When I was still a boy and not quite a man I sailed across the sea in a shoe box to stay with my Aunt Mary. Until then, I had been raised by the government's Bureau for Orphaned and Misplaced Children and only through a bureaucratic mistake did they discover I had a living relative. Aunt Mary loved cats--she had over two hundred and they sunned and hunted all over her farmhouse and the forty acres that surrounded it. Each one had not only a name, but a personality, and Aunt Mary knew each one intimately. I, by the time I had spent a week with them, knew many by name and had my own preferences, my favorite being a ginger tabby that spent every night curled at the foot of my bed.

  "He adopted you," my aunt said. "You are owned by him and must give him a name."

  "But he already has a name," I said.

  "He chose you over me. The name I gave him wasn't true and no longer applies according to the ways of cats."

  And so I sat and thought of names: D'Artagnan, Bartholemew, Gladstone, Morton, Mergatroid, Aloysis, Hamlet, Humbert, and hundreds of others. I thought for days: while I ate, while I worked, while I wandered the countryside. I sat by the river's edge watching the water and heard nothing suggested in its whispering ripple. I told my aunt and she said, "You won't find a name for a cat by the river; water knows nothing of cats. Look in a place more familiar to them. Remember, in a name there is destiny and destiny doesn't often come easily." So I spent two days thinking under the bed. My cat brought me muffins and tea and he slept in a ball by the dust bunnies that gathered in the corner. After two days I still had no name. I followed the cat for two weeks, sleeping when he slept, playing when he played, wandering where he wandered. No name came to me.

  "You're looking too hard," my aunt said. "Maybe the name is in front of you." So with that in mind I set the cat firmly on a stool and studied him. I moved the drapes to see how the dapple of light played on his stripes. I circled him as he bathed to get here and there a better view. I sat and he sat and I stared and he stared and his look said to me, "Get this naming over with, I want to eat." But I wouldn't let him rush me. Shortly before dinner I stood and said, "Cat, your name shall be Cat." He closed his eyes slowly in the manner of cats and his low purr danced over the afternoon sunbeams.

  Seasons passed and one year after winter turned to spring I took to wandering the farm in the late afternoon; Cat trotting at my side or poking his nose into the brush or a clump of grass, chasing after a cricket or a mouse. And on those occasions when his hunt succeeded, he always offered to share.

  It was during one of those walks that I first saw Claire. Cat disappeared into a thicket near the border of my aunt's farm and did not return. I stepped in after him and, after stumbling through the brambles and tearing my shirt, saw her through a gap in the trees.

  She wore a gingham dress and sat on a bench in the middle of a grassy clearing, reading from a small leather-bound book that had "Sonnets" stamped on the cover in gold. As I stared, I forgot to breathe. Tulips and hyacinths bloomed white and red around the clearing's edge, but seemed pale compared to Claire. She had hair as black as a new moon at midnight. Her eyes were green, like spring grass in the morning dew. And her lips.... I doubt that any one of the dead poets whose words were inscribed upon the leaves of her book could devise a description that would reflect even a fraction of their beauty. Hidden in the thicket, I sat and stared and would sit and stare until I had grown wizened and old had Cat not acted as cats often do. On the pretense of chasing a butterfly, he bounded from the bushes into the clearing.

  She started when she saw him, as if she saw a charging lion, but then said, "Oh, kitty!" her eyes wide with delight. Cat, braver than I, jumped onto the bench beside her then tipped himself over, offering his belly for rubbing.

  I stepped out of the bushes and, when she did not scream, said, barely containing the quaver in my voice, "Excuse me, Miss, I just came chasing after my cat."

  She appraised me quietly then looked down to run her fingers through Cat's thick fur.

  "His name is Cat," I said.

  A slight smile fluttered across her lips. "So we will never forget what he is?" Cat stretched his forelegs so she could rub under his arm. His back toes curled tightly. "You are Mary's nephew," she said and after I nodded, "You have a leaf in your hair. Pluck it and come sit."

  Her father owned the farm next to my aunt's and she often came to this clearing to read stories and poems when she wasn't helping her mother or spending time with her horses.

  We sat and talked and when the sun threatened to slide behind the trees she said, "It's time I went home."

  "It's time I went home, too," I said, though I wished to stop the sun's descent and make the moment last forever. "My aunt might worry and come looking for me."

  She hid a grin behind her hand. "My father might worry and come looking with his shotgun." I scooped up Cat. "Wait," she said; and I waited. "I will be here tomorrow."

  "And so will I," I said. So will I.

  And so we met in that clearing every night from then until summer when we were forced apart. During that spring, a war across the world came to our doorstep and by summer boys like me who were not quite men were called by our country to fight the enemy. I knew I would be called and shortly after the harvest was done, the telegram came asking me to serve.

  I met Claire in the clearing the night before I left. "Marry me," I said, "before I go away. Wait here for me and I'll send you letters of my adventures."

  She looked at me sadly, tilting her head. "I can't," she said. "You are still not a man. When you come back, ask me again. But send me letters of your adventures. I would like to read them."

  "Then give me something to remember you by."

  She kissed me and we parted and I sailed again across the sea, carrying with me Cat and my clothes and the memory of her lips.

~

  To prepare for war I was given new clothes and a steel hat, a bayonet and a rifle. I spent six weeks in a room with a hundred others and we were taught the important skills of war: to march, to salute, and how to polish our boots.

  I met Ramsey, who said he was originally from Quebec, and spoke the French to prove it. He helped me learn the ways of a soldier and fed Cat table scraps when the sergeant wasn't looking.

  After we were trained, they hurried us to France where we waited for weeks before they sent us to the front--a world removed from my aunt's farm. We lived in mud; and Cat lived on mice, which kept our mud cleaner than the others'. "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," Ramsey said, "and that beast is closer to heaven than the rest of us." But the enemy did not agree, for as soon as Ramsey spoke they hurled artillery shells at us that churned blood into the mud and turned forests into match sticks. Ramsey ducked and Cat huddled in my rucksack.

  One night near dawn, as shells rained upon us, we were ordered to charge. "Over the top!" Ramsey said. "Watch my back and I'll watch yours!" We scrambled up the side of our trench and hurled ourselves across the shell-struck land. Here and there a lone tree remained, leafless and defiant against the ravages of war or nearly limbless, its branches requisitioned to make cook fires for our tea. Smoke and mustard gas billowed and mixed and rolled towards us like fog from the seaside. Barbed wire, strung like spider webs across the country, caught men like flies in its razor embrace, to twitch until slain by a machine gun bite. We ran. We ducked. And we prayed the gas wouldn't get us.

  Beside me I heard Ramsey huffing and then an explosion and then I heard nothing. I fell to my belly and looked behind me. Soldiers lay scattered around a crater. Some still, some writhing, some crying for God or their mother. All covered in dirt and blood. Cat crouched by one who moved only his arm to stroke Cat's matted orange fur.

  "I'm dirty now," Ramsey said. His shirt ran red to the ground he lay on.

  "No," I said, "No. You're the cleanest man I ever met."

  He smiled and closed his eyes. His face was pale and his eyes remained closed. I feared he was dead. Cat licked his face and Ramsey opened his eyes. For a moment the sounds of rifles and mortars and the screaming of men passed away and I thought I felt the rising sun. Ramsey turned his head to me and said, "Not as clean as that beast of yours." And then he died.

  I heard a whistle and a boom and the sun went away and we took no man's land for our own.

  Peace broke out a few weeks later and they sent me home. A brass band played as Cat and I alighted from the train and Aunt Mary threw her arms around my neck. My hand was shaken a thousand times, but I thought only of seeing my true love, Claire.

  I found her in our clearing reading a book about Dublin. We kissed, and Cat rubbed himself against her shins.

  "Marry me," I said. But she kissed me and shook her head and said, "I can't. You're not the boy I knew back then. He is the one I want to marry; the man from the boy I knew back then. Find him and ask me again."

  I didn't know where to look. I looked in the mirror and under the bed. I dug through the pockets of my uniform, but I found only lint, a stray brass button, and a one franc note. I looked at my medals: for marksmanship, for victory, for France. A citation star. Medals I had earned as the army molded me into a soldier from a boy. What had I missed along the way?

  "Claire denied me," I told my aunt.

  "You haven't fulfilled your destiny," my aunt said as she rolled the crust for a pie.

  "I've been to war, to hell and back and saw good men die."

  The sunlight coming through the kitchen window seemed pale and dim, incapable of illumination.

  "I denied your uncle twenty-seven times," my aunt said. "He was a great man."

  I checked in the margins of my Bible and I read the letters I had sent to my aunt. I spent a week of afternoons in the attic looking for patterns in the lazy dust motes suspended in sunbeams, and hours staring at photos of my uncle, searching for his secret in his silver nitrate features.

  During meals I looked in the soup and under my plate. One night I looked for patterns by arranging my peas. "You won't find what you're looking for there," Aunt Mary said. "Your journey isn't over yet," and she handed me a ticket for a train that left in the morning.

  I traveled West, past oceans of grain and endless stalks of corn, to where the land ended, then in a boat past the setting sun until I came to land again. I wandered for weeks, past grass-lined streams and bamboo groves. I learned to harvest rice, to eat without a fork and spoon, and how to bow in greeting. One day Cat and I came to a fork in the road. He went left, I went right, and I hiked for a hundred yards before I noticed. I turned back and found Cat patiently waiting, biding his time by washing his tail.

  "What?" I said, "You want to go this way instead of that?"

  Cat didn't answer, but stopped his bathing and stared at me. I knew then which path I had to take. Outstaring a cat was a mastery I would never achieve. "It's your way, then." Cat stood, stretched, then trotted down the path he had chosen, tail held high.

  I followed Cat until we came to the home of an artist who took me in as his apprentice and taught me how to paint with brush and ink. He didn't paint landscapes or portraits, but found the essence of a single thing and caught it with one deft stroke. Every morning he set himself in front of his subject--a koi, a bamboo stalk, a perfect cup of steaming tea (which he made me brew)--and studied for hours before marking his parchment. If the brush stroke wasn't to his satisfaction, he threw aside the painting and started again the next day. The paintings he finished were like living things, in detail exquisite, not a reflection of what they portrayed, but more an extension--an aspect that people could not normally view, much like a dog can hear sounds inaudible to man. Cat made paw prints on rice paper then took a bath; his paintingsoonly taking a minute or less.

  I spent my time sweeping and cleaning, slicing vegetables and fish that we rolled in rice and seaweed, brewing tea, grinding ink, and caring for the koi that flashed black and white and yellow and orange just under the water and whispered their fishy secrets to me when I stood at the edge of their pond. "The koi are liars," Master said to me, for Master was how my master wished to be called, "don't believe a word they say." I listened to him and to the fish, but I didn't know what to think. The koi distrusted Cat and clustered near the bottom of their pond when he spent lazy afternoons poised like a judge at the water's edge.

  After a season had passed and the leaves were threatening to fall from the trees, I asked Master when I would learn to paint. He squinted at me then paced the floor. He picked up a cup of ink, freshly ground and mixed by me that morning, and tasted it briefly, as if he were tasting tea. Slowly, he set the cup down. "I have taught you all I can right now," he said. "There is nothing more."

  I opened my mouth to protest but he cut me off.

  "Go back into the world. Continue your travels."

  I didn't know what to say. I packed my things and said goodbye to the koi. "See you tomorrow," they whispered to me, "Good morning," "Good night," and "Wonderful rain," and I knew that they were wrong.

  Before I left Master handed me a small wooden box, flat, and hinged in the middle. "It is a gift for my apprentice," he said. "Open it." Inside the box lay a pair of brushes and a fresh bottle of ink. "Use them as you travel," he said. "Look beyond what your eyes can see and put that on the paper. And send me pictures of what you paint."

  Cat and I traveled west until we met a Bedouin selling his wares: oils and spice, perfumed salves and ointments, carpets and cloths, lamps he said were magical. We joined his caravan and spent six months traveling from Constantinople to Casablanca. He had six hundred wives and two thousand camels and knew each one by name and personality. We lived in tents that sprawled across the sand and crossed deserts so hot that birds died of the heat and fell from the sky fully cooked. Even the camels were parched. At night we ate figs and goat and talked under the stars. He told me stories of genie and djinn and I told him stories of electricity and moving pictures. We discussed Allah and God and argued the differences between angels and men. He taught me how to add with letters.

  Cat loved the wives, hated the camels, and all the feelings were mutual. Every night he visited a different tent before joining me to go to sleep, curling up at my feet combed and primped, sometimes perfumed; sometimes draped in veils; and sometimes with bows in his fur, around his neck, or hanging off his tail. And when the camels would spit at Cat, he would spit right back.

  When we arrived in Casablanca, the Bedouin said, "Stay with my caravan and travel with me more. I'll take you to palaces and we'll meet with kings. We'll journey to the pyramids and visit Scheherazade."

  "I can't," I said, "I must return to my one true love."

  This distressed my Bedouin friend and he offered to give me twenty of his wives should I choose to stay. I refused and he offered fifty; then a hundred; then two hundred of my choosing. Again and again I refused.

  "Her beauty must make Cleopatra seem like a toad," he said and when I showed him her picture he offered his fastest camel to whisk me home. "If only I had a roc at my command or a fabulous ebony horse, I'd send you on your way yesterday."

  Cat and I set out sailing in a coconut shell. For twenty days and twenty nights we lived on fish and coconut meat, and washed it down with rainwater and milk. On the twenty-first day we came to a small island. Rising high above it stood a tower as tall as Gustav Eiffel's, if not taller, and tethered to the top a strange metallic zeppelin--all angles and points where there should have been curves and grace. "We might as well stop here," I said to Cat, "we're out of coconut and the skies are blue as far as the eye can see." Cat agreed, for, while he would never tire of fish, he was sorely sick of coconut.

  The tower was built of stone and palm leaves. Its door was a slab of teak six feet wide and ten feet high with a solid brass knocker in the shape of Triton mounted on the front. I knocked but no one answered. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then half an hour. Cat inspected a nearby tree and stalked a bug. I was about to leave when a homing pigeon with a note tied to its leg landed nearby. The message read, "Come on up. I've been expecting you," and was signed: Isaac.

  Inside, we found a circular staircase. Cat and I climbed for three hours, stopping along the way for a light dinner, and at the top we found our host in a big round room crammed with items scientific: Bunsen burners, a grinding machine, all shapes of beakers, dozens of lenses, a dynamo, and an abacus. Shelves held hundreds of books, none thin, and everywhere, reams of notes, none apparently filed. Replicas of all the planets hung from the ceiling and here and there stood globes on wooden stands: two of the Earth (one ancient, one modern), one of the moon, and one of the stars and constellations.

  "How did you know we were coming?" I asked.

  Isaac fluttered about the room, straightening piles of papers, here closing a book, there moving another, placing his spectacles in his pocket then putting them back on his nose. "The stars told me," he said. "I study the planets and the stars. There's a million billion of them out there and I know each one by name and luminosity." He swept his arm around the room. "Look," he said, handing me a page. Upon it was a list of stars, each entry written in purple ink in a cribbed hand.

  Cat sniffed about the room, threaded himself between the legs of a chair, bounded over a stack of books, then jumped onto a windowsill. Out the window I could see the zeppelin's gondola, made of oak and rattan, and, as the zeppelin bobbed in the breeze, occasionally glimpsed the burnished grey of the balloon itself. "Did you build that zeppelin?" I asked.

  "That," he said, then paused, his eyes wide, as he raised a hand, index finger extended towards the ceiling, "Is my greatest invention. With it I intend to fly to the moon. To Mars. And maybe beyond. I am sailing tonight and you and your cat will be my crew." And before I could reply, "It was stated in the stars." Phrased as it was, I could hardly deny that Cat and I would be Isaac's crew, but in all my travels I had never imagined my wanderings reaching the moon. And, in fact, I wondered if the stars did tell Isaac of our arrival for he had packed into the zeppelin's hold provisions for three: sandwiches and lemonade for us and twenty-five tins of sardines in water for Cat.

  We flew for three days, playing cards and watching the stars. Cat excelled at Gin and I was glad we didn't play for money. On the eve of the fourth day, we circled close to the moon, passing over dust and rocks and craters. Cat and I leaned out a window for a better view. Isaac studied the surface with the telescope he always kept handy. As we descended he said, "Oh, my!" then "Look!" then, "There, waving at us. The Man in the Moon," then pointed, "Let's set down near those rocks." I let out ether and Isaac worked the helm. Cat held on as the zeppelin lurched to the ground.

  A lone figure came running to greet us, a thin man with a head like a pumpkin, but all over grey; eyes as large and round as silver dollars; and tiny ears that barely showed. He wore a grey linen suit and a high starched collar and carried a pie that he presented as we stepped off the gangplank. "It's rhubarb," he said. "Welcome to the moon."

  Simon, the Man in the Moon, held a passing interest in astronomy, and he and Isaac became fast friends. They spent hours hidden away in Simon's observatory discussing and viewing galaxies, planets, and stars. But Simon was also a kind and attentive host who took time to visit with Cat and me and to take us on tours of the moon, showing us oddly shaped meteorites or his favorite crater.

  When left to ourselves, Cat and I awakened early to watch the Earth rise and spent our time wandering the moon. I made angels in the moon dust like I used to in the snow when I was a boy. Cat made paw-print nimbuses to finish my creations. We spent hours perched on the edge of craters, looking at the sky and thinking of Earth.

  Soon, everything reminded me of home. "Look, there's Pisces," Isaac said and I thought of the Master. "Look, there's Capricorn," and I thought of the Bedouin. "Look, there's Venus," and I thought of Claire.

  One day I approached the subject of returning to Earth, but Isaac replied, "Only a few more stars to catalogue," without ever removing his gaze from the eyepiece. The next day, I asked and he said, "I've just discovered a fabulous new galaxy," and on the third day, "Just a few more stars. A few more stars." I knew if wanted to see Claire again, I needed to try something new.

  The next morning, I started to leave paintings in conspicuous places. My art was not as fine as the Master's, but I had been practicing since I left his tutelage.

  "What's this?" Simon asked over breakfast as we drank our tea.

  "That's a koi," I said. "A fish." And when he looked at me with a puzzled expression, I said, "Surely you've seen a fish? They live under water."

  "A beast that lives under water?" Simon said. "Impossible! How does it breathe?"

  "Fish breathe water and don't need air."

  He set down his teacup and said, "This I must see."

  "Yes," I said, "we should journey to Earth. It holds more marvels than the sky holds stars."

  "I agree," Simon said, and to Isaac, "we should leave tonight."

  "But what about my scientific observations?" Isaac asked, his hand shaking as he tried to pour more tea, filling his saucer faster than his cup.

  "The stars will remain," Simon said, "but I must see this so-called fish."

  "And along the way," I asked, "could you drop Cat and me at home?"

  Three days later we were floating over Aunt Mary's farm. "Wait," I said as we descended lower and lower, "don't drop us at the house, drop us at that clearing."

  Simon surveyed the area through a telescope. "Where that girl sits reading a book?"

  "Yes," I said, "hover there and drop the ladder. That's where I want to land."

  The zeppelin blotted out the sun and I saw Claire stand and look up. Cat clung to my shoulder as I descended. The rope ladder wobbled as I climbed down. As each rung passed, my heart beat harder. I wanted nothing more than to sit in that clearing with Claire, to feel her warmth, and to watch the sun set; to smell the roses now blooming red and white and pink. I jumped the last few feet to the ground.

  I was about to embrace my one true love, but paused and took a step back. The Claire that faced me was not the Claire I had known all those years before. She wore a pale blue chemise and a navy cloche. Her cascade of hair had been cut short into a bob. She took a step towards me. Cat looked her over and gave her a sniff. He circled her legs and I waited and watched, and after he leaned himself into her shin, he yowled a yowl I'm sure the Master could hear. I looked into her eyes and I knew that she was the woman from the girl I had always loved. I smiled and she smiled and nothing I had seen in all my adventures was more magnificent than her smile at that moment. It was as if Cupid had loosened his arrow into my heart. "Marry me," I said, "I have traveled the world, seen art and wonder, and flown in the ether. I am the man from the boy you used to know."

  "I won't--" she said and a different sort of arrow pierced my heart. What more could I do, how much more could I grow before Claire refused to deny me? Would I circle the globe twenty-five times? Make twenty-five trips to our clearing? Suffer twenty-four noes before the yes I wanted? I hung my head and started back to Aunt Mary's farm. But I hadn't taken more than two or three steps before Cat darted between my feet and sent me tumbling.

  "I won't," Claire said, "because I want to see the wonders you've seen. I want to see the Taj Mahal and the Colossus of Rhodes. The Egyptian Sphinx" --she said while glancing at Cat, he playing innocent licking a paw-- "and genies and djinn. Whispering koi. And France. I want to see France."

  I rose to one knee and took her hand. "We'll see all that," I said, "all that and more. I'll show you the moon and the stars. We'll visit France, and if we have time, we'll visit Mars."