It got dark earlier tonight than it had any business doing, and she turned on the lamp by the window before she turned off the big light, which is a sequence I have never liked and have never been consulted about. The room went soft and yellow in the middle and black at the edges, and that was when I saw him.
He was sitting exactly where I was sitting. Same posture, same tail curled the same way around the same set of paws, same unimpressed look on his face, like he’d also just been interrupted mid-thought by the lamp. For one full second I assumed the obvious thing, which is that another cat had somehow gotten onto the sill without my hearing him arrive, which would have been its own serious problem, because the sill is mine and nobody arrives on it without an escort.
I stood up to deal with him. He stood up too, at the same time, in the same way, like he’d been waiting for exactly that.
I want to say I handled this with composure. I did not. I took a step sideways to get a better angle on him, and he took a step sideways to get a better angle on me, and we ended up right back where we started, facing each other, neither one gaining anything. I have had this exact standoff with a window spider in a different room, and that one at least had the decency to stay in his corner. This one was matching me move for move, which is a kind of behavior I associate with mockery.
I tried turning my back on him. If you turn your back on something, it tells you where its attention actually is — whether it stays interested in you or finds something better to do. He turned his back on me at precisely the same instant, which meant either he didn’t care about me at all, or he cared exactly as much as I cared, mirrored, which is somehow worse. There is nothing more insulting than being matched instead of beaten.
I sat back down to think. He sat down too, obviously, but I made myself not react to it this time, on the theory that whatever he was doing it for, denying him a reaction would take the fun out of it.
It didn’t take long for the thinking to go somewhere uncomfortable. He had the same gap on the left side of his face where I’m missing a whisker. He had the same way of holding one ear slightly lower than the other when he’s annoyed, which I only know about myself because she’s told me, affectionately, more than once, usually while scratching under my chin in the exact spot that makes the ear do it. I do not love the idea of a stranger showing up already knowing my private tells.
I decided the most useful thing I could do was get her involved, since she has a way of resolving disputes just by existing nearby, usually without even trying. I went and found her on the couch and made the specific sound I use when something requires her attention but isn’t yet an emergency, and she got up, sighing in the particular way she sighs when she’s pretending the sighing isn’t for my benefit, and came over to the window with me.
This is the part I was not prepared for. When she stood next to me at the glass, there were two of her as well. Standing exactly where she was standing, wearing the same sweater, looking down at the same cat with the same tired fondness on her face. I checked behind us to make sure nobody else had come into the room uninvited. Nobody had. It was just us, and also, somehow, also us, both at once, in the black part of the window where the yard should have been.
She crouched down next to me and tapped the glass with one finger, not hard, just enough to make a small flat sound, and said something to me in the voice she uses when she thinks I’ve worked myself up over nothing, which I resent on principle even when it might be accurate. The other her tapped her glass at the exact same moment. I watched very closely for a difference between the two taps and did not find one.
I am not going to pretend I fully understand what was happening in that window. I know what the room looks like with the big light on, flat and unremarkable, nothing in the glass but the yard and the shape of the fence if there’s any moon at all. I know what it looks like with just the lamp on, which is this — dark enough outside and bright enough inside that the window stops being a window and starts being something closer to a second room, laid right over the first one, with a cat in it who does everything I do the instant I do it.
What I decided, in the end, since nobody was going to explain it to me directly, is that he isn’t a threat so much as a condition. He shows up when the lamp goes on and the sky goes dark enough, and he leaves, presumably, when one of those things changes, and in between he just sits there, doing what I do, feeling what I assume I’m supposed to interpret as roughly what I’m feeling, without ever once doing anything first. I can respect an opponent who attacks. I don’t know what to do with one who only ever copies.
She went back to the couch eventually, and both of her went with her, which I chose not to think too hard about. I stayed at the window a while longer, mostly to see if he’d get bored before I did. He didn’t. Neither did I, really, but I stood up anyway, just to end it on my terms, and went and pressed my nose flat against the glass, right at the cold spot.
He pressed his nose against the exact same spot from his side. Cold met cold, nose to nose, and nothing else happened, and I stayed there a moment longer than I meant to before I pulled back and left him to whatever he does with himself once I’m not watching.