Michael opens closets and cabinets, looks under the bed, behind the toilet. He checks the washer and drier, empty delivery boxes, inside a pair of Wendy’s boots.
“Fuck you cat,” he says to no one. “Stop fucking with me.”
He opens the fridge and the freezer, leaves the doors dangling, holds a frozen chicken thigh to his face. He goes through the garbage. Maybe there’s a cat at the bottom of the bin. He searches the hallway, the stairs, the building’s basement. He knocks on other tenants’ doors but no one’s home. Only Michael in this building, and maybe the cat, stuck in a wall or a heating duct, dying of starvation. He thinks he hears a faint whimper coming from inside the staircase. When he gets close it’s gone.
4.
She finds her husband on the kitchen floor. His crying sounds like a small, failing engine, an electric toothbrush, maybe, on the last legs of its battery. She goes to her knees and tries to hold him.
“I’m so sorry,” is all she can say and not enough. Michael trembles. A mucused gurgle comes from his throat. The position is awkward, like burping a baby. Wendy puts her hand beneath his shirt and rubs his spine. Only hours ago she decided to leave this loft and not look back; to take time to think things over; to tell Michael she knows about the money.
He says, “I can’t find the fucking cat.”
“Ssshh,” says Wendy, aware of the cat’s probable state: drowned in a sewer, a disintegrating corpse.
“I want my cat,” says Michael. She smells a faint trace of urine and thinks he might have peed his pants.
“Just hold me,” Wendy says and squeezes, as if solace might be measured by a pressure gauge. Michael squirms free.
“We have to make signs,” he says. “Someone might find her and they won’t know where to bring her back.”
He rummages through drawers, pulling out pens and markers, ripping paper from the printer. Wendy tries to take him back into her arms, but Michael moves now with purpose.
“Forget the cat,” says Wendy.
Michael’s found a Sharpie. He makes the saddest sign she’s ever seen: a slanted scribble, barely legible, no name or photo with which to identify the animal. Wendy resigns herself to this futile distraction. They retrace Michael’s route. The search is her punishment, calling “Cat” and “Kitty,” telling him she’s sure it will turn up. It’s almost ten o’clock and she has to be at work. Michael’s knees buckle. Wendy catches him before he falls.
“Did you eat breakfast?”
He says nothing.
“You need to eat or you’ll be sick. Let me make you something before I go to work.”
“You’re going to work?”
“I have to, Michael, the timing isn’t the best.”
He escapes from the hug. Wendy cracks two eggs into a bowl and heats the pan. Michael pulls at the skin of his arm like he wants to rip it off. She beats the eggs.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he says. “I didn’t realize the timing doesn’t suit you. Silly me. I’ll just go back in time and tell Ricky to get murdered at a more convenient date.”
“Michael, I . . .”
“No, no, I totally get it. You have a big day today, and Ricky’s murder is screwing it up.”
“I just need to stop in. I can come back in a couple hours.”
The eggs sizzle. Wendy places two slices of bread in the toaster. Michael uses the spring mechanism to pop them back out. The slices flop onto the counter. Michael rips the untoasted bread into pieces, sprinkles the pieces on the floor. He says, “For the birds.”
5.
Things started well, outside Goldman, yesterday morning. Then, after lunch, Devor took the train to Park Slope to convince Sophia to come to the Funeral.
When he got to the Co-op, she was stocking coffee. She dumped beans into a wooden barrel and they clinked like rain on a tin roof. Devor was momentarily transported to French Guiana, their sophomore summer. They’d beautified a bus station as part of a community service trip jointly sponsored by Columbia’s French department and the campus branch of Amnesty. Satisfied with their work—they’d coated the station’s outer walls in mustard-colored acrylic—they took shelter from a passing downpour beneath the station’s tin roof and shared a triumphant spliff. When the rain stopped and they emerged, they saw that a spray-can artist had desecrated the work. The result was a caricature of a Rasta wielding an Uzi on a do-gooder who looked a lot like Devor. Sophia had said, “Lesson learned.”
What followed was twenty years of protests, and #Occupy, and marching for black teens murdered by white police, and marching to end detainment camps at the border, and marching to support the liberation of Palestine, and marching in support of reproductive rights, in support of bathroom bills and assault-weapons bans. Twenty years of debates and declarations, jealousies and denials of jealousy, hope and disillusion, the best sex Devor had ever had. Sophia did not believe in the prison of monogamy until, one day, she did.
She’d met a half-Lebanese professor of cognitive science who resembled George Clooney in certain bearded roles, and who complained about American hummus and today’s lobotomized slaves to their cellphones. Sophia moved into his Chelsea floor-through, and Devor spent a year brooding and dating before begging Sophia to dump the professor and take him
