Hypothermia

to lose your job in December, he told me, by way of example. That’s because I’m giving notice, I answered. I’m moving away in January. No, he insisted, they’re going to fire you and you’ll leave town after April. If you stay alive, that is. My favorite cat also showed up in my friend’s visions, an ill-tempered black Persian. There’s an animal here, he told me, who seems to be the protector of your house. That’s Gula, I told him. She’d give her life, he added, to save you or any of your family.
    Now that we’d finished I asked him if there were any sort of talisman he could recommend that might protect me. We were staring out his office window at a dingy, trash-strewn street. You’re a writer, aren’t you? he asked. More or less, I told him. So write it all out. Sometimes that can work like a lightning rod.
    Remembering, like storytelling, means creating order where none existed. The truth is that my session with the astrologer was much more confusing than the above, and his statements far less clear. But, regardless, I left his office feeling disturbed by something but uncertain of what this might be—sort of like the way you feel after drinking too much coffee. Back home I gave my wife a deliberately abbreviated version of my session, minus all the disgraceful catastrophes that were looming ahead. And because it’s better to prevent than lament, I began to write, almost furtively, a story about a cat that sacrifices itself for a man and his children.
    December arrived and they fired me from the company where I’d worked for years. You said that you were leaving in January anyway, so we made our own plans, my boss told me, trying to make it sound like it was nothing personal. As if it could ever not be personal. Around the beginning of February, during the same weeks I was fleshing out my story about the cat’s death, the police rang my doorbell in the middle of the night. They had my brother—one of nine siblings—locked up in the back of their patrol car with a cracked sternum and fractured ribs. They brought him like that, and at such an unlikely hour, because in a near-fatal accident he’d flattened a lamppost, which constituted a civil offense.
    By that time we had already closed out our bank accounts, so I ran upstairs for a roll of cash. We settled on a price and I paid up. I also tipped generously so that they would dispose of my brother’s horrifyingly wrecked car, and so that the officers would forget our names and addresses forever. I took my brother to the hospital.
    When I returned home many hours later, Cathy asked me if this had been the trouble I’d been expecting. What trouble? I asked her. What the astrologer predicted for you. Astrologers don’t predict anything, I told her. My brother’s going to be fine, don’t worry. I left the story about the cat unfinished and went back to work on the book that was due to be published before we moved.
    At last, my wife and I finished almost everything that we had begun in Mexico City, and in the middle of May, in one momentous effort, we left the country with our little boy, our cat, and our piano. Since my second book had already gone on sale and our university jobs in the hardly glamorous city to which we’d moved didn’t begin until after August, I decided to get back to my story about the man and the cat before classes started. As much as I disliked the idea of having to finish the poor beast off, I felt an overwhelming sense of metaphysical responsibility demanding I write out its demise. You always have to finish what you start, especially if the warring stars above augur your misfortune.
    At the beginning of August we moved to our new, permanent address. There, Gula and I and our little boy began to enjoy spending time in the garden, a real novelty for us. At night I worked on the story about the cat and the man.
    Gula had always been insufferably independent, but she’d never had any direct experience of the outdoors. Now she spent entire days hunting mice and exploring trees: she’d never even seen one before. Meanwhile, I finally killed the cat in the story I was writing.
    When one’s imagination runs dry, superstition is its last refuge, but superstition—once invoked—goes right on menacing us even when we have no need of it anymore, even when we deny its reality: no one really believes that such invocations have any effect on the world; we’re rational people after all, but we still knock on wood! One