cat week

by David Hinson

The room was spare and plain. Fluorescent lighting shone on blank walls that were not eggshell or icy mist or wedding veil but simply white. The hard carpet was patternless and gray. Eighteen workers, six to a table in three evenly spaced rows, sat behind identical computers, all facing a man on a stool.

It was nine in the morning on a midwinter Monday, and no one in this room would see the sun again until tomorrow. Within the past hour, each of the nineteen had parked in their assigned spot, surrendered their bags and electronics, gone through security, and taken the elevator to the twelfth floor.

Thomas sat at the computer at one end of the front row. Weeks ago, he’d sat behind a different computer in a different building, bored. He was not quite ready to change things so dramatically as to not spend his weekdays in an office, but he wanted to try a different one. At his old job, the money had been fine, there had been room to be promoted, and he had liked his colleagues, but he wanted to work way fewer hours so he could cultivate interests outside of work. His twins were driving now and were pulling away physically and emotionally. His wife, though not new to driving, was doing the same. Thomas felt like time was speeding up and that his planned retirement, still years out, would be on him soon. If he wasn’t careful, he feared he would walk out of an office for the last time and into an empty life he would hate.

So now he was here, working a job that promised fewer hours. It was his first day. Which was probably why everyone else initially looked at him when they heard the first meow.

All the typing and clicking stopped. Thomas looked at the man on the stool, Arthur, who had given him his orientation guide. Arthur looked at the back of the room. And then so did everyone else.

Nothing had changed back there. The white door they’d come through was closed. The other white door was also closed.

Someone began typing and clicking again. Others joined. Thomas went back to reading his orientation guide.

Then they heard the second meow.

It had been three years since the last time an office had reported an unexplained cat. The first one appeared at an insurance company in Florida. The next week, a bank in Pennsylvania. The week after that, a municipal building in Arizona. And then it didn’t happen again for six months. That first round went largely unnoticed outside the workplaces where they occurred.

The next cat, though, appeared in the front offices of the defending Super Bowl champions. It received wide attention, but hardly anyone took the incident seriously. They treated the cat with levity, as part of the team narrative. One year after going undefeated on the way to their title, the team had lost two quarterbacks to injury, lost the head coach to a gambling scandal, and lost their playoff chances by the middle of the regular season. When a black cat emerged from a cabinet, and the team turned things around the very next game with a blowout victory, the story wrote itself.

Cats appeared again the following year, in a newsroom in South Dakota, a design studio in California, a public relations firm in Texas, and a commercial real estate company in Mississippi.

And then it didn’t happen again that year or the next year, and maybe it never would again.

But what was going on in the spare and plain room on Thomas’s first day?

Arthur slid off the stool, walked to the back of the room, and opened the white door that didn’t lead to the hallway. And out trotted a black and gray striped cat. It stopped at Arthur’s feet and batted his shoelaces. Arthur knelt down to stroke it. “He-llooo,” he crooned in a voice none of the others had ever heard from someone with a linebacker’s build. “Who are yoouu?”

The cat didn’t reply. But someone laughed, and Arthur appeared to get self-conscious. He stood up immediately and pulled the door open wider to look inside. Others behind him craned their necks to look, too. Nobody had opened that door before. Apparently, it was a server closet.

The cat roamed.

“I’m allergic to cats,” someone said.

Arthur emerged from the closet. “Thomas?”

“Sir?”

“Please take the cat into the hallway. I’ll radio someone to take it away.”

The cat came over to Thomas as though it understood. Thomas scooped it up and carried it out. Arthur closed the door behind them. The cat squirmed, and Thomas set it down. “Don’t go far,” he said.

The cat stayed where it was but paid little attention to Thomas, scratching the carpet instead. Thomas crossed his arms and waited. The hallway was no more visually appealing than the office.

Eventually, a woman approached. Thomas assumed she was here to take the cat away, but her job was to patrol the hallways. “Why do you have a cat?” she asked.

“It was in our server closet.”

“So, you’re just going to stand here and babysit?”

“Someone’s supposed to come by.”

The woman made no effort to engage the cat. “Who are you? I haven’t seen you before.”

“Thomas,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s my first day.”

The cat meowed and started walking away.

“You should get your cat,” the woman said, and she continued down the hallway.

The cat stopped at another door and tried to reach beneath it.

“You Thomas?” a man asked as he approached. “I’m Luther. You have a cat for me?”

The cat offered no resistance to being picked up and taken away.

Thomas returned to his seat.

“All set?” Arthur asked.

“All set.”

Based on how it had happened elsewhere—one day, one cat—they assumed it was over.

But there was another meow on Tuesday.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The voice was angrier than Thomas would have expected.

“You’ll be fine, John,” Arthur said, making his way to the back of the room.

“I told you I’m allergic.”

Arthur opened the server closet door and out trotted a white cat. “Thomas?”

“Sir?”

“Please take the cat into the hallway.”

Twice, the cat meowed as Thomas tried to set it down. It wanted to be held.

“Another one?” The woman was back.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I didn’t get your name yesterday.”

“Catherine.”

“You go by Cat?” Thomas asked, gesturing down with his chin.

“I don’t,” Catherine said with no hint of humor.

It occurred to Thomas that he hadn’t seen anyone smile here yet. It made him miss his old colleagues. He wondered if he’d made a mistake coming here.

Luther arrived, and Catherine walked away. When Thomas handed over the cat, he felt like he should say something. But he didn’t feel like he needed to apologize, and he was no longer confident that a joke would be received well. So he said nothing. In Luther’s arms, the cat meowed all the way down the hall.

Wednesday.

Meow!

“Again?”

“John, calm down.”

“You’re doing this, aren’t you?”

Thomas didn’t realize John was talking to him at first. He was close to being done with the orientation guide and wasn’t fully listening.

“I’m talking to you. This didn’t happen until you got here!”

“That’s enough, John. Sit down.”

Thomas, angry, beat Arthur to the back of the room and opened the server closet door himself. Out trotted a black cat. Thomas picked it up and walked toward John’s seat. “Hallway,” Arthur said before Thomas could get there.

The wait was longer than usual. Thomas was bitter that Arthur had stopped him from confronting John, even though it was obviously childish to soothe his ego at the expense of someone else’s health. He wondered again whether he had made a mistake coming here.

Catherine finally came by. She had the black cat in her arms. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching him?”

Thomas had been so inside his head, he hadn’t seen the cat wander off. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Well, hold on to him.”

“Do you know where Luther is?”

“No,” Catherine said, and she walked away.

The cat tried to wriggle free, and Thomas relented. “Stay close.”

The cat slowly moved away but came back when Luther approached. “They sent people to look at that closet last night,” he said. He knelt down. “Where are you coming from?”

The cat meowed.

“Well, we’re taking you to a shelter like we did with your friends.”

The cat nestled itself against Luther’s leg and purred.          

Word hadn’t gotten out. It wasn’t as though they were security-clearance-holding contractors for an intelligence agency who had signed nondisclosure agreements. But there was an unwritten rule that nothing that originated inside was allowed out—except cats, apparently.

“They transferred John to another department,” Thomas’s desk neighbor, Izzy, told him when he sat down Thursday.

So no one said anything when the meow came from the closet.

Catherine and Luther arrived at the same time.

“My patrol route is different every day,” Catherine said. “I’m surprised I always see you.”

Thomas didn’t know how he should respond.

“We’ll see you tomorrow again, I guess,” Luther said, bending down to retrieve the orange cat.

Friday was the same.

Catherine said, “Have a nice weekend.”

Luther said, “I’ll see you again Monday.”

The cat was gray.

Monday was different.

The eighteen workstations and the stool were moved down to the eleventh floor. The new space was identical to the previous one. Thomas did his best to concentrate, but he thought of the cats constantly. Twice, he thought he heard something from the server closet, but no one turned around when he did. It was just a solid day of typing and clicking and eating and more typing and more clicking. But it felt incomplete without a cat, without Catherine, and without Luther. He didn’t know why he felt like this. He missed something that shouldn’t have happened, and he missed two people he’d encountered five times, said less than fifty words to, and knew nothing about. He didn’t even know whether another cat had trotted out of the closet upstairs.

Tuesday, he felt the absence more acutely.

Wednesday, he asked Izzy whether she’d heard about any more cats.

“I’d honestly forgotten about them,” she said. She’d never interacted with the cats. They’d just been minor moments in her day over one week out of the several years she’d been here.

Thursday, Thomas considered saying something to Arthur but talked himself out of it, ashamed of his sentimental attachment.

Friday, typing away, he tried to make sense of his feelings. He was new and had contributed nothing to the company, and being responsible for the cats had given him a designated purpose. Also, once he knew more people, he wouldn’t feel the loss of Catherine and Luther as much. And ultimately, this wasn’t supposed to be the interesting part of his day now anyway. He had left his old job to have more time outside of work and to make that time more interesting.

His second week ended. He exited the parking garage and pointed his car in the direction of the rest of his life and whatever he was going to make of it.

Photo of David Hinson

BIO: David Hinson lives in Washington, DC. He has previously published short stories in the Greyrock Review, Night Picnic, and Rundelania.