayne was a powerhouse, indomitable, the embodiment of the new, female, formerly disadvantaged executive. She had overcome the stereotypes of race and gender, bursting through glass walls and ceilings, propelling herself upward with ballistic purpose. Like scientists at Mission Control, invested in her success and in awe of her celestial ascent, her family watched her zoom into the stratosphere then welcomed her back with her payload of promotions and bonuses and exotica from distant galaxies—ostrich eggs from Johannesburg; megapixel, multizoom HD-enabled cameras from Hong Kong; gold chains from Dubai; backgammon sets inlaid with mother-of-pearl from Beirut and Cairo; jade from Beijing; iPads from New York.

Her perfect achievement could not be measured purely in income, although that was satisfyingly substantial. She had given birth to two beautiful daughters. She financed the writerly ambitions of her deliciously sexy husband (“white British,” according to the forms he filled out) who seemed happy enough to stay home and do the school run and supervise the staff in the hours of downtime between bouts of halting, anguished composition and the necessary displacement activities that nourish the creative soul.

His first novel—Birth—had been well received, if not well sold or marketed. He had a three-book contract, and she assumed that, in her absences, he was gestating the second of the trilogy. In the days of mechanical typewriters and A4 paper, she might have expected to see a slowly growing pile of completed script next to the clattering keys, like in that movie in the empty hotel with the famous actor and the boy and the woman. But that measure of progress had given way to the inscrutability of a hard drive and a backup USB stick, neither of which offered any clue to the work in progress.

She did not pry.

She was too busy to pry.

She did not ask to see his latest effort.

All work and no play.

The book. The movie. What was it called?

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” That was all the fake author had written. Page after page of it. Volumes worthy in bulk of Tolstoy, but worth their weight only in paper, used paper at that. Paper soiled by fraudulent effort. But if you flipped the adage—all play and no work—what happened in Gerald’s life? And with whom did he play?

REDRUM! Murder spelled backward. That was one of the linguistic tricks in the book. What does it take to drive a biped to that extreme sanction, to give someone a real redrummering?

Jack Nicholson. The star. No dull boy there, of course.

In secret, part of her calculated that provided Gerald looked after the girls—who adored having a long-haired, bohemian father whose brown-eyed gaze melted the hardest teacherly hearts, male or female, at parents’ evening—then that was fine.

And another part thought that, as long as their separations ended in passionate coupling that seemed to have lost none of its multiple magic over the years, that was fine, too, a bonus, an affirmation that their relationship, built on absences rather than shared drudgery, enabled them to survive the advancing years that frayed the fabric of so many of her friends’ marriages.

But another part of her frowned in puzzlement: the first novel had been published three years earlier. In a business that determined success or failure with unseemly haste, it had slipped into oblivion. He gave talks about the “craft of the novel” at obscure literary festivals, allowing tantalizing hints of his rough-diamond-northern-English accent to creep back into his voice, as if to suggest a life of deprivation and hardship at the lonesome coalface of composition. (Coalface had once been a possible alternative name for X, but had been considered far too literal. Possibly offensive.) The paperback of Birth would be stacked on a table for him to sign for those who purchased it—many of them, she had noticed at one gathering, quite comely young women. But, despite his promotional efforts, his wit, his charm, his slick manipulation of audiences, his Amazon ranking seemed like a mathematical impossibility: were there really 3,780,922 books that were better loved than his? He had extended and re-extended the delivery date for the second of the trilogy—Marriage—and the slow pace of the artistic endeavor gave her cause to worry whether it was not only the title but also their eponymous civil state that was holding him back from realizing what the kinder reviewers had called the promise of his debut oeuvre.

The third volume—Death—seemed far-distant and she prayed that it would become a reality before life, or, in this case, its termination, came to imitate art.

The Shining. That was the name of the film. And the book. Stephen King the author.

Had Stephen King ever seen a single word of his placed at 3,780,923 on the lists? Doubtful.

No longer snooting, X has determined that it is time to patrol the perimeters of her domain. X saunters down the long central corridor.

Sit back. Enjoy the ride.

They are in the guest bedroom now, she and X.

*   *   *

I spring upward from the carpet. The sleep-pad feels unpleasantly soft with no biped bumps and bones to guide my paws. No temperature spikes to draw my heat-seeking explorations. No sound of breath, grunts, whimpers, snores.

The sleep-pad is empty. There is no immediate danger but, as a cat, I know how easily that can change. Part of the whiteness has been folded back, so there is a soft, yielding ridge, then a smooth plain, then the mountain range called Pillows. Next to the sleep-pad, the humans keep containers and artificial suns that they control in their biped way, turning day into night, night into day, conjuring giddy images from darkened picture boxes.

There is a silvery, slidy square of something alien that I flip with my paw.

It falls from its place on a flat area below the artificial sun. I push it hither and thither. It is not terribly interesting. There is no purchase for a sharp, extended claw. It does not squeal or take flight. It has no tail or fur and holds no promise of sustenance. I bat it back and forth a bit but it does not seem to want to play. I sniff it. Neutral. Shades of chemical. Notes of lubricant. Unpleasant but inspiring curiosity.

I take it between my sharp little teeth. Its texture is difficult to place in my catalogue of sensations: hard, metallic on the outside, but something softer seems hidden within, bouncy, like one of those toys with which the humans try to distract me. My incisor easily penetrates the outer casing but the interior is glutinous, repellent. I bite a little deeper.

An unpleasant taste. Slimy. A voice inside me is telling me what it is but I cannot quite decipher it. And whose voice would it be anyhow?

The sound of the great white barrier opening and closing alarms us.

Redrum most foul may be afoot. For all we know or care.

*   *   *

We flatten ourselves—X and I—and turn, surveying options. Unusually, the access gates to the warm storage zones are open, welcoming. Dolores tries to say something, but she has no voice and no one is listening anyhow.

They traverse the sleep-pad. Leopard crawl, she thinks; but how would a cat know to attach that label to its reflexive, hunter’s advance, however appropriate to the action it described?

They leap down from the sleep-pad, bound across open space, accelerate, gather strength in powerful rear legs, and without thinking launch vertically into the place where bipeds store spare skins and coverings; past the lower part with the shiny knobs; carried upward with enormous, thrusting power; scrambling for a toe-hold, claw-hold, paw-hold, bringing up the rear legs to grapple for vertical progression, shooting improbably past what Dolores recognizes as shelves of agnès b. blouses, folded Armani jeans, cashmere from Brora, Ralph Lauren polos.

I am in among the warm, comforting things that smell somehow familiar, associated with a person who has left my life—her work fatigues, her camouflage. I turn in this dark, narrow space. I settle on my haunches, my left front paw folded under me, the right paw jutting out like a stump.

My acute aural capabilities signal approaching human voices, one on a higher register, the other lower, more familiar, the one that makes my name a threat: “X, X, X! What have you done now?”

My vibrissae that humans call whiskers have established my ability to fit in the space between yielding, warm piles. Framed by the limits of my adopted environment, I feel safe, although from another perspective I am trapped because there is no rear exit. I cannot leave my hiding place without forfeiting my invisibility.

The barriers close but not completely. There is a splinter, a shard of vision. I want to flee but something holds me back. I look around, sensing that somehow I am not alone, but there is no one here with me that I can see. Unlike the events I—we—can see unfolding through the crack between the doors.