D. D. West—Writing Sample
From Going Into It, Chapter 1, "North Ontario"
Josée takes the didgeridoo then and moves over to one side of the room, while Luc lies down on his back on an Egyptian rug that Josée’s father bought in a souq in Cairo when he was a peacekeeper. The rug is covered all over with intricate mathematical designs, and is about the right size for one person—six feet by four feet. Luc starts to pull in cushions close around him, and Marshal helps finish the job,
packing them close in all around.
Josée motions for Marshal to come over beside her, some distance away from Luc, and then she begins to play the didgeridoo. Marshal sits for several minutes, listening to the crazy sound without taking his eyes off of Luc, all the while
wondering how long it will take for Luc to go into it, and what will be the first sign he is coming up out of the trance, whether it will be fast or slow, and what will happen. Josée has told him that Luc is often a cat—sometimes nice and rubbing up against her, other times hissing and using its nails—but Marshal still doesn’t know what to expect.
Marshal thinks he sees something then. A sign of movement under the cushions. Luc seems to be stretching his arms, slowly pushing the cushions out of the way. He turns over onto his hands and knees and stretches his back up, like a cat. He walks his hands forward and arches his back down. And then he straightens back up onto all fours,
and slowly turns his head towards where Marshal and Josée are sitting. Josée turns her head toward Marshal, without taking her eyes off Luc, and says, “Careful, he might pounce.” But she has hardly finished the sentence when Luc hisses—a dark rasping sound coming out of the back of his throat and his wide-open mouth—and then Luc explodes
into motion, crossing the room as if in one bound and bowling Marshal over backwards. And Marshal can feel Luc’s nails driving into his scalp, shaking his head side to side, before Josée barrels into Luc from the side and knocks him off Marshal’s chest. Luc rolls away from the hit and out
of room they are in, disappearing through a doorway into the other side of the basement, to where Marshal knows the washer and dryer are, and Josée’s father’s workshop, and the
stairs.
Marshal says, “What do we do now?”
Josée says, “Keep your motions slow and deliberate. You don’t want to startle him. I think he might have attacked you because he didn’t know who you were. But we have to make sure he doesn’t go upstairs, doesn’t open the basement
door—if he knows how to open doors.”
Marshal looks at Josée, trying to understand where this is going—but like her, he is wary of getting too out of touch with Luc the cat. They poke their heads around the unfinished wall that divides the rug-and-cushions-and-didgeridoo
room from the laundry room and workshop. They are starting to walk past the laundry area toward the
workshop when they hear a noise behind them and realize Luc must have slipped up the stairs into the shadows towards the top. And in an instant Luc is upon them again, a hand swiping around in a wide hook, nails extended, as Marshal feels them cutting into the skin of his stomach, through his thin t-shirt. And then he is being battered by these swings, barrelled backwards again so his back hits the wall, and Josée is tackling Luc from the side again, separating him and pushing him off into the workshop.
Marshal looks at her. “What are we supposed to do? How long does go on? How does this end?” But he is not even sure he has said these things out loud, and anyway Josée has already started moving forward into the workshop and Marshal is following her. They poke their heads around the corner, and there is Luc, perched up on top of the workbench with his back to the corner, licking his arm from his forearm down to his hand—his long tongue working wetly along his skin. He does this first on one side and then on the other, apparently distracted and unaware of Marshal and Josée, who inch closer into the room, crouching down behind the workbench. Then Luc drops down off the workbench onto all-foors on the concrete floor, fluid and agile, and “walks” out of the room, his shoulders casually dropping as his limbs swing forward, like a lion pacing its cage.
Marshal and Josée follow him back out, and then suddenly Luc has spun around underneath Marshal, so Luc is on his back and pulling Marshal down onto him, his legs up in Marshal’s midriff kicking him, like cats sometimes do to kill birds, his teeth bared, hissing. And Josée is slapping Luc repeatedly in the face, shouting at him, “Luc, Luc, you’re Luc, you’re not a cat, you’re Luc.” And then suddenly Luc’s limbs go limp and Marshal collapses down on top of him and they are all panting and out of breath and Luc opens his eyes after a short time and says, “What’s going on?”
Josée says, “You went into it, and you were a cat. And you just kept attacking Marshal. Scratching, hissing. Just going
after him.”
Marshal nods, “That was pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. I didn’t know what was going on, or what was going to happen next."
Luc shakes his head. “Wow. I had no idea. I mean, I figured it might be the cat again, but I don’t know why, or what’s going on. That’s crazy.”