He Remembered the Meow

Ellis pulled open the heavy fire door to the basement and a wall of cold, wet-concrete air hit him. He didn't care. In his arms, wrapped in a greasy beach towel from the trunk of his Honda, was a cat. A gray tabby so thin you could count his ribs through the towel, one side of his face hairless and raw, a crust of something dark matting the fur behind his left ear. The cat smelled like mold and mouse droppings and rust.

Mrs. Gable from 1A was waiting for the elevator. She saw Ellis emerge from the basement stairwell like a man who'd found buried treasure. Her face did a slow crumple of disgust as the smell reached her.

"For heaven's sake," she said, stepping back. "What on earth is that?"

Ellis didn't break stride. He adjusted the towel, tucking a loose corner under the cat's chin. The cat let out a raspy sound, not quite a meow, more of a dry creak.

"Ellis, I asked you a question."

"I heard you, Margaret." He punched the elevator button with his elbow. "I've been looking for him since August."

The doors opened. He stepped inside and turned around, pressing the button for the third floor. Just before the doors closed, Mrs. Gable caught a glimpse of his face. He was smiling. She would tell her daughter about it later on the phone, describing the whole unsettling tableau. The man, the mangy animal, the beatific expression. Like a monk who'd seen a vision in a cave.

The first flyers went up in the third week of August. Ellis spent a Sunday afternoon at Kinko's, printing fifty color copies of a photo he'd taken on his phone. Binks, in the picture, was sprawled on the fire escape in a patch of afternoon sun, his good side facing the camera, the left side hidden. Gray with charcoal stripes, a white patch on his chest shaped like a smudged fingerprint.

"MISSING," the flyer read. "Gray tabby. Answers to Binks. Slightly asymmetrical whiskers." He'd added that last detail because it was the only thing truly unique about Binks, the only verifiable identifier. The left whiskers, the ones above the missing fur, were stunted and sparse. The right ones fanned out long and regal.

He stapled the flyers to telephone poles along Moreno Avenue. Taped them to the windows of the laundromat, the corner bodega, the community board outside the library on Camino Real. The August sun baked the paper until the ink started to fade within a week. He came back with fresh ones, pulling off the bleached copies, stapling up the new.

Binks had disappeared on a Tuesday. Ellis had left the kitchen window cracked open, just three inches, because the air conditioning in his unit was shot and the landlord kept promising to send someone. When he came home from his shift at the warehouse, the apartment was silent. The food bowl by the radiator was full. Binks's spot on the back of the couch was empty. The window was still open. Three inches. Enough.

The calls started the first week. A woman on Cortez Street had seen a gray cat near the dumpsters behind the Dollar General. Ellis drove over at nine-thirty at night, still in his work boots, and spent forty minutes crouching behind a row of reeking dumpsters, making the soft clicking sound with his tongue that Binks always responded to. Nothing. A kid on Avenida de los Árboles swore he saw a gray cat sleeping under his dad's truck. Ellis crawled on his stomach to look. It was a possum, fat and hissing, with eyes that glowed red in the beam of his phone's flashlight.

He started a log in the Notes app on his phone. Date. Time. Location. Outcome. The list grew long. September 3rd, 11:42 PM, gas station on Valley Blvd. Not him. September 7th, 5:15 AM, alley behind the high school. Stray, no white chest mark. September 11th, 2:30 AM, trailer park off the interstate. Wrong color entirely.

By October, his co-workers stopped asking why he looked so tired. Lou, the forklift operator, handed him a coffee one morning without a word. Just put it on the crate next to Ellis and walked away. Ellis drank it. The taste was bitter and burnt and exactly what he needed.

He widened the search grid. Went north past the freeway overpass. South to the drainage canal. He learned the secret geography of his own city, the forgotten spaces. The gap between the back of the church and the retaining wall, where weeds grew taller than his head. The dead-end service road behind the abandoned Circuit City, its asphalt cracked and pushing up dandelions. The thin strip of woods along the railroad tracks, where shopping carts rusted in the high grass.

He walked for hours. Called Binks's name into the dark. Made the clicking sound until his tongue was dry. Sometimes he just stood still in the middle of a vacant lot at midnight, listening. The city hummed around him. Freeway drone. Distant helicopter. A dog barking somewhere. Never the sound he was listening for.

Mrs. Gable cornered him in the lobby one evening in November. The flyers had been up for three months. The paper was yellow now, the tape brittle and peeling.

"You've got to let this go," she said, not unkindly. "It's just a cat, Ellis. You can get another one at the shelter."

"That's what my sister said."

"Well, your sister sounds like a sensible woman."

"I don't want another one."

She looked at him. The lobby's fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The radiator against the wall clanked and hissed.

"It's going to be winter soon," she said. "You can't keep wandering around at all hours."

Ellis nodded. The gesture wasn't agreement, just acknowledgment. He walked past her toward the stairs, and she watched him go, a man shrinking into his own stubborn hope.

December came and the nights turned bitter. The calls stopped entirely. A cold front moved down from the mountains and the temperature dropped into the twenties. Ellis kept walking. He wore two sweaters under his coat now, thick socks, boots that had started to separate at the sole. The flyers were ghosts, faded to pale rectangles with a suggestion of a cat.

He was walking back to the building on the third of January when he heard it.

A sound. Small. Frayed at the edges. Coming from the narrow ground-level window that ventilated the basement.

Ellis stopped. The street was empty, the sidewalk glazed with old ice. He stood perfectly still. The sound came again. Not a meow. A thread of a meow. A sound that had almost forgotten how to be a sound.

He went to the super's door and knocked until Arthur opened it, bleary-eyed, in a bathrobe.

"What?"

"I need the key to the basement."

"It's five in the morning, Ellis."

"I need the key."

Arthur stared at him. Then he shuffled back inside and returned with a brass key on a stretched-out ring. "Bring it back."

Ellis didn't answer. He was already walking.

The basement door opened into a lung of cold, still air. The stairwell light was burned out, so he used his phone, the beam cutting through the dark. The stairs were concrete, worn smooth in the center by decades of footsteps. At the bottom, a long corridor stretched the length of the building, cluttered with the usual debris of a hundred years of tenants. A broken dresser with its drawers missing. A stack of paint cans, rusted around the rims. An artificial Christmas tree, still in its box, forgotten since someone's holiday decades ago.

"Binks."

His voice didn't echo. The clutter ate the sound.

He moved slowly, shining the light left and right, ducking under low pipes wrapped in crumbling asbestos insulation. The floor was damp. Something skittered in the dark ahead, too small to be a cat.

"Binks."

Fainter now. He'd lost the direction. He stood still. Waited. Let the basement settle into its own silence. The drip of a pipe. The hum of the boiler. And then it came again, from behind a water heater near the far wall.

Ellis walked toward it. The space behind the water heater was a wedge of shadow, maybe six inches wide, between the metal casing of the tank and the concrete wall. He knelt down. The cold from the floor bit through his jeans immediately.

Binks was there. Just a suggestion of a shape, gray on gray, pressed so far into the crack that he seemed to have become part of the wall. Two eyes reflected the light. Dull. Blinking slowly.

Ellis's breath caught. He didn't move. Didn't call out. He just turned the phone so the light pointed at the ceiling instead of the cat, and sat down on the cold floor with his back against the water heater.

"Hey," he said. Quiet. Like he was picking up a conversation they'd started five minutes ago.

The cat didn't move.

"I've been looking everywhere for you, you know that? Cortez Street. The high school. That creepy trailer park off the interstate." He was just talking now, not thinking about the words. "Lou from work thinks I'm crazy. Mrs. Gable thinks I'm crazy. Hell, Arthur thinks I'm crazy."

The dark shape shifted. Just a tiny movement.

"I never got a new cat. I know people told me to. But I didn't. Your bowl's still there. By the radiator. It's probably dusty. I haven't touched it."

A longer pause. The boiler hummed. The pipe dripped.

"You got down here somehow. I don't know how. Maybe through that window that's always broken. I don't care."

And then, a sound from the darkness. Not the thread-like meow from before. A softer sound. The beginning of a purr. A tiny engine, rusty from disuse, trying to start.

Ellis closed his eyes.

He didn't know how long he sat there. Long enough for the cold to make his hands numb. Long enough to lose track of the time. And then he felt it. A pressure, feather-light, against his knee. He opened his eyes.

Binks had come out of the crack. He was sitting next to Ellis's leg, his head just touching the denim. Close enough to feel the warmth, not close enough to be held. Ellis didn't grab him. He just raised his hand, slowly, so slowly, and let it rest on the floor, palm up, next to the cat. An offering. A question.

Binks looked at the hand. Then he took one step forward and pressed his forehead into Ellis's palm.

Ellis could feel every bone in the cat's skull. The missing fur on the left side of the face. The stunted whiskers. He didn't cry. He was too tired to cry, too cold, too wrung out by the long five months. He just sat there in the dark basement of his own building, with his hand on the head of his cat, and breathed.

He picked Binks up gently. The cat was nothing. A bag of bones held together by matted fur. He fit entirely into Ellis's two hands with room to spare. Ellis wrapped him in the towel from his car, the one he always kept there now, just in case, and carried him up the stairs.

And that's when Mrs. Gable saw him. In the lobby. At 6:42 in the morning. Holding a filthy, half-dead cat wrapped in a beach towel, standing by the elevator, waiting for the doors to open. He didn't care what she thought. He didn't answer her questions. He just got into the elevator, pressed three, and went home.

The apartment was warm. The radiator hissed by the window. Binks's bowl was right where it had always been, a little dusty around the rim, exactly as Ellis had left it. He filled it with water from the tap, then opened a can of tuna he found in the back of the cupboard. The cat drank first, for a long time, his small pink tongue lapping at the water with a desperate, quiet focus. Then he ate. Small bites. Stopping to look around the kitchen between each one, as if making sure it was all still there.

He toured the apartment after that. Sniffed the baseboards. Inspected the couch. Walked into the bedroom and looked at the empty space on Ellis's pillow. Then he jumped onto the couch, circled three times on the left cushion, the one by the armrest, and curled into a tight gray knot.

Ellis stood in the middle of his living room. The sun was coming up, pale yellow through the dirty window. He took his phone out of his pocket, opened the Notes app, and scrolled through five months of entries. Cortez Street. Dollar General. The high school. The trailer park. The drainage canal. The church. The dead-end road.

He deleted them all.

Then he walked over to the couch. He sat down, slowly, on the right side, careful not to disturb the cat. Binks opened one eye. Looked at him. Closed it again.

The radiator clanked. Outside, a car passed on Moreno Avenue. In the apartment, the sound of a cat purring, a rough little motor, still learning how to run. Ellis leaned his head back against the cushion.

"Twenty feet," he said to no one. "You were twenty feet from the front door the whole damn time."

No one answered. But a paw, small and bony, stretched out and rested against his thigh.