Peter Beagle - The Line Between

She bent over Millamant, who slipped away from her as a yellow–haired young man in a Grateful Dead T–shirt and Bermuda shorts strode by, pumping his arms like a power–walker, totally absorbed in laughing, comradely conversation with his Walkman. I still see him, most days—it's been years now. Sometimes he's quite angry with the Walkman, but mostly he laughs.

Very gently for a voice out of a P.A. system in bad repair, Sam said, «He's right, Emilia. And you were right the first time. I have to go.»

«Go where?» she cried. «You don't even know, you said so yourself You could end up someplace worse than your damn TV screen—you could lose yourself for good, no Sam anymore, in the whole universe not the least bit of Sam, not ever, not ever.» She stopped herself with a jolt that was actually audible—you could hear it in her chest. Newspaper reporters probably aren't allowed hysterics. With actors it's part of the Equity contract.

«Maybe that's the idea.» Millamant sat down and scratched—very professionally, I noticed. «Maybe that's it—maybe you're not supposed to come back as the least bit of yourself, but to be completely scattered, diffused, starting over as someone utterly different. I almost like that.» And the mechanical voice sounded in that moment more like my Sam—thoughtful, amused, truly savoring doubt—than it ever had.

Emilia was hugging herself, rocking herself slightly. She said, «I couldn't bear to lose you twice. I'm telling you now, I have no shame, I don't care. I don't care if you show up as a—an electric can opener. Don't leave me again, Sam.»

Only a few of the cars going by had turned their headlights on, but all the porch lights were lit now, and the lawn sprinklers hissing to life, and I could smell Vietnamese cooking two houses down, and Indian cook–ing clear across the street. Two young women in identical jogging suits walked past, each carrying a pizza box and a six–pack. Millamant walked slowly to Emilia, climbed into her lap and stood up—surprisingly firm on the bad back leg—to put her paws on each side of Emilia's neck.

«Matter can neither be created nor destroyed," Sam said. «Didn't they teach you that in high school, out in frontier Metuchen? Listen!» for she had turned her head away and would not even touch Millamant. " Listen —when I was a speck, a dot, nothing but a flicker of TV snow, I knew you. Do you understand me? By the time you and Jake got me back here, I had already forgotten my own name, I'd forgotten that there was ever such an idea as Sam Kagan. But I was a speck that remembered Emilia Rossi's birthday, remembered that Emilia Rossi loves cantaloupe and roast potatoes and bittersweet chocolate, and absolutely cannot abide football, her cousin Teddy, or Wagner. There's no way in this universe that I could be reduced to something so microscopic, so anonymous that it wouldn't know Emilia Rossi. If they give my atoms a fast shuffle and shake most of them out on some other planet, there'll still be one or two atoms madly determined to evolve into something that can carve Emilia Rossi on a tree. Or whatever they've got on the damn planet. I promise you, that's the truth. Are you listening to me, Emilia?»

«I'm listening," she said dully. She still would not look at Millamant. «You'll never forget me, wherever you are—or whatever. Wonderful. But you're leaving.»

Millamant bumped her head hard against Emilia's chin, forcing her to turn her head. Sam said, «I don't belong here. You knew it before Jake did—probably before I knew myself. It's all I want in any world, but it's not right. Let me go, Emilia.»

«Let you go?» Emilia was so outraged that she stood up, dumping Millamant off her lap. «What hold did I ever have on you, living or dead? What about Jake? Why don't you ask Jake if he'd be so kind as to…» And her voice went. Completely. I told you it happens with Emilia.

I put my arms around her. An old couple passing by nodded benignly at us through the dusk. I looked at my friend in the ancient eyes of a cat, and I said, «She's not going to understand. If you're going, go.»

«You'll explain to her?» The robot voice couldn't possibly sound des–perate, any more than it could convey anger or love, but I felt Sam's grief in my body, even so. «You'll make her see?»

«I won't make her do anything.» I ached for Sam, but I was holding Emilia. «I'll do the best I can. Go already.»

Millamant didn't approach Emilia again, so she never saw the last look that Sam gave her. But I did, and I told her about it afterward. Then Millamant scampered up the

steps, lightly as a kitten, and began to dance.

My front porch could be better described as a catwalk with a railing. You can't even rock on it in comfort—your feet keep hitting things—and it's the last place you'd imagine as a dance floor, even for a small domestic animal. But Sam used to tell me, when we were young and I'd been awed by the flamboyance of some performer's style, «Good night, Jake, any–body can throw himself around Lincoln Center—all that takes is space and a little energy. The real ones can dance in a broom closet; they can stand on line at a checkout counter and be dancing right there. The real ones.» And Millamant was a real dancer, that one last time on my check–out line of a porch.

I can't be sure of what I saw through the gathering dark then and the gathering years now. Millamant seemed to me to be moving almost on point, if you can imagine that in a cat, but moving with a kind of ardent restraint in which every stillness implied a leap at the throat, and vio–lence trembled in the shadow of rigor. At moments she appeared to be standing completely motionless, letting the twilight dance around her, courting her like a proper partner. There should have been a moon, but there wasn't: only my rust–colored bug light to catch the glitter of her eyes and the ripple of her fur: So the one thing I am certain about, even at this dim distance, is that that dance was entirely for Emilia. Not for me, not for Emilia and me together, like that first time. Emilia.

She wouldn't look at first. She turned her head completely away, star–ing blindly back at the street, one hand clenching white on a fold of my sweater. So something else I can't say is just when the dance took hold of her, drawing her gently home to what Sam and Millamant, Millamant, too—were telling her forever. All I know is that she was crouched beside me, paying such attention, paying, as I never paid to my wives, my direc–tors, or to Sam himself, at the moment when someone's headlights played briefly over us and it was only Millamant there, limping down the steps to clamber heavily into Emilia's lap and lie there, not purring. Only old Abyssinian Millamant, tired and lame, and uninhabited.

I also don't remember when it was that I said, «He made us let him go. He danced us away from thinking about him, holding him. Just for that little, but it was all he needed.» Emilia didn't answer. The lighted kitch–ens along my street were long dark when I finally got her into the house and put her to bed.

That was long ago. Emilia went back to New Jersey with Millamant and married a nice special–education teacher named Philip, some years later. She didn't write to me for some time after her return, but she telephoned when Millamant died. Gradually we took up our correspondence again, though Sam was as notably absent from it as he had once been its prime mover. I sent a gift when the boy was born: a complete Shakespeare and a Baseball Encyclopedia. If those don't cover a growing child's major emo–tional needs, he's on his own.

Me, I haven't yet been summoned to play Captain Shotover—or Lear, either—but

the Falstaffs have started coming lately, and the James Tyrones, and I did do a bloody good Uncle Vanya in Ashland one sum–mer. And I got to New York for the first time in decades, for a get–killed–early role in a big–budget thing where they blew up the Holland Tunnel at the climax. I rather liked that one.