Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg

lacking children or a house of our own, we were cut off from the calm, self-important hum of town life. Biscuit was our emissary. She was what we talked with our neighbors about.
    â€œYour cat was over,” someone would greet us when we came home.
    â€œShe give you any trouble?”

    â€œNo, no, she couldn’t have been sweeter. She’s welcome any time.”
    We were happy then, and while it’s stupid to make an animal the emblem of your happiness, I thought of Biscuit that way. Well, she was a happy cat. Even her busy, scissoring stride conveyed happiness, the purposeful happiness of someone going off to do something she loves. Watching her from the doorway, F. would sing bouncily in time with her gait: “Na-na-na-na-na-na-NAH, na-na-na-nah-nah-NAH!” She was going out into the world to be happy, and the world would oblige her, offering her its mice and birds, protecting her from speeding cars (we lived on a cul de sac) and villainous dogs (the town had a leash law).
    What that world was for her, it was for us, mostly. Several nights a week we’d walk down the quiet street past our neighbors’ houses, where TVs spilled their aquarium glow onto tidy mats of lawn. In the warm months, we’d head west onto Astor Road; we liked to bike there during the day. At night, the road rose and fell steeply amid groves of oaks and maples whose trunks shone a necrotic greenish-white beneath the moon. Between the trees, you could see the lighted windows of rich people’s houses, which might have been welcoming if they hadn’t been set so far back in the woods. Walking unseen through this dreaming landscape seemed to stimulate F. It amplified her sense of herself as an invisible outsider, and at the same time gave her a pretext for feeling like one, because of course anyone who walks out by night will be invisible to those who stay inside, which outside cities is almost everybody. As a teenager in a Midwestern suburb, F. used to creep out of the
house after dark to spy on her family members. One time, she told me, she’d shinnied onto the roof and looked in on her father as he sat reading in his study. What she saw on these expeditions wasn’t radically different from what she saw in the house during the day. Nobody shot dope or beat off to porn or wept over old love letters. They were just themselves, though sometimes they weren’t. She remembered the thoughtful way her father had taken a nut from a can balanced on the arm of his chair and looked at it appraisingly before putting it in his mouth. She remembered moments when familiar faces went dead, so that the animated voices that issued from them seemed to be the voices of indwelling spirits or demons. F. half believes in demons.
    Walking by night frightened F. too—who can walk through the woods at night without being a little frightened?—but that was its own kind of stimulus. Every so often we’d see the headlights of an approaching car and crowd onto the shoulder. Once, as the glare licked up the asphalt toward us, F. stuck her arms out rigidly before her and rolled up her eyes. She’s a pretty woman, even a beautiful one, but she can make horrible faces; it may be her prettiness that makes them horrible. Her eyes pop, her white teeth flash with carniverous mirth. At that moment, she might have been the Platonic archetype of a zombie, minus the decay. I stuck my arms out too, and we shuffled along like that into the oncoming lights, wishing we could see the look on the driver’s face. Afterward I marveled that he hadn’t run us over.
    When it got colder, we took a different route and crossed the main street into an immigrant neighborhood of flimsy
bungalows with two families sardined inside, or, more often, half a dozen lonely men. They’d come up to pick apples or berries or do construction at low wages and stayed on, indispensible and resented. One night we passed a tent where a party was going