Peter Beagle - The Line Between

Emilia was in the guest bedroom, talking on the phone to her edi–tor in New Jersey, so there was just me to be flabbergasted. When I had words again, I said, «Send you? We don't even know how you got here in the first place, and you don't know where back is. We couldn't send you anywhere the BMT doesn't run.» No furry ripple out of Millamant. «Why would you want to? To leave us again?»

«I don't ever want to leave.» Millamant's dull claws dug harder into my leg than they should have been able to. «If I were in a rat's body, a cockroach's body, I'd want to stay here with you, with Emilia. But it feels strange here. Not wrong, but not—not proper. I don't mean me inhabit–ing a cat—I mean me still being me, Sam Kagan still aware that I'm Sam Kagan. However you look at it, this is a damn afterlife, Jake, and I don't believe in an afterlife. Dead or alive, I don't.»

«And being part of the snow on a television screen, that's an improve–ment? That's proper?»

Sam didn't answer for a time. Millamant purred drowsily between my hands, and my Betty Boop clock ticked (at certain times of day, you can almost pretend she's dancing the Charleston), and in the guest bedroom Emilia laughed at something. Finally Sam said, «You see, I don't think I was always going to be TV snow. There was more to it. I can't tell you how I knew that. I just did.»

I unhooked a rear claw from my thigh. «Purgatory as a function of the cable system. Makes sense, in a really dumb way.»

Sam said, «There was more. I don't know that I missed anything much, but there was more coming. And if it's an afterlife, then the word means something they never told us about. I don't think there is a word for it—what I was waiting for. But it wasn't this.»

Emilia hung up and came out to us then, and Millamant stopped talking. Instead, she leaped down from my lap, landing with the pre–cise abandon of a cat ten years younger, and began to dance. Last night it had been for herself—at least, until we showed up—this time the dance was entirely for us, Sam showing off joyously, taking the whole room as his stage, as Millamant swam in the air from chair to bookcase and flashed like a dragonfly between bookcase and stereo, setting a rack of tape cassettes vibrating like castanets. Partnering my furniture, she swung around my three–foot–high Yoruba fetish, mimicking Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain; then whirled across the room by spinning bounds, only to slow to a liquidly sensuous cat—waltz in and out of the striped shadows of my window blinds. I couldn't remember ever seeing Sam dance like that: so much in authority that he could afford to release his body on its own recognizance. Millamant finished with a sudden aston–ishing flare of pirouettes from a standing start, and jeteed her way into Emilia's lap, where she purred and panted and said nothing. Emilia pet–ted her and looked at me, and we didn't say anything either.

Neither of us said anything after that about Emilia's taking Sam home with her. She spent all ten days of her leave like an inheritance at my house. Sly smiles, grotesquely rolled eyes and hasty thumbs–up signs from my neighbors made their opinion of my new little fling eminently clear. I really can't blame them: we almost never went out, except for a meal or a brief walk, and we must have seemed completely absorbed in one another when they saw us at all. But what they'd have thought of the hours we passed, day and night, watching an old Abyssinian cat dance all over my house, let

alone arguing with the cat about afterlives and the last World Series … no, it would have broken their hearts if I'd told them. Mine is a very dull neighborhood.

There was never a chance of anything happening between us, Emilia and me. We had grown far too close to be lovers: we were almost brother and sister in Sam, if that makes any sense at all. Once, midway through her visit, she was ironing her clothes in the kitchen when I came in to fill the cat dish and the water bowl. She watched in silence until I was done, and then she said with a sudden half–strangled violence, «I hate this! I can't bear to see you doing that, putting food down for him. It's not — " and she seemed to be fighting her own throat for a word " — it's not honest!»

We stared at each other across the ironing board. I said slowly, «Honest? How did honesty get into this?»

«Did I say that?» She scrubbed absently at her forehead with the back of her hand. «I don't know, I don't know what I meant. If he's Sam, then he shouldn't be eating on the floor, and if he's Millamant, then he shouldn't be making her dance all the time. She's old, Jake, and she's got arthritis, and Sam's dancing her like a child making his toys fly and fight. And it's so beautiful, and he's so happy—and I never saw him dance, the way you did, and I can't believe how beautiful…»

She didn't start to cry. Emilia doesn't cry. What happens is that she loses speech—when Sam died, she couldn't speak for three days—and the few sounds she does make are not your business or mine. I went to her then, and she buried her face in the ruinous gray cardigan I wear around the house, and we just stood together without speaking. And yes, all right, there was an instant when she held me hard, tilting her head back so we could look at each other. I felt very cold, and my lips started to tingle most painfully. But neither of us moved. We stood there, very delib–erately letting the moment pass, feeling it pass, more united in that word–less choice than we could have been in any other way. Emilia went back to folding her ironing, and I took the garbage out and paid some bills.

Then I spent some time studying Millamant. The cat didn't seem to be suffering, nor to object to being sported and soared and exalted all around my house, day and night. But the bad back leg was plainly lamer than ever; her eyes were streaked and her claws ragged and broken, and for all the serious eating she was doing, she was thinner than she had arrived, if you looked. Playing host to Sam—playing barre and floor, cos–tume, makeup, mirror to Sam, more accurately—was literally consuming her. I couldn't know whether she understood that or not. It didn't matter to me. That was the terrible thing, and all I can say is that at least I knew it was terrible.

The next evening was a warm one, pleasantly poignant with the smell of my next–door neighbor's jasmine, and of distant rain. Sam/Millamant hadn't danced at all that day, but had spent it necking and nuzzling with Emilia, taking naps with her and exchanging murmured do–you–remembers. We sat together on my front steps: a perfectly ordinary couple with a drowsy old cat in the long California twilight. I made small talk, fixed small snacks, felt my throat getting smaller and smaller, and finally

blurted, «You were right. I can't say if it's honest or not, but it's no good. What do we do about it?»

Emilia petted Millamant and didn't meet my eyes. Three high school boys ambled past, slamming a basketball into one another's chests by turns, their talk as incomprehensible as Czech or Tamil, and strangely more foreign. I said again, «Sam, it's no good. I don't mean for Millamant—I mean for you, for your ka or your karma, or whatever I'm talking to right now. This can't be what you're supposed to be … doing, I guess. Emilia made me see.»

In a very small voice, still not looking at me, Emilia said, «I changed my mind.» I remember to this day how sad she sounded, and how nei–ther Sam nor I paid any attention to her. An errant Irish setter, outrun–ning his jogger mistress, wandered up to say hello to everybody's crotch, but Millamant spat viciously and scratched his nose as Sam said, «I told you you ought to send me back. I did tell you, Jake.»

I started to answer him, but Emilia interrupted. «No," she said, much louder now. «No, I don't care, I can't, never mind what I said. I don't care about Millamant, I don't care about anybody except Sam. I just want Sam back, any way I can have him. Any way. It's disgraceful, I know it's dis–graceful, and I don't care.»