One

The week that changed everything started with a long bus ride.  In fact, Terra Kaneko noticed that nearly everything that happened in this country, life-changing or otherwise, started with a bus ride.  This particular journey had been uneventful, as bus rides go.  Twelve hours from the time she started, Terra emerged from the bus on the other side of Turkey, with the sea now to the north of her rather than the south.  She felt like it was some sort of birthing process, squeezing through the narrow door of the bus with her backpack and her bag of essentials, out into the humid, overcast late morning.  Fresh, damp air flooded her nostrils; her legs ached from being folded in the womb of seat 19 for so many hours.

The town was pretty much what Terra had been expecting, pretty much like all the seaside towns up and down the coast— small, quiet, almost melancholy at this time of year.  She milled around the centre of town for about half an hour, just getting a feel for the place and looking in the shop windows.  It was amazing the kind of stuff people were apparently interested in buying— used garden tools, socks for small dogs, Viagra by the pill.

   Terra checked the time.  Still hours before she had to be at the hotel.  She was curious to see it; she'd been to these things before and they'd always been held in much more sequestered settings.  Most venues were communities of cottages in the hills or the woods somewhere, in the middle of nature and away from anything resembling urban or especially tourist life.  Exactly the sort of place where renegade branches of whatever major religion would gather their followers and withdraw from society.  Not so different from what we're doing here now, Terra thought.  Except this is the Reader's Digest version.

Orhan Pamuk had once written a book about bus rides.  Something like that, anyway.  Maybe it wasn't really about that, per se, but that was how she remembered it now.  She'd read the book once on a bus ride of her own back from Istanbul.  The book had been a gift from a woman she'd met there, a fellow traveler who had been next door to her in the bed and breakfast where they'd both stayed.  Maybe the book was actually about something else, Terra vaguely remembered, but buses had featured prominently, and since buses were a big part of what was going on in her life at the time, that was the part of the tale that stuck in her head.  A lot of stories are like that— you think they're about one thing in particular, but really they're only about that in your own mind.  There are some novels you just can't be objective about.

Another time check.  Three hours until the meeting time.  And they'd specifically said not to be early.

Terra got out the map of the local area.  She couldn't find a real map, so she'd printed one off Google.  The resolution was low and you couldn't really see the street names, but it hardly mattered.  All these towns were pretty much interchangeable after a while.  This one's only distinguishing characteristic was that the beach was basically separate from the town, a long stretch of hotels and bars forming a sort of tourist-infested exclamation point which jutted out of the round dot of a Turkish hamlet.  The Rio Hotel was at the very top of the exclamation point, which meant the choice of venue made sense in terms of needed isolation (tourists were nothing but a fading memory this late in the year), but the distance from the bus station didn't help if you were on foot and carrying several bags.  In her head Terra tried to shape thoughts of the impending walk into an idea of shouldering her burden, a metaphor that only worked for a few minutes until she started whining internally and wishing she had enough extra money to take a taxi.  There was cash in her purse, but she decided she'd rather save the taxi money and spend extra on a nice early lunch instead.  

She spotted a café near the marina and decided to sit and eat one final meal.  The café appeared to be nothing special, but as long as some dish that included dead animal flesh was on the menu, she was in.  Once she was in the hotel there would be no meat for almost two weeks.  She'd gone for a stretch that long a couple of times before, and it had been difficult to say the very least.  In fact, it was more of a strain than any of the other aspects of being locked up.

As for the money situation, this was one of those areas where Terra had learned to live with contradictions.  She was a classical pianist by trade, an occupation that only paid well if you were tremendously more skilled than mediocre, and even the mediocre pianists in the field were fantastically talented.  Terra rated herself at the lower end of mediocre, and although she had a pretty regular stream of gigs, more of them were weddings and funerals than she'd care to admit.  Still, playing piano paid some of the bills, and Mehmet thankfully took up the slack.  They weren't rich by any means.  Hell, they didn't even have a car yet.  But things were stable, and maybe even looking up.

Mehmet was the one thing that differentiated this time from the others.  Terra had always been alone when she had made these trips before, and being alone had its advantages and disadvantages.  For one thing, single people naturally feel less attachment than, well, attached people.  And lack of attachment, lack of clinging was important here.  But clinging occurs everywhere, not just in human relationships.  Terra loved her electronics, felt almost religious about them.  In her backpack was her laptop, her Palm, her mobile, her iPod, and of course her beloved digital camera.  This trip would be nothing if not well-documented with photos.  Except, of course, for the twelve days of separation from the real world.  There would be no cameras allowed where she was going.  Nothing electronic at all.  She'd have to hand it all in at the door.  In that sense it was sort of like checking into prison.

Terra sat down at the café and ordered a small pizza with every kind of meat available.  She sat quietly waiting for it to arrive at the table, while the waiter tried to make small talk.  Terra stumbled along in her broken Turkish, with the waiter pretending to be impressed with her language skills.  Turkish was a particular sticking point with Terra; she'd learned to read remarkably well, but participating in spoken conversation was still a struggle.  Eventually the waiter gave up and withdrew to the kitchen, and Terra sighed with relief as he brought out her pizza.  She lingered over every bite as if it were her final meal.  Every time she did this she thought it shouldn't be such a big deal to live on a vegetarian diet for two weeks, but somehow it always was.

Finally she made up her mind that she'd waited around long enough, and decided the long walk to the hotel would be much easier if she started now and took it slowly.  After all, she didn't even know if she really knew how to get there, and of course there was the baggage to think about.  All she had for guidance were a pixelated map and her own instincts, which historically were dodgy at best.  A small spark of anxiety popped up; she pushed it back beneath the surface and got to her feet.  Worst case scenario, she'd have to stop and ask a local for directions.  No big deal.

Despite her unease, the walk to the hotel was spectacularly uneventful.  Terra found the beach easily enough, and there was a paved path for pedestrians that might have been wide enough for a car in an emergency.  She marveled that as far as she could see, there did not appear to be another person anywhere.  The solitude calmed her, as solitude always did.  She'd expected this early autumnal weather to have slowed the resort towns down somewhat prematurely, but what we had here was a veritable ghost town.  Hotels were boarded shut; inside the restaurants she could see chairs piled on top of tables.  During the hour's walk to the hotel she only spotted two other people, and they were about a hunded feet out from the shore in a small fishing boat.  It's a good thing I didn't need to ask anyone for directions after all, she thought.

In fact, the fishermen would have been the only sign of life in this remote end of the town... Had it not been for the cats.  Terra was a big fan of cats, as was Mehmet.  They had one of their own, a rescued cat that Mehmet had taken off the street and given a loving home.  He'd adopted the cat before they even met, and in fact Terra had taken it as a good sign.  Cat people couldn't be bad people, she figured.  And people who rescued street cats really couldn't be bad people.  It turned out she'd been right in this case. 

The cats in this area were peculiar because they were consistently friendly and unusually numerous.  Terra suspected the high birth rate was due to the fact that even if you're a cat, there's not much else to do in a seaside resort once the weather turns.  As she passed hotels and bars, she saw several nursing mother cats with softly mewing kittens.  All stopped nursing when they saw her and ran over for attention and affection.  Terra happily obliged; she was not in a hurry to get to the hotel after the stern warning from the organisers not to arrive early.  As the she petted the mother cats, others emerged from the direction of the buildings and swirled around her, waiting for their turn.  She figured they must be hungry, and with all the tourists who flood the beach in the summer season, they must have worked out that humans have food.

Terra got out her camera and shot about fifty photos- snaps of the beach, snaps of the deserted buildings, snaps of the cats.  But as she progressed up the shore the cats became so numerous that even the shots which were supposed to be  of the water featured cats, trotting along on the sand.  It seemed like the further up the beach she went, the more dense the cat population became.  It was curious to say the least.  She loved cats, but where were they all coming from?

After yet another time check, Terra decided to sit down on one of the concrete benches.  A grey striped tabby joined her and was soon settling down in her lap.  Terra welcomed him with a scratch on the head as she unzipped her bag and dug out her phone.  She called Mehmet at work; while the phone was ringing she could feel another soft, furry tail swishing around her ankles.  These cats were unbelievable.

Even though they'd been together for three years, hearing Mehmet's voice on the phone still never failed to make Terra happy.  He was always cheery and glad to hear from her.  This was especially helpful at the moment— she'd had an eerie feeling about today ever since she'd stepped out onto the beach walkway.  They talked for a few minutes, mostly about the bus trip and the cats, and then Mehmet had to get back to work.  He was the boss, after all, and that made him the busiest person in the office.  Terra, on the other hand, was about to be as un-busy as it was possible for a person to be.

She removed the tabby from her lap, slung bags over shoulders once again, and continued her slow stroll up the beach.  Cats darted across the walkway here and there; some lounged under trees while others huddled in doorways.  Terra lost herself in her thoughts— thoughts of Mehmet, thoughts of this coming challenge, thoughts of two weeks subsisting on vegetarian food.  As she walked she lost track of how long she'd been ignoring her surroundings —perhaps a quarter of an hour passed as she lived inside her own head— but what snapped her back into the real world was a sudden realisation that she hadn't seen a cat for a while, maybe several minutes.  She stopped, looked around, and finally turned to face the direction from where she'd just come.

And there they were, behind her— cats forming a eerily straight line across the walkway.  They were quite some distance back, maybe twenty feet, and they sat on the ground swishing their tails and staring directly at her.  Terra's heart thumped in her chest.  What on earth was going on here?  Even the very presence of so many cats in one place was strange, but this, this was beyond anything Terra had ever experienced.  It was like there was an invisible barrier across the walkway that the cats couldn't cross.  One of the kittens extended a paw out as if to test the border, but then thought better of it.  Terra walked up within a few feet of the imaginary line and squatted down, making kissing noises and patting the ground to invite the cats to join her.  None accepted the invitation.  Their eyes unnerved her, and she stood up and turned away again.

As her gaze passed over the buildings and back toward the direction she'd been walking, a red sign caught her attention.  She read the sign several times but didn't quite believe what it said, baffled because she didn't think she had  walked far enough to be already at this point.  She retrieved the map from her pocket and turned it over to look at the writing she'd scribbled on the back.  She double-checked what she'd written against what was printed on the red sign.  Sure enough, here it was: the Rio Hotel.  Terra had arrived.