Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which We Support The Free Market.
"So this is the basement," said Kathleen. "It's very...empty."
A faint doubt had crept into her voice sometime during the ellipsis, and I could understand why.
Several summers before any of this happened, at a vintage record store in Abelton Park called Drastic Plastic, Kitman had turned up a still-sealed copy of the 1977 Brian Eno album Before And After Science, and it was a good thing, too, because otherwise I would have no good way to describe the basement of the Nash Mider house.
Brian Eno may or may not have said in the album's liner notes that the purpose of art is to transmit untransmittable data; I expect he would have if it had occurred to him, because the album included as a bonus a set of four watercolor prints, three of which somehow, inexplicably, managed to convey the impression that something had just happened in a substantially empty and wholly static scene completely lacking in evidence of aftermath.
The basement of the Nash Mider house, bathed in pale, green-tinted light from the glass prisms mounted high in its walls, produced exactly the exact opposite feeling, i.e. that something was about to happen even though there was, strictly speaking, nothing there for it to happen to.
Kathleen wandered over to one wall and reached up to stroke a roundish light spot that marked the space where something had been removed. "There was a clock here," she said. "Judging by the nail hole."
"Yes, it's upstairs now," said Noel.
"Source of the time notations in that daybook, I expect," she said, walking to the far corner of the room, traling her finger across the roughly plastered surface of the wall. "Since the cellar is allegedly still odd, I surmise that the time element proved irrelevant."
"You're as bright as Mr. Kitman!" said Noel admiringly.
"And you talk like him, too," I said. She gave me a surly look over her shoulder before turning around and leaning up against the far wall.
She looked around the room. I looked at her looking around the room. Noel looked at us looking around the room.
"I figured it out," said Noel, looking smug as only a duck can. "Do you see it?"
"See what?"
"Nothing!" he said, and Kathleen growled faintly.
"Think mystic trash," I said. "Mind you, it did take us quite a while."
•
"This disturbs me no end," said Kitman, stowing his rubber mallet in his pack. "No hidden closets, no convenient messages scrawled on the walls in blood, nothing. Just an inchoate feeling of — latency. And I can't exactly quantify that."
"Would you rather break off and go rifle the desk drawers upstairs?" said I.
"In a word, yes," said Kitman. "But the ethics still bother me. There's got to be a third way, if I can just think of it."
He took up the one-hand-on-chin, other-hand-on-elbow position that is often accompanied by a sigh, and sighed.
Noel and I allowed him a decent post-sigh interlude, and then he sighed again just as we were about to say something.
"So," he said, "anyone want to have lunch?"
There are two basic strategies for packing picnic-in-another-universe type lunches.
The first, favored by the scientifically minded, is to methodically design a healthful, balanced, highly nutritional meal dripping with riboflavin, with an eye toward filling your lunchbox in the most space-efficient manner.
The second, favored by me, is to throw lots of desserts into a bag at the last minute and then negotiate with the scientifically minded.
A previously unknown third is to pack nothing at all, but happen to be a talking duck sitting between a couple of humans who are starting to feel increasingly guilty about the whole a l'orange thing. This is known as the foie gras ad hoc strategy.
Kitman had brought along his AM/FM/shortwave radio and for our dining pleasure played nothing, not even static, on all three bands.
"So much for that variety of technological civilization," he said, and switched it off.
"What do we do now?" said Noel, having just made a necessary trip to the kitchen sink due to the congruence of a Tastykake blueberry pie and a physiognomy not designed for it.
"Rifle drawers and mug the library?" said I.
Kitman tilted his head. "I was going to say return the diary to the window seat, because it isn't ours, but okay."
So we did. And greatly disappointed we were, too, because although what we turned up was interesting it wasn't actually helpful. For example, we found that Nash Mider had a drawer full of dried-up ballpoint pens. This was intriguing, in its abstract way, but did us no good in terms of finding out where he'd gone, unless it was to the 7-11 to get more pens. His library was certainly no less of interest, at least if you had a taste for faulty translations of the Rig-Veda or various collectible editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but in terms of, say, a Lonely Planet tour book about this particular lonely planet it was woefully deficient. The only real clue of any kind turned up in the form of a shopping list scribbled on a grubby scrap of paper.
"Milk, bread, pilcrow nuts," read Kitman. "Pilcrow nuts?"
"What's a Pilcrow nut?" said I.
"I don't know," said Kitman — which was a surprise, as due to his ongoing squirrel-taunting project (excuse me, squirrel-behavioral-observation project) Kitman knows his nuts. "What's a pilcrow?"
"A paragraph-break symbol," I said, "from the days when paper was so expensive that people didn't want to waste perfectly good blank space by starting a new line. Often looks like a P with a double vertical line." (Pronounced "¶".)
"So, a nut shaped like a pilcrow, one would suppose," said Kitman. "Presumably a local variety. Something to look for — there might be discarded shells lying around. Keep an eye out."
"Why?" said I.
"Given a known relationship between Nash Mider and pilcrow nuts, we can exploit pilcrow nuts toward the end of finding him. Locate one pilcrow nut and we can use the vaxillator to grok its resosignature. Then we can use that signature as a generic, and identify others wherever they may be as variations on a theme. We can vector straight to any and all of them, and if Nash Mider happens to be, e.g., lounging in the middle of a pilcrow grove, hey presto. --Good thinking, eh?"
Noel applauded.
"So all we have to do," I said, "is visit every pilcrow nut grove in existence until we find him."
"Right! " said Kitman, with a down-beat of the index finger in my direction. "It's a complete waste of time, but it's a thoughtful and systematic waste of time. Now all we need is a sample. We can try the wastebaskets..."
"Um," said Noel.
"Um?" said Kitman.
"I," said Noel, "would try looking in the fridge again. Maybe it's just me," he added with some small amount of embarrassment, "but there's always that one loose thing that gets lost in the back of the crisper and stays there until you clean out the fridge. It's usually a very wrinkly grape."
Kitman looked impressed. "With us it's usually a coffee bean," he said, "but that's a very good idea."
"I bow to your crisper experience," I said. "I eat out of the freezer."
We returned to the kitchen and pulled the bottom drawers out of the refrigerator. In one we found a sort of dried-up eyeball thing, and in the other was...something odd.
I'm sorry but it was.
There's a tragically debunked bit of mystic trash called Kirlian photography, which is supposedly a way to take pictures of the energy auras around living things. Among other promised oddities, you can take a Kirlian photograph of a leaf that's had a bit of it torn off and find that the aura still includes the missing bit as it's part of the leaf's self-image or some such.
What we found was a bit like that. Specifically, we found a shriveled-up bean-like thing, shaped like a two-tailed tadpole or a pilcrow, surrounded by a faint purple glow in the shape of a somewhat larger not-shriveled-up bean-like thing shaped like a two-tailed tadpole or a pilcrow.
"Fascinating," said Kitman, and picked it up out of the drawer — and almost immediately dropped it. A peculiar expression settled onto his face, and he stared at his fingertips...which were now, ever so slightly, glowing violet.
"What, did it burn you?" said Noel anxiously.
"Hah? Oh, um, no," said Kitman. "Not at all." He rubbed his fingers together with a faraway look in his eyes until the glow faded.
"What did it do, then?" said I.
"How shall I put this?" he said. "Touch it. But carefully, and not for long."
I gave him the eyebrow raised and fixed, but picked up the pilcrow nut...
I am four years old and in the courtyard of our apartment complex on a bleak winter evening, building a snowman under the red glare of a mercury streetlight — by myself because there is no one around to build a snowman with. The trees are iced over and gleaming, and there are colored lights strung on the buildings, and everything is utterly beautiful.
And then somewhere a power line snaps under the weight of ice, and my world goes out. There is sudden terrifying blackness all around me. I look up into the sky full of stars, bright and white...and take a startled, painfully cold breath in the totality of night...and I'm filled with a feeling of icy desolation and fearful dread...
...that I don't want to ever stop.
"Spit it out!" said Kitman.
I blinked back to reality and did as instructed. I didn't remember even lifting it to my mouth.
"That was...interesting," said Noel, looking up at me with fascination.
"It certainly was," said Kitman, giving me a worried look. "And all things considered, I'd rather not be able to find these things wherever they may be, because that's not the kind of feeling I want to get from an approximately inanimate object." He picked up the nut with a tissue and returned it to the crisper drawer.
"Not going to take a resosignature?" I said.
Kitman returned the drawer to its place and turned away from the fridge. "No way," he said. "I think we'd be better off going to the basement."
"To the basement?" said Noel.
"To the basement," said Kitman. "It suddenly occurs to me, possibly as the result in my elevated blood sugar level, that we neglected to apply the Pinkerton method."
We went down into the basement and divided it into squares...
•
"And eventually," said Noel, "while dividing and conquering, I realized what the excess of emptiness and feeling of something pending meant. Nothing — do you see?" He waved his hand to indicate the contents of the basement.
"I certainly see nothing," said Kathleen.
Noel reached into his pockets and pulled out a small plastic bottle. He unscrewed the lid, reached into the bottle and pulled out a yellow plastic widget. He began to blow soap bubbles with this. "Why do you see nothing?"
"Because," said Kathleen, her faint doubt becoming less and less faint, "the room's empty." She paused to look more intensely at, well, nothing much. "Unnervingly empty, in fact."
"Because there is...?" I said, waving a hand in a circular motion that seemed appropriate. I had probably seen it on TV.
Kathleen looked thoughtful in the traditional manner: forefinger middle knuckle to lips, thumb to chin. "There seems to be more emptiness than one would normally expect in an empty room of this size," she said. "And if that made any sense be sure to let me know sometime."
"Do you remember," I said, "what I said that Nash Mider wrote about an empty room?"
After a moment she said "A room so empty that it was full?"
"Not a bad phrase," I said. "Kitman could have kicked himself for not figuring it out."
"According to the teachings of the Pnikotinic Masters," said Noel, intermittently pausing to blow bubbles, "every empty space contains, in potentio, everything. You just need to look at it the right way."
"Like a trial-size Primordial Void," said Kathleen.
"The same principle as vacuum genesis," said Kitman, rattling down the stairs behind us, "in no way whatsoever."
"I thought you were doing hard work," said Kathleen.
"I was, until I heard my name mentioned on my way to the kitchen," said Kitman, taking a bite out of a cheese sandwich. "Carry on, Noel. I like a good lecture."
"I lecture well?" said Noel, cocking his head.
"You're right up there with Carl Sagan," said Kitman. He stepped over to me and leaned in close to my googolbyte voice recorder. "Note to Kitman," he said quietly. "After recovering missing house, see if COSMOS III is out on DVD."
Noel blew bubbles again. "The Pnikotinic Masters," he said, "used to spend all their spare time staring into empty coffee cups, contemplating the universe in all its possible forms. It was the meditative equivalent of satellite TV, only cheaper. I tried it a few times at home — I even sent away for their book — but it was a washout. I thought at the time that I had the wrong kind of cup, but the actual problem was that I was living in the wrong kind of universe.
"But this, ah, this --" he raised his hands to point at, essentially, everything — "this is the right kind of universe! Watch!"
We watched the bubbles float through the air: big ones, little ones, tiny ones, microscopic ones, unbreaking, unsettling in more than one sense of the word...drifting into a rotating pattern not unlike a whirlpool.
"I mentioned something like this before," I said conversationally.
"This cellar contains an excess of nothing," said Kathleen. "Like the fob on your keychain."
"Very much like the keychain," said her brother, watching the bubbles. "Why an excess of nothing has this particular effect on Brownian motion, I have no idea. Something to do with locally decreased entropy, maybe."
"So all those scenes in the daybook were what Nash Mider spotted in this cellar?" said Kathleen.
"At various times, yes," I said. "Although there was no time pattern to what he saw, except insofar as he managed to impose one. Try watching the bubbles — the refraction helps."
"Watch for what?" said Kathleen, looking at the bubbles floating by.
"Don't think of a jade pyramid," said Noel.
"A jade wha-- oh, good grief," said Kathleen, staring, with some degree of amazement, at a space right before her eyes.
"That was quick," said Kitman.
The three of us crowded around the empty space Kathleen was examining.
I let my eyes defocus, which also helps — and all at once and nothing first, I was in two places at once.
According to my eyes I was in the cellar looking at a random empty point in space.
Also according to my eyes — possibly eyes that I didn't strictly have — I was on a high hill, looking down into a palm-forested valley.
A pyramid rose out of the trees, gleaming like a polished and spectacularly misshapen green apple in the sun. A flock of birds with metallic red-gold-and-green plumage soared above it all.
"She's a natural," said Noel admiringly.
"Nice, huh?" said Kitman.
"What kind of birds are those?" asked Kathleen.
"Real ones," said Kitman, and took another bite of his sandwich.
"It's a pity I didn't spot the jade pyramid my first time," said Noel.
"Why, what did you find?" said Kathleen.
•
"You found a what?" said Kitman, earlier.
"A 7-11!" repeated Noel, pointing to a spot an inch in front of his face.
"Must be a very small one," said Kitman, but went over for a look anyway. We got down on our knees next to Noel and tried to see it.
I once had a Sears telescope, with which I once successfully looked at the moon — I say again, once. Spotting anything at all in the telescope's eyepiece was the ocular equivalent of one of those puzzles where you have to get a marble into the center of a set of concentric rings. If Giovanni Schiaparelli had had my telescope, it would have changed the course of Hollywood.
Spotting the 7-11 was even more difficult, since even determining the location to look required triangulation by way of Noel's crossed eyes, but the results were far more spectacular than the sad watery greenish image of the lunar surface that had led me to exchange the telescope for a rather more useful pair of binoculars.
I was in the basement, looking at Noel from a distance of less than five inches — and yet suddenly I was also in a parking lot, looking at the front window of a 7-11 from a distance of more than fifteen feet.
"Amazing!" said Kitman, from off to my left. "Somewhat distressing to my world-view, but c'est la."
"You see it?" said Noel.
"We see it," we said.
"Good. I'm going to try something."
"What?" we said — and Noel was in the parking lot, simple as that. He was still in front of my face, but he was standing on asphalt in broad daylight. He stuck his hand out and waved it straight through my head, which was just weird.
"Cut it out," I said. "You're tickling my medulla oblongata."
He didn't seem to hear me, so I waved my hand through his head, or where it would have been. He backed away — obviously lost sight of the peephole on his side of reality — looked around carefully and spotted it again...
...and he was back in the basement.
"Cool," he said. "Now you try it."
"I beg your pardon?" said Kitman.
•
"The appendix to the book I sent away for," said Noel, "described a mental discipline called 'Threading the Needle'. I was never sure why. It wasn't mentioned in the main text — didn't say what it was for or why you would want to do it. But the idea was to imagine your soul as a cylinder rotating through the fourth dimension."
"Like the shaft of a flywheel," said Kitman. "If you push a rotating flywheel, it moves at a ninety degree angle to the direction of force — and motion at right angles to time could be considered as motion between alternate universes..."
•
"Also," said Kitman, earlier, "maybe I could do my doctoral thesis in physics on the fluid dynamics of chakra energy flow." He covered his eyes with his hand and moaned with distress.
"Why do you moan with distress, Kitman?" I asked.
He lowered his hand to pat his vaxillator. "I may not be entirely clear on how this thing works," he said, "but at least some of it's based on good solid Silicon Valley surplus technology. As opposed to, you know, being entirely mystic trash. — No offense intended, Noel."
"None taken," said Noel.
But we tried it. And then we tried it again. Then we tried it some more and still didn't get anywhere. Meanwhile Noel bounced back and forth with no difficulty whatsoever.
"Other than the basic impossibility of it, I don't see why this isn't working," said Kitman.
"Maybe it's because I have more practice," offered Noel.
"How much time did you spend staring into an empty teacup trying to rotate your soul into another dimension?"
"On Saturday nights, quite a lot."
I said, "I'm getting a backache."
"I've already got one," said Kitman. "I don't think this is going to work in a timely fashion. Let's call it off for the moment."
We called it off for the moment, and Kitman rolled over on his back with a sigh of relief. "Oh, that's much better. It's hard to think on your knees."
"Incidentally," he added after a moment, "I'm an idiot. For a genius, at least."
"What now?" said I.
"The objective is to get from point A to point B. So long as Noel can do the impossible, we don't need to. I've already taken his resosignature, remember?"
"Ah," said I. "He goes to point B and then we use the vaxillator to vector to him."
"Exactly. And may I congratulate you on your grasp of the vocabulary."
All the lights were on in the 7-11 despite the absence of any power lines to supply electricity.
A bell tinkled when we opened the door, and alerted absolutely no one of our presence because the store was empty.
"Hello!" called Kitman. "Anyone home?"
There was no answer. We circled left around the cash register station and peeked into the manager's cubbyhole, but found that area equally unoccupied.
"Did you notice," said Kitman, "that the grass around the parking lot is making no inroads on the asphalt?"
"I can't honestly say I did," said I, examining a refrigerated case stocked with milk and ice cream at very affordable prices.
"The demarcation line was razor-sharp. —Hey, kids! Comic books!"
"Now I'm getting a sense of anachronism," I said, as we approached the rotating wire rack. "You don't see these any more."
"'Iggy the Stoof'?" said Noel, picking up a comic marked Still Only 35¢!
"Wish me a happy birthday, somebody," said Kitman, and showed us a copy of the New York Times dated March 8, 1978.
"Happy birthday!" said Noel. "How old are you?"
"Zero or nine months, depending," said Kitman. "Quite the coincidence, wouldn't you say? Maybe I'll buy this. Usually a paper from the day of your birth runs something like twenty bucks." He started over to the register and pulled a few coins from his pocket. "Anyone want an umpteen-year-old burrito?" he said, examining the nearby display of dough-wrapped beans under hot lights.
"Kitman?" I said.
"Yes?"
"Are you taking this seriously?"
"Of course," he said, crossing around and stepping behind the counter. "But that doesn't preclude taking it lightly."
He rang up a sale on the register and the cash drawer opened. It was full of bits of notepaper. He plucked one of them out from under the metal cash clasp and examined it. "Well, I'll be," he said. "An IOU signed by Nash Mider." He glanced back down into the drawer and prodded the papers. "Given the number of purchases these would indicate, I suddenly wonder who restocks the shelves...but no matter: we make progress. I think I've solved our problem, Nash Mider location-wise."
"How so?" said I.
"Free association," said Kitman. "My agile brain is now ticking over nicely. Is that a mixed metaphor?"
"Is it?"
"Yes. —Look: these papers are signed in Nash Mider's own hand. This one also bears an inky thumbprint. What do those things suggest to you?"
"Um," said I, hoping my own brain wouldn't embarrass me overmuch. "Means of personal identification?"
Kitman gave me a thumbs-up. "And what's the ultimate personal identification?"
"DNA?"
"Yes." He pointed into the drawer. "These bits of torn paper strike me, at least, as suggestive of the minor fragments of ourselves that we constantly, unwittingly, leave behind in the form of epethelial dust."
"Skin cells?"
"Précisément," he said. "Given even a single particle of Nash Mider, I can take a generic resosignature. One cell's worth of DNA is enough to find him, if we're lucky. A small vacuum, a really good magnifying glass and five minutes in his bedroom should suffice."
At this point, Noel, who had wandered off momentarily, stepped up to the register and dumped a half-dozen Tastykake blueberry pies on the counter. "Ring these up, would you?" he said, producing a small bill from his small plastic wallet.
"Going to pay in foreign currency?" said a smiling Kitman.
Despite his lack of actual feathers Noel looked crestfallen.
I swapped his bill for one of my own, as who would not?
"Not that our money is any less foreign," said Kitman, "being from another universe and umpteen years postdated." But he rang up the sale anyway.
•
"You know," said Kathleen, backing away from the cosmic peephole she had discovered, "I could do with a blueberry pie right about now."
"What," said Kitman, "don't you want to go plunging into the strange world of the jade pyramid?"
"Not on a substantially empty stomach," said Kathleen. "Jumping into unknown situations on the spur of the moment without adequate preparation is your tao."
"Hmf," said Kitman.
"What would you like for lunch?" said Noel, stepping toward the stairs. "I was going to make a tofu salad."
"That will do nicely," said Kathleen. "Well?" she said to me.
"Fine with me," I said as we followed Noel up out of the basement.
"I mean, what happened next?"
"Oh, that..."
