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  • Cat Man’s Caravan
  • Sean Turner McLeod (bio)

On a sunny day, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt is an ant-farm flipped on its side.

Like all the Champs-Elysees’ limbs, it’s never empty and never quiet, even in the breaths it takes when the harried lunchborne businessmen have returned to their offices—and later some—and later still others—to their wives—and the criss-cross joyous chants and challenges of the drunken dawn-time exodus is yet to begin, there is still noise: heavy-handed drivers who would sooner steer into the Seine than release their horns joining together in a strange, self-perpetuating chorus, like the yowling dogs who wake one another up and—in doing so—guarantee themselves a sleepless night.

With all this, passing through — as most are, on what won’t register to a tourist as more than a byway between one sight and another — it’s easy to hear this as one noise, with no parts beyond its whole and no details lost beneath.

But there are other notes, which seem disembodied and random when heard once: a hoarse, animal cry, for instance, in isolation—with everything else—might be road-rage escalating—a driver who can no longer find his horn or finds it wanting—or even a pained screech—a mover whose colleague dropped a cabinet on his toes, tired of suffering in silence—but when the same cry echoes every day, all day—once a minute all afternoon or only three times some whole evenings—it finds a body: one man shambling about the complex, ornate streets, worrying his arms and wearing out the trainers he’s worn since he woke up one day and they were there, and screaming, wondering why no one hears him.

Or the girl who clutches her shoulders and elbows like nooks on a cliff-face, who mutters and spits and can’t be older than twenty, whose stained joggers and brown-washed teeth only announce themselves the fourth or fifth day you pass her—the first time you notice her—who screams putain! and stalks down an alley you didn’t see was there but she jumps to by instinct whenever she is—eventually—noticed.

And passing by, that putain! might even be the response to the angry cry you heard: a chance to reflect on how a big city can agitate and scrape your nerves to the surface, and how—even though your little town may seem humble: no Eiffel progeny or triumphant arcs, you’ll sure appreciate the calm when you get back, the settling feeling of knowing every face—you’re sure people can’t know faces in a place like this: just patterns in a crowd, and probably you’re right: you won’t stay to find out—going away really makes you appreciate the things you take for granted back home. Good for you.

Bye.

Then there’s the Cat Man, who has made a caravan of himself.

Unlike other residents of the street he has no fixed pitch, because he doesn’t beg. He does accept donations—mostly food—but he would certainly never ask. Instead he moves his life up and down the avenue, staking out each bench for as long as he can before the police inform him they will soon have to move him on, and he finds a new spot, allowing them all a few more days not to worry about one another. [End Page 190]

The way he is set up in these spots looks so permanent, so heavy and implacable that it seems more likely the council disassembles the street around him and shifts it brick by brick in the night than that he moves it himself.

It’s hard—once he’s set himself up—to determine the shape of the bench at all, under the throws and boxes and dripping, half-dry clothes.

What had been an immovable symbol of municipal ownership is removed from the public space when Catman’s bike pulls up and the blankets drop, becoming the skeleton of his temporary home.

When it rains, he squats in the door of the bank.

At one point, he washed...

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