Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which We Learn Strange And/Or Terrible Things.
"He can have my other slice," said Noel, sacrificing a segment of heaven for the benefit of an approximate stranger.
"That is noble and you have my undying gratitude," said Nash Mider, helping himself to Noel's pizza. He examined the other contents of the table. "May I assume these peculiar white objects are drinking cups?"
"Soda water," said Kitman, pointing. "Flavored by artifice in orange and grape."
"Good heavens," said Nash Mider, "how science marches on. —It was science, wasn't it?"
He rose effortlessly from his chaise longue, and I noticed for the first time (I'm not very observant) that he was in curiously pristine condition for a man who had been lying down for a week without so much as getting up to visit the bottomless pit. Untangled dark brown hair spilled like coffee down the back of his unrumpled black suit; an equally untangled string tie hung over an unrumpled, unstained white shirt.
"Absolutely," said Kitman. "Science."
"Splendid," said Nash Mider, walking to the doorway. "Makes a nice change around here, which I shall regretfully eschew for personal reasons." He pulled a bellcord that I also hadn't previously noticed.
There was no sound, but much to our surprise the door opened from without, revealing a small, bipedal, immaculately dressed pig. He had highly polished black trotters.
"You rang, sir?" he said.
"Yes, Hodgson — kindly fetch us a bottle of brandy. Four glasses?" he added, glancing in our direction.
"We're too young for brandy, Mr. Mider," I said.
"At home, perhaps, but not abroad," he replied. "And you can't get any more abroad than this place."
"That may be true," said Kitman, "but alcohol destroys the little grey cells."
"Yes, but you're young and your little grey cells are still reproducing," said Nash Mider. "I'm old, and when mine burn out that's it. It makes more sense for you to have brandy than I."
"Still," said Kitman, "I believe I'll take a pass."
"Ibid," said I.
"I wouldn't mind a small one," said Noel cautiously. "I'm twenty-six."
"One large and one small, then, Hodgson," said Nash Mider.
"Very good, sir," said Hodgson, and vanished silently away.
Nash Mider turned back to us and brought his hands together in the usual steepled-fingers gesture associated with thinking and contemplation. "Now, let me see. You're here, you're not from here, you don't particularly know who I am, and you have just treated me to a meal beyond my ken. Have I appraised the situation correctly?"
"We also rescued you," said Kitman.
"Oh? From where?"
"Atop a spire atop a tower, under a planet."
Nash Mider blinked. "Oh," he said. "Bother. I finally worked my way up there and I don't remember a thing about it. Well, that's pilcrow nuts for you. Fiendish things. What a nuisance. Now I'll have to do it all over again, somehow."
Hodgson rippled in with the brandy. "Will there be anything else, sir?"
"Not at present."
"Very good, sir," said Hodgson, and was gone without ever really leaving.
"I expect," said Nash Mider, pouring Noel a very small one and himself a very large one, "that you would appreciate a quick precis vis-a-vis who, what, where, when, why and how."
"Absolutely," said Kitman.
"Very well," said Nash Mider. "—Incidentally, before I begin, are any of you ducks?"
"I am," said Noel, raising his hand.
"Ah," said Nash Mider. "I thought you were, but around here...well, no matter.
"I am Nash Mider, associate manager — or, more likely, former associate manager — of the Contamiski Construction Company, gentleman of inadvertent leisure, unpublished author...and perhaps permanent occupant of this house on the borderline. Not that I mind."
"Contamiski Construction," said Kitman. "Did you build this house? or a facsimile thereof?"
"Oh, no," said Nash Mider. "No no. I found it. In the woods. But let me begin at the beginning..."
He swirled his brandy in its snifter. (Snifter: a glass narrower at the top than the bottom to concentrate the "nose" of the brandy. Noel had a shot glass with a straw in it.)
"There was," said Nash Mider, "a girl." He raised his glass and hesitated with his lip on the rim while an expression crossed his face that was the exact opposite of dreamy. "And then after a while," he said, "there wasn't."
(A small fragment of silence drifted by...)
"My father sent me upriver from the main office to Abelton to...supervise the new construction we were doing there. Told me to find myself a place to stay, see what there was to see, and try to pay attention to what was going on.
"As it happened, I found a place to stay while I wasn't paying attention.
"I had gone up the forest trail to speak to our logging foreman about something or other, took a wrong turn — and found, to my considerable surprise, my house."
"Your house?" said Noel. (Or, rather, coughed.)
"Well, I had designed it," said Nash Mider. "Months before, as an exercise in drafting. I studied architecture, you know. I even passed once. Anyway, there it was, fully built and ready for occupancy."
He took another sip of his brandy. "Had I been thinking more clearly I would have wondered about it, but it was within days of my birthday, and a house would not have been the most generous gift my father had ever given. I thought it was some sort of oblique joke. My mind was on other things. So I moved in. Stayed in, too — there was a week's worth of rain and no work getting done.
"Within days, or rather nights, I began to have what I considered to be rather pleasant dreams. They didn't have any people in them, for a start. Drifting landscapes of ever-decreasing familiarity...
"Over time these visions began to deepen and intensify; the lands through which I passed became completely strange, and my dreams became not merely dreams unlike any I had ever had before, but dreams, I think, unlike anyone has ever had before."
He cast us a glance. "I have spent many a night beneath the foundation of reality..."
This was from his story "The Labyrinthine Void".
"You have known," I paraphrased, "the cold pleasure of dust-buried palaces —"
"— and windblown gods; empty spaces filled with music yet to be played —"
"Waiting," said Noel, staring crookedly out the window, "while starlight falls like snow, for morning to disperse my reveries, but what rises at dawn is not the sun."
Which puzzled me. "When did you read any of those manuscripts?" said I.
Noel dragged his gaze from the window; it didn't want to go. "What manuscripts?" he said, blinking sluggishly.
Now it was Nash Mider's turn for puzzlement. "You haven't read my work?"
"What work?" said Noel, and tried to poke his straw back into his bill.
"Noel, you're sloshed," I said.
"Okay," said Noel.
"We've been meaning to mention," said Kitman. "We came upon Noel stuck up a tree down the hill from this very house. He's not from anywhere we know. He's inexplicable."
"Yeah!" said Noel, excited and a bit smug.
Nash Mider set his glass down and took a seat opposite Noel. They regarded each other, with varying degrees of steadiness, for a long moment.
As it happened, they both had dark brown eyes, and I wished momentarily for a Pantone sheet or something, to see if they were identical.
"Have you ever dreamed," said Nash Mider to Noel, "of dark skies and darker stars?"
Noel blinked, and after a moment gave a hesitant little nod.
"Of walking across plains of black ice," said Nash Mider, leaning forward, "ice that glistens in unknown colors under the light of an absent moon?"
With less hesitation, but with a small gulp, Noel nodded again. Nash Mider leaned even farther forward.
"Of the night-carved temples under the red, red sun of Ibi T'za?"
"—Always!" breathed Noel.
Nash Mider shifted in his seat. "Of a...green jade pyramid," he said, "that casts coruscating waves of emerald light...?"
Noel opened his bill. Then he closed it again. Then he reopened it.
"Er," he said, "no."
"I think," said Nash Mider, picking up and finishing his brandy in one gulp, "there is something you need to see."
•
Kathleen had finished her lunch and was now checking her watch.
"It's all about the jade pyramid," I said.
"Where we have been," said Kitman, "and must return."
Kitman, sitting opposite me, was now armed with a pencil and pad of paper; I could see, upside down, that he had made lists labeled Unanswered Questions and Unanswerable Questions.
"I don't suppose," said Kitman to Noel, "that Mr. Mider said where he was going?"
"I think he went out for pilcrow nuts," said Noel.
"What, he's still on the pilcrow nuts?" said Kitman.
"Oh, no, they're not for him," said Noel. "They're for the voons."
Kitman dropped his pencil.
"As a topping," said Noel. "Voons love pizza."
A familiar voice sang in from the hallway. "They certainly do!"
It was, of course, Nash Mider.
"And a good thing, too," he said, stepping into the kitchen with a large basket of pilcrow nuts over his arm. "We've been having bad luck with the eyeball vines. What brings you back to my humble abode, Master Kitman?"
"As I don't want to interrupt an ongoing explanation," said Kitman, "let us step into the dining room and I will in-clue you."
I waited until the door closed behind them before continuing.
"Naturally," I said, "all those stories we found in the travel chest were neither more nor less than the approximate truth." I paused to consider what I had just said, and then carried on regardless. "Everything he wrote about, he had directly experienced."
"How is it," said Kathleen, peering over the sunglasses she had put back on for that purpose, "that he thought he could have been known as a famous author when he sealed all his stories in a closet in the basement?"
"Well," I said, "that's where things get strange."
•
"Bother," said Nash Mider, furiously sponging brandy from his shirt with a napkin. "How do I do it?"
"Dribble glasses, sir," said Hodgson, who, as I said previously, had never really left. "I have a terrible weakness for them."
"Oh," said Nash Mider. "Why?"
"Inexcusable errors in my upbringing, sir. I have a letter of apology from my parents if you wish to peruse it. I believe it includes a discount coupon for dry-cleaning."
"Leave it on my desk," said Nash Mider. "And fetch me a fresh shirt."
"Very good, sir," said Hodgson. "You may wish to retire momentarily to your bedroom, as I believe you will find pants apropos as well."
"Hm? Oh. No," said Nash Mider, looking down, "it hardly shows. Where was I?"
"Before you digressed," said Kitman, "you were telling us about your dreams of increasing intensity."
"Oh, yes," said Nash Mider. "I wrote them all down, of course. I had every intention of seeing them published; I knew they were unlike anything in print — well, except for Edgar Poe and Ambrose Bierce, perhaps. And I had always had literary ambitions...I certainly," he added, "wasn't qualified as an architect."
"I like this house," said Kitman and Noel and I simultaneously.
"Oh? Well, good," said Nash Mider. "But then things went peculiar."
Kitman and I exchanged glances.
"My dream self," said Nash Mider, "developed a mind of its own."
Kitman and I exchanged glances again. I mouthed the phrase 'tao dreamer' and Kitman gave me a dirty look.
"The first novelty," continued Nash, undoing his tie, "was that there was now continuity between waking and sleeping. I would get into bed, and drift off to sleep, and then get out of bed — in my dream — go downstairs and out the door and explore as per usual.
"The second novelty was that I, if that is the correct pronoun, had started taking notes. In my dreams I would find sheets of them scattered across tables, or on the floor. I couldn't read them without waking up, but I recognized my handwriting.
"I gradually became aware that I, and that is not the correct pronoun, was doing more dreaming than I was aware of. Dreaming while I was awake. Exploring my dreamworld while I was awake. Gathering data. Searching for something.
"And I found it."
Nash Mider paused to change his shirt. "One evening in November, I went to bed. I went to sleep. And woke up twice.
"Simultaneously.
"I was coexistent with myself. I was seeing everything twice, but it wasn't the same everything. I was breathing out of sequence with myself. I did and did not have to visit the toilet.
"There was me, in that paralyzed by sleep state you may be familiar with, in my bed, and there was another me, in my dream bed. And then we switched places.
"I was paralyzed by sleep in my dream bed, and he was getting out of my real one.
"He walked around to the other side of the bed — both beds — so that I could see him. He was me. Me with a slightly crazed look in my eye.
"He was carrying a keychain in his hand, of a type I somehow recognized, perhaps from the notepapers he had left lying around.
"It worked, he said. It worked. Oh joy, he said, oh, endless delight. Oh, wonderful end to eternal night."
Nash Mider put his jacket back on.
"He pointed at me, and said — ipsissimis verbis — 'You have a diseased imagination.'"
Nash Mider tied his tie, neatly.
"And then I woke up, fully and completely, here — and I have never seen him since, nor dreamed of my former world.
"I had hoped that since he was me, he would have and fulfill my auctorial ambitions, but apparently not. Ah well.
"Since that time I have explored my strange new world and in large part mastered it. I have made it anew, in some places. Some parts were strange to me — parts I knew, but did not myself create; the temples of Ibi T'za, for example. Those," he said, glancing at Noel, "were yours."
"Gosh," said Noel.
"But the jade pyramid," said Nash Mider, combing his hair to no avail, "that one is neither yours nor mine, and so I hypothesize that it is real. I have never managed to enter it. I think, perhaps, that together we might be able to penetrate its mysteries and learn something about what is really going on around here."
•
"Which we did," said Nash Mider, entering the kitchen with Kitman. "And as the authority on reality is Kuan Kuo, I suggest that you all move on to there post-haste."
"But I haven't finished with your library," began Kitman.
"My library?" said Nash Mider. "My library is for the most part my own invention, and worthless. Now hist."
"Hist?" said I.
"Hist!" said Nash Mider. "By Master Kitman's description, these squirrels of yours did not devour your house physically. It sustained no physical damage. It simply departed your ken, replaced with what Master Kitman referred to as the house that would have been built on that site. However, as you all still remember the house as having existed, yours is not a mere temporal problem. The house was gnawed away from its connections to reality itself, and your reality is most probably still repercussing. As I said, you need to see Kuan Kuo."
Hodgson chose this moment to liquesce in the kitchen doorway.
"If I may interrupt the discussion, sir, with some pertinent data?"
"By all means, Hodgson."
"There is a gnawing noise emanating from behind the wall in your study."
