Eleven Days

The Playbook of Cats, Chapter 1

The fog on Saint-Laurent had come down with the morning and decided to stay. It filled the street from the ground to the second floor and it did not move at all; the shop signs glimmered inside it without lighting anything around them. I walked through it for six blocks and it parted for me and closed behind me and I felt nothing, and then I stopped in front of the bakery, and it was suddenly all there was. The street ended twenty feet from me in either direction. The window of the bakery was the only thing with an edge left in the world, and everything I could see was arranged around it. How had I walked through this for six blocks without once looking up?

The bakery was full and warm and smelled of the inside of bread. I took my place behind a man reading a newspaper, and while I waited I read over his shoulder, a habit I have never managed to lose and have never much wanted to. He was on the second page. A photograph of a bridge at dusk, and under it three columns about something the city had promised and not done. I read the first column with him. He turned the page.

He was still on the second page. The photograph of the bridge was there again, and the three columns under it, and I had already read the first one. I read the first column again, slowly this time, giving every sentence the attention you give a thing you suspect of hiding something. It hid nothing. He turned the page again, and I let my eyes drift to the window, to the fog, because I had decided he had lost his place, and that a man losing his place in a newspaper was the most ordinary thing in the world. It was. I lost mine constantly.

The baker’s hands were long. I mean that they were a lot longer than normal hands should be, so that when she reached for the loaf on the top shelf she did not need to stretch, and did not need to look, and brought it down as easily as if the shelf had been at eye level. I thought she must have been very tall. Then I looked at her, and she was not tall, and I did not think she was tall anymore, because when you look at a person you see the person and not the sum of the things you had assumed about them. She was a short woman in her fifties with flour on her forearms, and light from the window on the flour, and that was all there was to see, so that was all I saw. Then it was nearly my turn, and I had not decided what to buy.

The woman two places ahead of me was wearing Mia’s coat.

The grey one with the torn lining she kept saying she would fix, and never fixed, because she liked the way it felt when she put her hand in the pocket and found the thread. I knew the coat the way you know a word in your own language. I knew it the way I knew her hand on my chest in the morning before either of us was awake. There was no moment of recognizing it. It was hers before I had finished seeing it, and something in me went toward it and toward her, all of her, at once.

She paid and went out into the fog, and the fog closed over her without a sound, and I let her go.

I did not decide not to follow her. I simply did not follow her, and it did not occur to me that I should have wanted to, even though everything I felt for her was there. Nothing was missing. The coat was there, and whose coat it was, and everything I would have said to her. The wanting was missing. And a missing want leaves no space behind it, because the only thing that could have felt the space was the want.

I bought a baguette, still warm, and carried it out into the soft grey street like something alive. I do not remember the walk home.

I woke up because the bed was cold on one side.

For a few seconds I lay there with the bread still in my hand. Then there was no bread, and there had never been any bread, and the fog came back to me, and the newspaper, and the hands, and the coat. I had been dreaming. I had not known it.

Mia had been gone eleven days.

The notebook was on the floor by the bed, where I had left it, with the pen inside it holding the place. I did not sit up. Sitting up is the first thing you want to do and the first thing that ruins it, because the body moves and the mind moves with it, and whatever was there goes wherever it goes. So I stayed on my back, reached down without looking, and opened the notebook on my chest.

I wrote the fog first. I always write the weather first, before anything else, before I have decided what the dream was about. Everything else in a dream changes while you write it down. You remember a man and by the time the sentence is finished he has become a man who was watching you. The weather does not do this. The fog was fog before I had any opinion about it, and it stayed fog. Not moving. Not thinning. I wrote that it had been in front of the bakery and that I had only seen it once I stopped.

Then the newspaper. The bridge, the three columns, the man turning to the same page. I wrote that I had explained it to myself and that the explanation had satisfied me. That goes in the notebook, always: not just what was wrong, but what I told myself so that it would not be wrong anymore. The mind is astonishingly good at offering an explanation, and better still at convincing you that what you are looking at is ordinary. Most nights it takes me a few seconds to hear it, put it down, and look at the thing again. That is all the training is. That morning, in that bakery, in that fog, I had accepted what the mind offered me three times and questioned it no further.

Then the baker. The hands, the shelf, the loaf. I wrote that I had looked at her and stopped seeing the hands. I did not write why. I had already written why, in other notebooks, on other mornings, and it was always the same reason, and I had never found a better way to say it than that when you look at a person you see the person.

Then the coat.

I wrote the coat carefully. The grey, the lining, the thread in the pocket. I wrote that the woman wearing it had paid and gone out, and that I had let her. My hand was not steady on that line and I let it not be steady. There is no point writing a dream down if you are going to correct it into something you can bear.

Under the coat I drew the line I always draw, across the page, and under the line I made the list. The man with the newspaper: yes. The baker: yes. The woman in the coat: yes. The other customers, the ones in front of the man and behind me, the ones whose faces I could not now have described: no. I did not have to think about any of it. You never do. You know who mattered in a dream, and nobody I have ever worked with has been able to say why, and by now nobody asks.

Three important, the rest decor. That was a normal count for a short dream. It told me nothing on its own. It never does.

Then, at the bottom, where I keep the last line for what I actually did, I wrote that I had not realized.

I read it back. I had walked down Saint-Laurent in fog that did not move, watched a man read the same page three times, been served by a woman whose hands could reach the top shelf without her lifting her arms, and seen my wife’s coat walk out the door, and I had bought a baguette. I had not realized once. Every time I had found something to tell myself, and I had believed it, and I had gone on.

I closed the notebook and lay there with it on my chest.

It had been years. There is nothing to be proud of in the first discipline; it is the one you learn first, and the one that the people who train you assume you will never lose, as they assume you will not forget how to read. I had lost it, in the fog, in front of a bakery, and I had not lost it in years. I knew what that meant and I did not want to know what it meant, lying there, with the cold on my left side and the bread that had never been in my hand.

I got up at seven forty. I put the notebook on the desk, on top of the others, and went to the window.

There was fog on the street. It was ordinary fog, the kind the river sends up in September when the nights turn cold before the days do. It sat over Saint-Denis at the height of the second floor. A bus went through it with its lights on. A man in a yellow vest was doing something to the base of a streetlight across the road, and he did not look up at the bus, and the bus did not slow down for him. I could see the pharmacy sign, the bank sign, and the sign of the restaurant that had closed in March and never taken its sign down.

I noticed that the fog was in the dream and the fog was outside the window, and I decided that this was a coincidence. It had been foggy the night before. I had seen it when I closed the blinds. My mind had used what it had, as it always did. There was nothing in it.

I stood there for a while longer. Then I decided that there was something in it, not because I had new information, but because I had been doing this for a long time, and in a long time you learn which of your own explanations to trust. The one about the fog was not one of them.

I made coffee. I did not eat the bread, because there was no bread.

The phone rang at eight ten. It was Renaud. He works the same jobs I work, or worked, and he is the only person from La Veille who still calls me at home instead of leaving a message with the office and waiting.

“I’m calling about the Thursday thing,” he said.

“I know what you’re calling about.”

“They asked me to ask. I told them what you’d say. They asked me to ask anyway.”

“What is it?”

He told me. It was a retrieval, a company in Toronto that wanted to know what a company in Zurich was going to do before the company in Zurich had decided. Three days of reading, one night, one report. It was the kind of job they gave people they trusted, and it was the kind of job they had been giving me for nine years.

“No,” I said.

“I know.”

“Not until I find her.”

“I know, Adrien. I told them. I’m telling you I told them.”

There was a pause. I could hear his kitchen behind him, a kettle, the radio. He did not ask how I was. He had asked on the second day and the fourth day and I had answered both times, and after that he had stopped asking, which I was grateful for and had not told him.

“If you need someone to read for you,” he said, “I have the weekend.”

“I’ll call you.”

“You won’t. But I have the weekend.”

He hung up. I finished the coffee. Outside, the man in the yellow vest had finished with the streetlight and was walking to the next one, and the fog was where it had been.

There is a difference between recognizing that something was wrong and realizing that it is wrong, and the whole of what I do lives in that difference.

Recognizing is easy. I can do it now, awake, with coffee. Set out on paper, the things I saw in that bakery are obviously wrong, and anyone could say so. Recognizing is what you do afterward, with the answer in front of you. It costs nothing.

Realizing is what you do inside, without the answer, while the thing is still happening and while your own mind is offering you, one after another, perfectly good reasons to leave it alone. He lost his place. She is tall. It is fog; fog does not move. Every reason is true somewhere. What makes it hard is that the reason comes from me. I trust it as much as I trust anything else I think, and I have to set it aside anyway and look at the thing again.

That is the first discipline. Everything I was trained to do afterward, the navigating, the remembering, the reading of what the dream returns, depends on it, because none of it can begin until the moment you stop and say, out loud if you have to, that this is not right. I had not said it. I had bought bread.

I put the cup in the sink.

I would prime tonight. Properly, this time. For eleven days I had been priming as a tired man primes, with the problem stated badly and the faith half there, and the dreams had returned exactly what half faith returns, which is fog. So I would do it as I had done it for nine years for other people’s problems. I would sit at the desk and write the seed, everything I knew about her, until every line on the page pointed at the same woman, and then I would sleep, and the mind would build from it whatever it was going to build.

That evening I sat down at the desk and took a clean sheet and wrote her name at the top.

Then I sat. The name was there and nothing came after it, not because there was nothing, but because I knew what a seed written properly costs. It costs an afternoon at the least, and all of the attention a person has, and I did not have that in me that night. I had done it a thousand times for people I would never meet. I put the pen down. Tomorrow, or the day after, I would do it for her.