Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which We Rescue Someone Who, Presumably, Needs Rescuing.
After obtaining Noel's flip-flop size — and after abandoning the notion of actually buying him a replacement pair of flip-flops upon rediscovering that Noel, unlike, say, Paul or Phil Hartnoll, actually did have duck feet — Kitman grabbed his favorite NASA cap from its hook by the hallway door, dragged it onto his head, saluted us and set out for Costco.
As soon as the door had closed behind Kitman I caught Noel's eye and said "Ten."
"Hah?" said Noel.
"Nine," said I, and reached for my back pocket. "Eight," I continued, extracting my vinyl billfold.
"Seven?" inquired Noel, cocking his head to one side.
"Six," I answered, flipping open my wallet. "Five," I expanded, withdrawing a fifty-dollar bill.
"Four," proposed Noel.
"Three," I countered, extending the hand bearing the fifty in the general direction of the door.
"Oh!" said Noel, with sudden understanding. "Two!"
"One," we agreed — and the door reopened.
An uncertain-looking Kitman slid into the room and said "Um."
This statement was followed successively by a somewhat embarrassed "Er. Yes," when the uncertain-looking Kitman noticed the green and black portrait of Benjamin Franklin III being proffered to him, and a blush-accompanied "Thank you" when he took it and oiled back out again.
Once the door had, this time definitively, clicked shut, Noel said "How did you know?"
"Genius, I suppose," I said.
After setting up Noel at the kitchen table with ice cream and cake (which was to say, with lime sherbet and his self-purchased blueberry pie, which was the best I could do with the resources available) I went outside to empty my shoes of alien sand and fetch the newspaper. I returned to the kitchen to find that Noel had still not mastered the art of internal application of blueberry pie filling, though he was making progress. I sat down opposite him and steeled myself for the most difficult part of co-hosting a strange visitor from another world: trying to avoid being humiliated by cultural dirty laundry.
Even the largest house parties are rarely allowed to expand into the laundry room, and for good reason. Those stains that you know perfectly well are not what they look exactly like will get more attention than the canapes you spent hours constructing. Alas, when it comes to visiting extraterrestrials, the world is our 24-hour laundromat, and all the detergent vending machines are broken.
I opened the newspaper, hoping against all past evidence that it would contain nothing that I would not want a duck to see.
The headline was ABELTON PARK KIDS FIND MISSING MONET, which was much to be preferred over, say, FRACAS IN STATE LEGE RESULTS IN MASS ARRESTS, but I was not measurably reassured. Did I dare give him the comics? How could I explain Doonesbury, especially if I didn't understand it myself? Could I manage to get the television listings into the Kitman family paper shredder without being obvious about it? I began pummeling my brain for contingency plans.
While I was thus distracted, Noel was washing up in the kitchen and disposing of his dirty dishes, or so I concluded when he coughed discreetly and I realized that the table was cleared and he was now solid green once more.
"Yes?" said I, with only a hint of panic.
"Is there a puzzle section in that paper?" said Noel. "I like to do the Jumble."
"Oh," said I. It took me a moment to answer, as I had been busy working up a plan to divert the slightest mention of the Washington Affairs section of the paper into a monologue on Greek Revival architecture with a focus on polychromy, a plan somewhat hampered by my profound ignorance of everything. "Um — yes. There's also a crossword, a find-a-word, and one of those things where you have to make as many words as possible out of one word in forty minutes."
"Wonderful!" said Noel, smiling broadly.
(It seems appropriate at this point to digress onto the subject of teeth, specifically the ones that Noel was now displaying and had previously deployed upon my own tender anatomy. Common or bulk ducks, of the type we observe landing in our backyard swimming pools if we happen to have such, have only one tooth, the egg tooth, which is used by the infant waterfowls to break out of their shells and subsequently discarded. Kitman would eventually explain that Noel was the product of the neotenic retention and evolutionary multiplication of same.
Why he had stubby ears Kitman was unable to explain, save possibly that God thought they were cute.)
I handed Noel the relevant page, along with a pen, and almost offered to go find him an egg timer but managed to catch myself in time.
While he focused on challenging his vocabulary, I sorted out all the potentially problematic parts of the paper and filed them in the recycle bin.
I had just settled back down and prepared myself for a quiet sigh of relief when Noel looked up from his textual noodlings, aimed his set of large brown eyes at me and said, "What does 'indicted' mean?"
I decided to try coughing up blood as a delaying tactic. "Hrrgh," I said. "Um."
"Just kidding," he said. "I know what it means. My culture's not perfect." He returned to his puzzle and added "I also know 'graft', 'extortion', 'tort' and 'antidisestablishmentarianism'."
(It was a fairly big crossword.)
I did not feel a great deal relieved by the depth of Noel's vocabulary, but my remaining pangs were rendered moot by the return of a package-bearing Kitman, who was a major distraction.
"Hello," he said, plapping into the kitchen. "Notice anything different about me?"
The plapping was a clue. I looked down at his feet and determined that he was now barefoot. Mostly barefoot.
"Sole Suckers!" he said, holding up one of his pedal extremities for our examination. It had a blue rubber pad stuck to the bottom. "Possibly with a trademark symbol. They're like Post-It Notes for your feet. I bought four pairs and will use my advanced knowledge of topology to fit three of them to Noel. Topology and an X-Acto knife. And Krazy Glue. Trademarks and patent numbers as apropos. Is there any more ice cream?"
"No," I said.
"Lime sherbet?"
"No."
"—Rats."
"No."
Kitman patted me on the head. "You're strange. I like you. Do you want to come along when I use my new Black and Decker trademarked product to collect anatomical fragments?"
"Uh—"
"No? That's all right, it won't take long."
And indeed it did not take long — up to a point. As regards recovering the necessary bits of Nash Mider, Kitman was as swift as he'd promised; on the other foot, his command of Krazy Glue proved to be easily the equal of his dexterity with duct-tape, and it took thirty minutes to detach various parts of him from a) various other parts of him, b) Noel, c) assorted pieces of furniture, d) Noel again, and e) other. But eventually we all stood ready, in some cases on blue rubber, to carry out our next probe into a world unknown.
"Right," said Kitman, once I had finished assembling Noel's new footwear, and placed the nearly-empty tube of glue on a table on the verandah, and locked the front door so it couldn't get him. "Shall we be off?"
"Absolutely," said Noel, skating across the living room rug on his blue rubber soles.
"In a minute," I said, shuffling through the mail that had been waiting in the mailbox. (Not normally appropriate behavior for a house guest, I admit, but Kitman has a tendency to misplace bills.)
"Anything good?" said Kitman, hefting his backpack into position.
"Telephone bill," I said.
"None of my concern, thankfully."
"Credit card bill."
"Ditto."
"A Fat-Wad-O-Good," I said. (Which is an envelope stuffed with local advertising. Occasionally useful.)
"Yours if you want it."
I stuck it into my pocket. "And, sadly, the electric bill you have been anticipating, in physical form at last."
Kitman flinched. "Place them all in the bills basket in the kitchen, please," he said, "and then let's try to get rich."
I obeyed, and returned to find Kitman installing fresh batteries in his vaxillator. "Next time, marine battery power, hang the weight," he said, and switched on.
From his pocket he withdrew a plastic baggie filled with dust. "Behold: Nash Mider," he said. "And possibly some small mites, but let's not think about that. I take a reading, so — " he did — "set this, that and the other — " he did — "and the next thing you know, it's hello Nash."
He pressed the Go button —
— and everything disappeared.
We plunged straight down into blackness.
"Well, this is somewhat unexpected," called Kitman as we fell.
"Ngah!" I said.
"Hang on, I've got a light," he said.
It was a battery-powered fluorescent globe with a Costco clearance-sale sticker on it, and it was shining right into my eyes.
"Ngah!" I said.
"Sorry," he said, and moved it out of the way. "Don't worry, we're perfectly safe," he added in a reassuring tone that clashed terribly with his lit-from-below manically exhilarated expression. "Try to enjoy it!"
This statement was so at odds with reality that it actually managed to stun me into momentary complacency.
"Kitman, I don't know if this is the right time to point this out," I said, "but we're falling to our deaths."
"Certainly not," said Kitman. "By the way, did you notice what's next to us?"
He waved the light to his left and I took a quick look. There was certainly something there, something very wide, very dark, and not as far away as I would like. I looked upward and saw a dim blue light disappearing into the distance at, I supposed, 32 feet per second squared. I looked down and saw Noel, who had his arms outstretched like Superman and seemed perfectly happy.
Kitman rotated himself into a sitting position in the rushing air. "I didn't get a very good look at things when we materialized, but I expect," he said, waving a casual hand upward, "that Nash Mider is back up there somewhere. For some reason we wouldn't have been safe materializing next to him, so the vaxillator selected our present position as the safest alternative."
"Splendid," I said. "Can we go vaxillating home now?"
"What, just when things are about to get interesting?" said Noel.
I looked at Noel. He, in turn, was looking into the abyss with delight.
Against my better judgment I followed his gaze downward and saw that there was now something below us other than blackness, in the form of a glittering point of light.
"Oh, here comes the bottom," I said. "How nice. Well, goodbye, Kitman. It's been nice knowing you, Noel."
"Don't jump to conclusions," said Kitman. "I don't think it's the bottom. Remember Noel's coin? With the skyscraperish thing embraced by tentacles?"
I remembered Noel's coin, with the skyscraper, et cetera.
"Oh, yeah," I said, and prepared to be consumed by terror, or, possibly just consumed.
And then...
...I slowly, deliberately, changed my mind.
Something was rising out of the depths, to be sure; something was approaching us, arriving far more slowly than was consistent with our rate of descent; but it was not what I expected.
It was —
Imagine a liquid chandelier.
Imagine a slow-motion waterfall.
Imagine a starry, starry night, with every star a different color and every star just a momentary reflection upon some part of a single entity.
This it was that was slowly ascending from the depths; this it was that now soared beside us; this it was that was now accompanying us, descending alongside us; this it was that waited and watched.
I cannot say it was huge, although it was certainly that, for hugeness is crude; nor was it gigantic, for the gigantic is brutal; nor was it vast, for vastness is impersonal.
— it was cathedral.
And it was alive.
And I knew it was alive by the way that Noel was speaking to it and getting answers.
(Wait. Noel was speaking to it?)
"Lento pastaa hirviö!" said Noel. "Auttaisitteko minua?"
(Yes, Noel was speaking to it. And it was answering him?)
"Kyllä kai," it said, in a voice like a long, heavy wave breaking on a cold, moonlit beach. "Minne mennet, mestari ankka?"
(Yes, it was answering him. Even Kitman was surprised.)
"Ylöspäin!" said Noel. "Huippu — kattoasuntu, mitä tahansa!"
"Ei ongelma," said the entity, and a ripple shuddered across its body, a concentric ripple that terminated directly opposite us, and from that spot there was an eruption.
Iridescent cords of translucent, almost gelatinous material reached out and surrounded us — and I didn't mind a bit.
Living cables slipped, slid, roiled around us — gathered us up against large sacs filled with violet liquid, floating sticky blobules that smelled of electricity — and I still didn't mind a bit.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that I should have been terrified straight into unconsciousness — that this creature, exposed to the light of day, would be a horror beyond description — but that just didn't seem to matter, as it was all just too interesting. No part of it was attached to anything else. Things rested atop other things, or were clutched in other things, or were entangled in other things, or passed through other things; there was no structure: all connections were temporary, if sticky.
Kitman leaned over to me. "Fascinating, isn't it?" he said. "Have you noticed the way things are passing through other things in an eye-twisting manner? I think this entity is unconstrained by three dimensions."
"We think as one," I said.
"Really?"
"No."
"Ah well," said Kitman,
Arcs of bluish light flickered all around us, and my weightlessness disappeared, replaced by an increasing and considerable upward acceleration.
"Going up!" said Noel.
"Noel," inquired Kitman, "what did you say to our, um, new friend?"
"I haven't the faintest idea!" said Noel.
"What, none?" said Kitman.
"No, none!"
"What, none?" said Kitman.
"Well, almost none," said Noel. "I mean, I know what I said — I know what I wanted to say — I just don't know what language I said it in. I asked for help, and it agreed and asked where we were going, and I told it and it said okay."
Kitman remained silent, but I knew what he meant.
I said, "''Okay'?", and leaned heavily on the quotation marks.
Noel shrugged.
Before either of us could think of a response, curtains of faintly glowing morphic substance parted before us and we were gently expelled onto the top of the tower.
"Olkaa hyvä," said another black wave of sound.
"Paljon kiitoksia," said Noel.
"Ei kestä kiitää," rippled the entity...
...and, so saying, slowly descended whence it came.
"Huh," said Kitman.
We were standing on the wide top of a tower of possibly infinite length, a top that was flat, cylindrical, about five yards in diameter and empty of anything other than us, specifically including Nash Mider.
"Aha," said Kitman, pointing upward. "Found him!"
I looked up —
— and became distracted, because there was a planet hanging overhead I hadn't previously noticed.
"Whoa," said I.
"Whoa what?" said Kitman. "Oh, that."
It's surprising how much bigger planets look when they're relatively small. The Earth is so big we hardly even notice it, but if you shrink it to the size of, oh, the giant disco ball from the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, suddenly it becomes much more impressive.
And it was indeed the Earth that was hanging overhead like a giant disco ball...although it wasn't exactly feature-complete.
It was rather patchwork, in fact. Sections were blank and others had faulty landscaping. I was reasonably sure, for example, that Australia was not supposed to be shaped like New Jersey.
And South Rhode Island, when it rotated into view, was flickering...
...which for some reason reminded me of what Kitman had said.
Although I said the tower top was empty, this was not strictly correct. It didn't have anything resting on it other than ourselves, but by virtue of the tower itself being very similar to various skyscrapers (except for being infinitely tall) it did have something approximating a radio mast projecting out of it...and it was this narrow mast that bore, upon its very top some forty feet away...
...a chaise longue.
(No, not a "chaise lounge". That is an abominable corruption.)
And it was this chaise longue, a walnut Louis XV jobbie — so far as I could tell, what do I know — resting precariously upon the rounded top of the mast, that was occupied by what seemed to be a man. At least, we could see a human arm dangling limply over the side and it seemed reasonable that there was someone attached to it, or it would have fallen down.
"How do people get themselves into positions like this?" wondered Kitman.
He walked up to the mast and ran his hand across its surface. "Smooth as glass and twice as slippery," he reported. "No chance of rappelling up to him. The fishing line trick won't work. Well, let's see if he's alive and awake and has any suggestions. — Hey, up there! Have we found Mr. Nash Mider?"
There was no response.
"Mphm," said Kitman, applying forefinger to lips and thumb to chin.
"I could try calling Leviathan up from the depths," offered Noel.
"No, no, I want to work the problem," said Kitman, and sat down to do just that. We joined him because why not?
"We can't vaxillate from here to there," he said, pointing chaiseward, "because there is an untenable position and entropic continuity will relocate us into the pit we just got out of. Nor can we work the process in reverse and bring him from there to here because the vaxillator just doesn't work that way.
"Logically, that eliminates us, him, here and there. —What's left?" he added, looking at us expectantly.
"Everything else?" said I, and pulled the Fat-Wad-O-Good from my pocket because it was uncomfortable.
"The vaxillator," said Noel a moment later.
Kitman beamed at Noel. "Excellent thinking!"
Noel looked down and stroked the dark surface of the tower abstractedly, mumbling something about keeping good company. (I noticed that there was a pattern of concentric rings on that surface, centered on the antenna, and wondered briefly if the tower had been made, or had grown.)
"We implicitly include ourselves in the solution," Kitman was saying. "But we don't need us."
"We don't?" said I, opening the Fat-Wad-O-Good and looking for useful coupons. I immediately found an ad for Contamiski Wind Of Change Alternative Energy, offering a month of free electricity for a year's service contract, only thirty days too late to do Kitman any good.
"No. We need only the transportation mechanism. We see the vaxillator as a device to transport ourselves, when in fact it's a device that transports itself and takes us along for the ride. We don't need to go with it."
"We don't?" I said again, setting aside a flyer for Bev's Book Barn.
"No. All that is necessary is to program the vaxillator to transport itself to Nash Mider, and then transport itself and Nash Mider down here. QED. Of course," he added, "first I have to program it to be programmable, but that's trivial."
Noel applauded. I joined in, and noticed a flash of gold amid the flapping mostly-white-and-green advertisements.
Kitman inclined his head to us. "Something about what I just said disturbs me deeply, but as I cannot at the moment think what it is, I simply accept your approbation with enormous modesty, and set about my task," he said, and did so.
"Kitman?" I said, after double- and then triple-checking my find.
"Mm?" said he.
"I've got a golden ticket."
He almost dropped the vaxillator.
I once read about an intelligence test based on rendering people unconscious and moving them to a different place, ranking by the first question they asked when they woke up. As I recall, "Where am I?" was average, "What did you do to me?" was superior, and "Did you know I'm a lawyer?" qualified you for Mensa.
I don't know how I would score "What is this and how did I manage to eat so much of it?" but that is what the presumed Nash Mider said after we had, eventually, wrangled him back to his own living room, and, of course, made a short return to Abelton Park to redeem a Venus Vincenzo Golden Ticket.
"It is," explained Kitman, "an Italian-American food object constructed of baked dough, olive oil, tomato sauce and onions."
"Or, as we know it," I expanded, "a Venus Vincenzo pizza pie." Which, incidentally, is the only foodstuff known that can bring a man out of a pilcrow-nut overdose.
"Pure delight in every bite," said Kitman.
"What an appalling phrase," said (the presumed) Nash Mider politely. "And yet so true. And since truth is beauty, how can it be appalling? — ah, the paradox makes me dizzy. Unless, of course," he added thoughtfully, "it's just the pilcrow nuts..."
Kitman and I exchanged glances. "That reminds me," said Kitman. "We were wondering...who you were."
(We just weren't wondering very hard, for although he was about a century short of the mathematical age of Nash Mider, his wardrobe was straight out of the 1890s.)
The Nash Mider candidate stared up at the ceiling. "You might know me," he said, "as Walter V. Finch." He looked at us hopefully.
"Um," said Kitman, "no?"
"Drat," said the unknown Walter V. Finch, and looked away dejectedly. "My name is Nash Mider," he said at last. "If there were justice you would know me as Walter V. Finch. That was my pen name."
"This may be a strange question," said Kitman, "but did you by any chance ever happen to live in a house wholly identical to this one save that it was located in a considerably less bizarre universe?"
"Is there any more of this pizza?" said Nash Mider.
