Page 36 of Victory Lap

“Yes,” he says, unbothered, shaking the treat dish once. “And I approve one.”

What follows is ninety minutes of the greatest athletic performance this apartment has ever witnessed. I say that as a man who won the Stanley Cup. Mishka enters the bowl on attempt one, sits like a portrait of a nineteenth-century industrialist, and refuses to look at the camera on principle.

“He won’t look at the lens,” Dominique says.

“He is deciding whether you deserve it,” Tikh says.

“How long does that take?”

“It could be years.” Bug will look at the camera but will not stay in the bowl. She exits over the rim the instant I put her in there. Eleven consecutive times. Finally she has to be lowered in mid-purr by Tikh, like expensive cargo. There is a period where both cats are in the Cup and both cats are asleep. Instantly. In defiance of all preparation. Dominique shoots that for ten minutes straight, whispering, “don’t wake up, don’t wake up,” like a prayer.

“How long can we keep shooting like this?” Dominique whispers.

“Until one of them dreams,” Tikh whispers back. “Mishka runs. Bug bites. We will know.”

“Why are we whispering?” Sadie whispers. “The bell rings when she so much as thinks.”

The bell does not ring. History holds its breath.

“Twelve,” Sadie says, catching the escape one-handed without looking up from her phone. “Franchise record. Somebody log it.”

And then it happens, the frame we came for, and of course nobody staged it. Bug and Mishka in the bowl together, awake, tucked into a yin-yang the exact shape of a bonded-pair diagnosis. Bug’s chin on Mishka’s back. The tiny jerseys crooked. Mishka’s paw hooked over the rim. Both of them looking dead into the lens like champions. Dominique makes a sound I recognize. It’s the sound I made when Bug first fell asleep on my chest at two in the morning. The sound of getting something you’ll keep.

“That’s it,” she says. “That’s the one. Nobody breathe.”

The bell on Bug’s collar dings once, softly, for emphasis.

We break for gumbo. There is a lot of gumbo. There is going to be gumbo for days, out of a pot that Sadie circled twice when she arrived. She asked about it. Then she went quiet in a way that Sadie almost never goes quiet, and squeezed my arm on her way to the fridge. She knows the full story. She was the first person to know any of my stories. Last winter hers was the only name on the list of people who knew me. Now the list has a team on it. A mother on speakerphone. And a man who will approve exactly one picture.

While we eat, Dominique’s laptop cycles the day’s shots on the coffee table. Four hundred and eleven frames. Tikh sits in front of it with his coffee doing his quality-control face. Blank. Thorough. Merciless. It takes him half an hour. I know better than to talk during an audit.

“Two hundred and six,” he says finally. “That is the one for posting.”

“Out of four hundred and eleven,” Sadie says, to the room, like a docent.

“The margin matters,” Tikh says.

We crowd in. It’s the yin-yang frame, obviously, the champions, the paw over the rim. It is objectively the greatest photograph ever taken.

“Wallpaper,” Sadie announces, phone already turned around as proof. “Consider all debts settled.”

But I watch his laptop when he thinks the audit is over, and he goes back, quietly, and stares at a second frame. And it’s not the cats. It’s a frame Dominique caught between setups. Me on the floor with Bug on my shoulders, laughing at something Sadie said. The Cup blurred gold behind me. The pot just visible on the counter at the edge of the frame. The whole loud mess of my life in one picture, and the quietest man I know filing it away like evidence.

“Tishka.”

“It is for the archive,” he says, with dignity.

“We have an archive?”

“We have an archive.”

The keeper inspects the bowl at seven and holds one gray cat hair up to the light.

“One,” he says.

“Mishka,” Tikh says, like a man giving up an accomplice.

The keeper decides against every possible sentence and logs it. The Cup goes back in its case, off to the next man on the schedule. The apartment absorbs the space it leaves the way our apartment absorbs everything now. Easily. The shelves shifting half an inch to make room for the new permanent residents. A jar of sea glass throwing coins of light. A pot with forty years of history in it. Four hundred and eleven photographs, one approved, one quietly archived.