Three Stories

The Cat Lover

When a door opens and you can’t see who’s com­ing, it’s almost always a cat that would like to be your lover. All cats are small, so the open­ing door looks like an acci­dent. It’s not an acci­dent, though. These cats take great care until one paw hooks and the door swings open.

When the door opens, the cat sits at a dis­tance. This is the dis­tance of masked balls, eighteenth-century call­ing cards—once known by humans, never for­got­ten by cats. you see its slanted eyes. you see its ele­gant face. The cat stares at you in all its wild­ness and comes to rest upon your heart.

Last night my cat lover woke me from a dream where I’d been look­ing for some­one who wouldn’t come to find me. This was some– one I’d known years ago, and I was search­ing the nar­row streets of an unfa­mil­iar city. When the cat woke me, I real­ized the entire fam­ily had gone to bed in chaos: My son was asleep in front of the tele­vi­sion, my hus­band on the liv­ing room couch, my daugh­ter in my son’s room, and me in my study wear­ing all my clothes—soft vel­vet clothes, some­thing I do when I hope there will be no night. It was three AM, and there was an unplanned feel­ing to the house, as though all of us, in order to sleep, had entered dif­fer­ent zones, and the house itself hadn’t been allowed to dream. The cat purred on my chest, but I shook him off and went down– stairs to cover my son. Then I wan­dered to the kitchen and ate lemon ice that reminded me of a place in France where sum­mers were so hot, ices dis­solved as soon as they hit the street. I had to stay in the store to eat them. I never knew what they looked like.

While I ate, it occurred to me that noth­ing has skin—neither my chil­dren, my hus­band, nor me. Falling into his body was just some­thing I did over four­teen years ago because light bound us together like gold. I fin­ished the ice and my cat lover vis­ited again: The approach, the encounter, the loom­ing, and then he rested against my body. His fur and my soft vel­vet dress felt the same—dark, pil­lowy tex­tures, things to love and dream in. I felt his small wild heart beat against my chest.

 

Schrodinger in Exile

Words didn’t work prop­erly at the time. He was stern on the coarse street. When peo­ple bumped into him, he cov­ered them with his own black coat and explained that they were mov­ing accord­ing to the laws of Brownian motion: Each street behaved like a cig­a­rette, emit­ting puffs of pedes­tri­ans, some­times in rings, often in clouds. Pedestrians couldn’t feel the exhale or inhale of the street and didn’t know they were being sucked in and released at inter­vals. This igno­rance, com­bined with fuzzy notions of free will, gave them the idea they could behave like trucks. They entered the streets honk­ing and screech­ing, and there was much rearrange­ment of bod­ies as they shifted gears, accel­er­ated, and worked clutches. They enjoyed the illu­sory sense of speed and didn’t care when they arrived too early or too late because some­times it took an hour to walk a city block and five min­utes to walk two miles. Schrödinger hoped his words had author­ity in the coat’s wooly dark­ness, but as soon as he fin­ished lec­tur­ing, peo­ple blasted out, pop­ping buttons.

Traffic con­ges­tion was com­pli­cated by the fact that vis­i­ble things (five per­cent of the uni­verse) were jock­ey­ing for posi­tion with dark energy and dark mat­ter (ninety-five per­cent of the uni­verse). Schrödinger alone under­stood this: At night he woke up with a pound­ing heart and reached for one of his two wives who slept on either side of the nar­row bed in the dread­ful fur­nished room they’d been forced to rent. Whenever he reached for one, the other also woke up, and he was sur­rounded by annoy­ance at being woken and hear­ing the same thing about dark mat­ter again and again when there were more impor­tant things to worry about like get­ting out of the dread­ful room and going back to their coun­try. They always turned on the light and made tea on the Bunsen burner, which they laced with scotch. He rejected the tea. He left and walked through the streets, which were as crowded at night as they were in the day. At night he didn’t try to lec­ture the honk­ing, button-popping, careen­ing pedes­tri­ans. Instead he leaped over inhales and exhales of the street look­ing for the space in between the fall and rise of the breath even though he knew that he, too, was caught in the breath­ing. Eventually he returned to the fourth-floor walk-up where his two wives were still drink­ing tea. He wished that he could assign dark mat­ter to one and light mat­ter to the other, but he knew that every­body in the world was sim­i­larly per­me­ated. Sometimes this elated him, and he embraced them both on their rick­ety chairs, top­pling them to the floor, hold­ing them close, when they said Edwin, it’s time to sleep, and pulling them back to the nar­row bed where he was com­forted by the beat­ing of their hearts.

But at other times these thoughts about the per­me­ation of dark mat­ter depressed him when he came home. And although this, too, went against the laws of physics, he had visions of dark mat­ter suf­fo­cat­ing every­body. He sat on the floor with his head in his hands, and his wives put down their cups and sat beside him. one rubbed his back, the other rubbed his shoul­ders, both telling him: Edwin, we under­stand the way you see things, but even so we get by. When they began to talk, he said that the fur­nished room was depress­ing, and one of them always said that his exile wouldn’t be for­ever and they would return to their house with its books and clocks and com­fort­ing beds. They knew he would counter by say­ing every­thing was tem­po­rary, and they always invoked care­fully worked-out sys­tems of space and time. They talked about how the sub– atomic related to the atomic, and how the atomic related to the world of couches and cars and clocks. They talked about veloc­ity, plan­ets, and galax­ies. They talked until he fell asleep on the floor.

When his black coat got holes and his wives had to buy him a used one, Schrödinger grew more dis­traught. He started to lec­ture chil­dren, as well as his wives, who began to take cir­cuitous routes to shop for gro­ceries. When he went out at night, he stopped leap­ing between the inhale and the exhale of the street and arrested pedes­tri­ans. Soon he began to ignore his own prin­ci­ples, which he’d not worked out com­pletely because his own brain was also a ran­dom par­ti­cle. One evening he was forced to arrest him­self for speed­ing. It was warm inside his coat, and sound was muf­fled. From an open­ing in the flap he could see pedes­tri­ans expand­ing and retract­ing in the milky light—thinking they were walk­ing, not know­ing they were only par­ti­cles of smoke. In the dis­tance he saw his two wives. They each had bas­kets of food and were aloft on cir­cuitous routes. The breath of the street was a labor of love, the act of walk­ing an act of faith. Schrödinger said a few words and let him­self out. After all, he thought, I’m not very far from home.

 

Silver

I’m always impal­ing myself on sil­ver things, things my lover gives me when I’m not look­ing. He buys me sil­ver rings and puts them on me when I’m asleep. He buck­les my waist with a sil­ver belt, drapes me with sil­ver neck­laces, fas­tens anklets under my jeans, puts six ear­rings in the holes of my ears. Silver and never gold, because sil­ver is the color of the acci­dent one longs for. It’s light that slants through rice paper shades, a face on the street that car­ries you through the solstice.

You can’t love some­one with­out hurt­ing them—that’s what my brother told me once. We were home from col­lege, wash­ing pots in the sink, and my brother had just gone crazy on LSD. He thought he could climb walls when he was only scal­ing a chair. He thought he could see the truth when he was star­ing at a shop­ping list.

But one thing I knew, he’d said to me then. you can’t love some­one with­out hurt­ing them. I saw that when I looked inside my brain and all the cells were singing, you can’t love some­one with­out hurt­ing them. They were beau­ti­ful, those cells. All of them were made of silver.

My par­ents were get­ting divorced, just as I am now. Light was com­ing through the kitchen, the kind of light that makes you think you’re in another century.

Is it fifth-century Greece? I’d asked my brother.

No, he answered. It’s the Huang dynasty.

I wanted to hug my brother and say every­thing would be okay: His

brain would stop singing. He wouldn’t have to hurt peo­ple he loved. In fact, things didn’t go well for him until he got a PhD in phys­i­ol­ogy and dis­cov­ered that those years of watch­ing his own brain cells had paid off. Now he lives in Rome and writes papers with titles like The Neurophysiology of Indifferent, Compatible Systems.

Sometimes I wake up at night, impaled by sil­ver, and think about my brother, far away in Rome. I think how he’s found love and hurt a lot of peo­ple in the process. I also think of my lover in a small beige room, sur­rounded by flow­er­ing trees. I lie in bed alone, wear­ing heavy silver.

Why don’t you take those off when you go to sleep? my lover asks, touch­ing the scratch marks on my arms and neck.

For God’s sake, what are you doing to yourself?

I don’t answer because then I’d have to tell him about the ran­dom sil­ver of his face the day he stepped out to meet me.

Your face was like that, I would have to say to him. Don’t you remem­ber? It was the day before the sol­stice, peo­ple were rac­ing around to buy presents, and you stepped for­ward to meet me. A week later you gave me a sil­ver bracelet. A week after that you gave me sil­ver keys. But none of this would have mat­tered if your face hadn’t been an accident.

~

Thaisa Frank, the author of the forth­com­ing col­lec­tion Enchantment,  is the author of three pre­vi­ous col­lec­tions of short fic­tion and the novel Heidegger’s Glasses,which sold to ten for­eign coun­tries before pub­li­ca­tion.  She is also the co-author of Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction    Her essays have been anthol­o­gized, and she con­tributed to the Afterward to the Signet Classics edi­tion of   Voltaire:  Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories.   She is the recip­i­ent of two PEN awards, has been Visiting Associate Professor in the Honors pro­gram in Creative Writing at UC Berkeley and teaches writ­ing in MFA pro­grams in San Francisco.  A native of the Bronx, NY, she lives in Berkeley, California.    Her web­site is  www.thaisafrank.com