Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which We Learn Things We Do Not Understand.
Five floors down the circular staircase, straight down the main corridor, at the second right — was the Jade Pyramid's Gift Shop, which of course we felt obliged to step into for a few minutes.
There were jade coffee mugs, souvenir postcards of the jade coffee mugs, t-shirts with humorous sayings on them ("I achieved samadhi through this stupid t-shirt"), pen and pencil sets, commemorative spoons, and helium balloons with smiley faces on them to celebrate either that particular Buddha who meditated until all his limbs fell off or Kuan Kuo getting a good deal on helium balloons.
They also had small jade flowerpots to grow bonsai bodhi trees in, large jade flowerpots to not grow bonsai bodhi trees in, some tea-ceremony cupcakes, and, by the cash register, a stack of thick yellow-covered trade paperback books. Kitman took one off the top.
"The Marching Moron's Guide® to Enlightenment," he read, "by Master Kuan Kuo. Cartoons by Rich Tennant."
"Every acolyte gets one of those," said Noel.
"Mphm," said Kitman, scanning the book rapidly.
"Do you feel enlightened, Kitman?" said I.
"Hard to say," said Kitman. "Most of the pages are blank." He showed me a three-page fold-out of nothing.
"There are three major schools of thought on that," said Noel. "One holds that they're not actually blank, but that the wisdom upon them is beyond our perception. Another holds they're meant to be experienced as being dynamically blank."
"And the third school?"
"Misprinted," said Noel.
"Ah," said Kitman. "And what do you think, Noel?"
"I think it's another zen joke," said Noel, pointing at the sign next to the books, which read CLEARANCE - 100% OFF. FREE PEN AND PENCIL SET WITH EVERY BOOK!
"Do it yourself?" said Kitman. "That makes sense, I suppose. Ties in nicely with the absence of anyone working the cash register."
After we helped ourselves to our freebies, because after all they were really nice pen and pencil sets, we stepped back into the hallway.
The Visitor Center next door was easily identifiable: next to the entrance was a plastic sign reading WAITING ROOM with a sticky note on top of it reading VISITOR CENTER.
We sat down in some mahogany chairs, which Noel explained would have been quite expensive and environmentally unfriendly had they actually existed, and waited.
There are conspicuous advantages, incidentally, to having a waiting room that's purely conceptual. It stays as clean as the day it was conceived and the magazines are always current, if not more so.
I picked up an issue of NEWSWEEK from next year, which had a cover photo of someone who was not a duck with the caption "S. Ross Gerber: Why We Need A Crazy Nevada Billionaire As President", and was about to turn to the movie reviews page to see if the long-promised Star Trek movie was actually any good when someone stuck his head in from the hallway.
"Noel?" said the person, who was a duck.
"Robin!" said Noel.
If Noel Quillie had the voice of someone with a tendency toward damp palms and apologetic looks, Robin Deason supplied the body. On the sides of his otherwise green head he had a set of red stripes that looked like cartoonist's shorthand for alarm; these were enhanced by a pair of round black glasses that gave him the look of someone who had just dropped something heavy on your foot, bearing in mind that you were a human being and three feet taller than he was. When he shook as much of my hand as he could I found that he did indeed have damp palms. He also had a ribbon tie that Nash Mider would have thought slightly out of style, and generally looked like Noel's less confident brother.
"I got Robin a job in the Records Department," said Noel proudly.
"Otherwise known as Stacks and Piles," said Robin.
"But we're working on it," said Noel. "Have you seen Kuan Kuo, Robin? We're waiting for him..."
"Actually," said Robin, "you're waiting for me, I'm afraid. He's busy. You know how it goes, you've just gotten to the top of the ladder—"
"—and there he is sitting on the shelf—" inserted Noel.
"—and says oh hello, have you got a minute, kono shigoto, tanonde ii ka na—"
"—and you have to go off and do heaven knows what, and half the time he never says why or even what—"
"Did he tell you?" interrupted Noel.
"Oh. Yes. No."
Most of the people in the room tried to exchange glances, but by and large looked at the wrong people.
"We have to wait for another visitor," said Robin —
— and on the word "visitor", none other than Nash Mider walked into the room, carrying a violet wood box containing a glowing green squirrel that was clearly stoned out of its mind on pilcrow nuts.
"Now we're getting somewhere," said Kitman.
Behind a frosted glass door with the names "Mr. Quillie" and "Mr. Deason" on it in gold leaf lies the Records Department of the Jade Pyramid, and if you've ever heard the phrase "Hall of Records" you'll have a fair grasp of it: a hallway, lined with shelves to the thirty-foot-high ceiling, extending to the vanishing point. The farther we looked the worse the bureaucratic inevitability got, surpassing Kitman's room in disorder within a mile; toward the front of the room there were stacks; to the rear, piles, with the Platonic Ideal equivalent of burst-open cardboard boxes no longer filled with papers much in evidence.
Near the door there were two large desks: one plain, one with everything. Both were modeled after Nash Mider's, much to Kitman's envy. Propped up against each desk was a wide-body scooter with baskets mounted fore and aft.
"You'd better put it on my desk," said Robin, indicating the former, empty one.
Nash Mider set down the cage, and we got our first good look at a metasquirrel.
He was lying flat on his back, staring into space with his little mouth hanging open, green glowing drool running down his green glowing cheek, half a pilcrow nut clutched in his paws. He was holding it by the glowing outline rather than the nut itself. He had a thin black collar around his neck.
"Interesting," said Kitman, pointing at the collar with his newly-acquired jade mechanical pencil. "Is that an ID tag I see?"
Noel passed him a magnifying glass, and Kitman swiftly transcribed the image to a page of Kuan Kuo's blank book.
It was a circle with a horizontal line through it, with eight lines around it at 45-degree intervals, like rays of light.
Nash Mider scratched his head. "Nothing I recognize."
Noel said, very thoughtfully, "Hmm."
"What?" said Kitman, somewhat put out that he was not the one saying "Hmm" very thoughtfully.
"I've seen that before," said Noel.
"So have I," said Robin, a moment later.
"So have I," said Kathleen, another moment later.
"I beg your pardon?" said Kitman.
"I've seen that symbol before," Kathleen said entirely through a shrug of her shoulders.
"Where?" said I.
"Most probably one of those Newton Blackspring books," she said.
"Ah," said Kitman. "Pity that all your Newton Blackspring books are currently unavailable."
"It might," said Kathleen, "have been one of the library's."
"Uh," said Kitman.
"Hm," he added.
"How are you fellows on Newton Blackspring?" he said to Noel and Robin, with mild desperation.
"Never heard of him other than from you," said Noel.
Robin shrugged. "We might have what you want," he said, "but..."
We all looked from the stacks to the piles.
"Why," said Kitman, his mild desperation shifting into slightly less mild frustration, "didn't they computerize all this when they had the chance?"
"Oh, they did!" said Robin. He held up the cuff of his left shirt sleeve. "This cufflink is a data storage crystal that contains almost all the information in this room."
"Great! Where's the computer?"
Robin pointed into the piles. "I think I saw it only a few weeks ago," he said, "before the slide."
"Oh," said Kitman.
"But," said Noel, "I saw that symbol somewhere nearby, and not in a book. On something I sorted."
"We'll find it," said Robin.
"We'll help!" said Kitman, and both Robin and Noel flinched.
Since I know how some people hate having other people mess up their filing system, I said, "We could take a quick trip to Contamiski County Library and look there while they're looking here."
"There is a certain logic in your position," said Kitman, "loath though I am to leave, since being here at least feels like accomplishing something. All right, we'll do that." And he reached for his vaxillator — in the backpack he wasn't wearing.
"Oh, crap," he said.
"You left your inter-whatzis travel gadget behind, huh?" said Kathleen.
"Evidently," said Kitman, "so."
"Oh, we can send you back," said Robin.
"Actually..." said Noel, looking thoughtful.
"What?" said Robin.
"We could," said Noel speculatively, "take them to level 26."
"We don't have permission," said Robin.
"Do we need permission?" said Noel.
"Possibly."
"Level what?" said Kitman.
"We don't have permission to tell you," said Robin.
"Do we need permission?" said Noel.
"Possibly."
"Look," said Kitman. "In some circumstances I would be desperate to find out what I'm not supposed to know, but at the moment I have other priorities. I've lost my house and I appear to be losing my mind as well. So could you please just send us back to Nash Mider's cellar? I can take it from there."
"Absolutely," said Robin. "Ready?"
"Yes,"
•
said Kitman. "Whoa! that was quick..."
"They got Kathleen!"
"What?" I said, in stereo.
I was in Nash Mider's cellar. We were all in Nash Mider's cellar. Too many of us were in Nash Mider's cellar.
There was an extra Kitman on the stairs, a stricken-looking Kitman staring wildly at an extra me standing right next to myself.
"She was in the third-floor bathroom," said Kitman2. "While we were busy at the library — they must have been swarming —"
"We'll get her back," I2 said, running up onto the stairs to take him firmly by the arms.
"From where?" demanded Kitman2. "Where the — what the —"
And the stairs — their stairs, not ours — shuddered, and wrenched, and warped away...and our duplicates were gone.
Kitman turned to Kathleen. "Don't go in the third-floor bathroom," he said.
"Okay," said Kathleen. "—Are you writing coming attractions now?"
This was directed at me, of course.
"I haven't even written what I've written, let alone what I'm going to write," I said.
Kitman was already ascending the stairs; we tagged closely after. "I'm willing to bet," he said, "that somewhere in this house there's at least one other squirrel gnawing away. I don't think that was the future, I think it was a potential revision of what's happening now."
•
"What worries me," said Kitman once we had vaxillated back to Abelton Park, "is that I'm beginning to be able to wrap my mind around the sentence 'Maybe Mom and Dad won't notice'."
We were looking up his driveway at the yellow Cape Hatteras now squatting in front of his back yard. It did...almost...seem familiar, did...almost...look correct. Only the giant oak tree behind it, looking even more immense due to the house's lack of a third floor, called its quality of belonging into question.
Inside, a telephone began to ring.
Kitman and Kathleen edged almost imperceptibly backwards.
"Why don't I answer that?" I said, and headed for the door.
"Thank you," said Kitman, "very much. And I do mean that."
The front door was unlocked.
I stepped into a fully furnished living room — or rather one that seemed fully furnished at first glance. There were chairs, and a sofa, and a television set. There was a strange-looking coffee table, which I wondered about until I realized why it was strange: it was completely bare. It was not stacked to overflowing with magazines with titles like The Northeastern Journal Of Arts or Synecdoche, and books like —
— books?
There were no books anywhere. This was a living room without books. There weren't even any empty bookcases.
Do you remember the sheer ravening terror I didn't feel while being ingested by a glowing gelatinous monster? I was feeling it now.
And the phone in the dining area was still ringing...
I answered it.
"Solicitor, was it? I hope?" said Kitman as I walked back down to the sidewalk.
"No," I said.
"The police?"
"No."
"My parents?"
"Yes," I said, "and then again, maybe not..."
I told him as gently as I could.
"Time share conference?" said Kitman, as though they were three unrelated words.
"It was a bad connection," I said again. "I could have misheard. In any case they'll be back tomorrow."
"They?" he said.
"My parents?" he said.
"Time share conference?" he said.
Thankfully, however much the universe had changed, the tree lab was still stocked with Kitman Cocktails, a drink which as previously hinted at has all the mental restorative properties of three weeks on Santa Catalina Island.
Kitman, chin on fist, stared down into the yard. "No, sir, no," he said. "My parents would never attend any such affair. Perhaps they were your parents instead."
"Could be," I said.
"There are three items on the agenda," said Kitman, draining his bottle and depositing it in the recycle bin. "One, locate that Newton Blackspring book. Two, get a cake."
"Cake?" I said.
"I remembered what it was that I had forgotten," he said. "The thing that was niggling at me in the basement of Nash Mider's? Wedding anniversary. The shock must have dislodged it. I was supposed to get the cake. When my parents return home, which will not be tomorrow, they will be getting a surprise off-year surprise party, which with any luck will be an actual surprise this time as it's on the wrong day."
"You forgot the cake?" said Kathleen. "How could you forget the cake? I told you about a dozen times."
"Three," said Kitman.
"No, definitely about a dozen."
"Number three," said Kitman, "solve the problem and get my house back. Number zero on the agenda, of course," he added, "is dropping Kathleen off somewhere safe. I was thinking of your house, Williams."
"I beg your pardon?" said I.
"I beg your pardon?" said Kathleen.
"The situation is dangerous and grave," began Kitman...
...and ground to a halt in the radiation from the lowering eye beneath Kathleen's eyebrow raised and fixed.
"As your big brother, uh..." His words dried up and blew away in the actinic glare. "...responsibility," he said. "And, uh...yes?"
"One of these days," said Kathleen, maintaining the roentgens, "I'm going to tell you what I did at music camp."
"Er," said Kitman,"what?"
"Have you not wondered," said Kathleen, "why I'm taking all this so much in stride?"
"Um," said Kitman, shifting uneasily in his chair, "natural sanguinity?"
"You think this is strange and dangerous?" said Kathleen. "This is a walk in the park, Kitman."
"What?" said Kitman.
"But whatever," she said, switching off her eyeball. "You're the authority. I'm going to his house," said she, pointing at him, which is to say me, "where I'm going to read comic books and watch TV after a well-deserved shower, and let big brother handle everything."
"I don't have any comic books," I said, "and my TV is broken."
"Then I'll BUY some comic books and FIX your TV. Let's go."
