“You’ll have to forgive me, but I’ve got to hang up. Have to be getting back to work. Don’t forget about the cat, now.”

And the telephone cuts off.

I sit there looking dumbly at the receiver a second before setting it down.

Now why would my wife know so much about the passage? I can’t figure it out. She’d have to climb over a high cinder-block wall to get there from our yard, and what possible reason was there to go to all that trouble to begin with?

I go to the kitchen for that drink of water, turn on the FM radio, and trim my nails. They’re doing a feature on Robert Plant’s new album. I listen to two songs before my ears start to hurt and I switch the thing off. I go out to the porch to check the cat’s food dish; the dried fish I put in the previous night hasn’t been touched. Guess the cat really hasn’t come back.

Standing there on the porch, I look at the bright spring sun slicing down into our tiny yard. Hardly the sort of yard that lingers fondly in the mind. The sun hits here only the briefest part of the day, so the soil is always dark and damp. Not much growing: just a couple of unremarkable hydrangeas. And I’m not terribly crazy about hydrangeas in the first place.

From a nearby stand of trees comes the periodic scree-ee-eech of a bird, sharp as a tightening spring. The “wind-up bird,” we call it. My wife’s name for it. I have no idea what it’s really called. Nor even what it looks like. Nonetheless, this wind-up bird is there every morning in the trees of the neighborhood to wind things up. Us, our quiet little world, everything.

As I listen to the wind-up bird, I’m thinking, Why on earth is it up to me to go searching after that cat? And more to the point, even if I do chance to find it, what am I supposed to do then? Drag the cat home and lecture it? Plead with it—Listen, you’ve had everyone worried sick, so why don’t you come home?

Great, I think. Just great. What’s wrong with letting a cat go where it wants to go and do what it wants to do? Here I am, thirty years old, and what am I doing? Washing clothes, planning dinner menus, chasing after cats.

Not so long ago, I’m thinking, I was your regular sort of guy. Fired up with ambition. In high school, I read Clarence Darrow’s autobiography and decided to become a lawyer. My grades weren’t bad. And in my senior year I was voted by my classmates runner-up “Most Likely to Succeed.” I even got accepted into the law department of a comparatively reputable university. So where had I screwed up?

I plant my elbows on the kitchen table, prop up my chin, and think: When the hell did the compass needle get out of whack and lead my life astray? It’s more than I can figure. There’s nothing I can really put my finger on. No setbacks from student politics, no disillusionment with university, never really had much girl trouble. As near as I can tell, I’ve had a perfectly normal existence. Yet one day, when it came time for me to be graduating, I suddenly realized I wasn’t the same guy I used to be.