People say you have to be careful and you can’t be too trusting and by God if you get into anything fun or dangerous you better only sample a little, and what I want to say is that there are certain people and experiences that can come into a person’s life that are so much bigger than all the goddamn rules.
I had been eleven years at the Boulogne Woods. Late one night, a male voice down the hallway roared Felicide! and What in the Sam fucking hell is going on? and Are we all strapped to the fucking wheel still! and his voice was startling and it was pleading as if he were in quicksand begging for a rope.
I exited my apartment into the hallway. Ford was down by the garbage room pacing and ranting. When he turned towards me it was like some kind of pirate-poet had been shaved and undressed and unloosed upon a modern time. Ford was muscular and tanned with tired brown eyes, and he wore only briefs, a tanktop, and socks. His hair was short and dyed platinum and sort of glued to his head what little of it there was, his body was covered in tattoos, and the veins in his head were overloaded.
Seeing me, he screamed in his scratchy plaintive voice that only a Neanderthal fuck would kill Felis catus, and how we were all so fucking base, and that if we kill cats we might as well kill each other, and that he was going to find the fucker and show him how ugly he was compared to a fucking cat, and he swore to God he would do it. When I got closer, I looked at him curiously, lovingly I want to say, as if he could tell me anything, anything—which he could have—and he pointed to the garbage chute like it was a courtroom witness.
I looked around and seeing no cat I asked him where the cat had gone. He said that dead cats didn’t fucking go nowhere, at least not in this world, but maybe in some kind of fucking Murakami world a cat could dance and have cocktails and take the train and shit, and then he explained how when he had seen the cat he had lost his wits and thrown it down the chute.
It was after midnight but to him it might as well have been noon—he pounded on doors and asked everyone if they knew anything about a beautiful Abyssinian cat, like so as he formed in hands into the size of a cat, a small housecat he said, but smarter and more agile with big ears with kangaroo-color fur, or who around had cats, or who would go killing a cat, the motherfucker, or what the cat’s name was. No one knew anything. Then Ford said he could see me, he could see my heart, and would I go with him to bury the cat?
I followed him. On the elevator down he looked at me with gratitude, like he needed me, and when we got to the garbage dumpsters he rifled around in one and pulled out a white garbage sack full of recycling, dumped it out, and reached with the sack into another dumpster, and told me to look away, and then he said he was done and when I turned back he had this lump in his arms within the white sack. He said I couldn’t see inside, it was too much, and no one should have to bear it up but him.
We walked up through the city side by side, Ford still in his underwear, carrying the dead cat—I too, in my underwear. Being with him we were as two tigers in the night and what could the onlookers do but behold and witness the two tigers, they could say nothing against us and they could do nothing against us and they could not even snap a photo, and that’s how we moved through the city at night, and I learned that a tiger is whatever a tiger does, and that’s how it felt to be a tiger.
When we reached the outskirts he slowed and I waited with the catlump in my arms while he climbed up the side of a restaurant so he could see better. When he came down we walked with purpose again for a half mile when we came to a cemetery. We looked around and now he seemed to defer to me as we read the headstones and names and situations of tragedy for a while, and there was a headstone of a deceased Roman Felicity which we were not sure if it was a woman or a man, but she or he was etched as a lover of hawks, and it was there in a space between Roman Felicity’s headstone and a tree that we used our hands to tear up grass and dig with hands an earthbox the size of the catlump.
He placed the garbage sack with the cat in the hole. I started to cover it with dirt and he said Wait and he stood up and recited the survivors of the Aby cat, Felis chaus, Caracal caracal, Lynx pardinus, Puma concolor, Panthera leo, and many others. We replaced the dirt and the grass and matted it flat so no one would notice, and again he said Wait and he found a soft rock, and he went to the clean side of the headstone and wrote Aby Cat and the date and then we walked back the way we had come. When we got back to the Boulogne Woods he said he needed to do something and told me to go ahead, so we parted outside the vestibule.
There were many such nights that autumn. One night he said all the dogs at the animal rescue were starving and we went in through an open rear door with fifty steaks for the dogs. Another time he said that the inhabitants of a nursing home were eating only whipped peas, and we went in in scrubs through the kitchen entrance and gave out King-size candy bars to people who were all sleeping, and on the way out a security guard stopped us and we grabbed him and tied him up with oxygen tubing and left him in the administrative suite. At times Ford gave me packages wrapped in foil that he said contained food for certain people that needed it and to whom he had communicated the care packages would be arriving and I was to go around and deposit these in certain discrete spots in the city which I was happy to do and did do.
In November I went down late to get the mail and there he was again frantic and said he had found the cat killer and we needed to perform a summary judgment. He said we needed to be completely innocent in order to carry out a summary judgment so we both undressed and stuffed our clothing in a package locker in the mail room. He said being naked was only part of it and that we needed to confess our sins to each other and he told me about a child he had not done right by, and I told him about beating off twice a day pretty much every day for the past eleven years. We walked through the city to the heights that overlook the church and the glen and he led me to a townhouse where the Aby cat killer lived. We made sharp sticks on the cement and slashed the tires of the two cars in the driveway and we used the sharp sticks to carve the word Felicide on the lawn.
In winter, I didn’t see Ford at all. I’d wait in the garbage room and the mail room, and I wandered the streets, and I wondered what he was doing and who he was doing it with and I wondered what I would do if I saw him walking the streets after dark with someone else, and I decided I would be as jealous as a lover and would need to leave the state for a while to recover my wits but then I decided instead I could accept him tutoring some other person, but in the end I decided I would not know for sure how I would react unless it happened that I found him with someone else.
Easter night there was a light knock on my door, and I went out into the hallway and Ford was there and this was when I asked him his name. He said that a name was whatsoever a person was called and he asked me what I would call him and I said Ford was simple and strong and he said that was his name then, and he called me Night because I was awake at night when others were asleep, and I said yes. I asked him where he had been and with whom and he said there had been barriers that had all been dealt with and would never happen again, could in fact never happen again, and now he wanted me to put that behind us, that he had come about something else more personal and more important than the rest, a final test he called it, and before he could ask, I told him I would.
We changed into white tunics and garlands he had brought and walked out again into the night, and he seemed so pleased and he said after the test there was so much more I would see and know, but first the test. We walked again side by side over into the industrial sector and he seemed burdened now as if to retract the test but I walked eyes forward to show I was not afraid. We arrived at a suite of offices and he opened one by key. We went inside and he said this was his work, and there was a front desk with a computer and phone and an office with computer and phone and a bathroom and a small kitchen with some fake trees. He pulled from his office desk a black handgun which he said was loaded and said my final test was to shoot him through the office door and I said No! immediately, and he said quietly, sadly, that without the test I was stuck and could not see more or know more, and similarly without the test he also could not see more or know more. He said he would not ask me to do anything that I could not do, and he repeated that I would have the gun, and he would close the door and wait inside, and at his word I would shoot through the door.
I stood with the handgun and he closed the door from inside and locked it. There was a jangling of keys, desk drawers opening and closing again, breathing, the stirring of water, and what sounded like him talking on the phone as if to a child, and I hoped this was my final test to just wait for him, patiently, until he came back out. That’s when he ordered: Night, time to shoot through the door! I stood there and pointed the gun at the ground and knocked on the door with my left hand and he yelled anxiously and said he could never open, never, he could never open to me again unless I shot through the door, and also that without this test we would be as two anonymous strangers in a city who had never met, and that everything we had experienced together would become nothing. I could not bear him not opening to me and worse passing him on the street and we not knowing each other, so I aimed at the door, in the middle where he must know I would shoot, at the height of his chest, right into his heart, my arm extended straight out ahead of me and I squeezed the trigger, I squeezed it so gently so that it would surprise me when it fired—it did surprise me and the gun fired and blew a hole in the door. A red sticky liquid leaked from under the door and got all over my shoes. After a while the door opened from inside.
Ford was there on his knees covered from head to toe in red and now I could tell it wasn’t blood for there was a large bucket of it near him, and he now leapt up and said I had done it, I had proved myself. He showed me how he had laid flat on the floor when I shot through the door and how he had made a bucket of fruit punch to look like blood and now he took the bucket and drank from it to prove it. My relief was immense and I let myself go and I fell to the ground confused and crying and laughing and I pounded my fists to the floor yelling Yes, Yes, and I shook my head fiercely and gritted my teeth and I thrashed about blindly screaming and cackling as he did the same and we roared and we howled and we spat and we brawled wildly and slapped each other and wrestled each other to the ground.
He left me again at the vestibule and I remembered something but he walked away before I could ask. When I returned to my apartment, my wife was awake and waiting and she was surprised. It’s four in the morning, she said. There was no way to explain myself, so I started at the beginning, how there was a man, Ford, in the building whom I had become friends with. She said I was making it up and she said we’d go down to the mailboxes and look at the names. I let her read about ten names, which was a mistake I admit, before I told her we’d never find the name Ford since this was just a name I had called him by and not his actual name.
She left to her parents’ house. As I sit here on the sofa the next day, after midnight, watching television, wondering if I’ll hear him, if he’ll knock, if I’ll see him again, I do remember the weight of the dead Aby cat in my arms, in the sack, and when was that exactly? And I think over my first night with Ford and how it was always him who held the catlump, and how he put the dead cat in the sack, and how he put the cat in its grave, and how I never saw inside the sack. After a time, I do remember him climbing to the top of the restaurant to look out, and how he needed both arms and legs to climb, and how I held the sack in my arms, and how it felt like a life was inside, with some residue of warmth, some potential energy waiting to be unlocked.