South Wabash

The rain ended only toward dawn, though for a long while afterward the city continued to resonate with water. Somewhere beyond the walls of the apartment, the tires of infrequent automobiles hissed upon the pavement; pipes answered one another with dull metallic echoes; and in the opposite window an insomniac stood smoking beside an open vent, so motionless that he seemed afraid of startling his own thoughts.

Moro lay upon the windowsill.

For several hours he had not spoken. At times the Man almost succeeded in believing that the cat had become ordinary again — merely a black silhouette among the reflections of glass and night. But then Moro would slowly turn his head, and the illusion of normality would vanish.

“If you had been permitted to choose any age in history,” the Man asked at last, breaking the silence, “in which would you have remained?”
The question surprised even him. Perhaps this is how the mind protects itself from the impossible: by speaking suddenly of something domestic, almost absurd.
He smiled faintly.
“Let me guess. Egypt under Amenemhat the Third? Tranquility, pyramids, cats, priests…”
“Too obvious,” Moro replied, striking the sill once with his tail.
The gesture disturbed the Man. There was the slightest irregularity in the movement, as though the cat had recalled, for an instant, something unpleasant.
“I had imagined,” the Man said, “that your kind preferred simplicity.”
“Not simplicity. Not comfort.”
Moro leapt soundlessly from the sill and crossed the room, carefully avoiding the light of the desk lamp. He had always avoided direct light. The Man had begun noticing this only recently, and he was no longer certain that the habit belonged to ordinary feline instincts.

The cat stopped beside the bookcase. The old wood smelled of dust, dry paper, and something nearly vanished — the odor of libraries whose windows had remained unopened for decades. Between the worn spines stood books on mythology, albums of reproductions, obsolete dictionaries, and notebooks filled with sketches of cities that did not exist. Then Moro stepped out of the shadow. For a moment his eyes reflected the lamp as two dim points of gold.
“Chicago,” he said. “November, 1932. The twentieth century.”
The Man laughed.
Not because anything was amusing, but because of the abrupt collision of two impossibilities.
“Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Moro remained silent for a long while.
Outside, a train passed somewhere beyond the buildings. Its light drifted across the ceiling, and for an instant the Man thought the walls had grown darker.
“Because the city had not yet understood that it was dying,” the cat said quietly.
The Man frowned.
“But Chicago did not die.”
“Not that one.”
Moro turned once more toward the window.
“Cities possess reflections as well. Occasionally the reflection survives the original.”
The familiar irritation returned.
“Do you speak in riddles deliberately?”
“No. It is simply that your species believes the world is obliged to be intelligible.”
The cat sprang onto an old armchair and curled into himself, though his eyes remained open.
“In thirty-two I lived near South Wabash, above a bar frequented by men who had lost too much and forgotten too little. Music played downstairs without interruption.”
“Jazz?”
“It had not yet acquired the dignity of nostalgia.”
The room fell silent again.
The Man noticed that Moro was looking not at him, but slightly to his left, as though something else occupied the room.
“And what was it like?” he asked softly.
Moro blinked once.
“Noisy. Hungry. Magnificent.”

A pause followed.

“At night the city glowed like an overheated machine. People drank, danced, shot one another, fell in love, disappeared. And no one perceived how thin reality had become.”
“What do you mean?”
Moro lifted his head.
“On certain nights the streets did not lead where they should.”
The Man felt a coldness move through him.
The cat continued in the same calm, almost meditative tone:
“A man would leave a club, turn into an alley, and return several hours later altered in some indefinable way. Sometimes he did not return at all. It was there that I first witnessed Kur beginning to seep into modern cities.”
“And nobody noticed?”
“Human beings notice far more than they later permit themselves to admit.”
Outside, the rain began again.
The Man looked at the cat and suddenly understood that he had never asked the most important question.
“How old are you?”
Moro did not answer.
He was looking somewhere beyond the room now, and for the first time there appeared in his eyes something that resembled not wisdom, but weariness.
A very ancient weariness.
“I remember cities that men now regard as myths,” he said at last. “But that is not the worst of it.”
“What, then, is?”
Moro slowly closed his eyes.
“I am beginning to forget their names.”