For a few years now he had been living with a cat whose photograph he had found on the internet. He could not remember who had posted the photograph. It had shown an image of a large-looking brown tabby with fur that appeared red under the yellow street light. He had recognised the street, even the very block from the way the road had curved. Spurred on by a force of will he could not explain he had went to that street corner that very night and found it sitting there. It was sitting on its rear with its head expectantly tilted, as if waiting. He bent into a squat, and the cat had leapt into his arms. From there he had brought it home.

He felt perplexed by his actions. He was a person who valued the ways things looked over how they appeared in person. At his job, he edited photographs for menus of mainland Chinese restaurants that had newly opened in the heartlands. His Instagram feed was filled with images of food, which he perused for frequent inspiration. Somehow a cat had crept in. He could not even remember the context in which it had been posted. Perhaps such was the power of coincidence.

In his flat, he put the cat down on the spare mattress in the living room. He had put out that mattress because his bedroom had become too hot. The cat settled easily at one end of the mattress. The weight it exerted on that end of the mattress discomforted him. The presence of another warm body inside the living room was too much. For the rest of the night, he watched the cat from the safety of his bedroom with the door half-ajar. It had the expression of an inexplicable self-assuredness, as if its nine lives were being lived out all at once in the present; he supposed that was true of all insentient things.

///

The cat made itself easy in the space of the flat. It almost never imposed its bodily needs. He did not know where it shat or ate. Some nights it would disappear entirely through the gate of the front door and he would think its presence entirely over. But by morning it would be sitting in his living room again.

It was an animal kind of persistence he found growingly compatible with his own. At thirty-seven and single he had no prospects in life but the dogged melding of all the prospects of his peers his own age. Numerous job fairs and networking sessions had convinced him that a digital career would be a promising one. At the advice of his lecturers he had gone into freelancing. With the money he had bought himself his own flat. At yearly reunions he prided himself on being squarely at the middle of the pack, neither reduced to embarrassing dependence on his parents nor garish high-flying living in some garish overseas post. His dreams were diffuse but sound.

He would get most of his work done in the afternoons in those days. The cat would watch him from his bedroom door, unmoving. Rarely, it purred. He would come to regard this as a sign that his life had reached a turning point marked by certainty: that his life would be marked by a series of tasks which endlessly pivoted on that which had come before.

///

The issue of his encounter with the cat returned to him time and again, which troubled him. He was not in the habit of pondering such things. On sleepless nights (of which there were very few) he would sometimes lie awake and think of the series of events that had brought it into his home. Some parts of it did not make sense. Why had such a post appeared on his feed? He had scrolled through the accounts he followed and found no such trace of it there. All he saw were endless recombinant images of Sichuan mala noodle bowls and barbecued skewers on stock-photo flames. Images of work haunted his e-spaces of leisure. There was no conceivable way the cat could have showed up, much less in a photograph taken near his own home. This was the realm of verifiable deja vu, or winning the lottery off the license plate of a crashed car. He searched online for such stories involving cats but could find none. The realisation that something beyond the normal had happened to him soon filled him with a mild thrill.

The cat, though, did not mind. By all accounts it sat and walked like a normal, corporeal being. It had grown to enjoy the occasional contact with the legs of his pajamas, and nibbling the remains of overcooked instant noodles he had made for himself at night. Once an elderly neighbour had visited his house to drop off a bag of dry food. She said she had heard the cat mewing downstairs as if it was hungry, and thought him feeding it more would shut it up. The look she gave him was a look of uncomfortable pity. But it assured him the cat was real.

He grew to see the cat as a constant in the space of his life, as immutable as the furniture in his own flat or the lights in the corridor beyond. The inexplicability that had brought it there only further cemented the embodied nature of its existence. More than anything, he realised, he had grown a need for something to be there. This sensation spoke to him on a level below what he might have called affection. It was a permanence that had emplaced his life. In his wilder moments (shortly before sleep) he would fancy that his permanence had emplaced its life in turn, and that on this cyclicity was founded the sum total of a fulfilling adult existence, upon which he would gain recognition as a valued member of society, which somehow also involved fading away into the background of every social gathering he would ever attend for the rest of his life.

Surety through obscurity, he mumbled as he fell asleep. Sympathy in kind.

///

By means of explaining what he did for a living, one of his university friends had sent him a link to a website. The website had images of cats on it. The cats, his friend explained, were generated using a set of instructions telling a computer in a distant server to paint pixels in a certain pattern. Another second computer would determine if the pixels looked like a cat and relayed the instructions to the first computer. In this way, each computer spurred on the other to create images that looked like cats. Together they created millions of images of cats that did not exist.

"Think of the possibilities," said his friend. "You'll soon be out of a job."

He scrolled through the images of cats that had loaded. None of them resembled any cat he had seen before. The cat in his living room watched with a kind of stilled bemusement. He smiled when he spotted a few flukes where the computer had failed to remove an extra ear, or an odd bend of the neck. None of them struck him as particularly convincing. As he refreshed and refreshed the page they appeared and disappeared at alarming speed. Images of ears and eyes and whiskers blended into each other, creating a kind of gestalt whole. The cat in his living room meowed.

That night, he realised another aspect in which the computer program had failed. The cats that did not exist had all looked at him with the same eyes.

///

The cat that was with him did not disappear. It did not melt in the night into a liquescent pile of pixels or a tangled mess of malformed limbs. It did not phase through walls or teleport itself into cyberspace. It lived, it slept, and it held space in his flat until it died.

On the day of its death he was sending out the final draft of a menu to a client. The client had wanted to open a gourmet Sichuan stall at a local hawker centre. He had prepared a whole array of exotic dishes that he was sure no Singaporean had eaten before. There were assortments of boiled organs arranged tantalisingly in blood-red soup. There were fishes cut up sideways, crisscrossed, and flayed into fanciful forms. There was chicken prepared to look like clouds of floating flesh, and single cabbage leaves boiled in water. He did not have to do much to edit the photos for palatability's sake, so eye-catching were their colours and forms. He had set them all nicely in thirty-six glossy pages when there came a loud sound from his living room. After he had saved his work he came out of his bedroom to find the cat lying feet-up at the foot of the mattress. Its body was already cool. There was nothing more that could have been done.

There was a recipe he dimly remembered from the first pitch with that client. It was for the dish of cabbage leaves in boiled water. "Despite the name," the client said, "there is much work that goes into the making of it. The water is boiled from the meat of three different animals. The bland appearance of the final stock can only be achieved with precise control over the composition of things that come before."

He buried the cat in a patch of grass at the back of the housing estate. It slid into the pit easily, as if weightless. He thought it would disintegrate between his fingers. But it did not. It remained resolutely real, settling into the dry soil as if it could belong nowhere else. Such was the consilience of its physical form that he had to throw up in a planter box afterwards, staining the crop of ixoras a sickly, tremulant green.