When you’re away, the cat howls at the ceiling like a wolf. Hours and hours he’ll go on like that. I don’t know how to make him stop.

“Jack,” I’ll say. “Jack Jack.” I’ll check the food and the water. I’ll pet his glorious dark ruff, pull the tail that looks like a duster until he chirps and glares at me with gold-piece eyes. I’ll sleep in the space you usually sleep and turn off the light at the same time we do every night. But he is not so easily fooled. The other kitty, the dopey one we say loves me, is purring devotionals at my feet, all warmth and fuzz. “Jack,” I say, “Jack Jack.”

This is how we speak to them: purely in names. But I don’t know if he even hears me; he has buried himself in a pile of your clothes in the next room. He is wearing your underwear and has barricaded the door. He’s smoking your stash and fucking up your recycling; I hear the paper bin crash. All of the neighbors will know you are gone tonight.

Howl! Howl, howl!

We’d both agreed, before going to the creepy wood-paneled house with six cat cages, twenty humans, three dogs and four kittens in the living room that we would only take a cat home if it was the perfect second cat. I was pushing for an elderly, marmalade-colored female.

“So . . . what do you think?” I asked an hour and ten cats later. I was holding a five-month-old scrawny male, with grey spots and a siamese nose. He’d been one of the first cats we’d picked up, and drooped into our arms obligingly, falling asleep within minutes. We’d wondered aloud if he’d been drugged.

Jurvis gave me his overwhelmed, “I can’t make decisions right now, please, please don’t make me” face.

We were just sitting around the living room, staring into computer screens and absently eating from aluminum take-out boxes — in short: minding our own business — when the cat brushed his tail into a candle and promptly burst into flames.

“Jack’s on fire!” Jurvis shouted.

I sat on the couch, a forkful of drunken noodles frozen in front of my mouth, watching as our blazing kitty ran towards the windows. We’re always yelling at him when he jumps on the table, and he knows that the windows, with their long gauze curtains, are a proper sanctuary. He’s allowed in the windowsills.

Well, now the curtains are on fire, I thought. The flames are crawling upwards and licking the ceiling. The entire apartment is burning down, and you haven’t even registered it yet. What will you save? Laptop? Camera? Striped socks? What will it be like to lose everything? To escape tragedy? Will you need the emergency ladder, stashed under the bed? Do you even know exactly where that is?

“I got him,” Jurvis was saying, face smooshed against the windowsill with the cat smothered in his arms. Jack — never one to be tackled, patted down, or generally prohibited from movement — mewed plaintively in his grasp, and the entire room reeked of smoke and scorched fur.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey, uh, good.”

But part of me still thought I was standing outside right then, covered in charcoal smudges and gazing upwards.

omg.

In case you were wondering whether or not Jurvis and I still have a kitten: yes. Yes we do. Or rather, we have a massive wild lynx that eats, behaves and snuggles like a kitten, and we’re assuming it’s the same creature we brought into our home two months ago.

Jack goes on a tear every night between eleven and one in the morning, playing parkour with the furniture and curtains. His favorite thing to do is “the running slide”: this mostly occurs on the wood floors between rugs, but has also been known to happen on the coffee table (he gets a head start from the kitchen) — resulting in laptops, beverages, papers exploding in all directions. His pet peeve is objects resting on surfaces, and also, his own tail. He will chase it for much longer than is generally considered dignified, mewing like a banshee. Our lower neighbor’s pet peeve is all of the above habits: almost every night our floor thunders with his pounding.

I’ve never met him, but twice I’ve dreamed of going downstairs and knocking on his door to apologize.