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West Forty-Eighth Street.
The first week of November, 2008.

Against a light, early morning drizzle in the cold, pre-dawn light, the trucks arrived.

There were four of them at first, then six, box-bodied and scuffed, painted with carting firms from Queens and the Bronx. They backed up to the stage door one at a time, beeping, while a conductor in a hard hat orchestrated the removals.

First were the cats, the ones who were too old, too young, or too greedy. They went into carriers, and the carriers were put into a van so that a shelter on Ninth could process them for health.

The biggest was the ginger, the size of a lynx, who had to be bundled into the box with the fur coat they found him in.

Then there were the biohazardous materials, moved out by workmen in full protective gear, looking like astronauts on the set of a sci-fi musical. The asbestos curtain was the primary target. It came down in sheets inside a makeshift tent, and the truck that bore it away was sealed and marked and cost more than every other removal put together, including the cats.

Then the regular crew came in, and they stripped, between them, thirty-one lines of hemp rope of three to four hundred feet each. The rigger from Delphine Richards’ people told anyone who would listen that this was history, that this was from the time of President Truman; then shook his head, because no one cared.

Later, more trucks came.
They came for the seats with good bones, which were stolen from the indigenous population of cats and sent to a warehouse to be reupholstered and re-sprung. The re-springer asked Dr Cooper, who was on-site with a clipboard, if he was sure about not using horsehair, and Cooper made the man put foam and mohair velvet in dark maroon down in writing.

In the weekdays that followed, the carpet people came and exposed the century-old wooden floor beneath.

Then the electricians and the plumbers came, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and decided that neither ancient wiring nor Neolithic plumbing could be made up to code as-is.

Cooper had the budget, and he chose replacement over kicking the can down the road. It was, he would later tell Eppie, the first time he could make that call in all his years as a Theatre Director, and it was… cathartic.

And while all of this was happening, a separate crew, confused but well-paid, worked on the smaller building next door, one that was already empty.

“What the hell are we furnishing?!” a workman asked as the waterproofing went in. They were building the strangest thing. On the ground floor, they had installed new drains, steel shelving, multiple commercial-tier sinks, a room for perspex-framed cages, a room that could be made sterile…

Then on the second level, another crew was building a café.

“Foreman says the owner’s putting the cats back.”

“The ones that went out last week?”

“I guess?”

“It’s a shelter,” said the foreman, a hearty Italian fellow, who had read the drawings. “Shelter on the ground. Second floor says there’ll be a café.”

“A café?” asked a second accent.

“For cats?” said an Irish one.

“So it’s like a zoo,” said the Latino one.

They thought about it.

“Who knows? That’ll never pass,” said the foreman. “Health department. Food and animals. Never in this city.”

“I hear they have them in Japan,” an Asian accent said.

“What, kitty zoos?”

“No, no, you go into the café, and you pet the cats.”

“Like a cat petting zoo?” the Irish one laughed. “That’s crazy! Who would pay for that? Street cat not good enough?”

“Apparently, the owner’s sixteen,” said an accent from New Jersey. “She’s the Bully Boy girl, you know the one?”

“That’s loco, mang,” the Latino accent stopped the plastering. “I LOVE that song!”

“Alright, enough,” the foreman waved them into silence. “They paid a deposit, and they’re paying well. Do your jobs.”

Outside, on the scaffold at the front of the house, two men were dismounting the old marquee frame bolt by bolt; somebody had a radio going, and the radio said that Senator McCain had won the presidency of the United States with two hundred and ninety-one electoral votes.

Not that it mattered to the workers who had steady jobs for months, and certainly not to the cats of West Forty-Eighth Street.

Broadway was experiencing the worst season the street had seen since nineteen seventy-four. The other houses on the block had stage crews standing in their doorways watching the trucks go by with the particular expression of people who were wondering if there was a job next door, considering what they were fitting out.

Truck after truck after truck, the thought grew in their heads.

Loyalty was good and all, but they too had to put food on tables and pay their rents.

West Forty-Eighth Street.
Friday, 7 November 2008.

Susanna Tyker came in through the stage door at half past eight in the morning, in a coat that had seen two decades on three continents, with the folio under her arm, and Eppie, who had been sitting on an upturned paint bucket at the loading dock for forty minutes, waved like a girlish Huckleberry Finn.

The overalls did not help the optics.

“Hello, Fontaine,” said Tyker. “Watch the coat!”

Eppie refrained from hugging the production manager.

She grinned instead at the lady who had put her on Budget and Logistics when she was fifteen and had told a room full of Seniors to listen to her, and Susanna had come, despite everything, to see what her former student was about.

Tyker patted her twice on the head, the way a genteel lady patted a street cat she was fond of, and said, “All right. All right. Theatre first. Then the play.”

“Plays,” Eppie grinned with teeth.

Tyker’s lips pulled to one side.

At the foreman’s urging, they put on hard hats, and Tyker was made to relent on her heels for spare workmen’s boots.

They walked the house together with her old mentor’s famous folio. Tyker said nothing for the first twenty minutes. She touched the plaster. She stood in the trap room and looked up. She went into the attic, where the smell still had corners, and came down again, and wrote something in the folio.

“As difficult as it might be for me to believe,” she said, in the empty stalls, while all around them there was still the noise of construction. “You have a theatre. A good one.”

“Is that a yes?” Eppie cockily cocked her head in a way that was clearly cocky.

“It’s a theatre, Fontaine. It has a stage and a house and a roof. It’s just money, and you have money.” She closed the folio. “Now, the plays.”

Eppie took Tyker to her temporary office next door, in a place that looked like a veterinary office with a café.

Without the cute furnishings done, with only the stainless steel tubs and tables, and the white tiles below, it looked like a serial killer’s clean room.

Tyker stayed close to the exit until Eppie pulled her into the third level, where something resembling an office was taking shape.

Her old producer read Saint Gospel Street, then wiped away a tear.
Then she read Pygmalion, the original, and gave Eppie the strangest look.
Then she read the twenty-page summary titled On Two, about a cross-class ballroom romance.

+ Karmic Causality
+ Karmic Causality

Two hours later, she held Eppie’s hand, squeezed her fingers to make sure that they were real, and said yes.

Lim came on the Monday.

He came from Kennedy on the train, arriving at the stage door of West Forty-Eighth Street with one suitcase, one backpack, and doubt.

Doubt that he didn’t know would soon be dispelled. He had left Omnia the week before. The internship had only lasted a few months, and it would have set him up to work elsewhere. He had sought advice from his father, and Wang Sifu had told his son that they owed the girl, and that she was a wee-little-thing living by herself in NYC, and that their family was indirectly responsible for that fact. He had a final meeting with Chen-ye as well, who told him to look after Eppie, and asked him if he needed money.

Lim declined.

His father had already paid for a fourth-floor walk-up over a laundromat, within walking distance of his workplace—the new Stray Cat Society. They would be sending money monthly as well, to supplement his income. After all, Wang Sifu’s clinic no longer had rent.

“Hi, kitty cat,” he spoke into her hair, because she was already hugging him. Her shampoo smelled like fresh fruit.

“Yo.”

“You’re taller,” he lied.

“I am standing on your shoes, you flatterer.”

The girl pulled back, and once more, more so than when she was a student, he was stricken by just how perfect she looked. It was an uncanny thing. No one without effort or make-up should look this good, have eyes that large, and skin that clear.

Instead of small talk, she showed him the annex. The drain, the shelving, the cages in their flat packs.

The setup, to Lim, was like a dream. It was as if the Stray Cat Society had infinite money, and brand new equipment, and a ventilation and plumbing system dedicated to the care of dozens of cats.

“Are there a lot of lovelies?” he asked.

“There are. They’re with another shelter for now, but it’s not sustainable. Will you take care of them?”

“With all my heart.” Lim licked his lips. “Am I alone?”

“Two more staff, vet on call two blocks away,” Eppie said, smiling. “You’re the Head of the shelter, the bookkeeper, the night man, the café manager, and our theatre-agent for cat-based merchandise.”

Lim felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders like twin boulders. He touched his hand to the new shelving, and the sink, and the one window that gave onto the street with stainless steel mesh.

“Café?” he looked at her.

“Intake on the ground floor,” Eppie said. “Quarantine at the back, by the drain. Adoptions in the window, so people see them from the street. Come to the second floor.”

“What’s on the second floor?”

“You’ll see.”

They came to the narrow stairs.

Then, not looking at her, he asked the question on his lips for the last twelve hours. “How is she? Is she coming?”

Eppie knew who he meant.

“She’s in Reedley,” Eppie said. “With the baby, and her family, for now.”

Then Eppie paused at the bottom of the stairs.

“Father Parson says Mio’s coming after New Year’s. They’re making the preparations. Go on up.”

Something inside Lim unclenched, and he felt his eyes grow warm.

The second level smelled of sawdust and fresh paint. At the top, Lim stopped so suddenly that Eppie walked into his back.

The second floor was half a café. Pastel shelves climbed the walls in staggered steps, each one wrapped in wool the colour of oatmeal, and they ran the whole room like a Ninja Warrior obstacle course, so that the aspiring feline acrobat could move without touching the floor. The walls had been washed a warm cream and stencilled with small paw prints, with spaces left for portraiture for Cat of the Week and Best Puss. Across the front window hung a lattice of unfinished perches, so that one day a row of cats could sit above Forty-Eighth Street and look down on it, while onlookers pointed upwards and melted from cuteness.

The floor was honey-gold and looked like oak. Lim crouched and knocked on it.

“Tile,” he said. “With drains.” Never in his life had he appreciated tile so much.

Along the back wall, behind panels of frosted glass, were nooks where a cat could disappear and be left alone. Below them sat a row of cubbies with doors, each one hiding a litter box. Overhead, silver ducting ran the full length of the ceiling like a ship’s engine room, powdered and painted in a pastel that made them nearly invisible.

In the corner was a small counter with room for one person, one coffee machine and a glass case, empty, that looked like it could hold doughnuts and other pastries.

“One staff for the coffee,” Lim said, counting. “Two for the clients?”

“A maximum of one client per two square metres,” Eppie said. “I’d say ten… And they would all have to sign waivers.”

“I’m going to live here,” Lim said, already imagining the floors filled with cats of all shapes and sizes.

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible…” Eppie interrupted him, then pointed at the next set of stairs leading upwards. Watching the girl, Lim decided that he preferred Eppie with long hair, because she looked more like a cat while wearing a ponytail. “On account that I’ll be living up there… discreetly.”

Her father rang on Wednesday, from midtown at the Belmont Building, when she was on break.

“HEY!” he said. “Wanna be a Sony Artist?”

“No?” Eppie answered. “Is this about the Delphine thing?”

“Guess I tried.” Her father paused to drink something. It was uncanny how she could hear the man grinning.

“You want to try harder…?”

“Naw, too much bother,” Curon laughed. “I am calling for another reason. You said you’ll find a singer for Rising Sun?”

“Ah…” Eppie realised this was what the drama was all about. “Any ideas?”

“Trent and I just spent the better part of two weeks going over our catalogues; we hit close—but nothing to the standard of Delphine Richards. You happen to know one?”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Eppie promised. Her faith wasn’t in her own connections but in the serendipity of the [System]. After a year and a half, it hadn’t left her hanging yet.

“Tell Cooper there’ll be a crew coming in next week with your sound. It’s off a Verner show on Forty-Fourth that’s posting its closing notice—so naturally I swooped in like a vulture.”

Eppie snorted. The visual of Curon with his big nose as a vulture was too funny.

“Yep. The producers owned their rig outright, and they’re selling everything to pay the creditors, so I got to it before anyone else did. Forty cents on the dollar. You’re getting a Cadac, forty-eight channels, a desk built for Broadway. The Meyer boxes off the proscenium, both sides, and the little ones under the balcony. Crown amps, best in the business. Forty channels of Sennheiser radio mics, and a box of DPAs, the hair clip model. A new MacBook loaded with QLab for the playback. Everything’s proven. It just has to be put back together. And if you want, I can get you the sound crew as well. Two of them. They were out of a job on Friday.”

Eppie, who had [Memorisation] holding every word of it, said, “How long does this all last?”

Curon hummed.

“The desk, twenty-five years. The boxes, twenty. The amps, until the fuse goes. The wireless, until the cows come home. The cable, forever. The mics, consumables.” She heard him sit back. “The value? Priceless.”

“I’ll take the crew as well.” She exhaled. “Thanks, Dad. How can I make it up to you?”

“You know how…” Curon’s reply was loaded.

Eppie sighed. “Top 10?”

“What?” Curon snorted. “Is a No.1 too much for dear old dad?”