inception. yusuf and his cat. spoiler-free! pre-film. pg. characters belong to christopher nolan.
intuitia
It is commonly thought that cats have a unique ability to predict death. They're seen as bad luck, as harbingers of that final moment, thieves of that final breath.
Yusuf is a man of science, and has no use for superstitions. His own cat keeps him company as he does his work, helpfully lying on top of the reference books he needs access to and accidentally knocking tiny glass phials to the floor with an errant swish of her tail. Despite the inevitable obstruction and destruction, he prefers having her around; it makes the days of compounds-gone-wrong easier to deal with. To see her basking in the Kenyan sun, eyes just barely open to scrutinize his experiments, puts him at ease when the frustrations threaten to overwhelm him.
The dream chamber beneath his laboratory is never without inhabitants, prisoners to the constructed realities that now trump the true universe. They exist almost exclusively in the confines of their own minds, and - as his assistant explains to Cobb, years later - come to his shop only to be woken up. They've long since ceased to have a use for the world as it is, and now live solely for what it could be.
Many of the clients are elderly, able to function at their best only in the space of a shared ideal, in someone else's imagination. To be torn from that life, to be pulled back into their crippled bodies and forced to eat or excrete, seems almost a cruelty. And honestly, who are they to say otherwise, to say that they dream of delusions? To maintain that the 'real' world is superior, a triumph over this unlocked potential?
She begins curling up beside the oldest of his charges, settled down to sleep or to groom herself, watching through those half-lidded feline eyes all the while. When this happens, Yusuf begins to notice. He tracks and monitors the ones who pass away days or mere hours later once she's chosen them as bedfellows, and more often than not, she senses their impending demise.
Weeks later, after he's counted the deaths of one after another, observed unfailingly by the cat, there is a man who begins convulsing despite the persistent dreamstate. His legs were lost to a factory disaster long ago, his skin jaundiced from hepatitis; it is obvious to anyone that he is suffering. She sleeps beside her ward faithfully, purring against the amputated stump of his thigh as he explores the collective subconscious.
When he starts to cry out in pain but remains unable to awaken, Yusuf introduces gradually increasing levels of his self-formulated narcotics to his bloodstream, and knows he has done the right thing.