Kassim had touched seven cats. Each one had ruined him in a different language.
He was a taxi driver in Istanbul — a German Shepherd of considerable dignity who navigated the city's traffic with the resigned competence of someone who had long ago made peace with chaos. His cab smelled of leather and pine air freshener and the faint, persistent ghost of sardines.
The first six cats were lessons. One sat on the hood of his taxi for an entire afternoon and vanished when he offered it milk — the hood stayed warm for an hour, and Kassim sat in the driver’s seat with his paws on the wheel, waiting for the warmth to leave too.
One followed him home, slept on his bed for three nights, and departed through a window he was certain had been closed. He woke on the fourth morning and pressed his nose into the pillow where the cat had been. Fur and silence.
One allowed itself to be held for the duration of a ferry crossing from Kadıköy to Eminönü and then, upon reaching the European side, looked at Kassim as though they had never met. His stomach dropped — the lurch of a dog who has been recognized and then, in one glance, unrealized.
Each one had ruined him differently. He kept no record. His body kept the record.
The seventh cat was the problem.
She appeared on a Tuesday when Kassim had a fare in the back seat — a businessman who was late for a meeting and who was paying double for speed. The cat sat in the middle of the road on the Galata Bridge, white, unmoving, looking at Kassim with one green eye and one blue.
"I'm losing six thousand lira a minute. Drive around the cat."
Kassim could not drive around it. The bridge was narrow. The cat was centered. And Kassim understood, with the clarity of a dog who has been waiting his entire career for this moment, that he was being asked to choose between the fare and the knowing.
He stopped the car. The businessman swore. The meter ran. Kassim’s paws were still on the wheel. His breathing had slowed to the rate a German Shepherd breathes when something important is happening — deep, even, the whole ribcage moving.
The cat — Serena, though Kassim would not learn the name until later — did not move.
She looked at Kassim the way she looked at everything: through the green eye as traffic and stone and the Bosphorus carrying light, and through the blue eye as a network of warmths, every person a temperature, every street a current. She went where the warmth was thinnest. She sat there because she was the connection, and sitting was simply what connections looked like when they were not yet ready to be understood.
The businessman left. The meter stopped. Kassim sat in his taxi on the Galata Bridge with the engine off and the window down and the wind carrying the smell of the strait into the cab, and he thought: the only appropriate relationship with a cat is one where you are constantly being left, and you accept this as a form of love.
Serena jumped off the bridge rail and disappeared into Karaköy, where an old man with a coffee cart looked up from his pouring and nodded, as if he had been expecting her, which — given that the old man remembered futures — he had.
Kassim started the engine. He drove. The bridge emptied. The Bosphorus carried the afternoon south. Somewhere, dogs were thinking about cats. The cats, in Istanbul and elsewhere, did not think about dogs at all.