Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which Discoveries Are Made.
"Home Warehouse," said Kathleen, studying the flyer that had been left in the brand new mailbox, "is having a sale on exterior flat paint."
She took a thoughtful bite of her Italian Ice and gave us, over the top of her sunglasses, the kind of look that was only possible if you were in fact wearing sunglasses, and which was probably the reason she had fetched them from the garage.
"A few gallons of red and a rental paint sprayer should do the trick," she said, and turned the page. "Mom and Dad will never notice the difference."
We were in the tree lab; that, at least, had survived. Going inside the new house was an issue that had not been raised; I for one didn't want to risk it on the grounds that there was no telling what horrors might be found inside its cheerful exterior. Sad clown paintings? Multiple televisions? The possibilities were endless.
"You're taking this with remarkable equanimity," I said.
"No more so than the Mr. Squooshee driver," she said, not looking up, "but then he didn't seem to have noticed that anything had happened."
Kitman coughed meditatively, and stared down through the leaves at the bright yellow backside of his new house.
Kathleen turned her head very, very slowly, and gave him another sunglasses look.
The wind stirred the leaves around us. There was a gentle patter of acorns on the roof of the tree lab.
Kathleen folded the circular and pitched it onto the escritoire. "Apparently I was too subtle. Why are you taking this so calmly, is the question that needs asking."
"I think," said Kitman, still staring down at the mysteriously unmysterious house that had replaced his own, "that this is the house that would have been here had our house never existed. The Mr. Squooshee man didn't notice the difference because reality was being altered. Those...squirrels gnawed our house out of existence — retroactively, if the word strictly applies — so we won't need to repaint; Mom and Dad won't know the difference."
"Kitman," said Kathleen, in a you-haven't-answered-my-question tone.
"Why," said Kitman, "are we still here? why are we still us?"
"Because we weren't eaten by squirrels?" said I.
"Dennis!"
"I'm working up to it!" said Kitman. He looked to me. "Why don't you handle this? You've got most of it written down. Illegibly, but even so, you can tell her better than I can."
"Omitting no detail," said Kathleen, "however slight."
"Oh boy," I said, and stroked my chin for no good reason. "Well...it started with Kitman wanting to clean the basement."
"And don't lie, either!" she said.
•
It was true. Kitman didn't want to clean the basement. Nobody wanted to clean the basement; they wanted to fill it with cement and turn the top of the cellar stairwell into a closet.
The Kitman abasement — which is what they call it — through no fault of the family, is a shrine to Apollo, the god of various and sundry things. As the oldest house in Abelton Park by more than half a century, Kitman's has been occupied by many families over the years, some of whom apparently stayed only long enough to drop off their unwanted possessions, which ended up down below in accordance with the principle that what goes down does not come back up. It has strata. A walk through Kitman's basement, to the extent that such is possible, will give you a whole new apprehension of the words between, atop and beneath. Especially beneath.
So, no. Kitman did not want to clean the basement; Kitman wanted to collect the savings bond that Dr. and Dr. Mrs. Kitman had purchased, shortly after they moved in, as a reward for the first person or persons who did.
There were no good alternatives as regards paying off the electric bill; this was Abelton Park in the summer. There was no snow to shovel, there were no leaves to rake, and all the lawns within walking distance had apparently been replaced with Astroturf. What else was there?
"Do-it-yourself origami kits," said Kitman, as we descended the cellar stairs.
"I beg your pardon?" said I.
"Think about it," he said, surveying the wreckage. "A manila envelope, ten sheets of paper, a page of instructions. Sell the package for nineteen ninety-five. Profit margin, eighteen ninety-five. We could sell ten easily."
His idea caused one of my shoelaces to unravel. I retied it, and then, since Kitman had not said anything else, retied the other.
"You don't think it will work?" said Kitman.
I straightened up and looked him in the eye. "Decades ago, Kitman, somebody took out ads in the newspaper. All they said was, It's Not Too Late To Send In Your Dollar! PO Box Whatever. People did. But from you I expect better than scams."
He didn't look convinced.
"Also, your conscience would start to bother you the moment you took out the ad. You'd buy fifty-pound cream stock and have the instructions embossed —"
"On glossy paper —"
"— on glossy paper, yes —"
"— with full-color illustrations —"
"— and use Tyvek envelopes instead of manila —"
"— and end up losing money. You are, of course, correct," he said. "I'm ashamed of myself for even thinking of it. And of course I couldn't afford to buy the advertising anyway."
He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "Well, let's get down to it."
And we did, dividing the room into squares according to the Pinkerton method and applying a divide-and-conquer algorithm.
After four hours of dividing wheat from chaff and toting the chaff upstairs and out to the the curb...the basement was even more of a mess than it had been to start with, in large part because one of us, who shall remain Kitman, had inadvertently kicked a hole into a large box of, well, wheat.
We sat on the basement steps and took stock.
Which is to say that I took stock. At length. I used the word "futile" several times, once as a verb.
When I had finished, or at least paused for breath, Kitman said "I would prefer that you think of it as structural progress. To achieve a reduction in entropy, short-term increases are sometimes necessary. It's not as if we have nothing to show for our labors."
"Yes. Wheat."
"And a set of Ropp cherrywood pipes."
"Which might be worth a pretty penny if they weren't burned out."
"And a remarkably complete collection of the Contamiski Times-Herald."
"Splendid, we'll make papier-mache." Which wasn't entirely fair. Some people do collect newspapers. The paper that started out as the Contamiski Times has a mildly interesting history; it's not a very good newspaper, but the publisher owns the press. From time to time competition starts up and eventually gets bought out. The full title of the paper is now the Contamiski Times-Herald Union-Leader Herald-Union.
"And then there's these," said Kitman, holding out a pair of blue, fist-sized sculpted glass baubles. "Insulators from telegraph poles. Rolled out of the wheat box. Highly collectible, and there may be more." He generously handed one of them to me — and then disaster struck.
Wheat had continued to leak out of the large box while we fiddled around, and so much had now been spilled that the box lost structural integrity and collapsed under the weight of the stack of boxes atop it.
The result was much like what you see in stock film footage of chimneys collapsing, except that as it was happening in Kitman's abasement there were complications in the form of a cross-basement Rube-Goldberg-style chain reaction that I will leave to your imagination, partly because the overhanging fluorescent light broke about halfway through the process, but which ended with the sound of a bowling ball being launched through a box of champagne glasses and about halfway into the far wall.
"Hmm," said Kitman, in the sudden darkness.
I concurred.
And we sat there for a while.
But as it turned out there was light, after all; greenish and dim, but light nonetheless.
The basement walls may have lacked windows (in fact, they did lack windows) but they did have half a dozen large prisms embedded at ceiling level. I'd seen their glassy tops on several occasions while helping mow the lawn, but hadn't realized they were more than paving-stone decorations. (Sailing ships used similar devices to carry the sun below decks.)
We got up from the steps and made our way across the — now less figurative — wreckage to determine what that last particularly impressive sound effect had been, and upon reaching the other size of the basement stepped across crunching champagne-type glass to find a bowling ball stuck halfway through what we had previously thought to be a solid concrete wall.
Kitman reached up and poked the bowling ball, which promptly fell down inside the wall —
— and landed on something that jingled.
It sounded disturbingly like Fortunato.
•
In the event that you ever have reason to tear down a plaster wall — to verify the presence of a dead fictional character or otherwise — I recommend that you have a trash bin ready beforehand. Otherwise the debris will get trodden underfoot and make a royal mess, or as close as circumstances will allow.
"What a royal mess," said Kitman, shuffling through shards of chalk-like wall material to shine his ten-million-candlepower flashlight into the (now much larger) hole. "What's the next-worst thing to a royal mess, by the way? A prime-ministerial mess?"
"A top-gallant mess," I said. "What's in there? Be oblique if it's disturbing."
"Um...no dead clowns in chains," he said, and stepped inside the wall. "No live clowns in chains, either. No chains or clowns at all, in fact. Ow."
"What ow?"
"Bowling ball."
"What jingled?"
There was another jingle. "A keychain."
"A keychain is a chain, Kitman."
"I stand corrected," said Kitman noncommittally. "The only other thing in here is...a large but thoroughly non-casket-shaped box. Not big enough to hold a complete clown."
"Thank you for that."
"I live to serve. Well, it might fit a small one. How tall are you, exactly?"
I heard a loud wooden creak. "Don't open it!" I said.
"Too late."
I waited, nibbling on my nails, at least conceptually.
"Sorry, no mummified clown parts," said Kitman. "In fact...nothing but..."
•
"I hate it when you do that, by the way," I said.
"What?"
"Trail off suspensefully when there's nothing to be suspenseful about."
"Well, that remains to be seen," said Kitman.
We were halfway up the stairs, lugging a travel chest full of loose papers.
"Unpaid bills from 1890," I said, preparing for another heave, "are not of much interest."
"Unless it's compound," he said. "And it's not all bills..."
•
"—You're doing it again!"
•
But he wasn't.
"I've got something here about the sacrificial temple of the voons," I said, some time later.
We were sitting in the Empty Room, which was now scattered with the contents of the travel chest: manuscripts of the old-school, non-figurative variety, all handwritten by one Walter V. Finch.
"Who do they sacrifice?" said Kitman.
"According to the narrator, the narrator," I replied. "The last line is 'The six-bladed knife is coming down!'"
"Good cliffhanger," said Kitman. "But try this one."
"What's it about?" I said, turning it right-side-up.
"It's a...travelogue," said Kitman carefully.
"Oh? How dull."
"Maybe, maybe not."
And I read:
Is this some mad dream of God?
It was a travelogue — but a travelogue about a man who each night walked under strange stars, through black pine forests scented with doom, down endless marble halls that stretched beyond human imagination, to an unknown destination.
I emerge at last into the very peak of the temple and find it to be so empty that it is full. The walls are transparent, revealing a somber cosmic panorama: above, half a universe of stars; below, a gleaming plain of black ice stretching unbroken and unending to the infinite horizon...to the fore reflecting in countless shades of deep crimson and deeper cerulean — all jewel-distinct and individual — the window-lights of the temple, and glittering with the stars in liquid blackness beyond. And I blow out my candle and praise the darkness.
"The next bit is of particular interest," said Kitman, and I turned the page.
May this phantasmic night of magnificent desolation never end.
"Eighty years early," said Kitman.
"Maybe this is where Buzz Aldrin got it."
"Not likely — not if it's been sitting behind a false wall in my cellar all this time. Have you ever heard of Walter V. Finch?"
"Nope," I said. "You'd better call your dad on this one."
"Hm," said Kitman noncommittally. "I'll hold off until he gets back. I'd like to get to the bottom of it myself if possible.
"Certainly to the bottom of this chest," he added, turning back to the box. "There might be a false one."
We emptied out the rest of the papers, but the bottom proved disappointingly solid, and careful measurements showed there wasn't room for a compartment in any case.
"I like a challenge," said Kitman.
"What, are you going to add a secret compartment?" I said.
"If need be," said Kitman. He tucked his hands behind his back and began to pace around the room. "It seems unreasonable," he said, "that we should find anything other than treasure in a sealed-up closet."
"Except Fortunato," I said.
"Anything other than treasure and dead clowns. People do not wall up closets by accident."
"Except when remodeling aircraft carriers."
"What?" said Kitman, his stride interrupted.
"The USS Enterprise, CVN-65. They lost an entire machine shop for a decade or more."
"All right, except when remodeling aircraft carriers," said Kitman. "But this house is not an aircraft carrier. No, people wall up closets with the intent of keeping the contents a secret. Ergo, the contents must be worth keeping a secret. There must be something here worth hiding, something too valuable to discard, too important to destroy — and I'm going to find it."
•
He didn't find it.
Oh, he tried. He tried all the usual chemical trickery on the manuscripts to find invisible messages, and I scanned them for coded messages of the "Gold Bug" variety (since Walter V. Finch was an obvious follower of Edgar Wallace Poe); we both struck out. He measured the chest again with precision Swiss calipers and then ran it through his home-built fluoroscope; it was solid oak. We both went over the closet (and basement walls) with rubber hammer and stethoscope, to no avail; there were no other hidden rooms. The keychain...
The keychain consisted of a ring of keys, a chain and a decorative spherical fob, and examined under an exceptionally good light and a magnifying glass gave up its non-secrets almost instantly.
Every key on the ring was to a door in the house, except two; one was to the travel chest, and the other was to the front door of the tree lab, which had been the back door of the house until Dr. and Dr. Mrs. had been introduced to the wonders of sliding glass. We confirmed the latter after carrying the empty travel chest up into the tree lab.
(I got custody of the manuscripts, just in case there was anything in them more subtle than a substitution code.) The steel ring itself we did not seriously expect to display any interesting messages upon exposure to heat, and in fact we didn't make a serious attempt at looking. Mainly because we couldn't find the blowtorch, or, for that matter, the metal detector we needed to find the blowtorch.
The chain and fob looked like silver, but after application of the Archimedes principle Kitman decided they weren't.
"Too light," he said. "Wrong density. Plated, maybe. Almost certainly worthless."
"You could try Antiques Roadtrip just to be sure."
"If they ever come back to the Expo Center, which isn't likely after the sprinkler fiasco."
He turned to the exceptionally good light to have another look at the fob. It was a mildly interesting inch-wide globe made of six circles of wire: one circle for the equator, the other two at right angles to each other, all held together with tiny screws. The wires had some engraving of the abstract pattern variety; Tiffany it wasn't.
He dropped the keychain onto his exceptionally messy desk (to which was attached the exceptionally good light) and it slid off onto his exceptionally messy bed (which caught the overflow from his exceptionally messy desk).
He turned out the exceptionally good light looking, as Mr. Clemens would put it, graveled.
"What could I possibly be overlooking?" he said. "What am I not seeing?"
"Sometimes, Kitman," I said, "if you find nothing, it means there's nothing to find."
"Nothing to find? I don't believe it. There's a purloined letter around here somewhere."
•
Strangely enough, we were both right.
•
Kitman's preferred method of thinking is to dangle by his knees from the lowest branch of the tree-lab oak and allow idea fragments to drift down and conglobulate in the top of his head.
It does work, but it produces Kitman ideas.
One of the first Kitman ideas I was exposed to, ten or eleven summers ago, went like this: "The love of money is the root of all evil. Evil leads to guilt. Guilty people blush. So if you see someone blushing for no reason, the odds are good he's in close proximity to ill-gotten gains." And we'd spent quite a few days on the banks of the Contamiski River monitoring beach cookouts for people with shame-filled complexions, and then returning to the scene of the presumed crime with shovels very early the next morning. We'd netted three dollars and sixty-seven cents in small change and a Wendell Willkie campaign button. Not exactly the Red Pagan Leola fortune, but several of the twenty-five-cent pieces turned out to be silver. Only the campaign button was counterfeit.
Late the next morning I watched an upside-down Kitman twirl his silved-plated keychain until it slipped off his finger and flew off through one of the spectacular shafts of sunlight the township provides on misty mornings and into a nearby bush to be investigated by a nosy squirrel.
"I had a terrific epiphany last night," said the upside-down Kitman. "Well, early this morning. It was dawn by the time I finished. Get away from that, tree rat!"
"Anything I might understand?" I said, while Kitman cartwheeled cut of the tree and retrieved the keychain from the marauding adorable fuzzy vermin.
He walked back through several more dramatic shafts of light, holding up the chain and looking at the fob with an abstract smile, which is better than dangerous. "Nothing," he said.
"Ah, too bad," I said, carefully disguising my relief.
"Nothing's very big in physics these days," he said.
"Oh?"
"Oh yes. It's all over the journals I can't afford to read." He tucked the chain into one pants pocket and pulled a slightly dirty napkin from the other — we'd gone out for habanero ice cream the previous evening — and swiped a pen from my shirt.
"Consider the speed of light," said Kitman, drawing a pattern of cross-hatched lines on the napkin. "Okay, that's long enough."
"Is this the epiphany I won't understand?"
"Yeah. This, " he said, holding up the napkin, "represents the universe as an informational structure."
"Tic-tac-toe?"
"No, a simple X-Y grid as commonly seen on graph paper. Space is not continuous, but quantized." He drew an O in the lower right corner. "That's you."
"Not very flattering."
"It's not your good side. Anyway, it's you, and you are a quantum data structure. Suppose you move across the grid."
He crossed out the O, redrew it in the center square, then crossed that out and drew another O in the upper left corner. "Motion consists of your structure ceasing to exist in one quantized slot and beginning to exist in another.
Transfer of information. The minimum duration for that process to occur is the maximum information transfer rate, which is the speed of light. Physics actually concedes that light-speed can be exceeded — in quotation marks — provided no information is transferred, because in the absence of information the concept of exceeding the speed of light, in and of itself, is not meaningful.
"Now, suppose it were possible to divide the structure that constitutes you through the nonexistent imaginary Z axis?" He pulled the two-ply napkin apart into two single ply napkins."We thereby produce two structures of semi-quanta. Since a quantum is the smallest possible unit of information, a half-quantum is therefore equal to...?"
"Nothing?"
"Good man. Thus each half-set —" he waved each half of the napkin — "can be considered to contain no information.
The information transfer rate limitation applies only to information. Information-free sets can be transferred from corner to corner in essentially zero time. Stick them together again when they arrive —" he reassembled the napkin — "and presto: instantaneous space travel. How does that sound?"
I considered the idea to the best of my ability.
"Like nonsense," I said.
"You're absolutely correct," he said, "and that's how I diagnosed it myself when I woke up with it at five this morning...but."
"You woke up at five?" (Kitman might still be awake at five, but he doesn't voluntarily wake up before ten.)
"Glass of water fell into the bed. Nonsense, I say, but."
He emitted an expectant pause.
"But?" I said.
"But," said Kitman, "it did get me thinking about nothing. You said there might be nothing to find. It occurred to me that that might be non-figuratively true, in the same way that nothing is very big in physics these days."
"Hah?"
"The travel chest," he said, pointing up into the tree. "Oak, yes?"
"The tree?"
"The chest. Oak. Solid oak. You know the density of oak?"
"No."
"I do. I looked it up at 5:16 this morning. I thought that chest seemed unusually light when we carried it up into the lab."
"It was empty. And I had the bottom end."
"Even so. As I said, I had an epiphany, and I never question my epiphanies. I knew the volume of the oak used to construct the chest. I looked up its density. I did the math. Then I came out here and put the sucker on the scales, and yup, that chest weighs a lot less than it ought to."
"Maybe it's not solid oak."
"Fluoroscope said it's solid as a politician's head." He stuffed the napkin back in his pocket and pulled out the keychain and twirled it again. "Helium balloons float. Density less than air, air pressure forces them to rise. They seem to weigh less than nothing. If the chest were sealed, air-tight, and the inside evacuated, the atmosphere removed, it would seem to weigh less, because it was being pushed up. But even that wouldn't explain the difference in weight." He made hypnotic gestures with the silved-plated keychain fob. "My hypothesis," he said, "is that the travel chest contains not merely nothing, but a positive excess of nothing. And so does this keychain."
"Huh?" I said.
"And then of course I got lucky."
"Huh?" I said again.
"You're getting good at that. What do you see right in front of your face?" He allowed the fob to swing to a stop in the middle of one of the aforementioned brilliant shafts of light. Mist curled through its wires.
Spiraled, in fact.
I watched it swirl around for a while.
Kitman elected to play through rather than wait for the question. "Why," he said, "is the mist behaving differently inside the wires?"
Outside the fob the mist was a soup of Brownian motion, and you could pass your hand through it without making much of a difference. Inside the fob it was going into a slow spin.
"I noticed it this morning thanks to the dust in my bedroom," said Kitman. "And an exceptionally good light. Peculiar, no? An absolute unqualifies scientific anomaly. And a good anomaly is well worth sealing in a closet, in my opinion."
•
Or not.
what we had on our hands was an object that had mild peculiar effects on dust motes and mist but either had no other interesting properties whatsoever, or was completely resistant to investigation. We spent the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon using every bit of scientific equipment in the tree lab that we hadn't used already and found nothing. Electromagnetic anomalies were absent. High-resolution photographs in various spectra revealed nothing. Contact microphones ditto. Kitman was tempted to try the blowtorch, but we couldn't find it even with the metal detector.
We sat and looked at the fob, which was clamped in Kitman's best vise.
"You could take it apart," I said. "Unscrew it, see what happens."
"And if it's a container, whatever anomaly it contains will be released. The prospect fails to appeal to me."
"Always a bad idea to release the captive singularity," I said.
"Well, it's not one of those. I did stick my finger in there. Several times. Nothing particularly awful happened."
"Like having your flesh torn from your bones and sucked into nothingness?"
"Yeah, " he said, with a trace of disappointment, and set it down, and looked at it, and...then we went and vacuumed up the wheat in the basement.
We didn't find the telegraph insulators again, either.
