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A prologue: it’s the first days of this new take on their lives and Cabanela will not, by any means, be persuaded to stay for the night. Dinner’s at their place more often than not; the back and forth of their chatter continues well into the night, turning tentatively trusting and intimate as the hours tick by, yearning glances masked by the low table lamp’s light. Yet at the end of the day, Cabanela will bow them goodnight, jump on his bike and go home, no ifs and no buts.
Sissel, watching it all go down from his vantage point on the radiator, can appreciate the unexpected penchant for constraint.
When it’s deep in the winter and a sudden thick snow fills the streets and buries his bike, Cabanela looks cornered. “I don’t want to regreeet this,” he laughs it off, or tries to.
“You are not going to look any less spotless in our eyes if we see you with bed hair just this once, I promise,” Alma says as he gets him some bed sheets, making an educated guess as to the probable cause of his reticence.
“You won’t,” whispers Jowd, making his own educated guess from his vantage point of ten years’ worth of experience, and fetches him a pillow. You won’t regret this, please kiss her, please kiss me, I know that you know that you want to, he thinks clear and bright as day, but it’s too early to say that part out loud and there is only one ghost in the room to hear it.
Neither of them is entirely wrong, but they are not right, either.
Jowd cannot sleep that night. As he walks past the living room to fetch himself some water, he is distracted by the patterns cast by the moonlight on Cabanela’s sleeping face. His skin looks like stone, cold and distant. Jowd stays his hand, repressing the need to reach out and touch him, caress the sharp lines of his cheekbones, feel that he is not some carved granite monument to the dead. He takes one step away, to let him rest, to avoid kneeling down and begging for forgiveness or doing something equally stupid, but the stupid must’ve leaked out and he steps on Sissel’s squeaky toy which lay abandoned on the floor, close to the couch. Cabanela opens an eye, raises an eyebrow, voluptuously stretches in the couch until his foot pokes out of the linen at the other end, and with that the spell is broken, he’s flesh and bones again.
No-one pays attention to Sissel’s offended stare. The cat takes great pride in his tidyness.
Time passes. Some things change. Most habits really do not. Sissel observes. He learns the A-B-C before Kamila does (Alma is a good teacher, it is good practice). The library does not notice when certain scientific tomes are picked up and left open on a table by patrons who shall forget having done any such thing, nor when a non-existent wind meticulously flips their pages.
The fact itself: “Jowd,” he calls out one day, following a vacant meow with a ghostly connection. “I have been dreaming about stars.”
For once, Jowd does not know how to answer.
Neither does Yomiel, for a time. He hugs his cat as soon as they rush to tell him, as if to protect him from something he does not understand. They are not real dreams, says Sissel, not in the way he remembers them from the days of his life. He does not sleep, of course, and thus cannot dream. Rather, some days, when he goes back to his body after a long absence, he is filled with a knowledge of stars. A longing, perhaps. Yomiel holds him closer, smoothing his fur, which is as black as the cosmos.
“I did too,” Yomiel tells them over the phone, out of the blue, days later. “I remember the stars.”
“You do?”
“I am sorry, Sissel. I never told you, and then I forgot.”
The apologetic stonewall that his voice turned into leaves little room for doubt: this happened ‘back then’, in that other past, and so much of ‘back then’ is becoming a whitewashed canvas in Yomiel’s memory. Forgetting was the only way to survive.
“Stay in the present, my friend,” purrs Sissel.
“I’ll stay where it helps you. Besides, the stars were nice.”
It started for Yomiel in the same way Sissel is experiencing it now: it must have been in the last year, or last couple of years, before his deal was meant to go through. As Yomiel came back to his body, it was as if a cosmos had built up inside it. It unfurled as a whirling flow of stars, sparkling in his eyes in combinations Yomiel had not been able to find in any atlas. There was a hole among them, or a shadow...
“Maybe I could find them,” says Sissel. "For me and for you."
“Thanks, but I’ll pass.” He stays in the present. His life is worth living.
“Siiince you didn’t ask, baby,” Cabanela tells his partner over coffee, on the following day. “The kitty-cat’s got a piece of stardust lodged in his back. You wonderin’ where this mysteeerious space vision might hail from? Do get that intuition checked...”
“You think it’s Temsik?”
“You can’t spot an open-and-shut case when you see one? Tsk tsk tsk, my daaarling.”
“Nice bluff.”
“Beg paaardon?”
“Nothing, nothing. You think I should investigate the meteor to figure out what’s wrong with Sissel?”
“O-b-v-i-o-u-s-l-y.”
“I think I’ll look into what is hiding behind the meteor, then. Thanks for the tip, partner.”
“I hate you,” Cabanela snorts as he leans against Jowd’s shoulder, shaken by a little personal laughter.
“I can see that.”
A few days later, Cabanela is, of course, over for dinner, and as he waltzes in he is bristling with a strange energy Sissel cannot decode.
“No, no, he’s right this time, it IS funny,” Alma is saying, but from Sissel’s vantage point on the radiator, it doesn’t look like the whitecoat is listening, not really.
“Et tu, baby? You married the guy, but come on… you have a sense for fashion. For looooks. There is nothing salvageable about that lump of rock in the park...”
“Indulge me. Say I’ve got a thing for big round disasters. This one,” she says, thumbing at her husband, who waves, “has been around for twenty-eight years. What do you think the timeline is on the other one?”
“Fossilized dinosaur. Died all alooone because it was too ugly.”
“Try something more recent.”
“Collective hallucination. Denounces the repulsiveness of the world, or somethin’.”
“Do make an effort, my heart.”
“A deteeective’s effort?”
“I would not settle for anything less.”
He blushes as he collects his thoughts. “Eighty years ago. That’s the boring spot in this country's history, everybody knows that. A sore like that has got to come from there.” There is an emotion there, thinks Sissel, and that emotion may well be ‘lying through his teeth’, but who knows why, and covering for what. The inspector continues to be an amusing actor to follow. Never a dull moment with that one.
Jowd laughs. Promising a detective’s effort and getting it wrong is a big fat stain on that coat and they’re not gonna let him live it down for a long, long time, which may account for the blushing.
The correct answer, it turns out, was also twenty-eight. City records incontrovertibly state that the unsightly lump of rock appeared from thin air one day, perfectly smooth, pedestal and all – only the fountain is more recent. The municipality declared it an unauthorized act of vandalism and scheduled its removal, but that decision was met with a fierce opposition by park regulars and general busibodies alike, and since the citizens appeared to appreciate the addition to the park’s skyline, the mayor was quick to backtrack. Instead, local artists were asked to make a bid to give it a fresh coat of paint. Somehow “beaver pinecone from the seventeenth hell” won over a slew of floral patterns, abstract shapes, still lifes and gradients, and thus Mino the park mascot was born. And with or without Cabanela’s approval and/or patronage, the big fella’s merchandise has been going strong for a few decades now. The old mayor is still proud of how that whole situation shook out.
“That’s lovely, baby.”
“Isn’t it just!”
“And remind me agaaain, how does it help explain Sissel’s little cosmic thing?”
“It doesn’t!” Jowd laughs again. “Not at all! You may have been right!”
Cabanela grins and lets it linger. Smug looks good on him.
Other facts pertaining to a core truth: on that same night, Sissel figures that Cabanela’s strange tension could be relieved by some purring. He walks onto his lap, with the regal aplomb that comes with being the only pet ever allowed to step on the coat, curls up and gets to business. It works, for a while. Then the talks across the couch get schmaltzy and a little prurient, entirely too much for a thirteen-years-old ghost cat to endure, and so he hops outside to play with the falling snow, leaving his body behind as some indirect form of complaint. When he comes back, he finds Jowd and Alma already in bed, Cabanela and his bike long gone, and his body on the couch right next to where he left it. Hopping back inside, Sissel is struck by the dark awe of space. Stars, so many stars bursting in front of his eyes, and the longing is sweet and the emptiness comforting, and there is a dark spot floating away in that infinite embrace…
It is only years later that a case brings Jowd to interview the self-appointed park guardian. “I can feel the cosmos” is not what te detective needed to hear, and it is quickly discarded. It’s not relevant to the case, anyway.
The movie on the TV shows an army of domed spinning discs fill the sky. Their pilots, strange long-limbed creatures in white ceramic suits, are leading an invasion of Earth. It’s bad, even Sissel can see it: the budget is low to the point that one would expect to see the hands of the children playing pretend with their toys, and frankly, if he manipulated one of the leads he’d be capable of more convincing acting himself. This much he understands. But Alma and Cabanela, wrapped in a tangle of limbs, are laughing like it’s the funniest thing in the world, barely managing to point a finger at the TV screen before collapsing into yet another fit of giggles.
“One day you’ll understand,” says Jowd as he notices his cat’s bewilderment, with the same exact tone of voice he used to tell Kamila “it’s a grownups thing”. He must find the situation pretty funny, too, because there is a telltale quiver in his beard. Sissel curls up on his shoulder and pokes at it until Jowd erupts in a big laughter. One day he’ll figure it out. He’s got all the time in the world.
Time, as it is wont to do, continues to pass. The stars furling in Sissel’s body turn from a mystery to a familiar comfort. Some things just cannot be explained; chiefly among them, not only the galaxies inside him but the lone dark spot among them, a perfect oval cutout standing out against the distant lights. It’s a part of life, and a welcome one. Still, years spent among detectives gave him certain predispositions, a few curated habits. In time, he keeps track of variations in the intensity of these visions, taking note of time, position, proximity to other people. He never finds out where those stars lie in the sky, but he forms a map of coincidences back here on Earth, in increasingly detailed brushstrokes.
Sissel observes. He lets things happen. Maybe he plays. Maybe they are both playing, he and that one mobile dot on his map. It’s more fun this way.
Curtain call: it can wait until later, much later, when the beautiful patterns traced by the people in Sissel’s life have spread and grown to the point that he is living in five houses and no-one will notice if he goes missing from all of them at once to go check something out for a few nights in a row.
His stakeout at the park is over rather quickly. Maybe their minds think alike, maybe they always have. Maybe he was drawn to keeping watch over this place right now because the stars have been brighter these nights, and closer, and that lone spot in his visions is coming into focus at last, with round, empty eyes…
Whatever the reason, the wait is over. Sissel hears the newcomer approach and gets ready to pounce from his hiding place in the bushes near the fountain. The figure comes into sight.
Cabanela has not aged a day. He struts into the fountain clearing with the same old panache, whistling a little tune. His coat has changed to reflect the fashion of the new century, but white it remains, and spotless, spruced up by a dash of red.
“Hey, baby,” he greets the bush Sissel is hiding in. “Long time no see.”
“I knew my favorite whitecoat was back in town,” Sissel greets him back, walking out into the streetlamps’ light. “The stars were brighter.”
“Smooooth, kitten.”
“Smooth like Mino’s surface, which does not get warm even under the brightest rays of the sun?” Sissel stares at him with unblinking yellow eyes. Cabanela stares back, dark and unreadable. Sissel meows. “Why are you here now? What were you waiting for?”
“For you to figure it out.”
“I have known for years.” Everyone knows it within five minutes of interacting with him, Sissel thinks, it’s just impolite to say it out loud. Or it’s impolite for some part of their brain to say it out loud to the rest of them so they know, but don’t really notice.
“Then we were both havin’ fun. Wanna have some mooore?”
“To those stars? In a football-shaped ship that will look like a hole cut against the galaxy?”
Sissel hops on the fountain, then on a pillar and finally lands atop the ominous lump of cold, polished stone. It is not inert. Something is changing, something is whirring in its depths, coming alive. Down on the ground, Cabanela sheds a pretense of humanity. His skin is stone under the park’s lights, the same shade of gray as the spaceship he once reached this planet in. His smile does not change.
“Why do I feel homesick too?” asks Sissel.
“Hate to admit it, my frieeend – I’m not sure. The meteor, it followed… the ship’s propulsion does a trick with gravity, it must’ve been pulled in. But how a pebble may be feelin’ the blues… that’s for you to find out.”
The cat’s ears twitch. It’s a lot to take in. “I have to know,” he asks instead: “did you ever tell them where you come from?”
He laughs. “Kitten, no. It would’ve been an embarrassment for them. They found out on their own. Or where’s the fun in aaanything?”
“Fair.” He considers the present situation and the strange indirect chase that led to it. “It is fun. They of all people would have found it fun too.”
Cabanela leaps up, in a single graceful arc, to reach him above the ship. Some trick with gravity, alright. The man – the alien – fiddles with invisible buttons until a small door opens with a low whistle. The door to a new life, to discoveries beyond imagination. Sissel meows, torn between two worlds.
“Oh, baby...” Cabanela squats down to give him a scritch between the ears. Sissel can’t feel it, of course, but they both know that it’s the thought that counts. “The engines are cold, it’ll take a mooonth. Tell you what, I’ve been away long enough. I’ll come say goodbye to dear old Kamila too. What saaay you? Deal sweet enough now?”
Sissel meows again, sweeter now, with a hint of anticipation. He hops on Cabanela’s shoulder and his old friend rises again, and so they remain for a while, standing out against the moon, the soft purring of machinery underneath them mixing with that of a cat who will see the stars.