The Many Lives of Oberon

CW: Themes/mentions of death

***

He waits in his car for nine minutes before approaching my parlor. He stops at the window, leans forward to stare at the shop sign, waits for the person behind him to continue down the sidewalk. Only then does he glance over his shoulder, throw open my door, and scamper inside, holding an ash-gray cat as close to his chest as a love letter.

He shuts the door then turns to take in the shop's interior: the jars and vials on the shelf labelled "Potions," the votive candles tucked inside random nooks and crannies, the cuckoo clock in the corner, the crystal ball on the table in the middle of the room, and me waiting behind it. They're all for show, these decorations, though I'd never admit that to a customer. People are more likely to take you seriously when you conform to their preconceived fantasies.

"Hello," he says tentatively, shifting the cat's weight in his short-sleeved grasp. He stays where he is, the doorknob still within arm's reach.

"I've been expecting you," I say. It's another part of the fantasy, this mixed bag of a sentence. Sometimes those four words are enough to get a person to let down their guard. Other times, they're punctuated with the sharp slam of the front door.

This man, old enough to be my son, takes his time weighing my words, gives the shop another appraisal. A minute later, his shoulders relax, his grip on the cat slackens, and he takes a step forward. Then another and another, until he's on the other side of the table. Standing. Not sitting.

"You can tell me what's wrong with my cat, then?"

"Please, sit," I say, motioning to the other side of the table.

He pulls the chair out, plops the cat down, stays standing. Crosses his arms like so many skeptics do.

"What's the little one's name?" I ask, turning to the cat. Unlike its owner, it doesn't seem the least bit interested in its surroundings. It yawns before curling up into a chunky gray ball and closing its eyes.

The man scoffs. "You're the psychic, lady. Don't you know?"

The sign on the window, the one this man spent so long staring at before coming inside, reads "Madame Toussaint: Pet Whisperer." A psychic I am not. Not anymore. But that nuance is lost on some, so instead I say, "Well, you see, the past is more my specialty, my area of expertise."

He considers this statement, grunts, says, "His name is Oberon." And at my insistence, he scoops up Oberon and sets him on the table beside my crystal ball. The cat lifts his head for a moment, then returns to chasing sleep.

When I tell the man the fee for a consultation—which amounts to fifty dollars more than the flat rate, courtesy of what I call the "attitude tax"—he balks but begrudgingly accepts. Finally seated, stroking Oberon's fur, he says, softer than before, "Look, I just want to know what's going on with him, if he's gonna be okay. He's like this all the time now. Tired, I mean. No energy at all. I went to the vet and she couldn't find anything wrong. She told me some cats have these kinds of phases, that they bounce back eventually. But it's been over a month now and he's still like this. I looked you up online and thought you could, you know, do something."

I listen. Nod my head at the appropriate intervals. Wait to speak when the gaps between his words congest the room with silence. Glide a hand down Oberon's rigid body to assess the problem. When it looks like the man has said all he needs to say, that's when I break the news: "There's nothing wrong with your cat. The thing is, Oberon is on his ninth life."

The skepticism is back, but at least now it's laced with a look of curiosity: a raised eyebrow, a pursing of the lips. It's a small victory not to be instantly dismissed. I take what I can get these days.

"What, you don't actually want me to believe cats have nine lives, do you?" he says.

"I want you to believe the truth."

He pauses, glances at the crystal ball. "Go on, then. Make me a believer."

Like a conductor, I place one hand on Oberon and wave the other around the crystal ball, which fills with a cloudy white haze. This is also for show, a parlor trick; the real magic is happening in my mind. When I close my eyes, I see them—temples and sand, sphinxes and mummies, Oberon's forgotten memories. The visions come one after another like pictures on a slideshow. And among them all is a cat, dark-furred and regal, sitting on the side of a pharaoh. The story comes to me shortly thereafter.

"In his first life," I begin, "Oberon was born among the ancient Egyptians. He spent his early days as a stray, hunting down the mice and rats infesting the temples. He was swift, capable of pouncing in a second, with claws as sharp as daggers. He was so skilled at dispatching the rodents that when word got back to the pharaoh, Oberon was taken in and given a home in the palace. He was revered, worshipped, graced with gold necklaces and praise. When he died, the pharaoh even had him mummified as a tribute. By all accounts it was a good life."

As a vision of Oberon, wrapped head-to-tail in linen sheets, recedes from my mind, the man across from me is quiet, his expression inscrutable. He looks neither at me nor the crystal ball, but at his cat. 

"In his second life," I continue as the image of an amphitheatre blankets my mind, "Oberon was raised during the Roman Empire, in a town adjacent to The Colosseum. He—"

"The Colosseum?" interrupts the man. "That was hundreds of years after the ancient Egyptians, and that's being generous."

"These things aren't always immediate," I say. "They can be, but sometimes a soul can wander centuries before it finds a proper vessel."

He says nothing, not even when I end with "By all accounts it was a good life" again.

I'm halfway through chronicling Oberon's third life, the one where he was briefly reincarnated in Japan, when the man stops me again.

"I don't believe you," he says, and points to the hazy crystal ball. "I can't see anything through all that crap. Nothing. I want to see it."

"You don't believe me."

"I want to see it."

'"I can't do that."

"Riiight," he says, bending to collect his cat. "Can you see why I'm having a hard time believing you? Maybe coming here was a mistake."

You have to understand: Pet whispering is not a lucrative career. Shocking, I know, so I take what I can get here too. That's why, against my better judgment, I do something I haven't done since I was a little girl: With my free hand, the one that isn't touching Oberon, I take the man's hand in my own and tell him to close his eyes. He does, and side by side we watch the visions of seventh century Japan free-fall their way into our imaginations.

Actually, it was slightly different when I was a little girl. Back then, I saw premonitions of the future instead of the past, things yet to come instead of events you might find in a history book if you scoured long enough. In those days I had a best friend, Suzette, whom I told about my powers. She would constantly smile at me with her buck teeth and beg me to let her see what she was getting for Christmas or her birthday, and I would hold her hand and concentrate hard and we'd watch the visions together. Afterwards, I would always be exhausted, short of breath, drenched in sweat, a side effect of having a two-person premonition. Eventually, I lied and told her I'd lost my powers, and then I stopped using them altogether after Suzette's mother got sick and passed away and she blamed me for not predicting that sooner.

When I tried again years later, late one night with our family cat, putting my hands on her tail and concentrating, that's when I realized things had changed.

Suzette is who I'm thinking about when I feel my breathing become shallow. One of our hands—I can't tell whose—tightens its grip. The images of Oberon start to spin on their axis, like the slideshow projector was turned on its side.

I let go of his hand. The room slowly creeps back into dark focus, the man and his cat and the ticking of the cuckoo clock. Outside, the sun is shining.

"That's incredible," he whispers, clenching and unclenching his fist. "Wow. You really can see the past and—hey, are you okay?"

My skin is clammy, my breath ragged. The woman in the crystal ball's reflection has more than a few strands of hair out of place.

"I'm fine," I say in a voice almost resembling my own. "It's just a toll to do that with another person. Takes a lot out of you."

He looks sheepish, like a kid who got caught trying to sneak into a second movie at the theater. "I'm sorry," he says, and it sounds like he really means it. He runs a hand through Oberon's fur. "You don't have to keep doing that. You can just tell me what you see in your crystal ball."

To his credit, the man is quiet as I explain the situation of Oberon's fourth life, when he was a passenger on the Mayflower. When I get to the fifth and sixth lives, both of which were cats born into the exact same family, two generations apart, the man offers Oberon a belly rub. And even on the seventh life, when I describe how Oberon had to be left behind when his owner got drafted in the second World War, the man simply nods his head.

The eighth life is when things change.

For one thing, Oberon, who has been quietly resting this whole time, sits up and starts to wriggle, trying to pry our hands off him. And for another, the only visions I'm seeing all come from the same night. There's nothing of Oberon's life before then.

"Hold still, buddy, we're almost done," the man says, taking the cat in his arms in spite of its fussing and kicking and meowing. "Go on," he tells me. "I've got him."

With my pinky on Oberon's head, I close my eyes, concentrate, and immediately wish I hadn't. The images appear in a blur, like someone smushed two slideshows together, then put the amalgamation on fast forward. Things come and go from my sight: a woman, a man, a house, Oberon, the moon and the stars, a heavy container, something bright. It takes a while before I realize what that something is.

"What is it?" the man asks, wincing when one of Oberon's claw bites into his arm. "Ouch! You see anything?"

It takes everything I have to swallow the hairball-thick lump in my throat. "In his eighth life," I say, steadying my voice as best I can, "Oberon suffered a tragic fate."

They're quiet, the man and Oberon, who's back to his sleepy, yawning self now that my hands are flat on the table. Outside, a firetruck speeds by. A kid stares at us through the window, points like we're toys he wants. The cuckoo clock chirps, signaling the coming of the hour in fifteen minutes. The man speaks.

"I want to see it."

This time there's no skepticism in his tone, no reluctance to believe me. This time he wants to know what his cat has been through.

"Please. It doesn't have to be for a long time. I just want to see."

Would you believe me if I told you Suzette said those exact same words to me all those years ago, when she wanted to know if her dad was going to buy her a new birthday Barbie? But hearing them now, motivated by curiosity instead of selfishness, it makes me wonder if I can help these two.

As if he can understand, Oberon meows on command. But this one is different than the one a moment ago. Now it's a willing sound, an invitation.

"Please," the man says again. 

I'm not quite sure why I do it. It's not the money, otherwise I would've asked for an additional "hazard pay" tax beforehand. And it's not the thrill of the job either, because this is the first time I've helped a customer like this. But there's something about going there with someone else, to the past instead of the future, that makes it feel safer. That makes me feel like I'm not responsible for something that's already happened.

So despite myself, despite knowing how I'll feel after, I hold out my hand and let the slideshow play one last time.

I wasn't certain before, but now I'm sure that the man in this vision is Oberon's past owner, an ex-husband, a ex-lover, not some random criminal. I see the glint of jilted malice in his eyes, even though it's the middle of the night in the vision. I feel the vengeance pouring out of him like the gasoline he douses the front porch with. And I feel the spark of anger flickering as he strikes the match.

That's where I stop the vision, right before the disaster, right before there's no turning back. That way this man doesn't see what I saw the first time: the way Oberon, smelling the fire, ran immediately to his owner's room and clawed at the door, trying to wake the woman up as the flames and smoke filled in the starry night. The way he could have run away, slipped out the cat door, but chose to stay with this woman to the end.

The silence doesn't last as long this time. "Is that all there is?" he whispers. But the way he says it, it's like he's asking because he has to, like he doesn't want to know the real answer. 

My heart thumps against my chest. A cold sweat trickles down my forehead. The world comes back to me in bits and pieces, and I'm okay again. It's only when I'm about to take my hand from Oberon's head to wipe at it that I get a feeling in my stomach, a pretzeling of my insides. It's not a feeling I get anymore, but it's one I recognize from years ago: a premonition, a glimpse into the future. In my mind's eye, I see Oberon, his legs meekly plodding along a carpet, his body impossibly thin, his nose and right ear marred by unsightly red lumps that can only be one thing—cancer.

Soon. Within a year. The culmination of his ninth life.

The premonition ends.

Now my stomach knots from apprehension. The man is patient, waiting, expecting an answer. With great care and effort not to look at Oberon, I ask him his name.

"It's Neal," he says in a voice gentler than I would never have thought him capable when he entered my parlor.

Offering him my briefest smile, I wish, not for the first time, that things didn't have to end like this. That explaining the future to someone was as easy as explaining the past. For all the things I'm able to tell people, bad news isn't one of them.

"I'm sorry, Neal," I say, "but that's all I see. As I've told you, the past is my specialty, and that was all there is. Oberon's just tired. He's had a long life. Lives."

"I see," Neal says, his voice still subdued. He looks down at Oberon—Oberon, who gave his life for his owner in that fire—as though seeing him for the first time. Gently, he places a hand behind the cat's ear, the one soon to be infected, and scratches. Oberon purrs and his tail does a little jig. Neal smiles, says, "So that's what's gotten into you, huh, buddy?"

Something about the gesture squeezes the words out of me: "But if you want my advice, I'd cherish every day you two have together, however long that may be. The future is a frail thing. Impossible to predict. That's why I deal in the past, things that have already happened. Certainties." Then, before I can stop myself, I add, "And you might want to get a second opinion from another vet. Mistakes can happen."

Suzette would've looked like Neal does now, I imagine, head tilted to one side, eyes widening, mouth slightly ajar. I imagine so, anyway.

"I'll look into that," he says, giving each word ample room to breathe, to live. "Thank you. How much do I owe you again?" he asks, then opens his wallets and hands me the amount I tell him, the flat rate. He thanks me again for the advice, tells me he should get going now. I tell him that sounds wise.

Neither of us move. The air around us is different, charged with something electric and unspoken. The cuckoo clock chirps, once, twice, three times. Outside where it's sunny, a woman cups her hands together against the window and peers inside, Great Dane in tow. She's my next appointment. I don't particularly care for her, but she's a generous tipper. For that reason alone I should be rushing to start her consultation now.

But we just sit there, Neal and I. We sit and listen to the world around us: the echo of the clock ticking time away, and the woman tapping her bright-red fingernails on the windowpane, and the noise of Oberon breathing between us on the table, a reedy wheezing as fragile as the future, the sound of a life well lived.