| I have to admit, I always thought cats were a little crazy. Delusional, really; I have to be specific, I suppose, if this is going to make any sense at all. It’s not as though I thought they were enough like people to be sane, strictly speaking, in the first place. No, hear me out on this. You know how cats stare sometimes… really raptly, for all the world like they’re looking at something really important, or interesting, or just plain terrifying… only there’s nothing there. Just empty air, or a blank wall, or sometimes just your elbow. If cats could talk, I guarantee we’d classify them all as crazy without some serious explaining on their part. Personally, I’m not so sure about that anymore. I’ve always been more of a cat person, though. They’re independent enough that they can handle themselves for a while, without making you feel like crap when you come back. That’s really why I agreed to take in that stray… I needed something else alive around the apartment, and a cat seemed like the best thing. Conveniently enough, there was this little pregnant cat, hardly more than a kitten, really, and of course you can find homes for all the kittens, but not the mother. Great cat, though, even better than I realized. See, most cats just stare, but she actually tried to chase whatever it was she thought she saw. Hissed at it sometimes, or talked about it like she wanted me to know it was there. I think the cat probably thought I was one of her kittens, so it was still trying to defend the nest. Or maybe it just liked being fed, and having something warm to sit on instead of the floor. No, I don’t think the cat really talked. Just those noises cats make, the ones that aren’t meows or yowls or purrs… more like chirps, almost. And that noise that usually gets written as a little “meep” when someone even bothers to write it at all. I’m not the only cat owner that calls it that, you know. Talking, I mean. It’s just a much more conversational sort of cat noise than a meow, is all. Like the cat won’t stop until you respond in some way, say something back. Fine. From the beginning then. Like I said, it all really started when I got the cat. The cat starts getting really nervous, doing the “staring into the distance and making upset noises” thing. At first I figure she’s just freaked out about being indoors without the kittens, or maybe just about the kittens, or maybe she’s in heat again and there’s a tomcat around. It stops after a few nights, so I figure that she got over it, whatever it was. Life goes on, about the same as before, except that I have a cat now. Every once in a while her highness the cat deigns to be petted, so long as food and water are in evidence. The desk chair is deemed acceptable, with or without my lap on it, and so there is peace and harmony in the apartment. Then she starts doing it again. No reason I can tell. Stops again. Does it again, and this time she starts marking things… I didn’t even know female cats did that, but I swear that’s the only way I can explain it. Anything with fur that gets in sight through the big window is enough to send her into fits, and she’s still trying to protect the apartment from blank walls and empty patches of air. This goes on... and stops for a while, and goes on… I eventually took the cat to the vet. It was expensive, but I was starting to worry that something was wrong. Nothing noticeable, though, or so he says. I end up getting the cat spayed, because I needed to do that anyway, but it keeps going on just like it did before. So now I know it’s not that the cat was in heat, but have no idea what it really is. It’s a while before I figure out that there’s a pattern. I only noticed that because I ended up walking out, late at night, to avoid the noise. I kept noticing that there was no moon when I was out… just the stars. Hardly any clouds, either, just the clear black sky, like velvet with the pulsing stars sitting in it, looking for all the world like they were reflecting the light from the streetlamps instead of making their own. Sorry. Yes, I realize that you don’t care, even if you’re not saying it, but if this is going to make any sense when I’m done I have to tell you how all this seemed to me at the time, because even I can hardly believe it now. It’s just that the most sense I can make of it all still seems utterly insane… so I feel like I have to explain myself as well as I can, even though I’m still not sure what it all means. Or if all of it necessarily has to mean anything. And you have to admit, it’s just weird that my cat only freaked out on the nights of the new moon, right? After nine months, that starts to seem, well, systematic. It’d be a bit odd for mere coincidence, I tell you that. It made me think there had to be something cyclical about it, even if the moon thing was just a coincidence. I suppose I should get this out of the way, then, since you don’t want any more of my theories… Have you ever read Kant? The metaphysical stuff? I guess not. Well, he’s got this idea that the world can more or less be described in two ways, as phenomenon and what he calls noumenon. One of them (and I honestly can’t remember which… my philosophy professors would never forgive me, but there it is), well, one of them is the world we see, hear, touch, smell, whatever. The other one is the world that really is. The idea is that we can only detect the world that is through a bunch of filters, that determine how detect it. Time is a big one…he’s not entirely convinced that things really are the way we see them in time, which I think goes a long way toward explaining why time only seems to be a constant when you use a clock. It goes further than that, though; each of our senses is really just another filter between us, in our version of the world, and the real deal that’s out there past the filters. So we think of, say, a dog as “lacking” color vision, because we can see green, red, and blue where it seens black and white. But really, we’re missing almost as much, at least potentially, because we can’t see ultra-violet or infrared or x-rays, or whatever. And we might even be “missing” even more than we can guess because of our whole concept of sight, and the things it makes it impossible for us to imagine. I’m bringing this up because the whole situation makes me think what it would be like if there was something in the real world that got totally filtered out by, say, our vision. So there’s something there, but we just can’t see it. Or hear it, maybe, or both, because it just doesn’t pass through our filters in any form. It’d still be there. And anyone who did see it, or hear it, or whatever, would seem pretty strange to us… walking around something that wasn’t there, trying to chase it away, maybe even talking to it. Well, between the two of them, Kant and Anna (I actually named the cat Anna, after Kant’s mother, before any of this happened) were starting to make me wonder. Like I said, I’d always thought that cats were a little crazy, because they seemed to see things that weren’t there. What if I was right, only in the way I said it rather than the way I meant it? What I mean is, what if my cat (and maybe some “crazy” people too, for all I know) acted crazy because she saw things I couldn’t, instead of thinking she saw things that weren’t really there because she was a little crazy? I’d never really be able to tell, would I? I mean, presumably anything that I couldn’t see, hear, or smell would have more than enough chance to avoid me tripping over it if it wanted to. Yeah, I promise there’s a reason for all this. And yes, I know this is starting to make me sound a little paranoid. Maybe I am. But really, thinking about it does make you wonder. How could a cat go insane, really? If I’m not mistaken, the folks with PhD’s in this sort of thing think it takes a pretty sophisticated, stressful, society or some seriously screwed up genetics, maybe both, to break a human brain to the point of seeing things that aren’t really there. You’d think cats would be even harder to mess up, since their brains aren’t as overworked as ours. I mean, where in the hunt-kill-eat process do you find time to fantasize about mysterious benefactors or persecutors who secretly confirm your sense of self-worth? It doesn’t seem like a cat has any incentive to be delusional. Yeah, I know. Back to what actually happened. No more theories this time, I promise. So anyway, the cat bolts out the door one day, when I’m late for work. I can’t take the time to chase it down, so I figure I’ll just leave its bowl out at night at keep an eye out. It was a stray before, so I figured the thing can handle itself well enough to find its way back in a day or two, especially with the food out there to attract it. But it’s gone for a week or more, and after a week the food stops disappearing from the bowl. So not only is my cat not taking it… nothing else is either. I don’t know if you’ve ever left a bowl of cat food out for a stray, but that stuff is usually gone by the next night. If the cat doesn’t eat it, some raccoon or opossum or a flock of crows will. Nothing was coming near my place, though. This goes on for another week, and I’m starting to miss the cat, not to mention the non-refundable, $200 fee I had to pay to keep her in the apartment. After that second week, I’ve pretty much given up on the cat. I don’t mind saying that it went pretty hard on me… sure, it was just a cat, it’s not like it was a child or something, but it was my cat and I really did like the little thing. And the whole apartment is just starting to seem dead, and sort of off. I figured it was just the lack of cat at the time, but I’m not so sure now, as I can imagine you’ll understand in a minute. Monday night, on the third week, it’s a new moon again, and I’m almost missing that damned cat’s mewling when all of the sudden I hear it. Only this time it’s not just a mewl, it’s an outright scream, and it’s coming from the apartment next door. I guess I should have mentioned before that I never really talked to my neighbors… I just mean that I never really had to. They didn’t bother me, I didn’t bother them, you know? Only now I’m hearing what I’m sure is my cat, screaming bloody murder in their apartment. So maybe I shouldn’t have broken the window and gone in on my own. Maybe I should have told the dispatcher that it was a cat I heard screaming next door instead of just saying there was screaming. But there’s no way you can tell me what they were doing was legal, was it? I mean… animal cruelty at the very least, right? And when I get outside, it just gets louder and I hear what sounds like a bunch of people talking. Not sure what they were saying, though, but I was pretty certain I heard the words “gate” and “keeper” being repeated a lot, in the midst of a bunch of stuff I couldn’t understand. It might have been something African or Pacific Islander… or maybe I just think it sounded like that because I don’t really know what they sounded like, kind of like in the Rue Morge. Everyone thinks it’s some language they know of, but can’t speak a word in. Anyway, I was upset when I thought I heard my cat, but now that I knew there were a bunch of them in there doing whatever was making it scream, I just got mad. Outright furious, really, or I don’t think I’d ever have tried to interfere with whatever it was they were doing to my cat. It sounded like there were 30 of them, but you can’t fit that many people in these apartments. So I didn’t really know how many of them there were, or what they were doing, but they were doing it to my cat, damnit, and I wasn’t going to let them get away with it. So yeah. I wrapped my jacket around my arms and head and I jumped through the window. Actually, that was probably the stupidest thing I’ve said to you so far… the doctors said I was lucky I didn’t slice myself wide open, but I guess I was pretty frantic at this point. But, excited or not, I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw once I got that coat off my head. I mean, they were still sort of standing in a circle, wearing honest-to-God robes, for crying out loud. I know that’s the way you always see things like this done, but seriously. They were actually wearing robes. Most of them looked pretty ill, thinking back on it, and not just because I’d jumped into their little party. Only one of them really seemed to know what was going on… she glared at me, sure, but she seemed more exultant than anything else, like I’d arrived just in time to be an audience for whatever it was they were doing. Everyone else seemed to be worried, maybe even scared, like they were getting more than they’d expected, I suppose. I’m pretty sure one guy would have been sick pretty soon if I hadn’t distracted him by blundering through the window. It was kind of like I imagine walking in on a Baptist church service where someone has genuinely started speaking in tongues… pretty much no one expects it, most people don’t even like it one bit, but it’s not really as though they can say it shouldn’t be happening, at least not without doing some serious thinking. Or maybe like one of those sweet old ladies who always say “Heaven help us!” suddenly, actually, got a squadron of angels sent down to clean her lawn or make sure her grandkids were eating their vegetables. What was happening was just this. The cat, I still think it was mine, though of course I can’t prove that now, was floating. In midair. Just… floating. And it looked like it was being stretched. Pulled apart, really, but at the time I could only process that it was floating, and stretching, and that this lady was gloating over it while a bunch of nuts in robes were tying not to be sick. And then it just came apart. The… the cat did, I mean. No, I never saw who killed the poor thing. Like I said, it looked like it was just floating, but I don’t really think that. It doesn’t make sense for it to have just been there, in the air, and then practically burst like a… Sorry. It was pretty disturbing, and it was my cat, you know? It just doesn’t make sense, and I have to try to make sense of this as best I can, like I was saying. I think that it was being held, plain and simple, held and pulled apart, but by something that I couldn’t see. Something that couldn’t be seen by any person there, maybe. Not even the gloating lady, the one who seemed to know what was going on. And, obviously enough I suppose, something that didn’t want to be seen. Not even by a cat. Copyright 2007, Jason J. Summerlott |
