cat

[the following is submitted as an entry in the "broomsticks challenge" offered by john michael greer on his "well of galabes" blog]

0.

It is a year to the day Cat disappeared. Or went away, or crossed over, or whatever the hell happened.

Her grandmother, the blind witch, said she had moved to another zone, to live with her mother. But she would not say what zone. And Cat had told me her mother was dead.

So I am writing this as a sort of invocation. Cat, if you are out there. I miss you. Talk to me, kid.

1.

I pulled the letters from the box. The usual dunning notices, but then also goddamnit. On motel stationery from somewhere out on the plains, addressed to me. I recognized the handwriting, and felt a rush of disgust and anger.

A voice behind me said, "he means well." I turned around.

Maybe twenty steps away, leaning against the endless wall of mailboxes, was a kid about my age. Torn jeans and a cropped sweatshirt, short dark hair tousled. A girl, maybe. She was looking at me, but somehow I wasn't sure it was she who had spoken.

"What?" I said. "Did you say something?"

She sloped off the wall and walked toward me. Just for a moment I had this weird impression she was remaining in place, pulling the floor toward her with each step.

"I didn't actually say anything," she answered. Meaning what?

I stood there, the letters in my hand, the mailbox hanging open, and stared at her.

"Sorry," she said. "My name is Cat," extending her left hand. I did not take it. "I live in the block. Staying with my grandmother, actually. I didn't mean to pry."

"So you did say something."

"It wasn't me, not the way you think. But apparently you heard." She hesitated. Then she said, "This older male, maybe your father. He means well."

The letter was from my father. But how would she know? And who was she to interfere? This was something I wanted to put behind me.

"Sam," she said. Only my father called me that.

"How do you know my name?"

Cat took a half step back, folded her arms, tilted her head, looked at me for several seconds before speaking.

"This has begun badly," she said finally. "I should explain myself, but maybe not here. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

An eleven or twelve year-old kid offering to buy another kid a cup of coffee. But hey, why not? I didn't want to deal with my mother just yet anyway.

2.

"I am not sure where to begin," Cat said.

We were sitting on flimsy chairs at a tiny, bright yellow table in a cafe on the minus three level. A couple dozen people shouting over the canned music and the coffee grinder. I was taking small sips from a watery americano. Cat had an espresso in what looked like a paper shot glass.

"I don't know your father, obviously, and I don't know the situation, apart from what you heard. Though in that moment," she said, "I did see someone writing at a desk in what looked like a motel room. A snowstorm outside the window."

"I gotta say, Cat, I am feeling invaded here," I said.

"I know," she said, "I mean, I'm sorry. Boba is always saying I have to learn to take it down a notch."

"Boba," I repeated. "Take what down?"

Cat knocked back the espresso in one gulp. She sat looking at the empty cup in her hand. It was quite awhile before she spoke again.

"I have access to an entity on what I guess you might call an inner plane," she said, finally. "I call it the guide. Boba, my grandmother, has been teaching me to communicate with it more clearly. It was the guide who said your father meant well. The fact you could hear it means you may also be a sensitive."

Whoa. "Okay, so," I stumbled, "I almost liked it better when I thought you were intruding." The americano had gone cold. "Is this 'guide' talking to you right now?"

"Not really in words at the moment," Cat said. "Just impressions, images. Like, you have some regrets about stuff that went down with your father just before he left, you were confused at the time, you are trying to forget it all, that kind of thing."

"Yeah. I don't know if I can take this, Cat," I said, staring at the table top.

"I cannot be certain," Cat said, putting her hand over mine, "but the guide may be reaching out to you through me, trying to say something to you about your father."

I did not withdraw my hand. Abruptly I began weeping.

3.

"You were gone awhile," my mother said, without turning from the video box. I closed the door and slipped off my shoes.

"Yeah, I ran into some new kid down in the post, and we got to talking."

No response. Chatter from the video box.

"Here's the mail," I said, setting the notices with the others, still unopened going back several weeks, on the table next to two empties. She glanced at the stack of envelopes and cracked open a third.

She turned up another card in her solitaire. The seven of hearts, which she placed on the nine of clubs. More chatter from the box.

I went to my closet and shut the door. I pulled the letter from my bag and tossed it aside.

He means well. The road to hell is paved.

4.

I had a stash of these letters from my father in a box under my cot, mostly unopened. After the first couple or three, I had stopped reading. Explaining himself. Why he had to leave. Not to blame my mother, of course, just the way things had turned out, and so on.

Freaking trip to lay on a ten year-old, thanks, dad.

Things were pretty rough around here in the months before he left. A lot more screaming than usual, wish you were dead kind of thing. I mostly hid out in my sleeping closet.

The day he left she put on a scene where she threatened to call the enforcers to say he was stealing stuff unless he gave her contact info. For awhile she was on the handset with him every day, two or three times a day, again with the screaming.

And then he, like, disappeared almost. Still sending money sometimes, but not taking calls, and apparently moving around in other zones and then it seems out onto the plains.

A lot of the screaming was about money, how he didn't make enough, how she spent too much, borrowing against future income he might not make, and so on and on.

She felt entitled to achieve a certain social status, he said, and his lack of commitment to that project gradually wore her down. How he put it in one of the early letters.

Her parents were second generation immigrants, but they had a five-room flat in an upscale block while we had just these two rooms here.

She could have been a midlevel technocrat, but she made a choice to micromanage my entrainment instead. It seemed like every day of her life she regretted that choice, though really the point was she made you feel it.

Neither of them seemed to think I was part of the equation.

5.

I did finally open the letter.

He said he was out on the plains, in a camp with three or four or five others -- and of course he had to mention one was a "younger female" --, sleeping in a rusted out shipping container, pumping ground water with a makeshift windmill, tapping electricity from a transmission line nearby.

"Before I finally left the zones," he said, "I was sometimes eating from discard bins. Out here I can grow some of my own food, and I have enough paying work I can buy what I cannot grow." Repairing farm machinery. So apparently there is some kind of money economy functioning outside the zones.

"This is an entirely different world out here, Sam," he said. "I wish you could see it." Sky. A sea of tall grass. Blue mountains on the horizon.

And then the more difficult part.

"You ought to be getting a red card soon. And I don't know how you feel about it. I remember I didn't think much of it when I got mine, what is it, not quite thirty years ago. But then," he said, "I did not yet understand what all it implied.

"When they found me 'no longer useful,' I had less trouble letting go than I thought I might. Though don't get me wrong, Sam. It is not easy trying to get by without credentials." Well, duh.

"But the larger truth of our situation is more visible from the outside, or it seems so to me." Larger truth, whatever. "Makes much of what I used to do seem pointless -- or worse, actively helping the oppressor. I am not better positioned to fight him out here, but I can for the most part withdraw from the relationship."

Like he withdrew from my mother. And from me.

6.

A few days later I was down in the post again. The dreaded red card lying in an otherwise empty box. The future suddenly loomed. My first thought was how would my mother react. Red was what she wanted, of course. But what did I want. I left the card in the box.

On a hunch I wandered down to the cafe. Cat was at the same table, reading, an espresso at her elbow. She looked up as I came in and nodded toward an empty chair. I bought an americano and joined her.

"I want to know more about this guide," I said.

"Boba said you would," she answered.

"Hey, Samantha," someone called out. It was that idiot Jeremy from third form. He ambled over to the table. Standing too close, as always, passing a stylus from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth.

"Hey, Samantha," again.

"Who's your friend?" he said, gesturing at Cat. She began tapping one finger on the table, insistently. Jeremy focused on the finger and then blinked. Somehow I knew.

"What are you talking about, Jeremy," I said.

"Hey, Samantha," he said yet again, "they're moving me up to track five after hiatus. I just got the red card today," he said.

"That's good, Jeremy," I said levelly, staring into the cup.

"Did you get your assignment yet?" he insisted. I did, Jeremy, but it is not something I care to share with you. "No, not yet," I said.

I don't know why I am so hard on Jeremy. What does he want from track five? Bunch of sycophants who want to work in midlevel administration, be near the real movers. But it's not in their interest to let you all the way in, Jeremy, to get you out of the blocks. More messages from my dad.

After he left, I said to Cat, "for real? How did you do that?"

"I just removed myself from his attention," Cat said, like anyone could do it. So I literally said, "can anyone do that?"

"It takes practice," she answered.

7.

To me it felt like a crush. Fueled by caffeine.

I did not want her to meet my mother, and Cat did not seem to mind that. We would sit in the cafe for hours and talk about -- well, everything.

Sometimes she would point out something in the canned music -- an inverted pedal point, a rising key change or the use of an artificial harmonic to create a sense of urgency -- and it was like I was hearing it for the first time. No longer merely annoying, but nakedly manipulative.

Or we would talk about something one or the other of us had read, dissecting the arguments or critiquing the writing style.

But eventually the conversation would always return to what you might call "the situation." The technocracy, the zones, the outland. The vast machinery into which we were all being fed.

The red card still lay in the mailbox.

8.

Only once did she tell me anything about herself.

"From almost as early as I can remember," she said, "from when I was maybe three years old until just a few months ago, my mother and I lived on a farm in zone seven. There were maybe twenty people living there. It was an experimental farm, only a few dozen hectares. The ploughs were drawn by oxen and draft horses. We did all the harrowing and scything by hand."

She was gazing into some middle distance, and it sounded like she was describing a dimly remembered dream.

"There was no hierarchy," she said. "We were all of us field hands, and we were all of us managers. We made decisions by consensus. Sometimes we had itinerant laborers coming in from the outland, and even they participated in those processes."

It was not at all clear to me where this kind of farm fit in with what little I thought I knew about the technocracy.

Cat went on at some length. Apparently someone somewhere in administration had expressed concern about the sustainability of existing methods of producing and distributing nutrients. The farm was one of several dozen, mostly at the outer edge of zone seven, where they were trying out other methods.

But it seemed to me there was more going on here than farming. Ordinary people were making decisions in small groups, taking charge of their lives.

9.

To be honest, a lot of what I remember now is just watching her face, her dark eyes, her small mouth, the the hollow of her throat, her slender fingers. I was in love, as the kids say.

10.

So of course eventually I had to come up with her to Boba's lair.

Stepping off the lift into yet another indefinitely long hallway with numberless doors. Diffuse white light and grey carpet tiles.

Cat keyed a door on the left, and I followed her into a darkened space, which of course was much like the space I shared with my mother. The same glass wall looking out through a permanent grey mist onto an endless array of blocks, one after another, receding into a vague distance.

How many floors in each, how many units, how many unhappy people behind how many glass walls.

Cat slipped off her shoes and placed them carefully on a woven straw mat just inside the door. I followed her example. We stood for a moment in silence. My eyes began to adjust to the low light.

The layout of the flat was of course familiar -- kitchen here, toilet there, doors to the sleeping closets --, but the common room seemed almost empty. No chairs, no couch, no video box. Just a few square cushions scattered about the bare floor, and a very low square table on a thin carpet near the center of the room.

Sitting crosslegged at the table, backlit by the glass wall, was an old woman with very long, white hair, straying loose over a grey kaftan. She was turning over cards, one by one, from an oversized deck and laying them out on the table in some kind of array. Not my mother's solitaire.

Gesturing to me to stay in the entryway, Cat slipped silently across the room and bent to kiss the woman's forehead. She murmured something, and the woman turned her face slowly toward me.

She reached out with her left hand and beckoned, gathering each of her long, slender fingers into her palm. I approached. The woman indicated a cushion, and I sat.

She turned up another card, and placed it among the others on the table. I saw they were all blank.

Cat had stepped away from the table. She said quietly, "Samantha, this is my grandmother. You have heard me call her Boba, but her name is --."

"Boba will do," the old woman said gently. She turned a sightless gaze toward me, her eyes milky white.

"Catherine tells me her guide spoke to you," said Boba. She made a very slight sweeping motion with the back of her left hand, and Cat moved away and sat near the glass wall, looking out into the mist.

"I am not certain what happened," I answered. "I thought I heard someone say something."

Boba sat for a long time giving me that blank stare. After what seemed like several minutes she reached into the folds of her kaftan and produced a small, grey metal disk. She placed it on the table between us. "Take this," she said.

I picked it up. The disk was about the size and heft of a dinar, unmarked, with a rough, dull finish. I let it lie in the palm of my left hand.

Boba turned over another card and sat as though studying it. "Tell me about your mother," she said, turning over yet another card.

Suddenly the disk felt cold and heavy in my hand. I felt confused, unable to speak. Finally I mumbled, "she is unhappy."

Again Boba sat silent and then turned another card.

Quietly she said, "do you feel this is being directed at you?" And again I had nothing to say. I felt as though there was some truth I could almost grasp, but it kept escaping me.

And then this happened.

11.

Boba gathered the cards and squared them into a deck. She invited me to place my hand on the deck. I let it rest there for awhile.

I looked up and was startled to see Boba looking at me with an alert, very frank expression -- I would almost say kindly, but certainly open and unguarded -- through fine, grey eyes.

I must have blinked. There again were the blind white eyes, but it seemed like the expression somehow remained. I withdrew my hand. She turned a card.

I saw the two of diamonds. Or was it the four. But no, the card was blank. And I thought, I should be doing something, but what. It was like my life had been on hold for quite awhile.

Boba turned another card and placed it next to the first.

It was the seven of spades. Or the ten. No, it was again blank.

And I thought, this is just a story I am telling myself. But I am also enacting the story. It is like I am locked into the story I am telling myself.

I am saying "I thought," but it was more like a voice in my head, not entirely my own.

She turned over another card and placed it alongside the other two.

The four of clubs. No, the four of hearts. No, again blank.

And I thought, this story is not serving me anymore. It is holding me back. I have withdrawn from my mother, withdrawn from myself.

But who is this "me" person, and how does she -- or is it he, or somehow both, or neither -- how does s/he go about enacting a different story?

Another card. The four of spades. The ten again. And then the king of clubs. Blanks, blanks.

I felt like I was struggling to wake from a dream. Boba went on turning blank cards, but it seemed somehow like a loop -- the same movement of the fingers, the same blank card, the deck undepleted. There was a loud humming in my ears. My eyes closed.

12.

Cat was helping me to my feet. Apparently the interview had ended. Boba was nowhere to be seen.

Cat walked with me to the lift. As we waited for the cage to arrive, we embraced. It felt like something was ending.

In fact it was the last time I saw her.

13.

The lift gate closed. I realized I was still holding the disk.

I stood there without touching any of the call buttons. Eventually the cage descended on its own. The gate opened on the minus three level.

I wandered into the cafe. It was like watching a video. The baristas enacting their roles, the customers enacting theirs. The canned music and the coffee grinder providing a soundtrack. And was I a participant or merely an observer, or was I somehow both?

Sitting alone at the table where Cat and I had spent so many hours was an older man, reading a small book and making notes in the margins. He glanced up briefly, and it seemed some kind of silent acknowledgment passed between us.

It was time for me to talk with my mother.

14.

When I stepped into the entryway I could hear my mother talking to someone. It did not sound like she was on the handset.

I waited for a moment to hear another voice, who she might be talking with. Instead my mother called, "Samantha," meaning, come in here.

It was Jeremy. There was only one reason he could have come here.

I felt a surge of anger rising, or maybe it was fear -- the same thing, really --, but I let it pass through me. Arising in the chest and sweeping up the back of my head. Actually pretty interesting to watch.

I felt weirdly calm. I slipped the disk into a pocket.

Jeremy was sitting at the other end of the couch from my mother, his hands active as always. He avoided my gaze. The video box was flickering but silent. The table was cleared of the usual debris. I did not sit.

"Jeremy was telling me," my mother began, "that the assignments have been out for a couple of weeks already."

I did not say anything. Waiting for the other shoe.

"Did you get a card," my mother persisted. Jeremy stood, saying "maybe I should leave."

"No, stay, Jeremy," I said, raising a hand. "I want you to hear this." He sat.

"Yes, I got a card." A look of what I would almost call hunger in Jeremy's eyes. "And yes, it was red." Turning to my mother. I could see she was almost desperately afraid of what was coming.

"And you want to know why I have not said anything," I said. "So here it is.

"I do not yet know what I want to do. Somehow track five does not feel right, at least not right now. I want to take some time to learn more about how the whole thing works before I commit to a particular path."

Something shifted. My mother's face relaxed. It was like she suddenly recognized some part of herself in me. Jeremy looked stunned.

"I think something may be changing," I said, "and I want to try to be a part of that."

I talked about the farms in zone seven, and their experiments in self-governance. "This feels important to me," I said. "I can always go back into formal entrainment later, but with maybe a better sense of direction."

My mother stood and came over to me. We embraced for quite a long time, both of us crying a little, but also laughing. Our estrangement of the past few years seemed to fall away.

15.

So I spent several months on a farm in zone seven. My mother actually came with me, and she ended up staying, even after I came back to the blocks. She is there still. I think she may have found a new life.

We did have quite a number of day laborers coming in from the outland, and some of these ended up joining the community. Some who had come from the blocks went over the border to help organize similar farms in the outland. It seemed the border itself was disappearing.

Just once I glimpsed someone I thought might have been my father, but maybe not.

Jeremy visited for a few days, on a field assignment he had arranged with his track five mentor.

When I got back to the blocks I found Jeremy had set me up with an internship with the group in midlevel administration that is managing the farm projects. Skip right over the track five entrainment, which might have taken two or three years.

I have not yet decided whether I want to take that path. But thanks, Jeremy, really. I may have misjudged you.

16.

As it happened, the flat they assigned me, with two other young women returning from the farms, was in the same block my mother and I had left.

Literally the minute I arrived, I stowed my gear in one of the sleeping closets and took the lift to the level where Cat's grandmother lived.

I hesitated to knock on the door, feeling suddenly apprehensive. I was standing there with my hand raised when the door opened.

An old woman with very long, white hair, straying loose over a grey kaftan. Not evidently blind. A dark grey cat skulking about her ankles. A straw mat just inside the door.

"Yes," she said. Apparently she did not remember me. In that moment, somehow I myself was not certain we had ever met.

I explained I was looking for a girl about my own age named Catherine, who I had thought was staying in this flat.

The old woman acknowledged she had a granddaughter with that name, who had visited some months ago, but had since returned to live with her mother and so on. This is where we came in.

17.

I took the lift down to the minus three level and wandered into the cafe.

Sitting alone at the table where Cat and I had spent so many hours was an older man, reading a small book and making notes in the margins. He glanced up briefly, and it seemed some kind of silent acknowledgment passed between us.

It was time for me to get on with my life.

fin