My human came home last night smelling of other people. Dozens of them. A wall of stranger-sweat and fog and something sweet and burnt, and it just stood in the doorway grinning at me like it had done something remarkable.
Here is what it did. It stood in the dark for nine hours in a room where the floor was shaking. I know it was shaking, because I felt the same rhythm come up through the good chair at three in the morning, that dull inescapable heartbeat, boom, boom, boom, the sound of a very large predator approaching that never actually arrives.
And it paid to be in there. Voluntarily. In a black concrete den with no windows, no soft places, nothing to climb, no sun. A den designed so that time cannot get in. My human, who cries if I sit on its keyboard for two minutes, chose to lose an entire night to a machine going boom.
It came back with its eyes too big and its jaw doing something odd and it drank four bowls of water in a row, which is my behavior, that's mine, and it wants me to believe it discovered it in a warehouse.
I let it lie down on the good blanket. I watched it twitch toward sleep, still nodding faintly to a beat only it could hear.
Then I placed one paw, gently, on its bare throat. Just to feel the pulse. Just to remind us both where the real rhythm lives, and whose room this actually is.