James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

“Oh, Paul! Mr. Trilby!”

Paul paused in his doorway. Mrs. Prettyman, his landlady, was mincing across the parking lot. She lived in what used to be the motel’s office, a little brick building at the far end of the lot, and the very instant she stepped out of her door, all the loitering Snopeses along both sides of the motel ducked into their doorways and locked themselves in their rooms. Mrs. Prettyman curved neatly around the wide indentation of the drainage grate.

“I’m so glad I caught you.” Her sharp little heels somehow never caught in the cracks and potholes. “I’d just like a word.”

Paul waited in his doorway, his back to the shadowy room behind him. Mrs. Prettyman called herself “the manageress” of the apartments, though Paul was certain she owned the place. This evasion allowed her to deflect any requests for maintenance or extra time in paying the rent. “I’ll have to take that up with the owner,” she’d say, in her buttery Texas singsong, and then, twenty-four hours later, “The owner says the refrigerator is supposed to make that sound,” or, “I’m afraid the owner needs your rent payment this afternoon.”

She stopped with one hand on her hip and another, proprietary hand on the doorsill. “Hon, I know you got a cat in there.” She gave him a glittering smile, all steel and no magnolia.

“Really.” Paul did not invite Mrs. Prettyman in. “Have you ever actually seen a cat come in or out of my apartment?”

“Well now.” She waved her hand theatrically in front of her nose. “I don’t need to see it, darlin’, I know it’s in there someplace.” She replaced her hand on her hip. “It might be you just don’t notice it anymore.”

Oh, I notice it, Paul thought. That smell had caused him to be evicted from every apartment he’d had since moving out of Kym’s house. The Grandview was the last stop on Paul’s descent, the one place he was reasonably certain wouldn’t evict him. “On my word of honor,” Paul said, certain that Texans liked that kind of thing, “there’s not another living creature in here but me and the cockroaches.”

Which is true, thought Paul. Mrs. Prettyman narrowed her eyes and angled her head, peering past him. On a couple of occasions, Paul had caught her in his apartment when he came home from work, peering under his swaybacked sofa bed on her hands and knees or poking up the stained panels of the ceiling with a broom handle looking for the cat. He bought her off with an extra twenty-five dollars a month; this for a cat that didn’t really exist. Now she was obviously trying to shake him down for more, but he was damned if this greedy old harridan was going to get a penny of his raise.

“Come on in and look.” He gestured into his hot, malodorous living room. “If you can find the cat, you can have the cat.”

“Well now.” Her smile tightened, and she stepped back from the door. “If I ever do see a cat around here, I’m going to have to tell the owner.”

“Be my guest,” Paul said. “Give him my fondest regards.”

Mrs. Prettyman scowled at Paul through the crack as he shut the door. He drew a shallow breath and stooped to switch on the air conditioner under his front window; the unit began to chug, pouring a dank mist into the room.

“Hey, kitty,” Paul said in a monotone. “I got a raise today. Good news, huh?”

Ever since his final confrontation with the living Charlotte, her ghost had been a continuous presence in Paul’s life, waxing and waning like the moon — always there, but not always immediately visible. Paul’s memory was deliberately vague about the reasons for his murderous rage at the cat, but he did remember that he was responsible for her death by drowning in his bathtub. During the time he’d lived with Kymberly, Charlotte had been a sly presence, appearing only to Paul, and only fleetingly, tripping him in the middle of the night when he got up to use the bathroom or nipping his toes with her freezing teeth when he went back to bed. When he was trying to write his book, Charlotte got up to her old tricks, unplugging his computer while he was working or weaving between his legs, dank and cold, making him jump right out of his chair. Kym never said a word about Charlotte until the very end of the day Paul moved out, after he had finished loading his few remaining possessions into the back of his Colt. As he lowered himself, exhausted and sweating, onto the sagging springs of his car and pulled the squealing door shut, Kym bolted coltishly out of the house and stooped at his open window. Her hand pressed to her throat, her forehead knotted, she blinked at Paul’s lap as she worked up the nerve to speak.

“Well, so long, pumpkin,” Paul was about to say, when Kym blurted out her last words to him, without meeting his eye.

“Make sure you take the cat with you, okay?” Then she dashed back inside the house.

Since then Paul had worked his way down the hierarchy of Lamar’s cheapest rentals. As the money Kym loaned him ran out, Paul was forced to sell off his books, his stereo, and his computer. The day after he fetched up at the Angry Loner Motel — the only place that would take him without references or a damage deposit — he found himself at last at a temp agency, being interviewed by Erika, a pert young woman unnecessarily lacquered in makeup. She reminded Paul alternately of Anchorwoman Kym and of a younger Mrs. Prettyman.

“So you were an English professor!” she said, flipping through the ring binder of jobs. “That’s really good. You must have an awesome typing score!”

The next day he was working at TxDoGS and coming home every night to Charlotte, who began to assert her baleful presence more and more strongly. She shut off the air conditioner to leave Paul gasping and drenched with sweat in the middle of the night, then made it roar to life again just as he was getting back to sleep. She switched off the lights when he was trying to read. She extinguished the burners in his kitchenette when he was trying to cook or boosted the flame unexpectedly and burned his food. She turned the water freezing cold or scaldingly hot when he was in the shower. At night, as he tried to settle into his lumpy mattress, he could hear her padding across the carpet or glimpse her slinking silhouette against the piss-yellow glow of the threadbare drapes. On bad nights he felt her walking on the bed, and on the worst ones he felt the sharp pressure of her legs as she stood on his chest and dug her front claws — claws she didn’t have when she was alive — into his flesh through his thin blanket, emitting a low hiss that froze the tip of his nose. When this happened, Paul squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered until Charlotte went away.

She was most inventive when it came to Paul’s last remaining amenity, an old portable black-and-white TV he had salvaged from someone’s curbside trash. Sometimes she allowed Paul to watch what he wanted, limiting herself to a cameo appearance, dozing on the windowsill in the interrogation room in Law and Order or trotting along the beach in Baywatch . At other times she took over the programming and aired gruesome footage of cheetahs ripping bloody lengths of flesh from quivering wildebeest or particularly savage maulings of zookeepers and lion tamers. She ran Morris the Cat commercials that hadn’t been broadcast in years; she resurrected lurid episodes of When Animals Attack or When Good Pets Go Bad; she kept Paul awake all night with Disney marathons— That Darn Cat, The Aristocats , and The Nine Lives of Thomasina . One night she sprawled across the top of the set and glowered at him, her tail lashing back and forth across the screen, as she aired an entire eight-episode cable documentary about the cat in history. Paul fell asleep that night to the stentorian narrator repeating for the umpteenth time that “the cat was worshipped as a god in ancient Egypt.”