She went to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite had been and found the door open. Inside a maid was changing some towels and turning down the bed; she stared at Catherine over her shoulder. It took Catherine a moment to realize this was not the room she was looking for. She went back to the elevator and waited with a man in a suit who whistled aimlessly; every few moments his eyes would rest on Catherine and he would stop whistling. He kept pushing the button on the wall. Finally he got into an elevator going down, and when he was gone Catherine pushed the buttons as she had seen him do. An elevator arrived, empty, and she got in and got out at the next place it stopped—the sixth floor. She went to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite had been and knocked. A strange man in a bathrobe answered the door. She backed away and returned to the elevator.
For an hour she traveled up and down in the elevator knocking on people’s doors. After a while she began to understand the numbers of the floors and took them systematically, one by one; rather than wherever the elevator randomly let her off. She had eliminated all the other floors when she decided to try the fourth. She went once again to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite to have been. There she heard a sound, like a baby crying. She knocked on the door and no one answered. She knocked on it again and the only response was the sound of the baby’s cry. Some people in the other rooms were peering out into the hall, aroused by the sound of her pounding. After a while a bellhop arrived to investigate a reported disturbance. When he came up the hall the guests were still leaning out their doors; the bellhop seemed a little uncertain how to handle it. He said something to Catherine. She grabbed the knob of the door and shook it.
He would have pulled her from the door except that he heard it too, the sound of crying. He took her arm and she shook him away, pointing fiercely at the door. The bellhop looked around at the other guests. She’s been making a racket for twenty minutes, said one lady. The bellhop nodded and listened to the sound in the room and sighed, then he took a key from his ring and put it in the lock. He opened the door.
Inside, the suite still displayed Richard’s fastidiousness. The only thing about it not fastidious was Richard. He was lying on the living room floor in his underwear. An open bottle of liquor sat on the table, a glass overturned in the midst of a stain. There was also an empty pharmaceutical bottle on the sofa. Catherine stood behind the bellhop, who softly called to Richard and then bent down to gently shake him. At the frigid touch of Richard’s body he jumped back. Oh shit, he said.
He nearly ran over her trying to get out of the room. Catherine remained staring at the body. She heard the sound like a baby from the other room and, not taking her eyes off Richard, she stepped around him. In the other room she made the discovery. Trapped in the window was something that had once been a white kitten. The kitten had been trying to get out the window; she was moving, animated, but not really alive, caught rather in a last nervous reflex, like something that continues to move several seconds after its head is cut off. The window in which the kitten was caught had several long horizontal panes of glass which opened to an angle by a latch on the side. At some point the kitten had maneuvered the latch, squeezing between the panes of glass and pushing herself toward a crack at the side of the screen. So desperate had she been to get out, so frustrated had she been by how securely the window was fastened, that she became determined to escape at any cost. Now Catherine saw the side of the kitten’s head pressed flat against the pane of glass and its emaciated body twisted in the window; she had no idea how long the kitten had been like this. She might have been this way before Richard’s death; she might have grown from a kitten into a cat within the panes of this window, and he might have sat on the sofa drinking and taking his evil medicine as he listened to her howl. The last sun of this June night was gleaming through the glass at this moment and the new angle of each pane cast a different hue while the trees of the Hancock veldt cried hideously in the distance. The cat was drowning in the colors of the glass and the noise of the trees, and when she moved, the glass moved and the colors changed. The more hysterical her capture, the more vibrant the light, until she was writhing in the dark red of the spidersky that was caught in the window with her. When Catherine put her hands on the cat, the creature was
