FICTION — SHORT STORY

The Dream Cat Coincidence

A Tale of Reunion and Renewal

When I saw it the first time, I didn’t think much about it. I was dreaming, so I thought I was living at that time again, at the old party house where the cat, like some of the roommates there, showed up one day and never left.

She was dark with specks of white, and her eyes were fire-yellow. And everyone at the house seemed to enjoy her company, despite her high-pitched whining in the early mornings when everyone was too hungover to get up and feed her. Over time, it became my responsibility to buy the cat food and take her in for her check-ups at the vet, but I never considered her my own. Devi, as she was called, belonged only to herself, and when I saw her many years later in a dream, I thought nothing of the fact that I had buried her in the yard nearly a decade ago.

I was driving though the city when I noticed her walking near the overpasses where people slept in their tents and sheltered themselves from the weather. I suppose it could have been any cat out there running along the roadside, but I recognized her immediately as Devi, and following typical dream logic, I was more puzzled by her presence so far from the house than by her being alive beyond the grave. I only wondered why she was there and what she was doing, and as I passed her, she turned her head and looked at me before changing her course and vanishing down the embankment and beneath the bridge.

Housemate

A few nights later, it happened again. The cat was in my dream. And while I was on foot this time, I was in the same part of town, not far from the highway overpasses. I wasn’t sure how I got there or what I was doing, but I saw the cat sitting on a curb on the other side of the street. It was looking at me again, and just as it did in the previous dream, it got up and headed toward one of the overpass embankments.

On this occasion, I called out to the cat using its house name, but it paid no attention. It simply walked away, disappearing into the weeds of the embankment. I crossed the street to follow her, calling out “kitty” as I went. But there was no sign of her.

At the edge of the embankment, I saw only weeds and litter. And apart from the occasional flutter of plastic in the wind, nothing moved. After calling to her a final time, I stepped onto a makeshift path that led down the embankment to the overpass. Seeing tents there, set at angles against the concrete abutment, I was reminded of someone from the old house who was supposedly living in the area, according to rumors.

His name was Turner, and it made sense that I was reminded of him because he spent a lot of time with the cat. What didn’t make sense were the simultaneous thoughts about two different time periods. The rumors about Turner were recent, while the house and the cat were in the distant past. And yet it all made sense in the ruminations of a dreaming mind.

I hadn’t seen Turner since his last night at the house, but I remembered him well. He was noticeably quiet during the day hours and a bit louder in the evenings when he drank gin greyhounds and played music with his windows open to the street. Sometimes at late hours we would see him riding figure-eights on his bike in front of the house, an antique radio often strapped to the back of his seat to crank out his favorite bebop as he swayed back and forth across the avenue.

Turner could be aloof at times, and some of the other roommates found him a tad unsociable. But to me — and to the cat, it seemed — he was a comfortable presence. He had grace and tact, and he never spoke badly about others in the house, which was commonplace in that environment.

When I heard Turner was having a hard time, I wasn’t surprised. Even before the drinking, the man had a way about him. He seemed to prefer solitude to company, but he lacked the artistic drive that other loners often had. He spent his alone time reading or sitting on the porch and watching the evening traffic. There were times when he literally watched the grass grow, staring bemused at patches of lawn between the porch and the sidewalk.

According to the rumors, Turner was out there in one of the tents, now spending his quiet time along the edges of the city’s industrial decay. And when I thought about him. I thought about our last brief conversation on his way out. Curiously, the cat was in his lap at the time.

“Do you like it better?” I asked him. He was moving into a loft downtown, and all his property was stuffed into the bed of an old mini truck parked in front of the house.

He looked up at me for a moment then returned his attention to the cat, scratching at its cheeks until it purred.

“It’s alright, I guess,” he said. “Closer to work. And cheaper.”

“You’re gonna miss her,” I said, referring to the cat. And though he said nothing in response, he pushed his face against Devi’s fur and closed his eyes.

Recurrency

When I woke the following morning, I had a feeling that something more occurred in the dream, but I had no memory of anything but the cat under the bridge and my thoughts of Turner.

Later, after I had finished my work and had no other obligations, I took a drive into the city and parked in the area near the overpasses that I had been dreaming about. As expected, I saw the same buildings and the same streets and overpasses, but saw no sign of any cat, nor the ghost of one from a previous residence.

What I didn’t expect were the people. Many of the buildings in the area were vacant, and their doors were boarded up to stop squatters from breaking in, but the sidewalks around them were much more populated than I had experienced in my dreams, both inside the tents and on the outside, wandering the streets. And their bodies seemed to hang with unseen weight, tilting their gaits or leaving them hunched over sidewalk curbs.

I chose the same route I had taken in my dreams and followed the path to the overpass embankment. Though the tents were very different from those of my dreams, I somehow knew that one would stand out among them. Either from intuition, mere coincidence, or latent memory, I knew for certain that he would be there.

There, under the roar of highway traffic, was someone I recognized. Sitting in a lawn chair next to a large red tent was an older version of the Turner I knew so many years ago. And with a hand-rolled cigarette in the grip of his stained fingers, he looked at me and fired a small blowtorch to light up and breathe in the smoke.

“Turner?” I said.

He must have recognized me as well because he nodded as he blew out the smoke. But his eyes were still searching.

“The house,” he said with a slight grin.

“That’s right,” I said. “I remember the day you left.”

“You living out here?” he asked.

I nodded.

“No,” I said. “Not yet anyway. I actually came here to find you.”

His expression grew even more curious.

“Me?” he asked.

“I heard you were in trouble,” I said. “I wanted to help.”

He looked at me as if I had said something terrible. And for a moment, we stood there without a word between us.

“You want to help me,” he finally said. “Because we lived in the same house?”

I shook my head, beginning to regret my presence there. But I still felt bad for him. He was thin and pale, and the area surrounding his tent was strewn with the leftovers of routine survival and depravity. I couldn’t tell him the truth since I barely believed it myself, but I wasn’t yet ready to give up.

“You don’t want help?” I asked in frustration.

He spit out a final puff before smashing his butt into a can on the ground.

“How many people did you pass on your way here?” he asked.

I didn’t answer him, but it was quite a lot.

“They’re all people,” he said.

“I know that,” I said.

“Then why me?” he asked.

I had no answer for him, so I kept quiet.

“If you really want to help,” he said. “Help everyone.”

I looked around at the other people there, watching them the way Turner had watched the grass all those years earlier.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked. “It’s too much.”

“Of course it is,” he said. Then he got up from his chair and walked toward me.

“I’m glad you came,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “And I do appreciate you. But there’s nothing you can do here.”

After shaking my hand, he walked past me along the embankment and continued up the path to the sidewalk before vanishing like the cat, but in the opposite direction.

Standing there in front of his empty tent, I thought about the drive I took through the city and all the people I saw along the way. While the overpasses were known for their high number of campers, the entire city, it seemed, was now a campground. And it didn’t stop at the city limits. I stood at the center of an aggregation of decline, and with the clearest of eyes, I could see no end to it.

I decided that I would act on Turner’s words, but I had no idea how. At the moment, I knew only that a familiar sight from a dream had led me somewhere. And now I was driving home.

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