«Don't," Emilia whispered. She picked Millamant up again and held her close against her breast, not petting her.
Sam said, «It's like the snow on a TV set, when the cable's out. People just sit watching the screen, expecting the picture to come back—they'll sit there for an hour, more, waiting for all those whirling, crackling white particles to shape themselves back into a face, a car, a box of cereal—something. Try to think how it might feel to be one of those particles.» He said nothing more for a moment, and then added, «It's not like that but try to imagine it anyway.»
Whereupon Millamant fell asleep in Emilia's arms, and was carried off to bed in the guest room. She sauntered out the next morning, look–ing demurely pleased with herself, shared Emilia's yogurt, topped that off with an entire can of Chunky Chicken, went back to sleep on a fragrant pile of new–dried laundry, woke presently, and came to find me in the liv–ing room, settle briskly onto my lap and issue instructions. Fondling your best friend's tummy and scratching his vibrating throat for a solid hour at a tune may possibly be weirder than responding to his demand for more kibble. I'm still not sure.
Presently he remarked, in that voice that wasn't him and wasn't human, and was yet somehow Sam, «In case I haven't said it, I'm very happy to see you, Jake.»
«I'm happy to see you, too.» I stopped petting him once we were talk–ing: it felt wrong. «I just wish I could … see you.»
Sam didn't laugh—I don't think he could—but a sort of odd grumbly ripple ran through Millamant's body. «You surprise me. You didn't actually plan to have me come back with fleas and hair balls?»
«Just like old times," I said, and Millamant did the ripple thing again «Truth is, I think it's easier to accept you like this than it would be if you'd showed up in some other person's body. You always had a lot in common with Millamant.»
«Did, didn't I ?» For a moment the words were almost lost in Millamant's deep purr. «We both love peach yogurt, and having things on our own terms. But I couldn't dance like Millamant the best day I ever saw. Jake, you don't know—when she was a kitten, pouncing and skittering around the apartment, I used to watch her for hours, wondering if it wasn't too late, if I could still make my body learn something from her that it never could learn from anyone else. Even now, old as she is, you can't imagine how it feels….» He was silent for so long that I thought Millamant must have fallen asleep once more; but then he said suddenly, «Jake. Maybe you should send me back.»
Emilia was in the guest bedroom, talking on the phone to her edi–tor in New Jersey, so there was just me to be flabbergasted. When I had words again, I said, «Send you? We don't even know how you got here in the first place, and you don't know where back is. We couldn't send you anywhere the BMT doesn't run.» No furry ripple out of Millamant. «Why would you want to? To leave us again?»
«I don't ever want to leave.» Millamant's dull claws dug harder into my leg than they should have been able to. «If I were in a rat's body, a cockroach's body, I'd want to stay here with you, with Emilia. But it feels strange here. Not wrong, but not—not proper. I don't mean me inhabit–ing a cat—I mean me still being me, Sam Kagan still aware that I'm Sam Kagan. However you look at it, this is a damn afterlife, Jake, and I don't believe in an afterlife. Dead or alive, I don't.»
«And being part of the snow on a television screen, that's an improve–ment? That's proper?»
Sam didn't answer for a time. Millamant purred drowsily between my hands, and my Betty Boop clock ticked (at certain times of day, you can almost pretend she's dancing the Charleston), and in the guest bedroom Emilia laughed at something. Finally Sam said, «You see, I don't think I was always going to be TV snow. There was more to it. I can't tell you how I knew that. I just did.»
I unhooked a rear claw from my thigh. «Purgatory as a function of the cable system. Makes sense, in a really dumb way.»
Sam said, «There was more. I don't know that I missed anything much, but there was more coming. And if it's an afterlife, then the word means something they never told us about. I don't think there is a word for it—what I was waiting for. But it wasn't this.»
Emilia hung up and came out to us then, and Millamant stopped talking. Instead, she leaped down from my lap, landing with the pre–cise abandon of a cat ten years younger, and began to dance. Last night it had been for herself—at least, until we showed up—this time the dance was entirely for us, Sam showing off joyously, taking the whole room as his stage, as Millamant swam in the air from chair to bookcase and flashed like a dragonfly between bookcase and stereo, setting a rack of tape cassettes vibrating like castanets. Partnering my furniture, she swung around my three–foot–high Yoruba fetish, mimicking Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain; then whirled across the room by spinning bounds, only to slow to a liquidly sensuous cat—waltz in and out of the striped shadows of my window blinds. I couldn't remember ever seeing Sam dance like that: so much in authority that he could afford to release his body on its own recognizance. Millamant finished with a sudden aston–ishing flare of pirouettes from a standing start, and jeteed her way into Emilia's lap, where she purred and panted and said nothing. Emilia pet–ted her and looked at me, and we didn't say anything either.
Neither of us said anything after that about Emilia's taking Sam home with her. She spent all ten days of her leave like an inheritance at my house. Sly smiles, grotesquely rolled eyes and hasty thumbs–up signs from my neighbors made their opinion of my new little fling eminently clear. I really can't blame them: we almost never went out, except for a meal or a brief walk, and we must have seemed completely absorbed in one another when they saw us at all. But what they'd have thought of the hours we passed, day and night, watching an old Abyssinian cat dance all over my house, let alone arguing with the cat about afterlives and the last World Series … no, it would have broken their hearts if I'd told them. Mine is a very dull neighborhood.
There was never a chance of anything happening between us, Emilia and me. We had grown far too close to be lovers: we were almost brother and sister in Sam, if that makes any sense at all. Once, midway through her visit, she was ironing her clothes in the kitchen when I came in to fill the cat dish and the water bowl. She watched in silence until I was done, and then she said with a sudden half–strangled violence, «I hate this! I can't bear to see you doing that, putting food down for him. It's not — " and she seemed to be fighting her own throat for a word " — it's not honest!»
We stared at each other across the ironing board. I said slowly, «Honest? How did honesty get into this?»
«Did I say that?» She scrubbed absently at her forehead with the back of her hand. «I don't know, I don't know what I meant. If he's Sam, then he shouldn't be eating on the floor, and if he's Millamant, then he shouldn't be making her dance all the time. She's old, Jake, and she's got arthritis, and Sam's dancing her like a child making his toys fly and fight. And it's so beautiful, and he's so happy—and I never saw him dance, the way you did, and I can't believe how beautiful…»
She didn't start to cry. Emilia doesn't cry. What happens is that she loses speech—when Sam died, she couldn't speak for three days—and the few sounds she does make are not your business or mine. I went to her then, and she buried her face in the ruinous gray cardigan I wear around the house, and we just stood together without speaking. And yes, all right, there was an instant when she held me hard, tilting her head back so we could look at each other. I felt very cold, and my lips started to tingle most painfully. But neither of us moved. We stood there, very delib–erately letting the moment pass, feeling it pass, more united in that word–less choice than we could have been in any other way. Emilia went back to folding her ironing, and I took the garbage out and paid some bills.