<< Chapter 3 >>

In Which Pizza Is Eaten And A Squirrel Is Discovered.

"Buon appetito!" said Venus Vincenzo.

He shimmered away and left us to our, per Kathleen, sky-blue pizza. I would have said robin's-egg blue myself, but the basic point, namely that the circular Italian food object before us was at least 120 degrees away from normal on the color wheel, remained.

"Sky blue, why blue," ruminated Kitman. "Thereby hangs a tale. Would you like to hear it?"

"No," said Kathleen, and took up a slice without further hesitation.

"Oh well," said Kitman, and we followed suit.

 

•

 

"If it were a felony to transport pizza across state lines," said Kitman when the pizza was gone, "even internally, I would practice civil disobedience."

"Excellent," said Venus Vincenzo.

"The color doesn't put you off at all?" said the waiter standing next to him.

They both focused on Kathleen with a tincture of anxiety.

She shook her head. "After a while it seems perfectly normal," said Kathleen.

"Even more excellent," said Venus Vincenzo, with more than a tincture of relief. He took the waiter's bill pad, drew a red marker from his shirt pocket and signed his name across the total. "Present this after any meal," he said, tearing off the sheet and presenting it to Kitman. "You are eternally comped. Being a pizza artiste suits me well, but my father is a man of the people and I cannot help but feel the qualification of his approval whenever I see him. The brick-sturdy Blue Heaven tomato is the key to mass audiences, and I am forever endebted to your brother for introducing it to me."

And they departed.

"Transporting pizza across a state line?" said Kathleen.

"Wouldn't you?" said Kitman.

"Yes, but when you can't pay the fine it's something of an empty compliment."

Kitman winced. "When my royalties start to roll in," he said — and at this point I quietly slipped him twenty dollars under the table — "I shall remind you of your unkind words. — In the meantime," he added, "here is the fifteen dollars you asked of me. Keep the change."

"Kitman," she said, "you are a mensch. Or someone is."

"What did you want it for, anyway?" I said.

"THUMOS," she replied, and did not rise from the table because garlic is an opiate.

 

•

 

The sun would be red and brushing the top of Kitman's roof by the time we got back from Abelton; partly for sound reasons of topology, as previously mentioned, but mostly because you can also go very far in Abelton on twenty dollars, not least because the Arcade Retrochronique has free play on Saturdays.

And then there is, well, THUMOS, which is a used book store that has the same attraction to the scientifico-skeptically minded that the south magnetic pole has to the north. It has a chandelier of crystal skulls. It has maps of Mu and Lemuria and Atlantis on the walls. It also has bargain prices, and those of course seal the deal.

On this occasion Kathleen came away with a used copy of Newton Blackspring's Guide To Psychocrystallogy, and all the way home forced us to admire bits of it. (Yes, Kathleen does have an attachment on her handlebars that allows her to ride and read at the same time. No, she does not recommend it to any but fools and madmen, to use her precise phrase.) The book had been priced at $79.95 when new and, according to Kathleen, would have been worth it.

The Guide was at first glance a simple phonebook-sized volume aimed at people who had already had mood rings and wanted to upgrade to more proactive jewelry, starting off with a discussion of basics like where to wear your tourmaline for best results, why atacamite and how often and when to seek medical attention, that sort of thing, but quickly moved on to items like a fairly informed discussion on how to use rhodonite to help burn in your new headphones.

"Look at this!" said Kathleen, forcing me to stop at the side of the road and jabbing her finger at one of the pages. "This is where you get your value for money." She was pointing at a particularly complicated graphic that appeared to have been lifted straight from the Nazca plateau. "How to build an azurite radio for telepsychic communication! Can you get circuit diagrams from Seth or Ramtha? No you cannot."

"But will it work?" I said.

"Of course not. But if this were the kind of universe where this sort of thing could work, it would. It's very carefully designed. Newton Blackspring is the ne plus ultra of mystic trash."

She looked up at me. I looked back at her. We looked at each other...she smiled...Kitman burst out coughing for very good reason...

...and we continued on home.

Where Kitman ran over a squirrel.

 

•

 

The sun was in our eyes, I would make that clear.

"Look out for what squirrel?" said Kitman.

"The one you just ran over," I said, coasting up the driveway to a stop beside him.

"I didn't run over a squirrel."

"You certainly did, " I said. "Right over him." "Where is he, then?" said Kitman, looking up and down the blacktopped driveway and then up inside his front wheel mudguard just in case. "I see no sign of adorable fuzzy vermin."

I explained that there was no sign of adorable fuzzy vermin because a.f.v. had immediately scampered off around the south corner of the house.

"To die," Kathleen amplified.

Kitman gave us the eyebrow raised and fixed. "I will point out," he said, "that had I run over him, he wouldn't have been able to scamper away."

"Scamper off," we said.

"Scamper off. And I would have crashed my bike. What did he look like, and how do you know he was a he?"

"He was blue," I said, wisely ignoring the latter part of the question.

"Blue," said Kitman contemplatively. "Blue on account of being run over?"

"No, blue on account of being colored blue."

"Tomato blue," said Kathleen.

"Not a standard color for a squirrel, now that I came to think of it," said I.

"Huh," said Kitman, and took a few steps onto the south lawn. He peered around the corner. "Red is unusual, blue's positively anomalous. Very interesting, if you haven't gone mad. Remind me to check the squirrelcam..."

And we went inside just in time to catch the Galaxy Quest marathon on the Sci Fi channel...and I did not remind Kitman to check the squirrelcam.

I almost did. I did remember. It's just that I did not do the actual remembering until much later, after all the Galaxy Quest that could be watched had been watched, and all the Beethoven that could reasonably be played had been played, and, despite the Kitman Cocktails drunk during the course of the evening, it was finally necessary to go off and get my sleeve knitted.

And I remembered. Lying in the Kitman guest bed, with its adjustable temperature, softness, vibration, contortion, pitch and yaw controls, I remembered that Kitman had asked me to remind him to check the squirrelcam. I almost did. I almost managed to get up and go next door and remind him. But there is an insidious kind of sleepiness that can be overpowered by only a very few things, such as discovering that the bed is on fire, and, sadly, the bed was not on fire...

 

•

 

And then I woke up — totally, completely and clear-headedly, at four in the morning.

There were two reasons for this, both related to the three or four...possibly five...Kitman Cocktails I had drunk.

First, a complete 1-2-3-4-3-2-REM sleep cycle can take as little as two hours.

Second, despite their active ingredients, Kitman Cocktails are still 99 44/100ths percent water.

I was awake, alert, and highly motivated.

The hero's journey model mandates a rejection of the call to adventure, but says nothing about the call of nature, and so I was up and out of bed rather quickly.

A guest departing the Kitman guest bedroom for the water closet has a decision to make. He can take the staircase directly in front of his door straight up to the facilities on the third floor, or he can take the left or right hallways around the staircase and make use of the more well appointed w.c. on the second floor, the one that has interesting things to read in it like a rare Reader's Digest Condensed Mahabharata.

The shortest distance between two points being a straight line, I took f) the stairs and g) care of my business.

In due time I stepped back out into the hayloft, which is what the third floor of the Kitman house gets called when it gets called anything, and stood at the head of the stairs in darkness, and waited for the plumbing to decide it was finished.

The hayloft consists mainly of one large empty room, with two doors at its opposite ends — one to the bathroom, the opposing one to the study that overlooks the verandah. In the middle is the stairwell, surrounded by a half-height wall to discourage people from falling in. To the sides are bent walls covered in amateur artworks, behind which at floor level lie a pair of crawlspaces containing water tanks that have something to do with a passive heating-cooling system no one has ever explained to me.

The proceedings of the pipes came to a satisfactory conclusion...

...and just as I was about to step forward I didn't hear a strange noise.

Surprised, I hesitated, and didn't hear it again.

What I was not hearing was the sound of small claws on wood, coming from inside the crawlspace behind the baseboard wall to my right.

And when I say I was not hearing it, I mean that it was entirely in my mind. I was unquestionably perceiving it, but I wasn't hearing it. It was not the result of the vibrations of air molecules impinging on my eardrum. It was a Platonic Ideal sound doing an end run around the old anvil and stirrup straight into my consciousness.

I knew this not only because it was intuitively obvious, but because I happened to have with me a googolbyte capacity voice recorder I had bought that afternoon at Electronics Trash Hut in Abelton, and a bit of experimentation with the record and playback controls proved the only real sounds around were those produced by yours truly and certain parts of his digestive system.

I edged quietly over to the relevant wall, and applied ear to fuzzy fleur-de-lis wallpaper I could not see.

The sounds remained absent, but increased in perceptual magnitude to the point where I could perceive the soft noise of a furry body moving within the crawlspace. I recognized it instantly as the distinctive sound of a nonexistent squirrel, inside the wall. It was a sound that passed beyond disturbingwhen the sound of small nonexistent teeth grinding on wood was added to the mix. I've had squirrels eat my house and you do not want squirrels eating your house even if they don't exist.

I hesitated again in the darkness, wondering what to do about it, and suddenly remembered that in the study ahead of me were a pair of latching doors that granted access to both crawlspaces.

I padded quietly over the rug and opened the study door as quietly as possible, moved over to the right, got down on my knees and felt around for the latch-hook, which I undid very slowly, not-listening for any change in the unsound.

All this careful silence was undone by the groaning creak of the hatchway, which was enough to wake the dead, and possibly even Kitman in his room below; the unsound, however, continued unabated.

What did abate when I opened the hatch was the darkness, because there was a light inside the crawlspace — and when I looked inside, I saw, at the far end of the tunnel, a glowing blue squirrel with its gnawing muzzle halfway into a beam.