Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which At Least One Of Us Has An Epiphany.
"Wait," I said in the general direction of Kitman, who held off on vanishing.
"Did you...need to visit the little—"
"No. Something else." I stepped over to my duplicate. I said, "You're under arrest," because I knew I would know what I meant, and he did, obediently raising his hands. They were blank as an unused canvas. I couldn't allow that.
I pressed my own hands up against them and hoped that what I didn't really know how to do was getting done anyway.
"You're strange," he said, giving me the eyebrow raised and fixed. "I'm like you."
I pulled away, hoping he was right.
He was.
"Thanks," he said, looking down at his fingertips and rubbing them together. "Fingerprints at last. These will come in, uh..."
"Good grief," said Kitman, and vanished to avoid hearing the next word. Which didn't even come from either of me.
"Handy?" said both Kathleens. "Handy? You are like him! Both of you get out of here this instant before I kill both of you or do something I'll regret!"
I can't speak for myself2, but I got.
Captured.
I had disassembled the universe and relocated myself into a trap. No sooner had I reintegrated myself inside the tree lab than a net of faintly glowing white...substance wrapped itself around me.
"No conventional material," said Kitman, who was standing on top of a similar net. "And I don't think your Swiss Army knife is going to cut it, especially since you don't have one. Better use your escape route."
"I'm terribly sorry," said a strange new voice. "I was expecting someone else." The voice was coming from the approximate area of my left shin. I looked down and saw a small translucent red squirrel, glowing very very faintly in the sunlight. It was wearing sunglasses. "Allow me to introduce myself," it continued. "I am Ratavaara, Liaison Officer to the World Tree."
"I am Kitman," said Kitman, "duly authorized representative of the Jade Pyramid Reality Management Organization. Just out of curiosity, how do you speak English?"
"As the Liaison Officer to the World Tree," said the squirrel, "I speak all tongues."
"Really?"
"Naturellement," said the squirrel. "And may I add that I am most pleased to encounter a representative of the Jade Pyramid at last: I did file a request for an intervention...some time ago."
"Oh dear," said Kitman. "I'm afraid we hear that a lot. We're terribly backed up. As the poet said, it's a big universe, and we're not."
"No matter," said the squirrel. "You're here now. Terrible things are afoot, as you doubtless know."
"Well, in general terms, yes," said Kitman. "They always are, it's the nature of terrible things. Could you be a bit more specific? We actually came here to investigate an ontological infarct. Something about a missing house, although I don't actually see one."
The squirrel peered at Kitman over the top of his sunglasses. "Yes," he said, after a pause that, were it possible to print pauses next to words in the dictionary, would have been printed next to distinctly unimpressed…if that were a word rather than two words. "That is part of my problem. My villainous brothers have been tampering with things they wot not of. Soon they will return for the last remnants of the house in question, and then — disaster will ensue."
"That disaster will ensue, I take as read," said Kitman. "The details, however, escape me. I didn't get a full mission briefing, the relevant paperwork succumbed to a catering accident."
The squirrel made a valiant attempt to pinch the bridge of his nose, failing only due to its basic nonexistence. "The house you are investigating was taken by my vile siblings," he said. "They are shaking the foundations of this world in a hubristic attempt to replace the Goddess Nut that they so heinously devoured."
"Really?" said Kitman. "I remember reading something about the Goddess Nut, possibly in an interoffice memo. I thought it was pronounced Newt."
"No," said the squirrel.
"Ah. Yes," said Kitman. "So they've collected the house to undo their crime, somehow?"
"It won't work," said the squirrel dismally, "but they're going to try it anyway. They think if they bring all the pieces of the World Tree back together — the house was constructed from the World Tree — and put it into a negative entropy field...you do know your way around negative entropy fields, Kitman of the frequently respected Jade Pyramid?"
"Oh, I dabble, I dabble," said Kitman.
"Hmm," said the squirrel. "In any case they hope to reform the processed remnants of the World Tree into a living Tree to spawn a new Goddess Nut. Which will not work and will lead to disaster. I laid this trap," he said, indicating the glowing white net on the floor, "in an attempt to impede their progress. It is squirrelproof from the inside, but..."
He licked his incisors thoughtfully.
"Clearly permeable through the arts of the Jade Pyramid," he concluded, and continued with renewed enthusiasm. "—Oh, these terrible brothers of mine! They know no bounds. They stole the Goddess Nut, and now they steal houses with people still in them, and care not what they do."
"Houses with people in them?" said Kitman.
"I have been to their secret workplace," said the squirrel. "There was a person like you trapped in a room in midair."
"Really!" said Kitman. "Kidnappers, are they? I find that intolerable. Such things should be addressed."
"Alas, I don't know how you can," said the squirrel. "The workplace is impenetrable save to me and my siblings — and not usefully penetrable by me, at that, as there are traps such as these laid for me there."
"Oh," said Kitman, and carelessly reintegrated himself into a crouch. He looked the squirrel in the glasses. "Perhaps we could come to some cooperative arrangement."
The squirrel cocked his head to one side. "We do have a common goal, do we not? Perhaps I could take you there and you could help me put a stop to their plans."
"That sounds equitable," said Kitman.
"Then we have a deal," said the squirrel. "I will set about gnawing a hole large enough for you to accompany me, and return when it is ready. Is that acceptable?"
"Absolutely," said Kitman.
The squirrel vanished without another word.
"What exactly are we going to do, Kitman?" I said, once I was reasonably sure the squirrel wasn't coming right back.
"Basically," said Kitman, scratching the side of his cheek, "nothing. I'm going to set up a wide-angle receiver in an attempt to get a resosignature on the rat when he returns, but that's purely on speculation."
"Anything I can do?"
"Well, you could get yourself out of that net," he said,turning to his workbench. "After that, why not, I don't know...think?"
I reintegrated myself out onto the walkway that circled the tree lab, and tried to do just that.
It wasn't easy, partly because I usually outsource my thinking to Kitman, but mainly because it was an Abelton Park summer evening.
The sun hung huge and red on the horizon, backlighting the trees and houses in a lambent glow that would have made strong cinematographers weep. Crickets chirped, bees buzzed, and butterflies flapped silently. Air so fresh that you would think Mother Nature had installed a HEPA filter ruffled the leaves around me, and an acorn bounced off the tin roof.
It was lovely, the kind of lovely that would inspire worried people to say things like "It's lovely." "Yeah. Too lovely."
It was too lovely. If all the World Tree houses were now together, if only a single door remained, holding my world in place like the last fingernail on the cliff, why was Abelton Park still so...Abelton Park-esque? Why hadn't it changed even more than it had?
I leaned up against Kitman's photochromatograph, retied my shoe and thought about it. Not my shoe, everything else.
Thoughts crawled out of the back of my mind. One of them was this: Kitman had a photochromatograph. This was not normal. What were the odds that a junior high school student, genius or no, would save up a summer's worth of lawn-mowing proceeds for a photochromatograph?
It was one of those things that just didn't happen, to borrow a phrase from my duplicate — a source citation that caused another thought to crawl forth.
"Oh, crap," I said. "I gave him the wrong fingerprints."
It was true. They were on the wrong hands — he had my right hand's print on his left hand, and vice versa. If I'd been pressing my fingers against a mirror me, they would have been correct, but he wasn't a mirror me...
Mirrors, I thought. Something about mirrors.
I stuck my hands into my pockets, and pulled out a wad of detritus and desiderata that included a comb, a tissue, Kathleen's necklace, a small mirror and Kitman's net worth in the form of a South Rhode Island state quarter.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Noel had walked through a mirror because he knew how to get past himself...
What do you see if you look past yourself in a mirror?
"Where you've been," I said aloud, much to my surprise.
I looked down at the other contents of my pockets, turned the South Rhode Island quarter over in my hand and realized that there must surely be more holding my world in place than a door. South Rhode Island? Come on now. Two senators for the Half Pint State? That sort of thing just didn't happen. It would have been absorbed by North Rhode Island or New York.
I began to circle the walkway. Abelton Park disappeared behind the tree lab, and I looked over the roof of the Cape Hatteras at the sunset-red-bathed pine forest beyond.
The tree lab was built into what was, according to a framed newspaper in Kitman's house, the largest oak tree in South Rhode Island — and according to my own personal knowledge, the only oak tree in Abelton Park.
Where have I been? I thought. Where did I come from? Does a journey really start only when you realize that you're on one? I had had a very strange June, but when, exactly, had the real adventure begun?
I heard Kitman's footsteps on the boards of the walkway.
"I'm finished," he said, when he came into view. "It's ready. Not that it will do any good."
I turned around, and laid a hand on the trunk of the oak I had climbed a thousand times since arriving in Abelton Park. Why hadn't I realized it before?
"Kitman," I said, "this is the World Tree."
•
Kitman said "Hah?"
