“He probably thinks of it as steak tartar,” Old Horsemeat said.
Next day Kitty-Come-Here found her salted offering upset just as the two previous bowls had been.
###
Such were the beginnings of the Great Spilled Water Mystery that preoccupied the human members of the Gummitch household for weeks. Not every day, but frequently, and sometimes two and three times a day, Gummitch’s little bowl was upset. No one ever saw the young cat do it. But it was generally accepted that he was responsible, though for a time Old Horsemeat had theories that he did not voice involving Sissy and Baby.
Kitty-Come-Here bought Gummitch a firm-footed rubber bowl for his water, though she hesitated over the purchase for some time, certain he would be able to taste the rubber. This bowl was found upset just like his regular china one and like the tin one she briefly revived from his kitten days.
All sorts of clues and possibly related circumstances were seized upon and dissected. For instance, after about a month of the mysterious spillings, Kitty-Come-Here announced, “I’ve been thinking back and as far as I can remember it never happens on sunny days.”
“Oh, Good Lord!” Old Horsemeat reacted.
Meanwhile, Kitty-Come-Here continued to try to concoct a kind of water that would be palatable to Gummitch. As she continued without success, her formulas became more fantastic. She quit boiling it for the most part but added a pinch of sugar, a spoonful of beer, a few flakes of oregano, a green leaf, a violet, a drop of vanilla extract, a drop of iodine . . .
“No wonder he rejects the stuff,” Old Horsemeat was tempted to say, but didn’t.
Finally Kitty-Come-Here, inspired by the sight of a greenly glittering rack of it at the supermarket, purchased a half-gallon of bottled water from a famous spring. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of this step earlier—it certainly ought to take care of her haunting convictions about the unpalatableness of chlorine or fluorides. (She herself could distinctly taste the fluorides in the tap water, though she never mentioned this to Old Horsemeat.)
One other development during the Great Spilled Water Mystery was that Gummitch gradually emerged from depression and became quite gay. He took to dancing cat schottisches and gigues impromptu in the living room of an evening and so forgot his dignity as to battle joyously with the vacuum-cleaner dragon when Old Horsemeat used one of the smaller attachments to curry him; the young cat clutched the hairy round brush to his stomach and madly clawed it as it whuffled menacingly. Even the afternoon he came home with a shoulder gashed by the Mad Eunuch he seemed strangely light-hearted and debonair.
###
The Mystery was abruptly solved one sunny Sunday afternoon. Going into the bathroom in her stocking feet, Kitty-Come-Here saw Gummitch apparently trying to drown himself in the toilet. His hindquarters were on the seat but the rest of his body went down into the bowl. Coming closer, she saw that his forelegs were braced against the opposite side of the bowl, just above the water surface, while his head thrust down sharply between his shoulders. She could distinctly hear rhythmic lapping.
To tell the truth, Kitty-Come-Here was rather shocked. She had certain rather fixed ideas about the delicacy of cats. It speaks well for her progressive grounding that she did not shout at Gummitch but softly summoned her husband.
By the time Old Horsemeat arrived the young cat had refreshed himself and was coming out of his “well” with a sudden backward undulation. He passed them in the doorway with a single mew and upward look and then made off for the kitchen.
The blue and white room was bright with sunlight. Outside the sky was blue and the leaves were rustling in a stiff breeze. Gummitch looked back once, as if to make sure his human congeners had followed, mewed again, and then advanced briskly toward his little bowl with the air of one who proposes to reveal all mysteries at once.
Kitty-Come-Here had almost outdone herself. She had for the first time poured him the bottled water, and she had floated a few rose petals on the surface.
Gummitch regarded them carefully, sniffed at them, and then proceeded to fish them out one by one and shake them off his paw. Old Horsemeat repressed the urge to say, “I told you so.”
When the water surface was completely free and winking in the sunlight, Gummitch curved one paw under the side of the bowl and jerked.
Half the water spilled out, gathered itself, and then began to flow across the floor in little rushes, a silver ribbon sparkling with sunlight that divided and subdivided and reunited as it followed the slope. Gummitch crouched to one side, watching it intensely, following its progress inch by inch and foot by foot, almost pouncing on the little temporary pools that formed, but not quite touching them. Twice he mewed faintly in excitement.
###
“He’s playing with it,” Old Horsemeat said incredulously.
“No,” Kitty-Come-Here countered wide-eyed, “he’s creating something. Silver mice. Watersnakes. Twinkling vines.”
“Good Lord, you’re right,” Old Horsemeat agreed. “It’s a new art form. Would you call it water painting? Or water sculpture? Somehow I think that’s best. As if a sculptor made mobiles out of molten tin.”
“It’s gone so quickly, though,” Kitty-Come-Here objected, a little sadly. “Art ought to last. Look, it’s almost all flowed over to the wall now.”
“Some of the best art forms are completely fugitive,” Old Horsemeat argued. “What about improvisation in music and dancing? What about jam sessions and shadow figures on the wall? Gummitch can always do it again—in fact, he must have been doing it again and again this last month. It’s never exactly the same, like waves or fires. But it’s beautiful.”
“I suppose so,” Kitty-Come-Here said. Then coming to herself, she continued, “But I don’t think it can be healthy for him to go on drinking water out of the toilet. Really.”
Old Horsemeat shrugged. He had an insight about the artistic temperament and the need to dig for inspiration into the smelly fundamentals of life, but it was difficult to express delicately.
Kitty-Come-Here sighed, as if bidding farewell to all her efforts with rose petals and crystalline bottled purity and vanilla extract and the soda water which had amazed Gummitch by faintly spitting and purring at him.
“Oh, well,” she said, “I can scrub it out more often, I suppose.”
Meanwhile, Gummitch had gone back to his bowl and, using both paws, overset it completely. Now, nose a-twitch, he once more pursued the silver streams alive with suns, refreshing his spirit with the sight of them. He was fretted by no problems about what he was doing. He had solved them all with one of his characteristically sharp distinctions: there was the sacred water, the sparklingly clear water to create with, and there was the water with character, the water to drink.
Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats
Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in three collections: Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, and Close Encounters With the Deity. In 1981 he won the Nebula Award for his novelette “The Quickening,” and in 1983 he won another Nebula for his novel No Enemy but Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient of Days, Catacomb Years, Eyes of Fire, and The Secret Ascension. His most recent book is the novel Unicorn Mountain. Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.
In the wry and subtle story that follows, he demonstrates that everyone’s life is made up of many intricately interlocking pieces, and that some of the most interesting of those pieces may well turn out to be some highly lustrous cats . . .
* * *
Your father-in-law, who insists that you call him Howie, even though you prefer Mr. Bragg, likes jigsaw puzzles. If they prove harder than he has the skill or the patience for, he knows a sneaky way around the problem.
During
the third Christmas season after your marriage to Marti, you find Howie at a card table wearing a parka, a blue watch cap with a crown of burgundy leather, and fur-lined shoes. (December through February, it is freezing in the Braggs’ Tudor-style house outside Spartanburg.) He is assembling a huge jigsaw puzzle, for the Braggs give him one every Christmas. His challenge is to put it together, unaided by drop-in company or any other family member, before the Sugar Bowl kick-off on New Year’s Day. This year, the puzzle is of cats.
###
The ESB procedure being administered to you by the Zoo Cop and his associates is keyed to cats. When they zap your implanted electrodes, cat-related memories parachute into your mind’s eye, opening out like fireworks.
###
The lid from the puzzle’s box is Mr. Bragg’s—Howie’s—blueprint, and it depicts a population explosion of stylized cats. They are both mysterious beasts and whimsical cartoons. The puzzle lacks any background, it’s so full of cats. They run, stalk, lap milk, tussel, tongue-file their fur, snooze, etc., etc. There are no puzzle areas where a single color dominates, a serious obstacle to quick assembly.
Howie has a solution. When only a handful of pieces remain in the box, he uses a razor blade to shave any piece that refuses to fit where he wants it to. This is cheating, as even Howie readily acknowledges, but on New Year’s Eve, with Dick Clark standing in Times Square and the Sugar Bowl game only hours away, a man can’t afford to screw around.
“Looking good,” you say as the crowd on TV starts its rowdy countdown to midnight. “You’re almost there.”
Howie confesses—complains?—that this puzzle has been a “real mindbender.” He appreciates the challenge of a thousand-plus pieces and a crazy-making dearth of internal clues, but why this particular puzzle? He usually receives a photographic landscape or a Western painting by Remington.
“I’m not a cat fancier,” he tells you. “Most of ’em’re sneaky little bastards, don’t you think?”
###
Marti likes cats, but when you get canned at Piedmont Freight in Atlanta, she moves back to Spartanburg with your son, Jacob, who may be allergic to cats. Marti leaves in your keeping two calico mongrels that duck out of sight whenever you try to feed or catch them. You catch them eventually, of course, and drive them to the pound in a plastic animal carrier that Marti bought from Delta, or Eastern, or some other airline out at Hartsfield.
###
Penfield, a.k.a. the Zoo Cop, wants to know how you lost your job. He gives you a multiple-choice quiz:
A.Companywide lay-off
B.Neglect of duty and/or unacceptable job performance
C.Personality conflict with a supervisor
D.Suspicion of disloyalty
E.All, or none, of the above
You tell him that there was an incident of (alleged) sexual harassment involving a female secretary whose name, even under the impetus of electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB), you cannot now recall. All you can recall is every cat, real or imaginary, ever to etch its image into your consciousness.
After your firing, you take the cats, Springer and Ossie (short for Ocelot), to the pound. When you look back from the shelter’s doorway, a teenage attendant is giving you, no doubt about it, the evil eye. Springer and Ossie are doomed. No one in the big, busy city wants a mixed-breed female. The fate awaiting nine-year-old Jacob’s cats—never mind their complicity in his frightening asthma—is the gas chamber, but, today, you are as indifferent to the cats’ fate as a latter-day Eichmann. You are numb from the molecular level upward.
“We did have them spayed,” you defend yourself. “Couldn’t you use that to pitch them to some nice family?”
###
You begin to laugh.
Is this another instance of Inappropriate Affect? Except for the laughing gas given to you to sink the electrodes, you’ve now been off all medication for . . . you don’t know how long.
On the street only three years after your dismissal, you wept at hoboes’ bawdy jokes, got up and danced if the obituaries you’d been sleeping under reported an old friend’s death.
Once, you giggled when a black girl bummed a cigarette in the parking lot of Trinity United Methodist: “I got AIDS, man. Hain’t no smoke gonna kill me. Hain’t time enough for the old lung cee to kick in, too.”
Now that Penfield’s taken you off antipsychotics, is Ye Olde Inappropriate Affect kicking in again? Or is this fallout from the ESB? After all, one gets entirely different responses (rage and affection; fear and bravado) from zapping hypothalamic points less than 0.02 inch from each other.
Spill it, Adolf, Penfield says. What’s so funny?
Cat juggling, you tell him. (Your name has never been Adolf.)
What?
Steve Martin in The Jerk. An illegal Mexican sport. A joke, you know. Cat juggling.
You surrender to jerky laughter. It hurts, but your glee isn’t inappropriate. The movie was a comedy. People were supposed to laugh. Forget that when you close your eyes, you see yourself as the outlaw juggler. Forget that the cats in their caterwauling orbits include Springer, Ossie, Thai Thai, Romeo, and an anonymous albino kitten from your dead grandparents’ grain crib on their farm outside Montgomery . . .
###
As a boy in Hapeville, the cat you like best is Thai Thai, a male Siamese that your mama and you inherit from the family moving out. His name isn’t Thai Thai before your mama starts calling him that, though. It’s something fake Chinese, like Lung Cee or Mouser Tung. The folks moving out don’t want to take him with them, their daddy’s got a job with Otero Steel in Pueblo, Colorado. Besides, Mouser Tung’s not likely to appreciate the ice and snow out there. He’s a Deep South cat, Dixie-born and -bred.
“You are who you are,” Mama tells the Siamese while he rubs her laddered nylons, “but from here on out your name is Thai Thai.”
“Why’re you calling him that?” you ask her.
“Because it fits a cracker Siamese,” she says.
It’s several years later before you realize that Thailand is Siam’s current name and that there’s a gnat-plagued town southeast of Albany called, yeah, Ty Ty.
Your mama’s a smart gal, with an agile mind and a quirky sense of humor. How Daddy ever got it into his head that she wasn’t good enough for him is a mystery.
###
It’s her agile mind and her quirky sense of humor that did her in, the Zoo Cop says, pinching back your eyelid.
###
Anyway, Daddy ran off to a Florida dog-track town with a chunky bottle-blonde ex-hairdresser who dropped a few pounds and started a mail-order weight-loss-tonic business. He’s been gone nine weeks and four days.
Thai Thai, when you notice him, is pretty decent company. He sheathes his claws when he’s in your lap. He purrs at a bearable register. He eats leftover vegetables—peas, lima beans, spinach—as readily as he does bacon rinds or chicken scraps. A doll, Mama calls him. A gentleman.
###
This ESB business distorts stuff. It flips events, attitudes, preferences upside-down. The last shall be first, the first shall be last. This focus on cats, for example, is a major distortion, a misleading re-envisioning of the life that you lived before getting trapped by Rockdale Biological Supply Company.
Can’t Penfield see this? Uh-uh, no way. He’s too hot to screw Rockdale Biological’s bigwigs. The guy may have right on his side, but to him—for the moment, anyway—you’re just another human oven-cake. If you crumble when the heat’s turned up, great, zip-a-dee-zoo-cop, pop me a cold one, justice is served.
Thing is, you prefer dogs. Even as a kid, you like them more. You bring home flea-bitten strays and beg to keep them. When you live in Alabama, you covet the liony chow, Simba, that waits every afternoon in the Notasulga schoolyard for Wesley Duplantier. Dogs, not cats. Until Mouser Tung—Thai Thai—all the cats you know prowl on the edges of your attention. Even Thai Thai comes to you and Mama, over here in Georgia, as a kind of offhand house-warming gift. Dogs, Mi
ster Zoo Cop, not cats.
Actually, Penfield says, I’m getting the idea that what was in the forefront of your attention, Adolf, was women . . .
###
After puberty, your attention never has a forefront. You are dive-bombed by stimuli. Girls’ faces are billboards. Their bodies are bigger billboards. Jigsawed ad signs. A piece here. A piece there. It isn’t just girls. It’s everything. Cars, buildings, TV talking heads, mosquito swarms, jet contrails, interchangeable male callers at suppertime, battle scenes on the six o’clock news, rock idols infinitely glitterized, the whole schmear fragmenting as it feeds into you, Mr. Teenage Black Hole of the Spirit. Except when romancing a sweet young gal, your head’s a magnet for all the flak generated by the media-crazed twentieth century.
“You’re tomcatting, aren’t you?” Mama says. “You’re tomcatting just like Webb did. God.”
It’s a way to stay focused. With their faces and bodies under you, they cease to be billboards. You’re a human being again, not a radio receiver or a gravity funnel. The act imposes a fleeting order on the ricocheting chaos working every instant to turn you, the mind cementing it all together, into a flimsy cardboard box of mismatched pieces.
Is that tomcatting? Resisting, by a tender union of bodies, the consequences of dumping a jigsaw puzzle of cats into a box of pieces that, assembled, would depict, say, a unit of embattled flak gunners on Corregidor?
###
Christ, the Zoo Cop says, a more highfalutin excuse for chasing tail I’ve never heard.
MAGICATS II Page 2
