"Get away from me!” Charlie shouted at the woman.

“I only want to help.”

“I don’t need your help. Now get lost!”

Bracing himself on his cane, Charlie slipped to his knees and picked up the keys with his arthritic hands. The woman, a visitor for someone down the hall, stood watching him. Charlie disregarded the hurt expression on her face.

The door directly across the hall from Charlie’s opened. “What’s all this?” the man at the doorway asked with a distinctly British accent.

“I—I was just trying to help your neighbor,” the woman stammered. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

The Englishman glanced at Charlie. “Don’t let him bother you none, lady. He’s just a cantankerous old fellow. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”

Charlie sneered at them. “Both of you go to hell.” He entered his apartment, slammed the door, and turned the levers on the three extra deadbolts he had installed.

Charlie lived alone in his apartment on a floor occupied mainly by retired old men. He had no place to visit, and the only time he left the apartment was when he went out for cigarettes and groceries and for an occasional destination-less ride on the bus around the city. Only the day before, he had turned eighty. On that day, no one called; no one had come to wish him well. No one had even sent him a card. It was just another late winter day. It even rained that afternoon. He celebrated by cooking himself an actual fish for dinner—something he hadn’t done in years.

The pain in his chest had been increasing all morning. He hacked and coughed until he brought up a large gob of bloody mucous. He spit it into the kitchen sink and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He rummaged through his medicine cabinet in search of some relief. He found a vial of prescription pain pills left over from a hip replacement operation he’d had some years back. Although the pills had long expired, he took one anyway. Charlie had been diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago, and he suspected that he had since acquired a case of lung cancer to boot, but he didn’t want to go to the doctor. If it turned out he had lung cancer, there would be little they could do for him. He lit up another cigarette; cigarettes were the only vice that still gave him pleasure.

Charlie lay back in his recliner chair. A pressure switch he had installed in the cushion activated an ionic smoke remover. He considered himself an inventor, although he never made money from any of his inventions. His only source of income was a meager pension from a semiconductor manufacturer he’d worked for years before. Charlie inhaled from his cigarette. Once he had dreams of improving life for humanity, but his inventions never improved anyone’s life. He felt, however, that he deserved this insignificance because of the regrettable deed he had committed seventy-two years before.

The digital clock on top of the television read 5:54. Jeopardy would be starting soon. As he reached for the remote control, he saw movement in his peripheral vision—a cat. It was a scrawny, black thing with a white streak on its breast. It watched him through his window with luminous green eyes.

Being seven stories up, he rarely spotted any movement at the window. Even the pigeons knew better than to roost on his fire escape.

“Beat it, cat!” he yelled to the window. The cat remained where it was, watching him inquisitively with its phantom greens.

Charlie climbed out of the chair and shuffled toward the window. “Scram!”

The cat skittered back to the wrought-iron ladder. Then it stopped there, watching him, waiting for his next move.

“Beat it, I said!”

He waved his hand. The cat disappeared down the escape. He stood at the window, waiting for it to return. He wondered how the cat had made it seven stories up the fire escape. He wondered, too, why the cat had chosen his unadorned fire escape window among the multitude of others—there was no dainty row of potted flowers on the sill to make it appealing. Then Charlie remembered the pan of fried fish left over on the stove from the night before. Yes, that was it—it smelled the fish. He checked the window—it was tightly shut. That couldn’t have been it. Puzzled, he returned to the recliner. His back was beginning to hurt again, so he turned on the heating pad in the backrest.

Jeopardy ended and a rerun of Wheel of Fortune began. There was Vanna White, with her round, pretty face. She reminded him of Nona, a girl he had lived with decades ago. They’d been together for almost fifteen years. Nona had pressured him hard to marry her. Charlie knew it would never work, and he told her so repeatedly. Eventually, she left him and married an Iranian. They had three children and moved down to Florida. He lost touch with her after that. Charlie had lived alone ever since.

The light by the recliner came on automatically. He had most of the appliances set on their own timers, since getting up to turn them on was a chore for his old bones. Then he noticed green orbs at the window reflecting the yellow light.

“Damned cat!” Charlie was going to shoo the animal away when he remembered the fish in the pan. It was beginning to stink up the apartment. To save himself a trip to the dumpster in the basement, he cracked open the window and placed the pan on the fire escape. He withdrew his hand quickly lest the cat brush against him, for he disliked the feeling of fur. He closed the window and watched the cat devour the remnants of the fish.

“Maybe it’ll go away now,” he muttered to himself as he made his way back to the recliner. He turned up the volume on the television. “Do we have any Ts?” The bell sounded twice. “There are two Ts!” The audience applauded. Vanna, wearing a shimmering, full-length gown, strode across the stage. She tapped the video screens to reveal the letters. Charlie hated Wheel of Fortune. He hated Jeopardy. He hated everything on TV. In fact, he hated everything and everybody. But what else was there to do on a Thursday night?

Wheel of Fortune ended. Now it was completely dark outside except for the yellow glow of incandescent lamps in the windows of the apartment complex across the alley. He went over to the window. The frying pan was empty, and the cat was gone. He opened the window and retrieved the pan. Poking his head out of the window, he looked down through seven stories of rusty fire escape to the alley below. The cat had climbed a long way to reach his platform. Charlie rubbed his scruffy chin, impressed. Cats were remarkably agile creatures.

Charlie ate a few nutrition bars in lieu of a cooked dinner and went back to watching television. When the eleven o’clock news came on, all that news was bad news. Most importantly to him, the rapid transit workers had gone on strike. Bus travel in the city was now extremely limited. Disgusted, he turned off the set and stared at the blank screen for a while.

In the silence, Charlie meditated on his younger brother, Georgie. He still missed him, and often he wondered how the last seventy-two years would have been different if Georgie had been around. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so lonely and empty. Maybe the years wouldn’t have seemed so long.

He remembered when their mother called the police the evening Georgie disappeared. The police combed the neighborhood looking for him. Charlie remembered his mother’s sudden, heart-rending cry when two police officers and a Catholic priest showed up at the door the following afternoon to give her the news. The next day, a cigar-smoking detective came to the apartment to question Charlie, who insisted he knew nothing of how it happened. But the old detective somehow knew Charlie was lying. Hoping that Charlie would eventually talk, he visited the apartment a few more times over the years to question him, but for fear of the consequences, Charlie never told what he knew. Seventy years later, he still harbored the secret. Charlie sometimes wondered whatever happened to the detective. He was most certainly dead now, just like everyone else he knew during that period of his life.

When Charlie woke up the next morning, he still lay in the recliner. Sunlight shone through the window for only about thirty minutes a day this time of year, due to the angle of the sun and the position of the tall buildings.

And there was the cat at the window, watching him.

“Damned cat!”

He lit up a cigarette and took a deep drag. Immediately, he went into a fit of coughing. His head ached. He needed something to drink.

Stiffly, he got out of the recliner and ambled into the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of milk. The milk tasted like nothing as it slipped down his throat. Everything tasted like nothing. The smoking probably didn’t help. As he sipped the glass of milk, he noticed the cat was still staring at him from the window. He had less than a quarter of the milk left in the glass. He took another look at the scrawny cat and then at the milk he would probably discard. “All right, all right. Just a little milk to wash down that fish I gave you last night.”

Charlie poured the remaining milk from the glass into a saucer. He opened the window and had almost lowered the saucer when the cat rubbed its head against his wrist. He quickly dropped the saucer and shut the window. Safe behind the glass, he watched the cat lap up the milk, while he rubbed his tingling wrist.

He left the apartment to take the trash down to the dumpster in the basement parking garage. As he hefted the plastic bag over the metal wall, he spotted a peculiar-looking rectangular white slab mixed in with the rubbish. He extracted it from the junk and set it on the concrete floor. He unfolded it to reveal a keyboard and a small, blue screen. It was a portable computer. He pushed the power button. Nothing happened. Turning the computer over, he found a crack in one corner of the plastic case where it had probably been dropped. Something loose rattled around inside.

The computer felt good in his hands, for he had a special affinity for broken machines. To him, they were living things, almost like sick children. Having once created machines, he felt a sense of duty to repair them, to make them right, rather than discard them when they malfunctioned or became old. He took the computer back to the apartment to have a closer look at it.

Moments after Charlie re-entered the apartment, someone knocked at the door. He waited, hoping it wasn’t the manager again. If it was, then perhaps she would go away. The knock came again, this time more insistent. “Mr. Wilson,” the manager’s abrasive voice came from behind the door, “I know you’re in there.”

“What do you want?” he asked without opening the door. He knew what she wanted.

“Last month’s rent was due a week ago. You’re already three months overdue.”

“I paid you.”

“Hogwash, Mr. Wilson. You owe me a bit more than one hundred dollars. Try five-hundred-eighty.”

This was true. He had paid her only a hundred dollars, but that was all he could spare. “Go away. I don’t have it,” he said.

“Okay, Mr. Wilson. Have it your way. I’ll be back.”

After several minutes of silence, Charlie checked out the computer he’d brought up from the basement. On removing the cover, he discovered that one of the circuit boards had been broken in the fall and another had been knocked loose. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to get the computer working again. He pulled his old soldering iron out of the closet. He worked slowly and carefully on the broken circuit board, as well as his eyesight would allow. After a few hours, he had completed the repairs as well as he could. He reinstalled the circuit board and, in a moment of apprehension, pressed the computer’s power button. To his delight, the computer blinked to life. He pressed one of the buttons on the side, and a CD-ROM slid out on the tray: New York City Phone Directory. Although the computer was an older model, Charlie found that it was still useful. Even its beefy battery seemed to have plenty of life left in it. It bothered Charlie that someone had discarded the computer rather than having it fixed. Nonetheless, he had no real need for a portable computer. He decided that once the strike was over and the buses were running again, he would take it to a pawnshop for rent money.

He tinkered with the computer a little while longer. Then, feeling weary, he went back to the bedroom to put on his bathrobe. When he returned to the living room, the cat was peering at him from the fire escape. “Didn’t I tell you to go away?” He brought his face close to the pane. The glass fogged up with his breath. The cat pricked its ears, watching him. The saucer was dry.

This time he took the entire carton of milk from the refrigerator and brought it to the window. When he opened the window, icy winter air wafted into the room. He filled the saucer with the milk quickly to avoid having the cat touch him again, then he shut the window.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Charlie watched the cat eagerly lapping up the milk. He noticed it wasn’t wearing a collar. Probably it was a stray. He rubbed his hands together, chilled from opening the window. If it was a stray, it had no place to go. Just the same, he did not like cats, and he doubted the cat would like him either. Still, he felt sorry for it being out in the cold. And the night would be worse. The cat finished the milk then disappeared down the fire escape. Then Charlie came up with an idea.

Using the heating pad from his recliner, an old blanket from the closet, and part of a cardboard box he’d brought up from the basement, he fashioned a small cat bed. He plugged in the heating pad and adjusted the thermostat until it became comfortably warm. Pleased with its operation, he put the bed on the fire escape and waited by the window for the cat to return. After twenty minutes passed and the cat hadn’t come back, he remembered that it usually came at sunset. He didn’t relish the thought of waiting for it in order to plug in the heating pad every night. Then he had another idea. He removed the pressure switch from his recliner and put it beneath the blankets in the cat bed so that it would automatically turn on the heating pad whenever the cat lay down.

When all this was done, Charlie turned on the television and lay back on the recliner. A detective movie was on Channel 34. He particularly hated detective movies. He flipped through the channels. One hundred twenty-eight channels of garbage. He closed his eyes for a bit.

It was dark when Charlie awoke. For a while, he did not recall where he was. He allowed himself this bit of confusion, for he wasn’t often able to delude himself into thinking that things were better than they were—and that something had never occurred.

Heaving himself out of his recliner, he headed into the kitchen. A red light told him that the heating pad had activated. He stopped to look out the window. The cat laid curled up, sound asleep in the cat bed he had made. Charlie smiled. “I still hate cats.” After a small snack of sardines and crackers, he placed the leftovers on the fire escape, then headed off to bed.

Over the next week or so, Charlie became accustomed to seeing the cat on his fire escape every night. One night, he even allowed himself to pet the fur between its ears. It rubbed its downy head against his hand.

Then one afternoon, Charlie became bold and let the cat come into the apartment. He followed the cat close behind to see what it would do. He watched it crawl underneath the bed, poke its head in the closets, and explore the parameters of his living room wall. He had never owned a cat before, nor had he allowed Nona to own one. He discovered that they were interesting to watch, or at least this one was.

That evening, he daringly allowed the cat to sit on his lap while he watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. He decided not to smoke while the cat was in the room, in case smoke was not good for cats. At bedtime, he let the cat out and shut the window.

Charlie and Georgie are playing hide-and-seek in the empty lot, just the two of them. Charlie sneaks up on an old abandoned refrigerator where he suspects his little brother is hiding. He sees the door is open just a crack. To give him a scare, he begins rocking the refrigerator on the rubbish while holding the door shut. He hears his little brother crying inside. Then something in the rubbish gives way, and the huge metal box falls forward onto its door with a heavy thud.

Charlie hears Georgie screaming inside the white box. He laughs at how cleverly he has trapped his little brother inside. “See! You thought you could hide from me!”

Georgie pounds on the inside of the refrigerator. His voice is muffled. “Let me out!”

“Not until you say Uncle!”

“Let me out!” Georgie pleads, this time his voice sounding more like a cry.

“Not until you say Uncle!” Charlie repeats. He takes a seat on top of the refrigerator while Georgie thrashes about inside. Charlie laughs at how he really has his brother this time.

“Say Uncle!” Charlie yells.

The pounding and crying eventually subside. Charlie thinks Georgie is being stubborn again.

Soon, it’s getting late, and they have to be getting home for dinner. Charlie hops off the refrigerator to let Georgie out. He tries to lift it to gain access to the door. To his horror, he finds he cannot. Frantically, he tries again, but the refrigerator is too heavy. Charlie begins to panic. “Georgie!” he yells. He begins pushing, then uselessly kicking the refrigerator. “Georgie!” he cries out again. He puts his ear to the cold steel side of the immovable box. He listens intently for any hint of movement…

Charlie awoke in a sweat. For a while, he lay feeling confused and disoriented. Gradually, he came to his senses. He realized he’d been dreaming, and fortunately, the dream was now behind him. The sunlight shone cheerfully through the window, but the light could not penetrate the gloom. “Why do you haunt me, Georgie?” he whispered. “I’m an old man now. What’s done is done, and it was all done a long time ago.” He rocked his head from side to side. “So what’s the point in tormenting me? What’s the point? It’s been seventy-two years since that happened, and in that time there hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought of you. Why do you still torment me, Georgie? What is the point?”

Soft mewing jarred him from his emotional turmoil. He waited for it to cease. The sound continued, cloying, almost like the insistent wail of a small child. “Shut up!” He covered his head with the pillow, but his ears still picked up the mews. Then the mews abruptly stopped. Charlie lay in bed for a while longer with the pillow over his head. Then, through the pillow, he thought he heard the low boom of thunder and the rattle of heavy rain against the fire escape. He removed the pillow. The room was serenely silent. Puzzled, he glanced over at the bedroom window. Bright sunlight filled the pane just as before. There was no rain at all. How odd, he thought.

Charlie realized he was intensely thirsty. He got out of bed and shuffled toward the kitchen. He paused at the window and looked out at the fire escape. The cat wasn’t there. He’d heard it only moments before, but now it was gone. Why had it left so suddenly? Without further concern, he entered the kitchen. He opened the door of the refrigerator, then backed away in horror. Inside the refrigerator lay the cat—dead, with a thick purple tongue jutting grotesquely from its mouth.

Charlie woke up screaming. He sat up and looked around. It was not yet daybreak; it was still the late-night side of morning. Rain pattered against the window. Lightning flashed in the distance, followed closely by thunder. From somewhere, he heard the cat mewing stridently. Instantly, he realized that the cat was out in the rain, waiting for him to let her in.

“Hold on! I’m coming!” he yelled, hoping the cat could hear him. He scrambled out of bed, nearly falling in the process, and stumbled into the living room, faster than he’d moved in thirty years. He found the cat bunched up against the pane. He opened the window and plucked her from the fire escape. The animal was soaked to the skin from the icy rain, and she shivered in his arms.

“You stupid cat,” he said in gentle reproach as he cradled her. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t rely on me?”

Charlie brought the cat into the bedroom and dried it with one of his blankets. He half expected her to start purring and rubbing herself against him as she always did. But she just lay on the bed. Charlie wrapped her in a blanket to keep her warm. He held her. When dawn broke, the rain outside had not yet abated, and the cat’s condition still hadn’t changed. It occurred to him that the cat might die. He simply could not let it happen. If the cat died, it would be because he had made her sick by leaving her out in the rain.

He put the phone directory disk into the computer he’d recently repaired and used it to look up the phone number for a local veterinarian. A young woman answered. On hearing of the cat’s condition, she asked him to bring it in immediately so that the doctor could have a look at it. It would cost $80 for the visit, plus the cost of medication, if needed.

An appointment was made for that afternoon. The vet was located in another part of the city. Charlie opened his wall safe to check his funds. He had $97 cash and some change. He could afford the vet fee, but not the cost of a cab fare to get there and back. He decided to wait.

The cat’s condition worsened as the hours passed. He felt its fuzzy black nose as the vet asked; it was dry and warm, not cold and wet as it used to be when she nuzzled his arm while they watched Jeopardy. The cat’s breathing had become shallow and labored. She had not touched the food or water he’d left for her. He stroked the sick creature. The thought of the cat dying and leaving him alone terrified him. He decided to not delay in getting help, even if the vet would be angry with him for leaving the cat out in the rain.

He looked at the clock. It was still morning. Taking the bus was out of the question since the transit district was on strike. Then it occurred to him that he could walk to the vet. It had been a long time since he’d left the neighborhood, but he felt he could walk there if he took it slow and easy. The rain pattered against the window. It was cold and miserable outside. Somehow he would have to keep the cat warm and dry. He wondered if his old bones could pull him through. It didn’t matter—it had to be done.

First, he had to tend to the cat. He took the heating pad from the waterlogged bed on the fire escape. Then, laboring painfully with his arthritic fingers, he removed heating wires from the pad and wove them into a section of blanket. Next, he searched the apartment for a power source. Then he remembered the battery inside the portable computer he had found. He removed the battery from the computer and wired it to the heating element he wove into the blanket. When everything had been connected, he flipped the switch on, and the blanket heated to a comfortable warmth. He hoped the battery had enough juice in it to keep the blanket warm long enough for the trip to and from the vet.

Charlie lumbered along the sidewalks and across city streets. The rain was unrelenting. At times, the rain broke into sleet. He kept the cat cuddled in his overcoat, away from the rain and cold. He found himself feeling tired and short of breath. Increasingly, he had to stop and rest. While he sat, he felt the plastic around the blanket to make sure the heating element was still working. The journey lasted over three hours.

When he reached the vet, he collapsed into the waiting room chair. He searched his coat for a pack of cigarettes and realized he had forgotten them back at the apartment. He cursed himself for his lack of forethought.

Finally, his turn came. Led by a gum-popping teenage girl, Charlie carried the cat into the small examination room and gently laid her limp form on a broad, metal table. The vet, a young woman with reddish-brown hair and prominent cheekbones, arrived shortly after to examine the cat. She took the cat’s temperature, then checked her eyes. All the while, the cat lay lethargically on the table.

The vet looked over the paperwork that Charlie had filled out earlier. “Does she have her shots?”

“I don’t know. She just showed up on my fire escape one evening,” Charlie answered. “She was wet and cold, and I brought her in.”

“A stray, huh?” The vet frowned.

After a few more checks, the vet drew some blood from the cat and left the room. Twenty minutes passed. Charlie stared at the cat lying on the table. She looked so frail and helpless. Her eyes were no longer luminescent; they appeared dull and glazed. The vet returned to the examining room with a grim look on her face. She sat on a stool across from Charlie.

“I’m sorry to say that she’s suffering from feline leukemia. I’m afraid she’s probably not going to make it.”

“Oh, my God!” He felt those moist eyes again. “I shouldn’t have left her out on that fire escape when it was so cold.”

“Mr. Wilson, this isn’t something you caused. This is a disease that cats are susceptible to. I very much doubt that her staying out in the cold brought this on. She must have had this for a long time.”

“Then what do you think we should do?”

“Well, she’s suffering now. We could put her to sleep for you.”

The thought of putting the cat down was unthinkable to Charlie. He would hear none of it. “Is there another option?”

“We can give you some medicine for her, and if she’s kept warm, she might come out of it, but you need to understand that this disease is almost always fatal.”

Charlie thought of his experience with doctors. If they’d been right about the prostate cancer, he should already be dead. “I’ll take the medication,” he told her.

The rain fell in a torrent as Charlie made his way back to his apartment. He found it hard to keep moving, and he had to take increasingly longer rests. His artificial hip began to ache. His chest hurt, and he began coughing up blood, staining his coat and the blanket. His primary concern, however, was that the blanket stayed warm. The old computer battery gave out about ten minutes before they reached the apartment. Charlie’s feeble body sustained the warmth the rest of the way.

Back inside the apartment, Charlie felt sick and feverish. His lungs ached each time he inhaled, but he tended the cat first, even before removing his coat. First, he unwrapped the cat from the heating blanket, then he gave her the medicine with the eyedropper. He laid her on the bed with him. The long journey had taken its toll on his frail body, and he felt desperately tired from it. He removed his coat and shoes and got into bed without bothering to undress.

He craved a cigarette. He recalled last seeing them on the stand by the recliner. Too tired to get them, he decided to close his eyes and rest for a moment. A strange peace came over him. He hoped that the cat forgave him for leaving her outside in the cold and rain. And he thought that even if his efforts came to naught, and she died, at least he had done something.

* * *

There came a knock at the door the next morning. “Mr. Wilson?” the manager called out from behind the door. “Mr. Wilson! I know you’re in there. I have a writ. It’s time for you to pay or move out. Now open the door!” she ordered.

She unlocked the door with her keys and entered the apartment. She looked around the living room. “Mr. Wilson?” she called out. There was no reply.

She felt an icy draft and noticed that the living room window was open. She shut it. A small black cat with a white spot on its chest appeared from somewhere on the fire escape. The manager stared at it through the window. It had inquisitive green eyes. It mewed softly at her through the glass as though badly wanting in. The manager looked up at the sky. The rain was over; clouds were clearing.

She went into the bedroom and found Charlie lying in bed. “Rent’s overdue,” she snapped. “I have movers here ready to move you. It’s pay now or get out.”

Charlie did not stir. The bedroom felt oddly still. Cautiously, she stepped over to the bed. She felt his forehead with her fingertips and realized she wasn’t going to get her money.

She pulled the blankets over his head with a vexed sigh. That’s when she noticed the ripped heating pad, soldering iron, pieces of wire, and a partially disassembled computer strewn across the floor. “What the heck were you doing in here, you old coot?” she muttered to herself. The mewing continued softly, plaintively, behind the living room window.

The Englishman appeared at the doorway. “Is the old boy a tad short on the rent money?” he inquired with a smirk.

“Yep, and the old bastard croaked during the night,” she said, scrutinizing the mess in the room.

“It’s just as well,” the Englishman stated flatly. “He shan’t be missed anyway.”