The Bobcat

by Katherine Forbes Riley

  They’d been discussing omniscience, that all-knowing point of view from which so many traditional stories were told, and just before she let them go Professor Prince had asked Laurelie if she had anything to add. Laurelie had said only that she found it a particularly difficult point of view, because the space of all-knowingness was infinite while that of the page was so limited. She’d thought it was a rather obvious thing to say, but apparently Scottie thought otherwise. Stopping in front of her desk, he said loudly, “Frankly Laurelie, I don’t see how the size of the page is relevant at all.”

  If he hadn’t stuffed his hands in his pockets, she probably would have ignored him. But something about the way he did it made it seem like he didn’t mean to be belligerent, that he honestly did want to know.

  So she told him she had simply meant that when you left things out, all the negative space of what you didn’t choose to show was as meaningful to the viewer as what you did show. And so it seemed impossible for what was on the page to represent omniscience without it coming across as ignorant or biased and offending some people—

  Scottie howled then, literally threw back his head and extended the long vowel of his negation. The last student in the room jumped liked he’d been goosed and scurried out the door.

  “Art,” Scottie said urgently, “isn’t about perfection. It only has to be interesting. Mm,” he nodded, apparently liking the sound of this, “and anyway isn’t the space of any point of view infinite? Take mine, for example. You have no idea what I’ll do next.”

  He grinned then, and his expression was so mischievous that Laurelie couldn’t help but smile back. “Sure,” she said, “but most of it wouldn’t be art.”

  Now he laughed, and bouncing on the balls of his feet, told her he knew a guy in the film department whom he thought she might like. He was going to meet him for a drink in a few minutes, he said, and she should come along if she liked.

  She could feel herself trembling as they entered the pub, and found she couldn’t look directly at the bar, but rather had to confront it through mirror behind it, half-fearing and half-hoping to see the hiker’s body coiled somewhere.

  But the stools were all bare, and so were the tables, including the one against the back wall behind the little stage where the door onto the alley opened. Neither was the little pub dim and crowded, as it had been the last time she was there. On this chilly late November day it was bright with afternoon light and completely deserted. There wasn’t even a waitress at that hour, Scottie told her as they crossed the floor; they had to go and order their drinks at the bar. They headed then for a booth against the windows where a tall, bearded man sat alone. Soft rock was being piped through speakers mounted in the corners of the room, and Scottie was humming along and gripping the straps of his shoulder bag so tightly that she suspected with surprise he was nervous too.

  Two drinks later she thought she understood. Scottie had feelings for Will. And while Will himself was largely inscrutable, she suspected those feelings were reciprocated. Will was in AA, and so none of them were drinking alcohol, but rather mugs of hot cider, which were fragrant and soothing. Sitting there, two hours flew by, full of an animated conversation in which they all shared their opinions about the responsibility of contemporary art, but threaded through as well with a second conversation, a cautious and unspoken one going on between the two men, and to which she was only a spectator.

  The following Friday afternoon Scottie invited her to come to the pub with them again. This time another grad student joined them as well, a friend of Will’s from the philosophy department, with whom she suspected them, as the afternoon progressed, of trying to set her up. But if they were, it was such a lighthearted attempt that she didn’t really mind, and neither did they seem to when she ignored it.

  The next week another grad student showed up, and more came in the weeks after that. By January they were pushing tables together and calling it their Friday faculty meetings—only half-joking since all of them were shouldering significant teaching responsibilities so that their advisors could spend their time less tediously engaged. Settling in, they would complain of the piles of tests and papers they had to grade, and the undergrads who, despite the great show the professor put on in class, soon figured out the difference between taskmaster and decision maker, and then came to them arguing for better grades. Laurelie and Scottie would cast each other guilty looks, for their complaints seemed weaker by comparison, their labor consisting largely of monitoring studio classes and helping the students with their art one on one. Indeed Laurelie mostly enjoyed it; each student was like a puzzle, finding the right artists to show, the right words to deconstruct their art and make it open up, so the student would see it working just like his or her own.

  The conversations didn’t linger long on onerous topics, but seemed to touch on everything else, lasting late into the night until the little pub was bursting and the bartender was shouting, “Last call!”

  Left to her own devices, Laurelie would have shied away from belonging to this or any group, and perhaps Scottie understood this, for he always came to fetch her at the end of class on Fridays. And always afterward, she was glad to have gone, for the intellectual connections forged there were always so cerebral and intense. Probably there were corporal connections being forged as well, but for Laurelie this was purely a gathering of minds seeking to discharge the subjectivity they’d been accumulating all week. Their areas of expertise spanned so many fields of humanities and science, and visually it was a motley crew as well, some people armored in collars and ties while others swaggered around in leather. And they spoke such different technical languages; probably the most interesting part was watching them try to make themselves understood. In the process a subject would be stripped and redressed again in a way that bore little resemblance to the original, so that even topics upon which she couldn’t dwell alone, like love or sex or sickness or death, yielded no painful effects. She imagined those meetings as outside the realm of reality, as if they weren’t really humans assembled there but rather their ideal projections outside themselves, observing their bodies’ own natural patterns and rhythms.

  In real life, however, she was still subject to random possessions. There was no predicting it; she might be drawing or doing some small task about the cottage or kicking her way through piles of snow with Rowan and Dark, when for the space of a heartbeat it was his limbs she moved, his thoughts forming in her head, his eyes through which she suddenly saw the world. And yet as painful as this experience was, as soon it was over she’d long for it back, struggle to return to it as if to a dream and then, still full of the suffering that follows failure, grow desperate with a need to finally exorcise him.

  20

  A handful of dry brown leaves skittered at the bottom of the library stairs, hunched there against the wind. Snow had just started to fall, hours earlier than predicted, a curtain of crystals as tiny as pinheads and so dense it looked like fog. The only reason she’d come to campus at all was because the plows were so lazy on weekends. If she were going to be holed up in her cottage for the next two days, she wanted to spend them with Mondrian, for the man was a genius with visual rhythms. She’d been sketching the Friday pub meetings lately, and wanted to try taking a non-figurative approach, capturing instead of the physical interactions themselves, those of the energy of the conflict and epiphany that she perceived to be underlying them.

  But now leaving the library with her backpack full of art books, she was thinking only about the long walk home. Already the sidewalks were coated in white and the roads would have been treacherous on her bike. In her hurry she brushed the arm of a person coming up the stairs, and his own books tumbled down them.

  One landed at her feet and with a murmured apology she bent and collected it. Rising again she took him in, crouching opposite her to gather the rest. For a moment she studied him, his furry head, his pale hands like paws, and the overall softness to him—all details that were familiar to her, and yet
once again new.

  Looking up then, his eyes widened, and his lips parted in surprise. Close-cropped hairs edged the thin lips like shards of gold, each one reflecting back at her the snow-light as he said, “Laurelie! I haven’t seen you around since our philosophy class. I thought you’d graduated, actually.”

  She nodded. “I did. I’m in the MFA program now.”

  She brushed off the fresh dusting of snow that had accumulated on his book in the few minutes she’d had it in her hands and held it out to him. It was red-bound and gold-lettered with a plain dark cover. Constructing Torts, it said.

  “Thanks. It’s not a cookbook, you know,” he said, and she watched a slow blush creep around his grin. “I’m doing my honor’s thesis on the influence of linguistics on law.”

  The linguistic major switched to beer after one mug of cider, but she stayed with the warm fragrant drink, sipping it slowly and looking out the window as she listened to him pointing out linguistic loopholes in the Constitution. The light was fading now, and the snow was coming down fast. She imagined it was laying a great bandage upon the earth, under which it would become whole again, and new. A fire burned merrily in the fireplace, and she imagined Kvothe the wizard and Roland the gunslinger sitting before it with their heads together. One broken, Kvothe murmured, and the other sick, so how could either heal? See how this one leans in, Roland agreed, how he pitches his voice so earnest and low. He wants to make her new.

  On the stage behind them, someone fingered a bass. A drum kicked, a flute rippled, and a fiddle trotted after it. Their tight, high-energy music spread through her and she closed her eyes, feeling the rhythm change and change and change again.

  Jason had fallen silent. Opening her eyes, she found him holding his mouth like there was something in it and looking down at his bottle, turning it in his soft pale hands. Seeing the glass’s slow revolution and the firelight reflected there, she wondered how gentle they would be.

  21

  Laurelie reached up without looking away from her panels and grabbed the close-knit cardigan that had lived all winter on the arm of her couch. She stuffed her arms into its sleeves and returned to her work, but a few minutes later put down her colored pencils again and sighed. The extra sweater made five layers on her torso, and not only was she still cold, but her arm movement was now significantly compromised. For a moment a strong sensory memory of fur sliding over bare skin flooded her mind, before she pushed it away again.

  She could have moved up to the couch from the floor. There was so little insulation in the cottage’s walls that it was four degrees warmer up there; she’d actually measured the difference one day with a meat thermometer. But apart from the cold she had a perfect nest of pillows down on the floor, surrounded by her cats and her best heavy weight paper. She’d been down there ever since the snow started, the whole day slipping by while she worked.

  Even after a few dozen snowstorms in this house, still the quiet surprised her. Storm was far too fierce a word, she thought, for what was going on out there. Beyond her picture window the world was white and round and still, nothing moving except the steadily falling snow. The flakes were fat and slow now though, which meant the storm would be ending soon. One would never know it but today was actually the first day of spring. There’d been hints of it in recent days, flashes of birdsong she wasn’t sure she’d heard, a faint rotting smell she wasn’t sure she’d smelled as the old snow crept back into the shadows, and yesterday the roads had been clear enough to bike to campus. Coming home again she’d noticed the river ice was turning yellow from the heating tannins in the water below.

  But overnight winter had come roaring back. Rowan and Dark, at least, would be elated. Tomorrow she’d take them to scale the mountains left behind by the plows and skate the driveways where puddles had refrozen. Rowan would tell a tale as they went, of tracking monsters and giants by their footprints in the snow. He talked constantly now, a stream of consciousness that ran so fast sometimes all she could make out were the conjunctions, an den, an den. But still she grasped the images he painted, as if when something came from that deep inside an imagination, it didn’t matter on what vehicle it was conveyed.

  Looking down at her panels, she wondered if the same could be said about them. She was working on a new series, one that scared her a little, and sometimes a lot, for it involved completely regular people doing completely regular things, and moreover not at all painfully. She was using techniques derived from Vermeer and Morandi, who had also painted the things one saw every day, but so luminously as to capture something deeply essential, something magical about them. The panels before her now showed a student simply walking down an empty hallway. The person was slender and nondescript, wearing khaki slacks and a pale blue oxford and brown shoes, carrying a musical instrument in a small black case. Smooth brown hair lay close against the scalp and the face and eyes were bare of expression, as if lost in thought. The thought bubbles rising from the chest and head contained only notes of music. She was trying, as the panels focused in, to use light and shape to make the face grow more rapturous, and at the same time make the music in the thought bubbles more complex, building in the penultimate panel to a feeling she wanted to seem almost like desire as the face filled it completely, all skin and eyes and lips. Then in the final panel the form was shown from behind, again genderless and nondescript, but for a sleek brown ponytail that swayed long and sinuously to the waist.

  But it was so hard to make something feel magical without the props of fantasy, and moreover her fingers had stiffened now from the cold. She decided to warm them around a cup of hot chocolate. Maybe she’d even light a fire. Will was usually the fire builder, but it would be another hour before he and Scottie arrived, if they even made it at all in this weather. Though they’d never missed a Saturday yet, always showing up at sunset with takeout and a movie and then hanging out in her living room feeding the fire and talking until long after midnight. Scottie called it camping.

  She smiled. A fire would be perfect. But seeing the basket beside her fireplace empty gave her pause. If she wanted a fire, she was going to have to go for logs. She decided it was worth it. After putting on her snow boots, parka, hat and gloves, she pulled open the front door only to find a waist-high snow drift blocking her way. She clambered around it, sinking deep enough even at the sides that snow went down her boots, and imagined winter chuckling gleefully. Now she headed for the porch stairs, proceeding down them much more cautiously, for a foot of fresh snow lay upon them and she knew from past experience that black ice might be hiding underneath. However, the late season snow was heavy and sticky, and this gave her traction as she descended. It also made traversing the leaden drifts hard work and she soon grew hot, plunging her way around the house to the eaves at the back.

  Finally, the woodpile. One column remained, stacked high and tight; the rest Will had been steadily gnawing away at all winter. She studied the column while she caught her breath, and soon discerned a pattern. It was planned well, shards and broken pieces tucked in so that both logs and kindling could be gathered in a single armful. Clutching one, she started back. The going was easier now, following her own footsteps. In the quiet she heard nothing but the crunch of her own boots and the beat of her own heart, perceiving the great and singular whiteness like a presence, or rather an absence, a void. Nothing else was alive on the surface, but many were lying in cold torpor beneath it, waiting for the sun to awaken them. But already the pale light was retreating, and the touch of the wind promised another cold night.

  Inside her cottage she clumped directly to the fireplace and dumped her load in the basket. Her cats woke then and grew playful, stalking the white geometric tracks she’d left across the floor while she built her fire. She took her time with it, weaving a large loose bed of paper twists and kindling and then erecting above it a magnificent teepee of logs. The result so pleased her that she lingered a little while after lighting it, watching the flames consume the paper and lick up the sides o
f the wood.

  In the kitchen she filled a pan with milk and added half a bar of chocolate. She stirred until it began to steam and then, smelling smoke, remembered her fire and headed back to the living room to check on it.

  Halfway there she halted in shock. Fat white ribbons spiraled lazily out of the fireplace, slowly diffusing into a room already hung with clouds of smoke. Running to the front door she threw it wide, and then ran back to the kitchen and opened the window there too. Tugging at drawers, she looked for something she could use to push up the flue, for she’d been so focused on making her fire that she’d forgotten to open it.

  Grabbing a wooden spoon and dishtowel, she hurried back toward the living room. But hardly had she stepped into the front hall when she heard footsteps on the porch. Moments later two forms burst in. Both black, the first one was so large it took the snowdrift without losing a step. The other one sailed like a shadow right over it. And then, still trailing swirls of white, both of them disappeared into the smoke seeping from her living room.

  She followed them, uncertain what she’d seen, half-believing that in her alarm she’d imagined it. Then upon entering the smoke she forgot everything else, for her eyes began to sting and her lungs burned and she began to cough forcefully, unable to take a single clean breath. She covered her nose and mouth with the dishtowel and breathed shallowly through it, but it hardly helped. Unable to see and blinded by tears, she simply continued on until she felt heat, and then suddenly the fireplace was before her, still seething angry fat billows of white, and a man was crouched on the hearth before it.

  For it was a man. The treads of his black boots were still clotted with snow. His face was tucked deep into the collar of his black coat, and his black watch cap was pulled down low. Behind him paced a black dog, whining and pawing at his legs. Already the man was reaching into the fire. For a long moment his arm hung there while snakes of flame writhed hungrily beneath it and tried to reach it by scaling the tepee of logs. Then finally there came a squeaky creak, and the arm was snatched out again.