“I couldn’t stand another well-wisher. Another person of good intentions but little imagination. He would have wandered off, too, at his own wake. Without saying good-bye. Suddenly I just missed him and wanted to come up here and see if the bed still held his shape. His scent on the pillow.”
My brother clearly did not know what to do or say. As he searched the corners of the walls before him, he knitted his fingers together and crossed his legs at the ankles. She had always made him slightly uncomfortable. The cat leapt upon the bed and meandered to my pillow, where he curled like a dish and settled into the dent left by her head.
Sam patted her hand. “You know it was an accident. He was gone right away. Maybe the cat got underfoot, and he fell backward and hit his head. Must have been the cat.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Harpo said from the pillow.
Downstairs there was a party going on. Someone had finished a joke and the punch line released a tide of laughter that rose and fell away and left behind a deeper silence. Stories at funerals seem to me to be the surest sign of our resiliency. That we want to, and can, make each other laugh. I almost wished to be down there among my friends and relatives, to hear what might be said about me and set the record straight, but I could not bear to leave her, even in my brother’s good care. As for the cat, I could strangle him, but what’s the point? He was forever underfoot. Sita had been there with me all night, not the others, just Sita. I must have risen from the bed, careful not to wake her, and stumbled in the darkness to the bathroom. I tripped over the cat, hit my head, and would not get up.
“I cannot believe Jack is gone,” she said.
Jack, of course, she called me Jack. That’s my name. My brother’s name is Sam. He moved out when things started getting serious between me and my girlfriend, Sita. Who was now speaking of me in the past tense.
The cat read my thoughts. “Because you are definitely not in the present, at present.”
“It’s like a bad dream,” she said. “Wouldn’t he have found some humor in the situation? Awakened from his dream only to fall out of the world. Since he was nothing but a dreamer.”
I was taken by her flat assertion. I always fancied myself a man of action.
“Come now,” said Harpo. “It’s just the two of us now. You can be honest with me.”
A debate with a cat was out of the question, but at the very least I felt I should express my gratitude. “Thank you, at least, for saving me back there. From the mad woman with the gun.”
He coughed on a hairball. “Don’t mention it, mate. Just an accident that I showed up at all.”
At last, Sam cleared his throat. “He was a dreamer, but such a serious one. When he was a little boy, he liked nothing more than to draw these elaborate designs of his own imagination on this brown paper Mother gave him. From the time Jack could draw, he would sit all day at our father’s desk, sketching out his dreams.”
I had dreams, all right. Skyscrapers and museums, whole cities, and cities connected to other cities. Or simply the perfect house.
“I often dreamt of something better for myself,” Harpo said. “Don’t be so incredulous. Cats have nine lives, you know.”
“Then there’s hope for you yet.”
“Even housecats dream of becoming tigers. As long as there’s the chance of starting all over again, there’s hope, mate.” With that, Harpo began to lick at the fur near the base of his tail, the first step in a grooming process that always seemed to last forever. I could not watch, for it made me a little sick to my stomach.
My attention strayed to the commotion going on downstairs. A man’s voice, loud with drink, began some apocryphal story to regale the house of mourning. I wondered who else had come to the funeral but knew that I should not leave the room. Part of me wished to reach out and comfort her, say a few words to my brother, but there was no way to do so from this separate plane. This whole ghostly situation—or whatever one calls it—is quite frustrating.
“When we first met,” Sita said, “he was so funny and charming and smart. I am so angry that he would leave me all alone like this. What am I to do now?”
My brother had no good answer.
She considered his silence and folded her hands, as if in prayer. “I have a story to tell you,” she said. “About your brother and me.”
Leaning back against the pillows, in a gesture I had seen before on this night, Sam settled in for the tale.