The Cat King of the Library

A short story

I usually spend my afternoons at the local library. It’s severely underfunded with only a modest selection of books, but it’s familiar and comfortable with a huge skylight at the center of the ceiling through which warm sunlight floods the floors and shelves. For a couple of months in the summer, the lack of air conditioning makes it too hot to enjoy, and for a couple of months in the winter, the lack of heat makes it unbearably cold. But in the months in between, it’s a great place to sit and think.

I do this often. Sit and think. I’d say it’s the thing I do most often, more than anything else, not because I particularly like doing it, though that’s usually true, but because it’s the only thing I’ve ever been really, truly good at doing. I don’t have any talents or skills that are natural to me. Anything I know how to do I’ve learned how to do, usually by learning the hard way. I’m not musically or artistically inclined, I’m not particularly beautiful or athletic, and I’ve never quite been able to mold myself to fit the system of the world around me. I used to think it was quite pathetic, even pitiful, to only be really good at sitting, still and silent, but as I’ve aged, I’ve learned that most people can’t do this at all, even for a few seconds. The world is too full of distractions. Its luxuries and comforts are abundant and relatively accessible, at least for many of us, and for many of those many, it isn’t worth straying from them too far.

I have found that sitting long enough to become uncomfortable, and being willing to stay in that space for a while, makes returning to the comfort much more enjoyable. It creates a moment in time filled with deep appreciation; a humbling kind of gratitude. I also find it a useful way to address the monster in my head, whose voice has ebbed and flowed over time from gentle whispers to incessant screaming. Lately, its presence has been casting a large shadow over my thoughts, and its voice is inescapable for long moments at a time.

It was in a moment of quiet meditation while addressing this monster that I met a small gray cat named Shadow.

I sat on a round floor pillow in between some shelves of books, doused in the sunlight streaming in from the transparent ceiling. I was the only one in the library, save for an elderly woman who quietly pushed around a cart of books, intent on her day’s work. I sat with my legs crossed beneath me and my hands in my lap. My eyes were closed, and I paid close attention to each breath that entered my body, and each breath that left it. Suddenly, a book came flying off the shelf behind me, barely missing my head as it landed in a crumpled heap on the floor. My inner focus was broken by the commotion, and I turned my head. My eyes found a small pair of round green circles staring down at me.

“Hello,” I said to the cat. It was small and lean, with soft gray fur and a thin tail that flicked in a new direction every second. I’d seen it before, but only in passing. It seemed most content to keep to itself, never caring to be bothered by the library’s patrons. It had been around for as long as I can remember, but I’d never been close enough to see its eyes. I reached a hand out slowly, hoping not to startle it, but it jumped off the shelf.

I thought it would scurry off, I’d return to my quiet place of thought, and that would be that.

But it walked in front of me, and sat. Then it spoke.

“Hello,” the cat said.

I blinked, instinctively retracting my hand, my mouth agape.

“No,” I said, smiling. “It must be a trick of the mind…”

The cat blinked with indifference.

“No trick,” his small voice said. It was quiet but confident, like he knew exactly who he was in a world that didn’t care one way or the other. “Not of your mind or mine. They call me Shadow.”

My brain struggled to process the cat and his words. I closed my eyes and shook my head, as if to shake reality back to a state of normalcy. When I opened them again, the cat looked at me amused. I couldn’t help but laugh. Surely this was a sign that I was officially losing my mind.

The cat chuckled with me.

“I suppose you’ve never spoken to a cat?”

“Oh sure,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve spoken to many cats. But they’ve never spoken back to me, at least in a way that I could understand. How is this possible? How can I know this isn’t some hallucination of the mind?”

“Well, everything is a hallucination of the mind,” he said. “Surely you know this. I suppose you don’t know that people can only properly hear me when they are close to death.”

My heart dropped and my breath caught in my throat, and a dreadful panic crackled like fireworks on my nerves. I was not sick, and there seemed to be no present dangers in the library that day. Perhaps the cat knew of a future close at hand that I was not yet aware of. After several moments of silence, the initial panic faded and was replaced by a steady calm. I’d never been scared of death; in fact, I often looked forward to the day it came to claim me.

“Are we not always close to death? It is the final act of every life, after all,” I said. “Why am I close to death now?”

The cat looked at me as though deciding how much it should say. I could see a certain knowledge behind his eyes, and there was a certain desire to know what he knew that pulled at my curiosity.

“I’ve seen you many times,” he said. “Coming in here and sitting. Always the same, even though you choose a different spot every time. I know why you meditate. I know you fight a long, hard battle against a voice of darkness that lingers inside your head.”

I felt the blood pool in my cheeks, and the skin on my back and down my arms felt hot. I’d never spoken to anyone about that voice, the voice of the monster, because I’ve always been afraid that if I admitted it was there, then it really would be. Keeping it to myself made it seem less real.

“It’s okay,” he said, feeling the need to provide some reassurance. “You are not the only one who knows the monster.”

I drew a deep breath in, and exhaled a long, melancholy sigh. Suddenly I felt very ashamed. Ashamed that I spent so much time wallowing inside myself as if the only person to ever know such pain; ashamed at knowing the monster at all.

“It’s okay,” the cat said again. “It is neither good nor evil that you have this monster. You just have it. You see and feel things in ways many others do not. You pay attention, and for that you have learned a great many things about this world. Things many people willfully choose to ignore.”

I locked eyes with Shadow. He was unbothered by the intensity of my curiosity to hear more of what he had to say.

“But there is a price for all things, including knowledge,” he continued. “You know the pain of loss. You understand grief. You’ve seen inhuman cruelty and horrific tragedy. You know yourself to be an imperfect being constantly making mistakes, and you know the loneliness of being lost in a world that is built by greedy selfishness caked in blood. You know you don’t belong anywhere, and so you know the feeling of being completely and utterly alone.”

My curiosities halted, and I put my face in my hands, not wanting to hear anymore of what I already knew. Shadow spoke as though to console, but his words held nothing except painful truths. I couldn’t help the tears that formed and fell.

I sobbed into my palms for several moments, biting my own skin to keep from unleashing too much of the pain that lived inside of me. I breathed rapidly, trying to calm myself down, but there was too much of it. I felt myself become overwhelmed, totally encased in all the ways I knew he spoke true, feeling the pain of so many griefs boil to the surface all at once. I put my hands on either side of my face, feeling the slickness of my tears on my cheeks, and opened my mouth wide to let out a silent scream.

We stayed like this for a while. Me on my floor pillow, shifting between sobs and hushed wails, with Shadow sitting before me. Eventually, there wasn’t much left to release. My sobs turned into a quiet stream of tears. My arms relaxed and my hands fell to my lap. I stared blankly at them as the last of my tears fell down my cheeks. Then, Shadow took a few steps toward me and looked at my hands like they were in his way. I moved them to the side, and was surprised when he crawled into my lap. We sat together in near silence. The only sound I could hear was the far-off rustling of the librarian, and Shadow’s gentle purr as I stroked his back.

“Why have you told me all of this?” I finally asked. “You haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.”

“Because you seem to have forgotten that for all your grief and pain, you have also known deep beauty and love. You have known what it is to feel at home in another person’s gaze, even though you’ve known the pain of never seeing this gaze again. You have known the power of compassion and empathy in times of great hardship, even though you’ve known that it is never enough to stop the hardships altogether. You have known what it is to fundamentally change in ways for the better and make wiser decisions than you did before, even though you know that it shows you all the ways that you yourself can and have committed evil. You have known what it is to be your only companion and the strength that comes with that, even though you know that you are still alone in the end.”

He paused, then sat up straight to gaze into my eyes, red and swollen from tears.

“You know, but you forget. It is not your knowledge of bad things that feeds the monster in your head, but your forgetfulness of the good things that does. When you sit down to think, tell me honestly, what do you focus on?”

I wanted to tell him that I focused on things that brought me joy, but this would be a lie. I wanted to tell him that I thought about nothing, having mastered the meditative state of complete silence and stillness, but this would be a lie, too.

“I try to focus on good things, or, at the very least, nothing at all,” I said. “But more often than not, my intent is overrun by the bad things. It’s like the voice in my head isn’t mine at all, but a parasite. A vermin determined to break me down until there isn’t even hope to hold onto.” I dropped my gaze, feeling ashamed again. Ashamed that I was not strong enough to keep even my own thoughts in control. “It’s like for everything that I do or think I can do, the voice tells me I’m lying to myself. It tells me I’m no match against it. It tells me I have no control.”

“And you listen,” Shadow said.

I nodded.

“And I listen.”

“That is why death is so close to you now,” he said. “You’ve been listening to that voice in your head for so long that you’ve convinced yourself it’s real. You’ve convinced yourself it is the real you, instead of a version of you that is too scared to believe in its own power for good. It has convinced you that everything is pointless, and that all of your efforts are for naught. You have convinced yourself that the monster has taken the reigns rather than having given them up yourself. But it is no monster that lives in your head. It is you.”

I didn’t want to believe what Shadow told me, but I knew it to be true. I didn’t want to believe that I was my own monster, because somehow that made it scarier. Believing the monster was separate from me made it easier to understand why it wanted to kill me; why it wanted to overrun me with darkness. Knowing that I was the monster made me both ashamed and terrified. How could I kill the monster if the monster was me?

Shadow hopped from my lap and walked toward a large window. I wasn’t sure if he intended for me to follow, but my legs moved before I could hesitate. The clear glass stretched from my chest to the ceiling, and outside there were several tall trees interspersed among a small field of grass, sliced down the middle with a single walkway and benches at either end. The leaves on the trees’ branches danced lightly in the breeze, waving their shadows across the ground in a quiet performance of shadow and sunlight. The cat hopped onto the windowsill, wrapping his tail around his legs as he sat. The sunlight made him look regal, like some sort of wise old cat-king. The Cat King of the Library.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked, mindlessly wondering about it in the midst of our heavy conversation.

“Very long,” he said. “I have had many conversations with many people. You all seem to make things much harder for yourselves than they have to be.”

I smiled, knowing this to be true, too.

“Have you ever gone outside on a very hot day, suddenly very grateful for the relief of the cool of the shade?” he asked. “Or, conversely, gone outside on a very cold day, suddenly very grateful for the relief of the warmth of the sun?”

I nodded slowly, thinking hard about this and mulling on his words several times over. I knew he was hinting at something much deeper than weather.

“There is good and bad in all things, and the good and the bad themselves are always relative and subjective, depending on the chill or heat of the day and where you stand in relation to everything else.”

I looked out at the trees. I watched a bird chase another against the backdrop of a blue sky before disappearing behind the foliage.

“There is good and bad in all of us. You know this, but you shy away from it. The darkness inside you that you have chosen to ignore has transformed into a monster that seeks your demise. It is the cold without sunlight; it is the heat without shade. It is also that which seeks to teach us the value of goodness over evil. If you can understand that evil is the true teacher of goodness, then you understand that it is ultimately you who chooses what you reap from its harvest. Learn from it and you will grow; run from it and you will be destroyed.”

The cat pensively watched the trees through the window. More birds flew above them and into the sky, where they could be seen as silhouettes darting to unknown places. Shadow did not move to see them, rather keeping his gaze straight ahead like a stoic statue.

“You have darkness in you, my friend,” he said. “You have long tried to outrun it, only to find this path ends in failure and further pain. You then tried to turn into it, to face it head on, intent on healing from it so you could banish it from your mind forever. Only to find that no matter what you seem to do, no matter how many times you watch it leave from the deepest places of your mind, it always finds its way back. And now, you don’t know what else there is to do, and it is overtaking you. You have convinced yourself that if it is to live forever inside of you, you must surrender all your power to it.”

I kept my gaze ahead, and my arms rested on the windowsill as I listened to the cat’s words. Every few seconds I felt the tip of his tail brush my arm as he flicked it back and forth.

“But this is a lie. A lie you don’t need to tell yourself. It is true that you cannot outrun it, or banish it, or do anything to rid yourself of it completely. It is a part of you, and it always will be. But you need not surrender to it. Let it rather become a part of your power for good, your power for right; let it be the teacher that it is and show you the parts of yourself which you can transform to be even more than you were before. Everything can be fuel for good, even darkness, if understood and harnessed in the right way. The shadow can be your friend or foe, and the sunlight can save or kill you. Ultimately, you get to decide where you stand.”

Then the cat turned and leapt from his perch. I was barely turned around when I watched the last of his tail disappear behind the shelves. It was certainly an unexpected afternoon, receiving life lessons from a wise old library cat. I came in hours before feeling terribly heavy. I’d spent the night before crying myself to sleep, undertaken by the pain of grief. Grief for the loss of so many people, both to death and circumstance; grief for the hurt caused by others, and the hurt I caused others in turn. I could barely bring myself to come here today, and when I did all I wanted to do was sit in the heaviness. I didn’t want to outrun it. I didn’t want to face it. I wanted to surrender to it. I wanted to surrender, and let it all go. No ordinary person would’ve guessed that I walked into the library under the weight of such pain — I’d become quite good at hiding it all from the world — but Shadow knew. Shadow knew what I carried, and he knew what I needed to hear to carry it better.

And after listening to his words, none of it felt so heavy anymore. I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d learn such a profound lesson from a talking cat — life really does hold its surprises — but there I was. And there was my pain, a few shades lighter and for once with more roses than thorns. I knew it was there to teach me, not to kill me. It was then that I understood that pain really is our greatest teacher, and when we listen to it without trying to run or conquer, suddenly it doesn’t feel like pain anymore.

It feels like strength.

I spun on my heels and picked up the bag I’d left by the pillow on the floor, eager to go feel the sun on my face and let the day carry me to its next unexpected event. I looked at the book that Shadow had knocked from the shelf, and picked it up. It was a novella I’d once read about a man contemplating suicide, when an angel of darkness suddenly appears and convinces him not to. Or, rather, gets him to convince himself not to, and by the end he really believes it. The angel of darkness is gone, and the world carries on. I didn’t understand it the many years before when I’d read it, but I felt much closer to it now. I put it under my arm, and looked for the librarian when a fuzzy patch of gray caught the corner of my eye. I looked over to see Shadow sitting on top of the shelves watching me, glorious in his likeness of a king. I reached forward and he bowed his head so I could scratch his ear.

“Thank you, Shadow,” I said.

He meowed.