Genni Gunn’s fourteen published books include novels: The Cipher (Sept, 2024); Solitaria, (long-listed for the Giller Prize) Tracing Iris, (made into the film The Riverbank); and Thrice Upon a Time, (finalist for the Commonwealth Prize); three story collections, Permanent Tourists, (finalist for the ReLit Prize); On the Road and Hungers; three poetry collections, Accidents (finalist for the SCWES Book Prize, and the DiCicco Poetry Prize), Mating in Captivity, (finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award); and Faceless; a collection of travel essays, Tracks: Journeys in Time and Place; and three collections of poetry in translation from Italian. She lives in Vancouver. Find her on Facebook, LinkedIn or her website.
THE CAT'S FUGUE
After a year of illness, Evie’s twenty-one-year-old cat Max dies. Evie glimpses him beside her on the couch, hears his soft pads on the hardwood floors, catches the end of his white tail as it disappears into the bedroom. He is a shadow, a missing link, a melancholy sound in the night, grief. He is everywhere.
Every day now, Evie turns on her computer and watches animal rescue videos, as if by the act of witnessing, she too can be part of the saving: litters of bunnies found shivering in a covered hot tub, foxes with heads stuck inside bottles, starving dogs chained in abandoned basements, koalas and sloths crossing busy highways, kittens abandoned in a barrel of rainwater. The kittens are often drenched or covered in oil, eyes glued shut by mange, tails spindly and soiled. They’re mostly terrified rather than thrilled at being rescued, clawing and hissing at their saviours. Oh how she wishes she were a kitten hissing and clawing her way out of life's predicaments, especially those she cannot control.
Soon after Max’s death, Evie’s sister, Dilla, disappears in the middle of the night, taking her eight cats and whatever else she can fit inside her SUV. Evie knows this because in the morning, she finds the note Dilla slid through the mail slot. We are sworn to secrecy, it says. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you where I’m going, or I will be dammed. Beware. The end is coming.
Evie imagines the cats mewling on the night drive, trembling and frightened inside their cages.
By morning, sixteen houses on her street are also vacant, their front lawns strewn with discarded toys, plastic bags, old tires. One family even leaves behind an old trailer, as if they were in such a hurry, they couldn’t be bothered to fill it and hook it up to their car.
Evie stands outside, frowning, and stares at the abandoned houses in their cul-de-sac. She followed Dilla to this suburb two years before, struck by the closeknit community—as if a large family had moved here and taken residence together. Dilla is five years younger than Evie, and despite being thirty-one, has not yet settled into her own life. Rather, she maintains a pattern of serial attachments to fringe movements that span health, religion and politics. For example, during Covid, she bought “spiritual vaccines” from Happy Science; spent $900 on “foot reading” to diagnose nonexistent problems; followed various sci-fi cults like Raëlism and The Cosmic People of Light Powers, who claim humans were created by aliens (and once, for a few months, The House of Yahweh, for whom Satan is a woman who appoints all political and religious leaders). It’s as if Dilla were seeking an alternative identity. Meanwhile, she held down menial jobs, was disinterested in furthering her education, and used Evie as an ATM machine. Evie enabled this because after their parents’ early deaths in a car crash, she had become Dilla’s legal guardian, and she now has a vague sense that she is responsible for Dilla’s ridiculous ventures.
For the past year, Dilla has been attending meetings she described as “sessions” at the house of Reverend Audrey, a woman she idolizes. God speaks to her, Dilla said. Evie, who is skeptical of people claiming god speaks to them, tried to understand who or what this woman was. She’s marvellous, Dilla would say. I would do anything for her. If only you’d come and see for yourself.
“Reverend” Audrey lived down the street from Evie, in a now-abandoned house. Evie first met her when she bought her own home in the neighborhood, exchanging a few words on the sidewalk. All this preceded Dilla’s obsession. Or so Evie thought. She sighs. She should have suspected something, especially when Audrey said odd things that Evie couldn’t understand or make sense of. For example, Audrey believed cats carried people’s souls to heaven. “I have a clutter of cats,” she told Evie, laughing. “Twelve of them.” This was Cat Lady territory, though Audrey was not any type of Cat Lady. Instead, she was a tall, beautiful woman with dark, wavy hair that flowed to her waist. She was always immaculately dressed, drove an expensive SUV and had a gardener. Evie imagined she might have a cat nanny.
Before Max’s death, before Dilla’s disappearance, one day, while Evie was in the middle of practicing Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude,” the doorbell rang.
“I heard you play,” Audrey said without niceties, “and I wonder if you’d be interested in playing for a private function.”
“I play for my own enjoyment,” Evie said.
Audrey smiled. “This would be a neighbourly thing,” she said, “between us, though, of course, we’d pay for your time.”
Evie had hesitated. “What kind of repertoire would you expect?” she asked. During Dilla’s last obsession—a foray into wellness comprising week-long cleansings at secluded locations, vaginal steaming, vampire repellent spraying, and injecting expensive mud until it was discovered to be poisonous—Evie had played weddings, private functions, funerals. These gigs entailed her replicating familiar tunes to an unresponsive audience. When she realized she was background noise, she stopped accepting those gigs, and now only did ones where she could play classical pieces.
“Exactly what you were playing,” Audrey said, smiling again. “Beautiful classical music I could hear from your open windows.”
Two weeks later, Evie had gone to the address Audrey provided and found thirty to forty people—Dilla included—seated on grey, metal chairs facing a raised platform where a clowder of cats circled, tails up, or lay in fluffy cat beds, licking their glossy coats, or sat, staring adoringly at Audrey, who stood in their midst at a podium, bible in hand.
“God has sent us a musician,” Audrey said, as if this hadn’t been prearranged. “Listen to his message in the music and you will be saved.”
The congregation turned to look at Evie, who was already regretting her decision to come. They nodded and smiled, urging her to the front of the room, where a grand piano awaited. Evie followed their lead while Audrey continued to speak, vaulting from topic to topic, vocalizing nonsensical warnings about cataclysmic events, quoting non-sequitur bible passages without apparent narrative or design. One of the cats jumped off the platform and onto the piano stool beside Evie. Although she had come ready to play the Chopin number, the cats and Audrey’s unsettling ramble reminded her of a piece by Bohuslav Martinů, “Procession of the Cats on Solstice Night,” a kind of witches’ encounter. The piece was just under two minutes long. Yet, as if summoned, slowly, some of the cats rose out of their beds and approached her. She repeated the piece, and soon, people began to move into the aisles, dancing, yelling, singing. Some fell to the ground, making moaning sounds. Evie squirmed when she saw Dilla writhing like a snake on the linoleum floor. What could possibly be driving her? She had failed her, she thought, or maybe the music was causing the madness. She switched to the Chopin, to no avail. Audrey’s words became guttural sounds, which Evie thought must be what they called speaking in tongues—though what tongues, exactly, was a mystery.
Perhaps that’s the point, she thinks now: to encourage a congregation to invent language no one understands, so there can be no questioning its divine origin. “Glossolalia,” she says out loud, blablablablablablablabl, rolling her tongue against lips without celestial intervention.
Dilla’s attachment to Reverend Audrey is not only her latest obsession, but one that, right now, rings alarm bells. What kind of religious movement would require followers to enact a crusade in the middle of the night, leaving their families no forwarding address?
Evie walks up and down the street, picking up some of the scattered garbage. She has the sense of an apocalypse, the getaway from zombies in a horror movie.
The thing is, there are no zombies. There’s nothing chasing anyone out of town.
Evie is chummy with some of the families on this block, and their baffling flight unnerves her. Do they know something she doesn’t know?
She steps back inside, turns on her laptop and searches cats, rescues and desertion. Clicks on a link about a wealthy widow living In Rome with her cat Luca—a black stray she’d rescued from the streets. She was devoted to this cat, as if he were a son (tears well in Evie’s eyes), and spoiled him with soft downy beds, imaginative toys, freshly cooked meals of chicken, salmon and tuna, even once with caviar. She had no children, and as she grew older, she began to fear she would die and Luca would be abandoned to the streets. She hired a nurse who became not only her companion, but the cat’s as well. The nurse played with Luca, cooked his meals, coaxed him into a harness and walked him in the park. She crocheted him two little wool coats—one blue, one green—sewed him a yellow raincoat and bought him rubber booties in case of snow. In the summer, she wet Luca’s paws to keep him cool and changed his water often. The widow, becoming more frail, elicited a promise from the nurse to always look after Luca.
The widow died at the age of 96, and much to the nurse’s astonishment, bequeathed her $15 million estate to her and Luca, as long as she would love and care for him until his death. And so Luca was twice abandoned, twice rescued. The nurse claimed she’d had no idea her employer was so wealthy. Evie has a hard time believing the nurse was not aware of the widow’s wealth. However, she thinks, as long as the cat is cared for, the nurse deserves the fortune.
Evie slams shut her laptop to curb the urge to watch animal rescue videos. She needs a sister rescue video. Before their parents died, Dilla was a normal preteen who spent her leisure hours lying in bed, texting friends. She streamed movies, played flute in the school band, read books and got good grades. Evie had been free to date, fall in love, go on school outings, deceive her parents, have sex, try marijuana, and sneak out of her bedroom window at night. She had also managed good grades.
All this came crashing to an end when Evie and Dilla found themselves grief-stricken and alone. A social worker suggested Dilla be placed in a foster home, but Evie fought this in court. She was eighteen, and if the teenage protagonist of A Heartbreaking Book of Staggering Genius could take guardianship of his brother, she could become Dilla’s guardian. Overnight, her happy-go-lucky days ended. She was surprised by her own fierce mothering. Their parents had left a sizeable estate (though only a fraction of the wealthy widow’s) so Evie devoted herself to protecting Dilla, guiding her through the difficult adolescent years. When Dilla rebelled against Evie’s rules, Evie would say, I love you. I want you to be safe.
You’re suffocating me with love, Dilla would answer. Evie worried that this was true, but she was terrified that something could harm Dilla. The world was full of drunk drivers, kidnappers, drug dealers, sex offenders, murderers, thieves, con artists, and unimaginable perils.
When Dilla finally moved out into her own rented apartment, Evie bought a piano and called Miss Beatrice, her old piano teacher. She had taken lessons from Miss Beatrice throughout her childhood and teens, but had given it all up when their parents died. She finally felt free to resume her love affair with music. As well, Evie went to the local animal shelter and rescued Max, a scrawny two-year-old with one ear partly bitten off. Nineteen years they’ve spent together. He is one of the great loves of her life.
Perhaps it’s my fault Dilla has vanished, she thinks now. She has overprotected her instead of teaching her to thrive and survive. Fed her when she should have taught her to fish. Even in adulthood, Evie has continued to monitor Dilla’s life, as if they’ve been in a perpetual chase. She sits at the piano and plays Aaron Copeland’s “The Cat and the Mouse,” her feline fingers glissading from treble to bass and back in a chase, hope, a play on the edge.
Often, when Max was still alive and healthy, Evie would awaken in the early morning to the sounds of his tiptoes across the piano keyboard, as if he were composing a tune to rouse her from sleep. These wanderings—these paws across the notes—were intriguing. Last month, she was so struck by his tune that she wrote down Max’s melody and used it to compose a fugue. The cat’s composition was somewhat atonal, with several notes in B-flat major. She imagined Max’s black paws stepping up on the thin black keys, as if he knew music theory. She composed an answer to his runaway tune in A-flat major, her own fingers mimicking his walk across the keyboard, only a bar behind, chasing his melody with hers.
During Max’s long illness, Evie had researched classical music that might soothe him. Composers obviously had also loved cats and dedicated compositions to them. Her favourite is Scarlatti’s “Keyboard Sonata in G minor,” also known as “The Cat’s Fugue.” Much to her delight, Max’s morning compositions were oddly similar to Scarlatti’s central motif. She wondered how many cats prancing across her piano could eventually reproduce “The Cat’s Fugue” as a million monkeys typing for a thousand years might reproduce a Shakespeare play. In music, a fugue introduced a melody, repeated and developed by interweaving the voices; in psychiatry, a fugue was a flight from one’s life, a loss of identity—that period when one forgets one’s life and starts a new one, then recovers, but forgets that new life. Compulsory amnesia, Evie thought.
She streamed Per-Olov Kindgren’s “Pueblo de los Gatos,” a classical guitar piece that had Max snoring through it all, completely uninterested in the village of the cats, happier as the king of her house.
On YouTube, she found Rossini’s “Humorous Duet for Two Cats,” thinking Max would love the meowing sopranos. Instead he screeched and ran into the bathroom, the furthest room from the speakers.
She had read that Debussy adored cats, so she downloaded the score and played his “Clair de Lune” for Max, who looked at her mournfully, then licked his hind quarters.
She had almost given up this idea of soothing classical music for Max, until she played Alvin Curran’s composition “Light Flowers Dark Flowers.” The first minute featured the loud purring of a cat. Max rolled over in front of the speaker, in absolute ecstasy.
None of this kept him from dying.
She gets up and wanders through the house, trying to recall warning signs. What did she miss? Perhaps Dilla was not visiting as often as she used to, but Evie had been busy with Max. She tries to pinpoint anything strange that Dilla said, but most of what Dilla said and did this past year was strange: suddenly adopting eight cats, talking about cat souls, declaring that Reverend Audrey was Jesus’ sister… These were not warning signs, they were alarms Evie had missed or dismissed.
She uses her spare key to enter Dilla’s furnished basement suite, which mirrors the chaos left on lawns and driveways along the street. In the kitchen sink and drying rack, plates and cups and glasses are balanced haphazardly; scattered across the dining room table are placemats, cutlery, bowls, and boxes of cereal. Dilla’s laptop is gone, though her printer remains, and on the floor, an assortment of clothing, jewelry, cleaning supplies, paper and tissues forms a Hansel-and-Gretel dropping of clues. Evie picks up each item—a life discarded—but none reveals where Dilla has gone. It’s hard to know whether Dilla’s flight is a result of impulse or coercion. She’s rash, yes, but also timid and easily influenced. She did run away once when she was fourteen—boarded a bus to the next town, then returned a few hours later. Evie didn’t even know she was gone.
She locks up and walks back up the street, staring at the empty homes, feeling as if she’s wandered onto a dystopian film set. In front of Audrey’s house, she pauses, wondering if someone should call the Reverend’s estranged ex-husband, who (Evie’s heard) still pays the mortgage. Perhaps he has some idea where Dilla has gone. Estranged, she thinks.
Audrey’s house is undisturbed. Is it her imagination or has it always looked so sinister? The Thuja Green Giants lean in, shading its windows, grazing its roof; grass and dandelions spurt from cracks in the driveway and between paving stones. Evie starts up the eerie path, where delphiniums, hollyhock, foxglove, Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers rise at either side, creating a blooming security perimeter. Above the door, the eye of a surveillance camera stares back at her. She wonders if Audrey is watching her right now on her phone.
“What have you done to my sister?” she says to the camera.
Back home, she sits at her computer and searches Audrey Baker, who comes up in various posts as the leader of four different “spiritual movements” readying for the end of the world—Heaven Be, Freedom Glory, Golden Scripture and Bodhi Love. Doomsday cults, each situated in a different state as if the end of the world were a destination. Evie marks each on a map, looking for a pattern, but there is none. Several posts warn that Audrey Baker is a scammer peddling fear to the gullible.
Next, she researches cults and reads through nightmarish scenarios, from Heaven’s Gate who believed God was an alien, to Shinrikyo whose members paid money to drink his blood, to the Branch Davidians who practiced polygamy and married girls as young as ten, to the People’s Temple in Jonestown. All of them resulted in multiple deaths. Surely Dilla would never blindly drink poisoned Kool-Aid, or follow anyone off the end of a cliff. But the thought disquieted her. Dilla was fully committed to her various obsessions, a positive trait in different circumstances. It was as if Dilla were on a perpetual quest, testing new lives, then discarding these disguises and moving on to the next. She always comes back, Evie thinks. I’m the default. But what if she isn’t?
In the first year that she had Max, he wandered away four times, leaving her frantically calling animal shelters and veterinarian hospitals. Each time, however, Max returned on his own, a day or two later, often wounded, exhausted, hungry. She never scolded him, but rather gathered him in, nursed his cuts, fed him, and loved him unconditionally.
On one of the occasions when Dilla returned from a failed love affair with a musician, she called Evie “a spinster who knows nothing about love.” But Dilla was wrong. Evie had had a number of secret lovers and once had fallen in love, but been unwilling to commit herself to someone while she felt totally responsible for Dilla.
I’m only thirty-six, she thinks now. Perhaps, with Dilla gone, she could move on, have a different life.
Later, Evie calls the police but feels foolish when she has to admit that Dilla is thirty-one and has left a note.
“She’s an adult,” the policeman says, his voice bored. “And apparently not missing, but voluntarily gone.”
“You don’t understand,” Evie says. Why didn’t she take Dilla’s attachment to Audrey seriously? Research her church or whatever it was? “What about all the people from these houses? They’re all gone,” she says to the policeman, who sighs.
“No law against moving,” he says.
“But don’t you think it’s strange that an entire street empties out overnight?”
He sighs again. “Don’t you watch the news?” he says. “Stranger things than this are going on all the time.” Then his voice softens. “Wait a while. Your sister will call.”
She hangs up, discouraged. She’ll declare Dilla missing in a week or two, and perhaps the police will track Dilla’s cell.
In late afternoon, she goes back out and wanders up and down the street. The quiet is eerie, unnatural. It reminds her of a rescue video that showed a ghost gated community of once-luxurious, deserted houses and yards that stray cats had claimed, and defended as their own. The rescuers stood outside the wrought iron gates, their traps in hand, watching the feral cats hiss and growl. Evie wanders in and out of the deserted yards, swing sets and kiddie pools; looks in windows at the half-eaten dinners, the empty bookshelves. How long will it take, she wonders, for feral cats to move into this cul-de-sac?
She picks up the note once again. The end is coming. She imagines Dilla writhing on a floor somewhere, offering herself up like a sacrifice to an alternate god. A longing spreads in her chest. She thinks of Max, the heartbreak when he stopped eating and drinking. She held him in her arms and tempted him with morsels of his favourite foods; squeezed a dropper of water into his mouth. None of it helped. Max stared up at her, his mournful eyes opening and closing, his paws stroking her face. The end is coming. No, she thinks, the end is always here. Abiding. Timeless. Mother, father, lovers, Max, Dilla, dreams, youth. She places the note in the sink and strikes a match. Flames rise briefly, dwindle to ash, rise again. She sits at the piano and begins Liszt’s “Liebestraum No. 3,” a melancholy piece about love that extends beyond death, her body leaning into the forlorn melody, the fluid arpeggios that rise like dreams.