It happened exactly the way Cray said it would.

            Explosions outside, some separated by seconds, others by barely the blink of an eye. And flashing lights, bright enough to illuminate the entire living room, which ended after an instant and were followed by others, fading just as fast.

            When they looked out the window—and both Doodles and Cray did, squeezing in and bumping beside each other beneath the living room drapes—their eyes and ears hurt. Yet…

            “It’s beautiful,” Doodles said, confused because beauty hadn’t been predicted.

            “Right.”

            “You never said…”

            “I did,” Cray insisted.

            “No, you…”

            Doodles gave up. There was no correcting Cray, let alone arguing with him, though he hadn’t said it, she was sure.

            Doodles stared at him. The alternating light and dark revealed and concealed, concealed and revealed his face. His eyes stayed visible, for they were always wide open, Doodles thought, with pure exhilaration. And his lips were parted, too, which sent the same signal of delight.

            Then his bottom lip ascended and his upper lip dropped down. Doodles couldn’t hear him snarl over the onslaught outside. Yet she knew he was impatient.

            Had he always been insane? Sincere? Or was it all an act?

            Because Cray was a better actor than Doodles, despite the fact that she’d been the one with the kind-of show biz career, the reason she was here in the house in the first place. The Circuitous was no road to stardom, she admitted, yet it had always gotten attention as a novelty, if nothing else, for cats weren’t known, to put it mildly, for doing anything on cue or over and over.

Doodles had no memory of life before the circus. Apparently, she’d been found as a kitten in the street and taken in. The circus people named her Princess Diana, because they found it funny how her hair fell, but she’d thought the name foolish and had never heard of her namesake. Those days had disappeared from her mind. She’d simply awakened being taught to do a trick, a human woman holding a small hoop and she being urged to run towards and jump through it.

            “She wouldn’t do the other trick,” the woman said to someone else.

            “Which other one?”

            “The mirror bit. She wouldn’t do it.”

            There’d been breakaway paper, she learned, covering the hole in another hoop, creating a makeshift “mirror,” and she had been supposed to burst through it and had resisted. This new hoop had an uncovered circle in the center.

            They tried to teach her to go forward and back up, back up and go forward, then accelerate, lift from the ground, and fly through the new aperture, like an astronaut shooting from a capsule into space or was it like a capsule propelled back to Earth’s atmosphere, in a body of water?

            Doodles wouldn’t go near it: she stopped short. Was she scared of the small sphere and what would lie beyond it? Did she have the skittishness but not the imperious attitude of her kind? Maybe Doodles was—she hated the cliché, cooked up by humans, stupid ones—scaredy.

            For it wasn’t just the hoop she couldn’t handle. The slalom ladders were a no-go—and don’t get her started on the ladder that led to a tiny platform from which she was supposed to dive or just drop onto a tiny pillow. That was ridiculous!

            The woman trainer segued to simpler kinds of accomplishments for Doodles: parallel slats, walking on her hind legs, rolling a little wheel toward another cat rolling his own, then one jumping over the other, but…

            “Forget it,” the woman told her friend. “She’s not one of us.”

            Doodles was informed she’d be taken care of before being adopted by non-show-biz people. And if the woman sounded judgmental and superior to so-called “civilians,” she still fed Doodles and provided her with a clean bed in the barracks or dorm or whatever circus animals called home. And while Doodles kept to herself there, didn’t mix much with the seasoned show cats, it was because she was shy, not snooty, no matter what others thought, especially Lulu, the “star” who always knew where her light was when she sailed through the circle, pretended to back up and go forward, go forward and back up before “getting up the nerve,” which crowds adored but which fooled nobody, Doodles thought: she was just an old ham.

            Doodles didn’t trust their promise of being protected until adoption. (Later, she knew she’d been too wary and shouldn’t have been so suspicious.) One night, she escaped.

            She suffered another stay on the street before being scooped up by animal protection and sent to a shelter, more crowded and noisier than The Circuitous: now she realized and rued her mistake in bolting. A fifteen-year-old volunteer named her Doodles for some silly reason, and she understood again she’d had it better before—at least there she’d been a princess. Luckily, Doodles was quickly adopted by Lady, as she called her, never having caught her name, and taken to the home where she was now, listening to and looking at the noise and lights out the living room window next to Cray. He was another cat already there when she arrived.

            Cray had originally been named Creighton: it said so on the collar bought by whoever had abandoned him. He was black with white paws, the opposite of pale blonde Doodles. Yet it was said they were alike in temperament, each withdrawn and anti-social, the reason they had to be fostered before adoption, a job Lady had accepted, taking them home from the same shelter on different days.

            Doodles had overheard this on Lady’s phone calls, the one way she communicated with people, there being few if any visitors to her small, two-story home. The place was rarely vacuumed or dusted and smelled of all the meals Lady had burned, from pea soup to garlic spaghetti sauce to toast. Lady herself smelled of liquor, the reason for her neglect of the place, Doodles understood. The television was always running, repeating reports from a twenty-four-hour news channel, while Lady was passed out everywhere from her room to the toilet to the living room couch, from which she’d just been awakened by the noise and lights outside.

            At the start, Doodles and Cray kept their distance from each other—not hostile, just self-protective. Yet an exchange of glances revealed both knew they had to be on their best behavior—quiet and polite, not quiet and aloof—in order to get adopted and out of there.

            The first prospective adopters were a mom, a dad and a baby in a stroller. Doodles did everything but jump into their laps, purring, bunting, and brushing against their shins. She endured her butt being smacked too hard by the father (why did men, and it was always men, do that? And why did some cats seem to like it? Was it a dysfunctional accommodation of abuse? Anyway). She even let the baby tug her whiskers—once—before the mother yanked him back. Doodles thought she showed more acting talent than she ever had before. Maybe the stuff in the circus had just been too silly, was that all?

            Doodles believed Cray would play his part, too. Yet as soon as he saw the small family, poised to love him, he raised his tail like a cartoon thermometer, arched his back and hissed in a stereotypical portrait of a ghostly black cat. This scared the baby, who screamed and clutched the mother holding him, digging sharp infant nails into the woman’s arm. Then Cray advanced, his own claws displayed, striking and sinking them into the leg of the father, who tried but failed to dodge the attack.

            After shrieking more like a human devil than a domestic pet, Cray emulated a bat that flew and landed on the empty seat of the stroller, ripping it open and tipping it, destroyed, onto the floor. He leaped off and, in a final incarnation, slithered snake-like from the living room.

            Thus ended the first adoption attempt.

            Lady, who had bathed and dressed up for the occasion, spent the rest of the day and night behind the closed door of her bedroom, the sound of clinking ice and the smell of a burning plant sedative emitting from beneath the threshold.

            “Why did you do that?” Doodles whispered, shocked enough to end the silence she and Cray usually sat in.

            Doodles’ natural discretion was being sorely tested by Cray, whom she realized she had gotten all wrong from the start.

            “It’s all part of my plan,” Cray replied, and his very voice and attitude were different today, more cynical and calculating—his real character!

            “I know they called me Creighton because it sounded like cretin,” he continued, “but that was bullshit. I’m nobody’s fool. And their nickname for me at the shelter, Cray, was a diminutive for crazy. Well, I’m crazy like a fox—an expression I hate. Crazy like a cat!!”

            Doodles had always disliked the expression, too, as well as most typical ideas about animals. People thought cats couldn’t, for instance, speak in sentences, write a novel or cure a disease. They just didn’t want to, that was the truth. Cray sensed her distraction and waited until Doodles’ drifting eyes settled on him again.

            “I simply played docile and dumb,” he said, “to get from the shelter to here, to her house.”

            He pointed at the bedroom door, under which pot smoke and equally noxious news headlines seeped. “Here’s where they’ll be arriving.”

            “Who?”

            Cray began to answer with impatience. Then he remembered not everyone knew as much as he—no one did!—and softened his tone.

            “The ship from the planet of cats,” he said, “will be landing here.”

            “There’s a planet of cats?”

            Doodles had just blurted it out.

            “Yes.” Cray’s restraint grew more tortured. “Felinear, it’s called. I was born there but landed here in an aborted mission. Now they’re coming to rescue me. The landing site is Lady’s backyard.”

            “What? Here? Why here?”

            Cray’s eyelids sank then slowly rose, as if he were absorbing forbearance like Visine.

            “I said I was from Felinear. I didn’t say I ran it.”

            Doodles had to admit this was true.

            Then Cray explained the process as he anticipated it: blasts and lights when the ship landed, a scramble aboard, a takeoff back to the stars.

            “I hadn’t anticipated having company…” Cray’s tipped head indicated Doodles, the intruder. “But it changes nothing. I’m not getting adopted. I’m going on that ship. If you want to come with, come with. But I’m doing it, whether you like it or not.”

            Now, amid the blasts and lights, Doodles saw and heard two things. Cray began to paw at the window, which was weak, old-school glass and all that stood between them and the backyard. And behind her, through a gap in the shabby, pilled drapes, Lady awakened with a gasp and gurgle from the couch, knocking over a bottle and a bong.

            “Watch it, for fuck’s sake,” someone else said.

            Doodles squinted through the slit. A man was standing near recumbent Lady, hoisting his droopy jeans and belting them to the farthest loop. He flinched as, for a second, the latest and loudest bang brightened the living room.

            “What’s that,” the man said, “a world war?”

            “No, stupid,” Lady said. “It must be a holiday.”

            “Today? I’m not stupid. You’re stupid.”

            “Stupid enough to sleep with you, that’s for sure.”

            “You were yodeling a different tune last night, girly.”

            “Go to hell.”

            Doodles hadn’t wished to stay an additional evening in this environment; she should have begged to be adopted. Yet, earlier, responding to Cray…

“I’ll come with,” she’d told him.

Why had she believed him? Because his description of his homeland was so appealing? A planet that was an enormous park with plush green grass in which to nap, play and evacuate? Stocked with an endless supply of rodents, fish, and insects to chase, torture, and kill? Twenty four-hour sun to sleep beneath? Nobody neutered, promiscuity permitted, no limit to the litters one produced?  Or had Doodles just been—as she was so often—too afraid to say no?

            Because she’d agreed not only to go with Cray when his “ride” arrived but to prevent their going anywhere else. They had hoped Lady—never energetic, always aimless—might abandon the adoption process after the first fiasco. When that didn’t happen (“Maybe she forgot,” Cray said, and Doodles thought it possible), the two came up with a plan. There’d be no improvising, no leaving anything to chance. The stakes were too high.

             “Okay?” Cray asked.

            “Okay,” Doodles answered.

            The next applicants—“victims,” Cray called them—were two college girls, moving into an apartment off campus in the local town. Cloyingly, they cooed over the cats (“So cute!” “I like the blonde one—she has a little bang!” “He’s named Cray, like crazy—that’s hilarious!”)

            While Doodles was tempted to delight them with her bag of tricks—purring, sidling, getting “scritched” (and not being pounded, since both were female), she had pledged to stick to the script. Cray had already started doing it, anyway.

            “Oh, no!” one girl cried.

            How he did it on command, Doodles couldn’t figure. Cray vomited with projectile power (he’d barely finished his breakfast) and then committed an unspeakable act of diarrhea, after which he “scooted” unself-consciously, rubbing his beleaguered buttocks on the carpet before exiting stage left, into the bedroom.

            This had been his idea for an action, and Doodles had doubted he could perform it at will. Yet he had. And the students played their parts as Cray predicted: stunned into silence, they fled.

            “A good magician never reveals his secrets,” Cray said afterwards when Doodles inquired about his methods. She thought he might have excelled in The Circuitous himself, though his talent would have emptied not filled auditoriums.

            “Sorry I didn’t join in,” she said.

            Doodles had been expected to bring up the rear, as it were. She hadn’t decided to abstain; it just happened that way.

            “You made the right call,” Cray said. “It would have been overkill. One should always know when to get off.”

            While Cray replenished himself at his bowl, Doodles watched Lady clean the carpet in shaky silence, sniffing back what she suspected were tears. She turned away from the unsettling sight.

            The next adoption hopeful was a quiet man in middle-age, a clerical collar visible beneath a scarf protecting him from the damp of Lady’s home.

            “I wouldn’t want to separate a pair,” he answered when asked if two cats were too many. “Especially if they love each other.”

            Opportunistically, Lady didn’t answer. When Doodles and Cray entered, however, doubts may have arisen in the man’s mind. The cats stayed apart and, when one got too close, the other hissed him/her away.

            Things degenerated from there.

            Cray struck the first blow, with a belt to the face of Doodles, which snapped her to the side and nearly brought her to her knees. Having agreed to and been braced for a fake fight—and feeling real pain— she helplessly howled. Acting from pure instinct, she sank her teeth into Cray’s scruff and started to shake him to death. Lady began shouting as the priest backed into a table, sending several wine glasses shattering on the still-stained carpet.

            Rattled by her force, Cray freed himself from Doodles’ grip. Each chased the other into the bedroom, skidding at separate times into the wall in the hall on the way. This obscured the sound of the priest running and the front door slamming.

            “Great job,” Cray said, a little blood on his bib. “You really went for it. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

            “But…” Secretly, Doodles felt both sheepish and proud, as surprised by herself as Cray. “I thought you said no improvising?”

            Cray shrugged. “I wanted to light a fire under you.”

            “Well, mission accomplished!”

            She meant this in more ways than one, for yet another adoption had been foiled. And still more would soon be stopped, as the two slept, hid, and even mimed mating (cleared by Cray, with Doodles’ consent) to scotch the process.

            The feeling of being partners with him pleased Doodles, she couldn’t help it. Cray also seemed to approve: one day, he rubbed against Doodles and lingered, in a way that suggested more than gratitude. Then he licked the top of her head not just to clean it, Doodles thought, for today she had no jelly there. In any case, the sensation wasn’t unpleasant.

            Lady ceased setting up the meetings. Her despondency increased: alone, she sat and cried more often. She blamed herself for the failure of fostering in embittered mumbles between imbibings. Her interactions with Doodles and Cray became limited to leaving out their food (which to her credit, she never forgot to do) and emptying their tray, the contents of which she had formerly tipped into trash bags left for collection and which she now just flung out the back door onto her increasingly untended lawn. Cray was satisfied with this turn of events but—if she were being honest, which given his mercuriality, she wasn’t always with Cray—Doodles was troubled. Then, at last…

            “It’s showtime,” Cray said.

Noise and flares had begun outside, unhinging the house. That Lady was with a strange man at the time seemed one step forward and one back for her, Doodles thought. In any case, the visitor was gone before the Felinear ship’s landing was complete.

“Happy ‘holiday’!” the man said.

Maybe he had been as disturbed by the cacophony as Lady’s company and the now undeniable din of Cray’s attempt to escape both the house and Earth. His scraping more frenzied, Cray was maniacally bent on breaking through the window. He caused a crash and a crack big enough for a cat.  Then Cray was gone, too, as was Lady, if only into her bedroom to hide, collapse or both.

“Come with!” Cray cried, his voice disappearing.

The jagged spikes left in the window dramatically framed the final, fading blasts and flickers of light. Soon the sky grew entirely black and the street silent, as if no stars or neighbors were left alive. More sparkles were inside than out, as shards strewn in the carpet caught and reflected a car’s passing brights.

A cold breeze fluttered the drapes, as Doodles turned and fought to be free of them. Why hadn’t she followed him? Why had she stayed put? Had she been once more—and most consequentially—afraid? Doodles had been enslaved by her anxiety, and Cray was free.

Exhausted and too upset by the insight to remain conscious of it, she lay on a chair above the sharp, treacherous shag surface of Lady’s world and fell asleep.

 

Doodles was awakened by the smell of something burning, an odor she didn’t recognize. When she opened her eyes, she saw Lady feet away, at the kitchen table. She realized the smell was coffee not burning but cooking. Doodles had never known Lady to drink it.

            Lady wore what humans called a housecoat, a shapeless garment adorned with a hideous flower pattern. Lady’s long gray hair had been washed but not dried, merely brushed back from her brow. Doodles had never seen her face uncovered by hair. The woman looked unrecognizable, younger and older, and not unattractive.

            Lady started to softly speak, as if she’d been waiting for Doodles to awaken to do so. Doodles had to strain to hear.

            “Most dogs and cats are scared of fireworks,” she said. “Creighton went nuts, ran away and hasn’t come back. But you showed common sense and stayed. You weren’t afraid. You’ve got guts, Doodles.”

            Doodles stared at her, hearing this. Her shocked expression must have been appealing, for the woman wriggled her fingers at her waist. In a second, Doodles was standing, then sitting, then encircled in her lap, a first for her with any human on Earth.

            Lady had only one drink that day. Doodles counted, for she followed her everywhere. The window would soon be repaired, but now Doodles looked out and imagined herself going forward and backing up, backing up and going forward, then flying through the hoop, the mirror, the mirror, the hoop.