Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which Preparations For An Investigation Are Made
Kitman was not in his room. Kitman was not in the second-floor bathroom. The Empty Room also was devoid of Kitman, which made sense and left one major possibility other than his having been eaten by a ghostly squirrel, and this was tested and verified when I found Kitman awake in the ground floor auxiliary library, immersed in a magazine — and a pleather chair, from which he hauled himself with a giant sucking sound when I told him he had squirrels in the attic.
"Kitman, you have squirrels in the attic!" I said.
"Yes, I know," said Kitman, from his immersement in his pleather chair. "Kathleen has told me on several occasions. I mark them down on the calendar."
"In the attic of your house," I amplified.
With a giant sucking sound he hauled himself from his immersement in his pleather chair. "What, real ones?"
"Well, no," I said.
"Imaginary ones?" said he.
"Well, no," said I.
He hesitated. "Mathematically imaginary ones?"
"Uh...maybe."
"Perhaps," said Kitman, gesturing toward a nearby divan (of the psychiatric type, I suddenly noticed), "you should explain in full, omitting no detail however slight."
I sat down and did. To my surprise Kitman had a possible explanation ready and waiting.
"Metasyntactic variable?" I said.
"Me-ta-plas-mic en-er-gy," he repeated.
"Is that another phrase I shouldn't use?"
"No, go right ahead," he said, and held out the magazine he had been reading. He tapped it with his right forefinger, as he didn't smoke pipes and had no pipestem to tap it with. "See page 38."
It seemed peculiar that the April 1908 issue of MODERN ELECTRICS (Hugo Gernsback, editor) should contain the explanation to my inexplicable experience; it seemed like jumping the gun somehow. Nonetheless I turned the pages as directed until I came to an article titled "A Metaplasmic Energy Detector Circuit", written by Hugo Gernsback (editor). It featured an elaborate circuit diagram.
"Metaplasmic energy theory," said Kitman, "comes out of Thomas Edison's notion that it was possible to communicate with the dead. Edison worked up the theory, Tesla corrected his math, Gernsback put their joint work onto a breadboard and published it in his magazine. What do you think?"
"I think they didn't have breadboard in 19-ought-8."
Kitman looked at the ceiling, first in sadness, then in contemplation. "A standing wave of metaplasmic energy, like ball lightning," he said. "This could be quite interesting."
"Kitman," I said, studying Gernsback's diagram, "electronics is not my forte—"
"Contamiski Power and Light agrees," said Kathleen, who chose this moment to wander into the room clad in a complicated set of red, gold and green pajamas. "If memory serves," she added.
"But," I continued with enormous serenity, "this looks remarkably like the diagram of Blackspring's psychic crystal radio set."
Two eyebrows went up, one per each Kitman.
"What does?" said one.
"What on earth are you wearing?" said the other.
"Mu Shui Jiao robes," said Kathleen. "You gave them to me on my last birthday."
"I did?" said Kitman.
"After Uncle Jon gave them to you on your last birthday, yes," she said. "I've been wearing them ever since. Are you sure you have an IQ of 155?"
"151," said Kitman, focusing his gaze floorward. "They do go nicely with the paisley slippers."
"Never mind my choice in footwear, purple-sneaker-man."
I looked from Kitman to Kitman and said "Moo...?", compressing boundless ignorance into a monosyllabic utterance.
"Mu Shui Jiao. Taoist pajamas," she explained, twirling around in a silent explosion of bedizenment, revealing acres of hitherto unsuspected and highly complex bed-clothing. "They make it physically impossible to get comfortable in bed, so you have to compose your mind in order to fall asleep. — Sorry, was that your nose? and what's this about diagrams?"
"Was, yes," I said.
"It's all about ghost squirrels," said Kitman. "Apparently there's one in the attic." He began feeling his way over to the doorway with one hand while holding his eyes closed with the other. "Williams, kindly explain while I go dig up my 23-piece screwdriver set."
I related my unusual experience once more, again omitting no detail, however slight. Kathleen nodded thoughtfully throughout.
"Where did you get a googolbyte capacity voice recorder?" she said.
"Electronics Trash Hut," I said. "Actually I think it may be smaller capacity, but the manual dares anyone to prove it. — I didn't wake you, did I?"
"What, with all your cludding about from room to room yelling 'Kitman! Kitman!'?"
"Um...yeah."
"No. I was still awake," she said. "Actually I hardly ever wear these," she said, brushing at her pajama robes. "They're too much trouble."
"Then why?"
"The others have holes in them and I have a guest." She leaned over the table and picked up the copy of MODERN ELECTRICS. "Is there any possibility that this is an April Fool's article?"
"Gernsback was not noted for his wacky sense of humor," said the returning Kitman. "According to the letters to the editor in the following issues, the readers who built the metaplasmic energy detector never detected anything — indicating, I gather, a lack of metaplasmic energy to detect — but there's no chiding admonition from the editor re getting snookered through excessive credulity toward that which is set in type."
While he said this he dumped an armload of assorted electronics on the table. Amid the wires and tubes I could see a radio-controlled Humvee from several birthdays ago and a small Franklin VeePod of more recent vintage. And a large roll of duct tape.
"You're sending in a camera crew," guessed Kathleen.
"Right," said Kitman. "I'm pretty sure I can rig some sort of metaphasic...ah, metaplasmic interface for the VeePod, and then we'll investigate properly."
"Why not just go look?" I said.
Kitman stopped sorting through his tableful of electronic esoterica and looked up at me as if I were mad.
"Where," he said, "would be the fun in that? — Really, Williams, sometimes I despair of you."
Kathleen and I shrugged at each other. Kitman continued to spread his bits and pieces around for a bit and then said "Um."
"Um?" said I.
"Um," said Kitman, scratching lightly at his head. "Would one of you mind nipping up to my room and fetching my 23-piece screwdriver set? I seem to have forgotten it."
"Where is it?" I said.
Kathleen coughed lightly. "In my desk drawer," she said.
Kitman gave her the eyebrow raised and fixed. "That could explain why I forgot about it before I found it," he said. "But no, I stole it back yesterday."
"So did I," said Kathleen.
A homeopathic frown visited Kitman's face.
"Twice?" said Kitman.
The frown moved over to Kathleen's physiognomy and raided the refrigerator.
Kitman looked magnanimous in victory, which is to say he put on a genteel smirk. "Try under the bed, Williams," he said, "in the shoebox marked 'shoes' ."
"Aye, sir," I said.
"Well, who else?" said Kitman, and chortled at his own joke.
Kathleen groaned faintly and headed stairward; I trotted after. At the top of the stairs I turned right and she turned left, and by the time I had dug as far as the shoebox marked 'shoes' and determined that it contained, oddly enough, shoes — namely, a pair of black high-heeled pumps — Kathleen was standing behind me again holding a box labeled "23 Piece Screwdriver Set".
"I'll take those, " she said, indicating the shoes. "I was wondering why he'd swiped them."
We swapped, and I would have taken a moment to reflect on the degree of politicostrategic machinations possible between siblings and how glad I was to be an only child, but she didn't give me a chance.
"So," she said, "he was in the hayloft crawlspace?"
"What, glowing squirrel-wise?" I said, because, well, it always pays to be specific in situations like this. "Yes."
"Let's check it out," she said.
I might explain at this point — i.e., as we climbed the stairs to the hayloft — that Kathleen, though a collector of mystic trash, is a subscriber to the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, and at least philosophically a charter one at that; and therefore is quite naturally less inclined than Kitman to take my word as fact. Although come to think of it Kitman also has a subscription to the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER.
There's a moderately popular literary structure that starts off "In the cold, rational light of day", and ends with whatever proposition you wish to dismiss through argumentum ad idiom. (One might more appropriately invoke the cold, rational light of the bathroom fluorescent, save that it is so distressingly unpoetic an image.) At any rate, it was a phrase much on my mind, because dawn was in progress; indeed, the grandfather clock in the living room struck a distant six even as we arrived at the topmost landing, and when we reached the study the morning sun was streaming in the third-floor windows. If the cold rational light of day was going to retrospectively quash my notion of a nocturnal numinous nut-nosher, transforming it from eerie possibility into errant hallucination, losing me the respect of all currently stocked Kitmans, this was the time. I was expecting it like a man waking from a dream expects the sound of the alarm that woke him, and I opened the study door for Kathleen with a certain regret.
The cold rational light of day, however, had neglected to account for the study's rationality countermeasures.
The study, for example, has simulated-stained-glass plastic appliques on its windows.
The study, for another example, has prismatic crystal windchimes in front of its windows.
The study, for a particularly inexplicable example, has an abandoned discotheque mirror ball sitting on top of one of its bookcases opposite the windows.
In sum, the cold rational light of day never stood a chance. Ambient-illumination-wise, the study resembled Athens after Zeus dropped a rainbow on Greece to see if it would splash when it hit. Warm, mellow and more than a little psychedelic, this was light to cause members of the Missouri branch of the American Association of Skeptics to give the benefit of the doubt.
Kathleen turned to me and said, "Just so I'm clear on this: you haven't been eating ergot-contaminated bread, have you?"
She's tough, Kathleen is.
"Well, no," I said.
"Good," she said, "I didn't think so." And she turned to the crawlspace access panel, which I had — very sensibly I thought — re-latched before running off.
"You re-latched the panel before running off," she said. "Very sensible."
"Um," I said, and pulled the window shades down to reduce the light-level in the room while Kathleen opened up the wall. She got down on hands and knees, took a deep breath, and stuck her head into the hole.
I waited.
She started to back out, and stopped.
I waited a bit more.
She crawled further in.
I waited a bit more. I was starting to get good at it.
Finally she backed out and stood up, and brushed her hands together while looking distantly at the far wall with an obscure look on her face.
"Did you..." I said, trying to cram the question into the ellipis.
"See a softly glowing blue squirrel?" she said, rubbing her fingers together and looking at them in an abstracted fashion. "No."
And she walked out of the room.
After reorienting my mind a bit I ran after her and caught up with her in the second floor hallway.
"Then what did you see?" I said. "If anything?"
"See...?" she said. "See, nothing at first. It was as dark as the inside of an unlit crawlspace." She rounded onto the stairs. "So I deduced that this particular unlit crawlspace was necessarily and ipso facto devoid of softly glowing fuzzy vermin; and this came a considerable relief, because with any luck it probably meant that I wasn't smelling any either."
She paused at the first floor landing.
"And yet there was no question that I was getting the strong and distinct impression of an enclosed space that had, of late, been enclosing a squirrel. Even though I was still holding my breath, that was my strong and distinct impression."
"Something strongly stinct?" I said.
"Exactly," she said, "and in a way that was bypassing my nose. It was about then that I stopped crawling out and crawled further in."
She resumed her course for the auxiliary library.
"And then what?"
"And then I saw it," she said, turning in through the library door.
Kitman was fiddling with his esoterica and desiderata. "You saw it?" he said, dropping a piece of esoterica onto a piece of desiderata.
"No," she said. "I didn't see it, I saw—" and then she said what she had seen.
"What?" we said.
"Be a little less scatological," added Kitman.
"A softly glowing blue poo," she said. "Is what I saw. A wholly insubstantial softly glowing blue poo, I might add."
She brushed her fingers on her pajama leg.
"What, you touched it?" said Kitman, somewhat disgusted.
"I told you, it was wholly insubstantial," she said. "Here's your screwdrivers."
She threw him the pair of black high-heeled pumps, from which he removed two wads of tissue paper and 23 screwdrivers of varying sizes.
I tossed him the empty case.
"Splendid! " he said, and set about connecting desiderata to esoterica, wielding the screwdriver as though it were a fencing foil.
And at this point I began to sense something familiar in the air, and the reason was this: Kitman was going to Explain, and pending Explanation was roiling in the atmosphere like mammatus clouds before a whopper of a summer thunderstorm.
Kathleen fled the room, murmuring some excuse about changing into something less difficult, but I stayed behind.
Kitman pawed through a pile of TTL logic circuits from Electronics Trash Hut, found one in particular, held it up and declared "This is the key."
"Oh, yes?" I said. I considered smiling and/or nodding but it didn't seem apropos just yet.
"Indeed," he said, and attached it to his breadboard. "It divides an input signal by the square root of minus one."
"Oh? " I said.
"Yes. You see, Williams, ghosts do not exist. Your basic Edison-Tesla ghost is a metaplasma — a standing field of statistical aberration that oscillates between infinite and negative-infinite energy over a period of one chronon, which averages out to zero, and is therefore strictly nonexistent."
"—Good, " I said, letting the waves of explanation wash over me without resistance.
Kitman raised his screwdriver didactically. "Except, of course, that the metaplasma emits energy on a probabilistic basis, in accordance with the Uncertainty Principle — photons so short-lived that they travel less than a Planck length before they cease to exist. So not only does the ghost not exist, but you can't see it."
I smiled and nodded.
He snapped a crystal oscillator into place, and said "Except for the imaginary light, which you also can't see."
I could have been more baffled at this point, but it would have involved a stack of steel plates and an arc welder.
"Imaginary," I said. I didn't make it a question because that way lies madness, but he took it anyway. Kitman takes questions the way some people take the last chocolate.
"Well, you have to realize, Michelson, that some light travels faster than light. Ask me about the Casimir effect later. — On second thought, don't," he added, for Kitman is not cruel. "Just accept that you can produce it with two very closely spaced plates."
"Okay."
"Thank you. Anyway, statistically, some of the light the metaplasma emits comes in the form of faster-than-light photons, which — though they travel less than one Planck length in real time — travel indefinitely far in imaginary time due to relativistic effects. You don't want to ask me for the details on that, either." I agreed that this was so and he moved on.
"Anyway, the metaplasmic energy detector uses two closely spaced plates as a filtering antenna in order to receive an impossible, imaginary radio-frequency signal, divides that by the square root of minus one to convert imaginary to real, and finally outputs it by way of a sort of inverse theremin."
"What, theremin like Jean-Michel Jarre plays?" I said. (I had introduced Kitman to the OXYGENE album. It had changed his life.)
"Yes — only backwards. Or upside down, or something. The theremin uses two antennas to detect changes in electrical potential resulting from the proximity of the performer's hands. The inverse is the production of a field that gives you a tactile experience of any spirits that happen to be passing by."
"Putting the feel in field, eh?" I said.
"Very good!" said Kitman, kindly. "Or getting the feel out of the field. And speaking of third base, it's a bit rude to go around feeling up any spirits that happen to be passing by, so I re-rigged it to output video to the VeePod instead. —And lo!"
He hefted the fruit of his labors in his hands like Frankenstein's Gerbil.
"Behold," he said,"the metaplasmic detection apparatus."
I examined the fruit of his labors. It looked like a smaller, more organized pile of undifferentiated technology.
"Gosh!" I said.
He set the device down upon the Humvee and flexed his hands as though in preparation for a delicate operation. "Now comes the hard part," he said, and sighed.
"Hand me the duct tape, would you?"
