From the moment I brought him home, Chester was a great companion for Beautiful White Princess. They were fast friends and their temperaments complemented each other well. One time I even saw them curled up on the bed together!

I bonded with Princess by brushing her perfect long hair and telling her stories of her beauty—of how it was legendary far and wide. She tucked me in every night by lying on top of me, her face inches from mine, and letting me scratch her cheeks and head while she purred and kneaded my chest and licked the sheets beneath my chin.

I bonded with Chester by chasing him through the hallways of my apartment building—a game he invented for us. I lived in a front second-floor unit of a small three-story building with basement. One night Chester was pawing at the door asking to go out. Being the sucker I am, I let him out to explore the hallway. (Princess had done this in my previous apartment building but she never went more than about 25 feet.) Instead, he disappeared into the front stairwell and was gone—like totally and completely gone in an instant. Like Harry Potter disapparating kind of gone.

This is what the hallways look like now (since being renovated).

I laughed and guessed he’d gone up a floor, so up I ran. No cat. Hmm. Down a floor. No cat. Down another floor. Ha! There he was, sitting in the middle of the hallway staring boredly as if he’d been waiting for hours. As I ran toward him laughing, he turned and sprinted into the back stairwell. This time I saw that he’d gone up. As I was more than halfway to the back stairwell, I increased speed and followed him up. But did he go one or two levels? A quick stop on two revealed no cat. I ran up to three and there he was in the middle of the hallway again, bored and watching me. By this point I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe–his nonchalance was killing me! As you can imagine, as I started to approach him he turned tail and sprinted into the front stairwell again. How the EFF was I going to catch this cat?!

I don’t remember how the game finally concluded (any of the times we played it). I might have had to shut front and back stairwell doors strategically to be able to trap him. Or maybe he finally just let me catch up to him. That game cracked me up—every time—and we played it almost nightly. I had already known he was magical at understanding what I was saying to him and now I knew he was faster than the speed of light. He was a trickster with a dry mischievousness.

We played that game for many months until I came home to a note on my door from the apartment manager. She said she’d received complaints from a neighbor who was deathly allergic to cats that my cat had been spotted in the hallway on numerous occasions. So as not to kill this neighbor, I was expected to keep my cat in my apartment at all times.

Dumb.

I would need to think of a way to give Chester more opportunities to run and play and change altitudes within my apartment…

Eventually I would land upon the brilliant idea of building him a cat tower.