The Cat Wore Electric Goggles

by Ian Hutson

  Someone rang a bell, somewhere.

  Moreover, what then of those Brothers yet to live their lives in the Abbey? What of days yet to come? Were they too already real, already thought about and lived? How was their separation different from those of the dead? Why were days past inaccessible and days yet to come unknown? Why did past and future so very neatly straddle the here and now, in some process of serial revelation? What was this point, this wave of moment that took them all, sometimes quickly, sometimes at the speed of a dusty funeral march, from part of the past to part of the future- and always only in the one direction? Why did he, Timothy, not know everything in one moment? What was this limitation and its purpose?

  Timothy’s brain cried halt, and out of sympathy he turned both body and mind back to the problem of the graffiti. That at least was real and there for all to see.

  Popular opinion among the Benedictine was that the Devil and his minions was among them, and this opinion was given legs when yet more strangeness was daubed on the walls. This time it was a representation of the abbey itself, with walls falling and flames consuming the fabric, and alongside a caricature of a crowned king - with tights, a knowing look and no fewer than six wives.

  The Abbot had it painted over immediately, affording Timothy only the briefest of examinations.

  For want of a better defence the doors to the abbey were closed and locked against the world outside, while the brothers set about a struggle with what could only be something from the next world. To full days of services and duties and teaching was added paranoia and suspicion and full days of penitence and masses. Eating and sleeping made way for desperate prayer.

  Timothy found himself spending an awful lot of time in his cell, thinking about the problem, drifting off, thinking about it again. He didn’t believe for a moment that the graffiti was demonic. The Devil was no artist to use paint and canvas! It was the work of some flesh and blood that walked the earth. He decided to put himself in the place of the perpetrator, to stand where they had stood and to try to think their thoughts. In this way Timothy hoped to understand why and, eventually, who. Clearing his mind of all distractions, such as the ache of cold stone in his knees, Timothy allowed his mind to fall forwards into the vague shadows and colours of the void that appeared whenever he closed his eyes. He resisted the temptation to dismiss the vague green and red blotches and instead send his mind chasing after them, allowed it to forget the business of the body, and he withdrew into a single chain of thought.

  It was impossible! He tried with all of his might to travel the corridors and cloisters of the abbey like some ghost of the present moment, and he achieved absolutely nothing. What was intended as movement produced only memories of earlier travels, things that he had already seen. Exasperated, Timothy cleared his mind again and tried a fresh approach. Instead of travelling as one would when walking he set his mind to letting the past come to him, to pause the day and roll back all of existence to the moment he needed, to change everything as though he were at the centre. He felt quite giddy at the notion of existence flowing around him and then he felt guilty at such concentrations on the self. Needs must when the Devil drives, and to solve the crime he had to know the past.

  Timothy found himself spending an awful lot of time in his cell, thinking about the problem, drifting off, thinking about it again. He didn’t believe for a moment that the graffiti was demonic. The Devil was no artist to use paint and canvas! It was the work of some flesh and blood that walked the earth. He decided to put himself in the place of the perpetrator, to stand where they had stood and to try to think their thoughts... and became aware that he was thinking again about doing something that he had already done.

  He laboured to his feet and checked what he could see of the abbey from his door. The abbey was as timeless as ever, unless actually caught up in the flow of ritual time meant only the position of the sun or the passage of the stars at night, and it was impossible to distinguish between days of the week or weeks of the year. The sun was low, but rising - the day was young. He hadn’t been noting the time, and so had no recollection of when he had retired to his cell to think. Still, he couldn’t help but feel fractured, somehow disjointed by his meditations, and spent the rest of the morning feeling as though he was somehow living a memory, not quite his usual self.

  Mass followed on mass in the post-noon, and Timothy’s knees once more protested at the cold stone of the abbey floor. Following the services by rote, he again allowed his mind to fall forward into the space in front of his closed eyes, to chase after the patches of nebulous red and green and to be elsewhere while he survived interminable ritual. In hindsight the afternoon and evening passed without a moment’s thought, as easily as a sparrow flies through a garden with no more than a flutter of wings. Hindsight, Timothy idly thought to himself, was a wonderful thing, most especially when one could rush towards it and put dull, dreary hours quickly into the past.

  Fresh drawings had appeared in some strange hand.

  The first to be seen was a fanciful mythical animal with a comet in the sky above - the beast had two massive legs and a tail, two diminutive fore-legs and jaws fit to swallow a cow whole. The beast was looking up at the comet. Did the comet signify the death of the King? The legend scrawled beneath the graffiti was “T-Rex”. Who or what might T be?

  The second vandalism was a more simple cartoon, a dot or nucleus of some kind, with three overlapping ellipses evenly spaced around it, and alongside a simplified cloud that resembled nothing more than a mushroom reaching high into the sky. The Grim Reaper was depicted in the mushroom, complete with scythe.

  Timothy called for his assistant, the dratted lad had the uncanny knack of never being anywhere to be seen when needed. Most of his fellow Benedictines thought much the same of Brother Timothy, commenting to each other that he only seemed to be present on occasion and to somehow melt into the unseen in between times. Timothy insisted that the graffiti be copied down onto paper, agreeing with the Father Abbot that the images would be destroyed the moment they had outlived their usefulness in his investigations.

  ‘Ah - Brother Edwin. A faithful representation of these evils if you please before they are expunged. The human memory is a wonderful thing and knows only the bounds of birth and death, but may oft-times be remiss in the details. The Devil lies in the details. Miss no detail.’

  Timothy retired to his cell to do some more serious thinking on the problem. There had to have been at least one witness to the vandalism - the perpetrator. The walls of the Abbey were solid, the gates had been locked and so, logically, the perpetrator was within the walls. How then to gain access to the knowledge locked in the perpetrator’s memory? How to get them to see their own crime and step forward? He considered the shape of events within the Abbey. If no-one had witnessed the act then it existed in the memory of just one individual, and for all others it had taken place in that mysterious world where everything else took place - in the out of sight and out of mind.

  Timothy rested his mind by wondering about the parallels of the bounds of something being out of sight and thus out of mind with the bounds he had spoken of earlier to his apprentice - the limitations of birth and death. Countless lives had been lived before his own birth and no doubt countless lives would be lived after his death, each as real as his own and as full of incident and memory. How peculiar it was to be mortal human and to experience only this narrow slice of the whole, for such a brief period as as single life-span. What would it be like to know, to experience the other life that went on out of sight, out of mind - and what would it be like to know and experience life before and after his own? What hand was it that stopped and limited the human mind so? Why would a god stop that and yet allow a demon to paint graffiti? Questions, questions, questions. Timothy yearned for some answers instead.

  Brother Edwin, in a rare moment of both tangible, useful presence and grasp of the questions at hand, volunteered his opinion that life and the completeness of existence was in fact a sing
le and singular thing, and that maybe the mortal human mind was just a little to small to comprehend it all at once. A single human lifetime, lived for just a human span seemed to satisfy most - perhaps no-one had thought or dared to look for more? Brother Edwin offered that perhaps all men had simply been taught that one man, one life with all else being in the purview of God was all that they should know, all that they could know.

  Brother Timothy, taken aback, spiralled around the thought and mired himself in wondering whether the Abbot would consider his apprentice’s opinion a blasphemy. As he did so, Brother Edwin melted from his consciousness and Timothy became distracted again with his own thoughts. He wondered briefly whether this distraction was in itself proof of what Brother Edwin had said, and then Timothy again returned to the nature of existence and time - and, almost as an aside to this more interesting thought, how to discover who it had been, in the out of sight and out of mind, that had painted the graffiti. Was this terrible limitation, this inability to comprehend more than a tiny portion of life between a single birth and a single death really a protection? What ordered these events and arranged them one before the other in memory?

  Timothy pictured the major events of his life stacked one upon the other - among stacks of similar events for everyone else in the world. Then he tried to imagine adding a stack of ordered events for those who had lived before him and for those who would live after him, and it seemed a most untidy vision indeed. Some stacks of life events in the image in his mind overlapped - he had known people who had died, more would be born while he lived who would out-live him. Some events in those ordered piles were shared - and shared or not shared with a multitude of different people!

  Suddenly the picture of these individual stacks of ordered events for each life became so disastrously complicated and tangled that it resembled nothing more than a loose pile of hair! How chaotic was that? How could any sense ever be made of such a heap? Was life then nothing more than some furball of memories, coughed up by the Abbey cat? If it were so then the more we learned of other lives then the more tangled and complicated existence would become! This ran counter to all that Timothy loved, all that he knew - that knowledge was a good thing, a beautiful thing, a simple thing.

  Timothy felt his mind unravelling at the prospect and the moment that the little voice in his mind vocalised “unravelling” the image of existence re-drew itself, became simple, became beautiful in that simplicity. Existence, he thought, was certainly a tangle - but not of separate little off-cuts of wool. It was a tangle of one single, infinitely-long length of wool! A knot of all existence that had not been pulled tight.

  Tangles in proximity made up his life and the lives of those around him, sometimes in contact, sometimes not - but they all came from different points on the same single length of the wool of existence, the line that ordered the events of their lives into manageable form and comprehension. Some came from far up the line to rub shoulders, some came from far down the line, and the connection between them was lost, out of sight and out of mind, in the general tangle of things.

  A bell sounded, and Timothy lost the vision the moment his mind was distracted by the sound. What was left was a dull ache, some sense that he had seen life and all of existence for what it was but that he’d somehow put the thought down and couldn’t remember where it was. He scrabbled to reach it again and urged himself to remember a single line, one life, tangled and meeting itself without recognition.

  What then of animals, he thought? Is there a separate line for each form of life? That thought re-introduced complication, and it robbed the notion of its beautiful simplicity. It was a dangerous thought, but what if there was but a single line and all other life were part of that string too? What if the line was not just an ordering of life, but of all things, all events, all objects? That was indeed a tangle too difficult for a human mind to picture. Timothy had gone as far as he could with knowledge only of length, breadth, width and linear time.

  Brother Edwin brought him the sketches of the odd beast and the mushroom cloud.

  ‘Why is it do you think’ asked Timothy, as much to himself as Edwin, ‘that we can only remember as far back as our own childhood, and yet we may think of the long-distant past and the future?’

  Brother Edwin let slip what might have been a smirk of some sort and joined Timothy in his contemplations and his investigation.

  ‘Others who lived before us had memories of their own times that pre-dated our birth, so perhaps the fault lies not with earlier memories, for they assuredly existed, but with ourselves in our knowledge of them?’

  ‘And the future?’ asked Timothy.

  Brother Edwin was on a roll. ‘We have memories that post-date those of these same people - we must therefore believe that those who live after us will have their own memories too. Life has gone on, life will go on. We have learned only to see a portion between our own birth and our own death.’

  ‘And why do you suppose that we see only our “own” portion?’

  Brother Edwin wondered how far to go, what to reveal. ‘In the refectory we eat our own meal, but all of the Brothers eat at one and the same time, each his own separate meal. Except for Brother Oswald - he’ll eat several meals at once, if not cautioned.’

  Timothy agreed that Brother Oswald did indeed have an unhealthy view of food. ‘Sometimes we sit together at meals, sometimes we sit apart - we all eat our portion of the same meal, sometimes in the knowledge of one company, sometimes in another. Those out of sight, out of mind also eat.’

  Brother Edwin put the lid on it. ‘Perhaps the past and the future are just out of sight, out of mind - but no less real, no less current?’

  ‘Everything is everything all of the time, and we’re just making sense of it as best we can?’ mused Timothy.

  ‘It’s a dangerous thought’ said Brother Edwin.

  ‘Yes - but why now? What defines my now? My now can surely not be the same as your now.’ said Timothy, thinking aloud.

  ‘Is there a now? The now you just mentioned was past before you acknowledged it. Isn’t “now” just a nice way of making sense of everything being everything? To pick up one part of our life, put it down, move on to pick up another - rather than trying to pick it all up at once, to hold onto everything?’

  ‘My mind hurts.’

  ‘Shall I fetch you something from the infirmary, Brother Timothy?’

  ‘Not at the moment, no, thank you - later will be fine.’

  ‘Had I known earlier that you would be suffering from a headache I would have brought something with me.’

  ‘Some preparation...’

  ‘Herbal?’

  ‘No - I meant preparation for the future. We do sometimes think ahead of ourselves. We react to our past, too, but why always from the here and now? There must be some viewpoint other than “now”. Some way to un-fix ourselves from this thread of life.’ Timothy looked out of his narrow window onto the business of the Abbey beyond. ‘But consider, Brother Edwin, if we are all part of creation, all just a part of this tangled line then there is no such thing as other people. Does then what we know as life and death simply mark out the chapters of one continuous life, tangled upon itself? Are we truly the sum of all that there is? One single spark, aware of itself in so many different ways?’

  ‘And, Brother Timothy, since memories of these other lives exist, they are our own memories, as real as the memories we embrace in the here and now , this moment. Why do we pick up other lives and histories and hold them in some mechanical regard instead of simply knowing them?’ What is it that denies us access to our own, other memories?

  ‘Does anything deny us access to them? Do we simply not look for them, out of some force of habit or behaviour? Can we pick them up as we might pick up and remember or experience some portion of our current lives? To do so would be to know all things, surely? Only God knows all things...’

  Brother Edwin smirked again, this time without hiding it.

  Brother Timothy took a deep
breath and composed himself. ‘If that is so then I choose, for the moment, not to embrace such knowledge - although I do confess, I would like to know enough to help me solve the mystery of this wild graffiti. I must think, alone.’

  ‘As you choose, Brother Timothy, as you choose.’

  Everyone agreed that many days had passed since the last instance of devilry being daubed on the walls, and that this was a good thing. Timothy slept, and Timothy thought, and he thought bigger and bigger thoughts.

  Then one day Brother Timothy, walking, turned the corner into the long cloister and saw Brother Edwin standing back and wiping the evidence from his hands after putting the finishing touches to a long fresco of fresh graffiti. He had begun with a living blob crawling out of the ocean, growing legs, standing up, becoming a chimpanzee and, eventually, a man, walking. The endpiece of his artwork appeared to be men in some sort of container landing on the moon and planting a flag of some union, filled with crosses and diagonals.

  As Timothy and Edwin then stood in the here and now of that moment the Father Abbot rounded the far corner, and was aghast.

  ‘Brother Timothy, Brother Edwin - you have caught the vandal?’

  Brother Timothy answered. ‘We have.’

  ‘Who then? who?’

  ‘I am the vandal’ said Timothy, locking his eyes with Edwin. ‘The vandal is me.’

  ‘And I’ added Edwin.

  Timothy grinned, seeming demonic or insane in the moment to all about him. ‘The first graffiti appeared before I thought I had solved the mystery. Now I see that when is irrelevant. I drew them, but not with these hands.’

  ‘You understand the diagrams?’ asked Edwin.