On the road, on my way to New York, I wrote letters so Mama and Papa wouldn’t worry about me, but phone calls became very difficult.

“Mama, please don’t cry.”

She handed the phone to Papa. “Mickey, you need to grow up and stop this crap. You need to come home and go back to school . . . or get a job. Stop this crap! It’s killing your mother.” Papa spoke in machine-gun bursts, just like all his brothers.

“Papa, I can’t do that. Where I am is not pretty but at least I can walk down the street without remembering everything Rivka and I did there.”

“Son, you’re acting like a child. You’re only thinking of yourself.”

“Look, clearly you’re not hearing me. I can’t come back. Papa, it was killing me there. Everything I saw, heard, smelled, touched, reminded me of Rivka. I just can’t do it.”

“I don’t know why you call. Every time you do it upsets your mother.”

“Yeah . . . I see what you mean . . . tell Mama I love her. I love you, Papa.” I put the receiver gently in its cradle. That was the first and last time I’d phoned home since Chicago. It was early August, 1965, six months after I’d left home.

I continued writing letters weekly. I didn’t want anyone to come find me so I took the train to Philadelphia and mailed them from there. It’s not like I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands. Sean Patrick had taken a break from his Masters program and gone to Nepal to meditate. So even if I’d wanted to talk to him I couldn’t. Sally Anne had received a Rhodes scholarship and was just starting her year at Oxford. I probably could have tracked her down but I couldn’t even face talking to her when I’d been in San Francisco for a few weeks in February and she was just across the bay at Cal. What was I going to say to her now? Al was out there somewhere. Last I heard he was heading up to Alaska to work on the pipeline. I still couldn’t bring myself to call Ava or Maria or Steve. After the last time I’d spoken to them before I left Hillsdale I’d sat for an hour on my back porch, holding Papa’s Smith and Wesson in my lap, my head in my hands, wanting to end me.

I saw her standing at the kitchen sink in my flat, her back to me. She was wearing the floral print sun dress she’d been wearing that day, the first time we’d made love. Her long, curly blonde-auburn hair was unmistakable and was floating, moving in slow motion as if from some gentle breeze. She’d just filled a glass with water from the tap and seemed to be putting it up to her lips. I was trying to get to her but the air was thick and the harder I tried, the farther away from me she got. “Rivka!” I cried out but the sound of my voice stopped at my lips. I started to weep.

“Sound doesn’t travel well in here, Misha,” an unfamiliar voice, speaking in Russian, said from behind me. I turned easily, the air gel having dissipated and on the floor, by the bathroom door, stood a large, beautiful calico cat.

“But . . . Rivka . . . she was right here.”

“I know how disappointed you must feel,” said the cat.

“How can you possibly know? You’re just a fucking cat.”

“Pooh, pooh, pooh . . . a lot you know. Cats know everything, asshole. You’ll see,” it said and trotted into the bathroom, its voice trailing off. “Don’t forget, you’re working the morning shift.”

I awoke to my alarm clock. I looked over at the kitchen counter, hoping to find Rivka but I was alone. I jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom. Still alone, but the hinged window above the bathtub was slightly ajar.

I went to eat at Mama Lu’s about once a week. I would have gone more often, but every time I went she sent me home with a basket of bread, chianti, her pasta of the day and a container of her minestrone soup. I felt guilty not going more often, but I felt funny accepting these handouts from her. I know she was just being a sweet person, trying to take care of me, but I felt guilty being taken care of, guilty for feeling gratitude, guilty for being a little bit happy when she sat at my table resting her hand on my hand, asking me how I was feeling, hugging me and kissing my forehead.

I was sitting on my bed, finishing off the last of Mama Lu’s soup and the chianti when I heard a thump coming from the bathroom. As I was going to investigate a large calico cat slowly emerged. It looked the same as the one in my dream. It paid me no heed as it strolled by me, thumping my leg with its prodigious tail. “Hello, cat. Are you in the wrong apartment?” I spoke to it in Russian. It just seemed right, it’s having spoken to me that way in the dream.

“Mraw!” It was acting like it owned the place.

“Are you friendly?” I reached down to pet it and it hissed at me and scratched me, ripping the skin from my right elbow to the first knuckle on my middle finger. Blood immediately started oozing. “Jesus Christ, fucking cat!” I wrapped a towel around my arm, putting pressure on the wound and dressed it as well as I could, wrapping my whole lower arm with gauze. “What is it with New York? I can’t seem to go anywhere, including my own flat without someone drawing blood!”

“Meow . . .” The cat was watching me dress my arm.

“I guess that will teach me. Mama and Papa always told me not to touch strange ANIMALS!” I said, directing my exclamation at the cat.

“Rrrr . . .” Indifferent.

I stood there, staring at the cat with open hostility. 

“Raaww . . .”

The cat stared back at me for a moment then made another cat sound, turned around and exited, taking its time. I walked over to the bathroom door and saw the crazy cat nimbly jump up first on the bathtub, then the window sill, then out the open window.

“Fucking cat! That’s the last time I leave that fucking window open!” 

How the cat got the window open after that I could never figure out but it came and went as it wished. It liked cockroaches, eating them. They only appeared in the early morning hours. I finally realized it was when the Mirianovs started up the ovens below. I had started calling the creature “Kot,” the Russian word for cat, usually male. Female cats were usually called “Koshka.” I thought this cat was much too ill tempered to be a female so I called it Kot. Based on my experience thus far it seemed to me to be the correct call. Life would show me, however, that my reasoning was possibly fallacious.

                                                                                                  ***

My sister, Sally Anne, four years my senior, five-foot-four, lithe with long, wavy dark red auburn hair, very much like Mama’s, sat down beside me on the sofa closest to the fireplace in our living room in Hillsdale and asked, “What’s wrong, little brother?” She looked so much like Mama at sixteen, if the old photographs of Mama at that age hadn’t obviously been old photographs you’d have thought they were pictures of Sally Anne. 

“Oh, Sal. I don’t know what to do. Rivka’s . . . I mean, for the last three years we’ve spent so much time together, ridden our bikes all over, gone to movies, gone to fight class, watched TV, played music, talked for hours on the phone, studied together, camped out in her backyard”

“She’s your best friend.,” she said, interrupting my monologue.

I looked at her and sighed. “She is. She’s my best friend. Since the first day I met her she’s been my best friend . . . and we still do stuff together, just not like before . . . and I miss her.”

“So, what is problem?” she asked, with a Russian accent.

I scoffed. “That was actually pretty good.”

“Spasiba.”

“I don’t know. She’s so, I don’t know if angry is the right word. Maybe not angry, just annoyed or irritated or . . . like she’s frustrated with me. We speak in Russian all the time. You know this, right?”

“Da.” She nodded. “Konechna! [Of course!]”

I smiled at her and chuckled, shaking my head. My sister is very funny. She gestured for me to continue. “So lately, she only speaks English with me. I talk to her in Russian. She answers me in English. We rehearse together, we play gigs and afterwards she’s just gone.” Rivka and I had been gigging together as “Rivka and Misha” since we were nine years old. She on piano, sometimes accordion, and me on violin.

“Do you think she likes, you know, some other boy, like a boyfriend?”

Alarm bells were clanging. The plane was crashing, oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling, people running and screaming in the aisles. “You think that’s it? You think she has a boyfriend? Oh, God!”

“Hey, hey . . . I don’t know. It’s probably not that. I think you’d know if she was hanging out with some other boy. I mean, it’s hard to hide that kind of thing in school. Maybe you should talk to her about it?”

“That sounds scary. Wh-what if she does like a boy, not me? I don’t know what I would do.”

“Do you like her?”

“Of course I like her. She’s my . . . was my best friend.”

“I mean, do you like like her?”

“Oh, you mean like, really really like like her?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, little brother . . . do you like her?”

My sister looked like she wanted to hug me. God, I must have looked really pathetic. I certainly felt like I looked pathetic. “Sally Anne, I think about her all the time. I mean, I’ve thought about pretty much nothing else since the morning I met her. We talk about everything, I mean everything. She is so . . . funny and so . . . bright, so brilliant. Sometimes when we’re singing together at a gig I get so . . . I don’t know . . . lost maybe, in her voice and I miss my cues, you know . . . her voice is just so beautiful . . . and clear . . . and . . . Sally Anne . . . I do like her. I mean, I like like her. I really really like like her . . . I need to tell her.”

I jumped up and started right then left indecisively, like I couldn’t decide where to go because . . . I couldn’t decide where to go.

“Okay, hold on there, little buckaroo. Take a deep breath and think about it. You don’t want to seem too eager.”

“What? Why . . . why not? I mean, what?”

“Yeah, exactly. Think about it. Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. Alright? Just take some time and think about it.”

“Yeah, okay. Thank you, Sal.”

She couldn’t help herself and hugged me, her little brother. Her little brother who was five inches taller than she was.

                                                                                                ***

I was truly miserable. And I was, at that time, in Eighth Grade, not a glass half empty kind of guy. I knew how smart I was. Apparently that wasn’t enough to ensure happiness. I was sitting by myself outside the Boys’ Locker Room at Painter Junior High under the overhang, looking out at the athletic fields, watching the rain, wondering what Rivka was doing. I really didn’t understand why it was that just a few months before I’d been so happy, Rivka had seemed to be happy. What could have happened in two months?

Rivka and I had started Seventh grade at the new Junior High and her mama decided that giving us a ride to school every morning made sense. It would be so much more convenient for Rivka and me and would give Mama Rakhel an early start in the mornings to do research in the Reed College library in Portland for the book she was working on at the time. The morning ritual of running to Mama Rakhel’s car and hopping in the back seat, sharing morning pleasantries, world news, our three way conversations with Rivka in the front seat, me catching Mama R’s eyes in the rear view mirror, waiting eagerly for Rivka to look back at me and smile, maybe tease me, maybe give me shit . . . It anchored me, made the day start right, made my life right. Gazing at her from the back seat, I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted things to stay exactly as they were and they did through Eighth Grade, joyously so . . .  until they didn’t.

Rivka and I were in the secondary, ancillary library sorting books, ostensibly because we’d finished and presented our joint project in Social Studies. It was supposed to be about the railroad’s role in the industrialization of the United States, but we focused on the Pullman strike of 1894. Mrs. Hamm had no idea what to do with us. We questioned the validity of everything about the sources available to us and spoke in a language that, while English, was filled with irony and metaphor that seemed to go over her head. And we found each other’s comments extremely funny but were generally irritating to Mrs. Hamm. So, sorting books was a kind of exile.

“Is Dumas in Fiction or Political Commentary?” I thought she would think that was funny and we’d been laughing at each other’s comments earlier in class.

She looked at me, clearly upset, like she wanted to say something but couldn’t decide what it was. Either that or she knew what it was but didn’t feel she could say it. “Y-you . . . agh . . . Fiction,” she said finally, exasperated, shaking her head and sighing forcefully. 

She didn’t seem angry with me. I thought, She seems frustrated with herself, or me, or both. Why is she so upset? And why is she still not answering me in Russian? And why don’t I just ask her why she’s so upset?

I picked up another unsorted book and tried again. “Oh, The Iliad . . . I really like this story. Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships.”

A long moment passed. “She must have been very beautiful,” she murmured, slightly smiling ruefully to herself.

I was looking down and without thinking said, “Da, like you.” I honestly hadn’t meant to say that out loud and it seemed to me the room got even quieter. I could hear the window curtains gently waving in the breeze from the furnace fan. I was looking down, studying my Converse All-Stars. Low tops. One shoe had started to come untied. I thought, Why didn’t the fucking fannings make an appearance before I said that? But at that time the fannings had a schedule all their own.

She was staring at me. I could feel her eyes boring a hole in the side of my head. We were about a foot apart.

“You think I’m beautiful?” she asked softly, speaking slowly to me in Russian, for the first time in weeks.

My head seemed to slowly turn of its own accord and I found myself looking into her eyes. Her blue blue eyes, bluer than mine. My mouth, on its own, started speaking, “I think you are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life.” My heart stopped, the clock on the wall stopped ticking. I waited for death.

“That-that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me, Misha.”

I was barely breathing.

She’d said it in a voice I’d never heard her use before. And it made me feel like I had a sun in my solar plexus. She took my hand in hers. Our faces were inches apart. Her eyes were closing as we were drawing inexorably closer, her lips beginning to part.

Explosively, the door to the secondary library opened and Mrs. Bailey, the librarian, came in with a squeaky-wheeled cart full of books and we separated abruptly and began picking up random books from our cart, putting them on each other’s piles without regard to where they were supposed to go, furtively glancing at each other, Rivka torturing me with her crooked smile.

                                                                                                  ***

In New York I helped Sofia with her math homework almost every weekend. For some reason that didn’t hurt. Maybe because she was so young and sweet and innocent . . . and safe . . . like Kot. Kot was safe in that as long as I didn’t try to get some emotional attachment to it it was a source of comfort. I say ‘it’ because I didn’t know Kot’s gender and had no intention of trying to find out. Any time I thought of physical contact with Kot I just looked at the scar on my arm and immediately disabused myself of that notion.

Funny, Kot and Sofia got along famously. The first time she came up to my flat to bring some bread and Kot was there I was very alarmed.

I started to say, “Be very careful, Sonya, Kot is . . .”

Too late. She walked right over to Kot and picked it up and started petting it and scratching behind its ears. Kot seemed to love it. “Aren’t you a gorgeous cat! Oh, I just want to take you home with me, you’re so sweet!” 

I couldn’t believe my eyes. At that moment I realized Kot wasn’t antisocial, it just hated me. “Kot obviously likes you, Sonya.” I showed her my scar. “It certainly doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, my goodness!” she said, responding to my long curvilinear scar. “Well, Misha, cats are funny. Maybe Kot sensed you don’t like cats and it did that, you know, scratched you to confirm your suspicions about them.”

“Ok, little sister, Kot is obviously smart enough to live on its own, but really, I don’t think it can read minds.”

“Don’t listen to him, Kot. Of course you can read minds.”

Kot purred. “Prrr…”

Months drifted by. A shitty winter. A shitty Spring and Summer. Time seemed to merge into one grey day and night. Everything had become automatic. Milk for Kot. Tutoring for Sofia. Train to Hell’s Kitchen, work my shift in the warehouse, go home to my shitty hole, get out my gun, load it and do my existential soliloquy.

And then one night mid November, almost a year and a half after arriving in New York, I I had reached the end. What the fuck . . . I’d given it a shot. I opened the fifth of Jack I’d been saving and drank straight from the bottle. First time I’d touched the hard stuff in quite some time.

“Wooee! Kot, you want some of this? Too bad! I only share with my friends . . . and you are . . . definitely . . . not . . . my . . . friend!” I poked the air with my finger, emphasizing each word, holding the bottle by the neck. I had drunk half of it at that point and was as inebriated as I’d ever been in my life.

Kot looked up from the cockroach squirming between its paws after just having had its head bitten off, languidly chewed and, “Mraw . . . Ok, I’m sorry about that little scratch on your arm . . . I just don’t like to be touched without my permission.”

“Little scratch? Little scratch?! Look at this scar, you crazy fucking cat!”

I took another drink and got my gun, checking it to see if there was a round in the chamber. Nope. I dropped the clip out, regarded it, popped it back in, racked a round, flipped off the safety and set it down beside me on the bed. I spent the next several hours drinking and talking to Rivka.

“Do you remember . . . first time we met, angel?” I asked her softly.

“Of course, Misha. You were staring at me from the back of the room.” She was lying on my bed, wearing tight jeans and the white sweater she’d worn on our first date.

“I’d just seen the most beautiful creature I’d ever encountered in my life.”

“Misha . . . I thought you were so gorgeous . . . do you remember I smiled at you?”

“Of course. You were missing one front tooth . . . I thought that was just . . . so adorable.”

“I remembered about my tooth and got very self conscious.”

“Da . . . that too was adorable . . . You know, I fell in love with you right then, at that moment.”

“I was definitely interested but I didn’t really fall in love with you until you attacked Garth after he pushed me down.”

“When I saw him push you down . . . well, I . . . I just acted automatically.”

“So protective. Such a chauvinist.”

“I know. I got better, didn’t I?”

For hours this went on. Talking with Kot and Rivka. At some point Kot just wasn’t there anymore. I guess it went out to . . . wherever it went, maybe on the prowl, maybe visiting other apartments with a roach problem. Maybe just to find a more erudite conversationalist.

I was standing on the sidewalk across the street from Rivka’s house. There were three matte black trucks and a black stretch limo on the curb. I could see activity in the house, shadows really, silhouettes. Then I saw my girlfriend and her parents, dressed in the vertically striped inmate uniforms of the Nazi death camps, being herded out to the limo, their guards prodding them with bayonets. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. I tried to run to their aid, but I looked down and my feet were encased in concrete. Kot was walking back and forth in front of me.

“You’re kind of useless, Misha . . . can’t you see they’re taking Rivka. Taking Itzak and Rakhel. Do something! Do something, asshole!” 

I awoke from the dream and was disoriented. The bottle was in my hand and the gun was on the bed. I began writing letters.