Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which We Go House Hunting.
"So what exactly is the point of transcendence if it isn't actually helpful?" said a frustrated Kitman. "I'm not an iota closer to getting my house back!"
"Well, don't jump to conclusions — not that particular conclusion anyway," said Robin. "First let's regroup in the living room of the house that you can see."
"Fine," said Kitman. "How?"
"Everyone focus on the living room."
I directed my attention to the living room of Nash Mider's house, consciously setting aside the rest of, well, everything.
"The living room," said Kitman. "Okay, I'm looking at it."
"Zoom in on it. Imagine a telephoto lens."
I watched the Nash Mider living room expand in importance.
"Done. Now what?" said Kitman.
"Change your point of view," said Robin.
What Kitman said in response to that I didn't hear, because I was distracted by virtue of suddenly being in the living room of the Nash Mider house.
It was the simplest form of travel imaginable — no imagining the soul rotating or anything. One moment I was in the mojo-dojo, looking at the living room, and the next moment I was in the living room, looking at the living room. All it took was the realization that at the moment, I wasn't, strictly speaking, anywhere at all, and that therefore my location was a mere matter of opinion.
When Kitman arrived a moment later, he said "It's sort of like catching elephants."
"I beg your pardon?" said Robin.
"You know," said Kitman. "You just look through your binoculars the wrong way and use a pair of tweezers to pick up the elephant."
"Oh," said Robin. "Technically it's called psychodynamic elision."
"Say again please?" said Kitman.
"Psychodynamic elision," said Robin, carefully enunciating each of the eight syllables.
Kitman pinched the bridge of his nose. "I begin to understand," he said, "the appeal of living in a gated reality. Incidentally, looking at the whole of existence all the time is starting to give me eyestrain. Not to mention vertigo. How do we stop being one with everything and just exist somewhere in particular?"
"It is getting a little annoying," I said.
"Isn't it, though?" said Robin. "Just think 'trap my mind' and the halo you're wearing will do the rest."
I thought.
Reality collapsed around me, and quite a relief it was, too.
"Ah!" sighed Kitman. "Back in the crib. More or less." He took off his halo and examined it. "Did you say this thing had biofeedback circuits?"
Robin nodded. "Use it enough and you should catch on as to how to transition through phase space on your own."
"Is it good for anything else?"
"Everything else," said Robin. "I've got a brochure if you want to see it. It's all a bit much for me, though. Although I would like to sign up for the instantaneous training montage."
"The what?" said Kitman.
"The ultimate learning tool. Just as you can move between points in nominal space without passing through any intermediate points, because there are none, you can move directly from ignorance to understanding. Of anything. It's all conceptual."
"Whoa," said Kitman. "When does that class start?"
"As soon as Kuan Kuo finds someone to teach him," said Robin.
We looked at him a while, until he said "What?"
"I need," said Kitman, setting the halo back on his head at a rakish angle, "a glass of water."
"Now," said Robin, while Kitman ran the faucet in Nash Mider's kitchen. "What did Kuan Kuo say to you, exactly, before he sent you off to get haloed?"
"Ah...hum," said Kitman, glancing to the ceiling. "A house has three stories. To travel between them requires exertion, volition and access to the stairway — but remember the doors. Have fun."
"Okay," said Robin. "What does that mean?"
"Hey, if you don't know—"
"It smells allegorical," I said.
"To high heaven," agreed Kitman.
"Which may mean it's completely literal," said Robin. "Kuan Kuo's sense of humor, you know."
"So it boils down to the stairway and the doors," said Kitman. "Okay, fine."
He carried his glass out of the kitchen to the top of the cellar stairs. "Exertion and volition," he said, and took a thoughtful sip. "Right."
He took a few steps down.
Paused.
And snapped his fingers. "Aha!" he said.
"That trick hardly ever works, Kitman," I said — but when he turned around there was a grin spread across his face.
"Well," he said, raising his glass in salute, possibly to himself, "it worked this time."
"Free my mind," he said, purely for effect.
"Well," said Kitman a few minutes later, "since the halo was the only new item in my inventory, I figured it had to be connected."
We were standing in phase space on Kitman's abnormal staircase, which sounds like a 1960s rock band but probably isn't.
In phase space it offered not one, not two, but three different flavors of up and down.
(If you'd like some vague idea of how it worked, just grow a third eye in the middle of your forehead and you'll more or less have it. Each eye will give you a slightly different perception of a single scene, neither overlaid nor overlapping nor, strictly, side by side, and unless you suffer from amblyopia or some such you could perceive all three images as one single scene.)
With trivial effort I could shift my shoe onto any of three (non)coexistent steps, and step down into any of three (non)coexistent basements.
One basement was clearly Nash Mider's. One was even more clearly Kitman's own. The surprising third was empty, but not unnaturally so as Nash Mider's was; it just looked as though it had never been used by anyone for anything.
"Three houses," said Kitman. "Connected at the staircase, but nowhere else. I hope there's an explanation for all this."
He looked into the basements and said "Hmm," in tones of contemplation.
Suspicion entered my mind. "Kitman," I said, "are you contemplating what I think you're contemplating?"
"An intriguing way to clean my basement?"
"Yes," I said.
"We think as one," he said. "Disturbing, isn't it? Now," he added with a certain amount of relish, "let's go upstairs. My upstairs."
We did.
We emerged into Kitman's home.
What can I say?
Things I had merely known were there, I now once again actually saw.
Things like the bookcases that lined the hallways, worn and scratched and friendly to the touch, scatter-topped with sheet music:
"You wanted to know about my parents?" said Kitman, running a hand along the backs of the books on the top shelf.
"Very much," said Robin.
"On my seventh birthday they took me to Discount Book Depot. They gave me a brown paper grocery bag and told me we weren't leaving until I'd filled it. They did the same thing every year until I was fourteen. Then they started giving me gift certificates."
Things like the paintings that hung above the bookcases:
"When I was twelve," said Kitman, "they went out and bought multiple sets of oil paints and for a whole year of Public Television we all had to paint happy little landscapes. And they made us watch every sunset. Three hundred and sixty-six sunsets. Some of them from the roof."
"Who did that one?" asked Robin, indicating an appalling, justly unsigned Fauvist rendering of the houses that had been across the street.
"Him," said Kitman, indicating the only other person present.
Things like a nickel-plated harmonica, sitting on top of the sitting room wardrobe.
"So that's where that got to," I said, taking it down and blowing the opening riff of "Surfin' USA".
"That was the next year. Everybody had to learn to play," said Kitman. "My mother is the only person I know who can play the glass armonica."
"May I see that?" said Robin, as curious as you might expect him to be about a lip-based musical instrument.
I gave it to him and he examined it with endless fascination.
"Why is Noel's address engraved on the bottom?" he said. "With someone else's name over it?"
"Actually, that's my address. And it's my name," I said. "Mr. Kitman had it personalized before he gave it to me." And a very nice birthday it had been, too.
"Here," said Kitman, stepping around to the front of the wardrobe and pointing above it. "These are my parents. Taken at the wedding."
Many photos taken at weddings display the just-married couple cutting a cake. This one was a little different.
Robin studied the picture of the Kitmans co-wielding a pizza slicer and gave a philosophically resonant hum.
I looked down at the white carpet with its intractable ink-spill and didn't feel embarrassed all over again because when they said don't worry about it they meant it.
Things like these and the people behind them.
Kitman sighed, a sigh of happiness and helplessness.
"Look up, Williams," he said, laying a hand on my shoulder and turning me around. "Look up and out and see what we're dealing with."
I looked up.
Outside the large bay windows of the sitting and living rooms was a landscape rather strange even by our expanded standards.
We were looking out onto a large grassy meadow that extended, undulating, all the way to the horizon; above was a cloud-studded blue sky with a warm yellow sun in it, at about a ten-o-clock position.
We were also looking out onto a blasted heath of dead grass and dead trees under clouds of hanging ash and no visible source of light.
We were also looking out a winter scene of torrential rain and snow.
These environments were fighting for dominance, boiling and bubbling through one another, occasionally interrupted in spots by yet other scenes. It was, in a word, chaos.
"Chaos," said Kitman. "This explains it all. This is the borderline. This is inside the borderline."
"Hah?" said I. "It's a bit wide for a line, wouldn't you say?"
"Fractal dimensionality," he said. "Or something like that. Putting the house in Hausdorff, haha. —Put that in when you write this up."
"Whatever," said I, and turned to look out the side window. What I saw was mildly surprising.
"Hey!" I said.
"Hey what?" said Kitman.
"It's another house!"
"Okay, two houses in Hausdorff," he said agreeably, and looked out the window. "Huh," he said. "That makes sense."
It was another barnlike Kitman-Mider house.
"Why?" said I.
"If there was a third, where else would it be but conceptually equidistant from the others? Balance, you know. One on each side of the borderline, one in the borderline. I wonder if anyone lives there?"
"I think someone definitely lives there," said Robin from behind us.
We turned around to face him, and as it happened the living room side window.
Outside that window was a very solid looking maple tree. A very large maple tree. A very odd maple tree, which, though it rose from the ground, did not so much grow from it as project out of it.
There was a hole in the side of this maple tree, at ground level: a hole as wide as Kitman's front doors.
And as we watched, a blue squirrel ran out of this hole, and scampered across the flickering ground, off to the left and out of sight.
We crowded up against the window for a better look.
Hanging in midair, and looking perfectly stable despite this, was Nash Mider's study.
"Just as I thought," said Kitman. "There was another squirrel at work in there. We'd better shake a leg. They've got two out of three and they're making progress on the third."
"Shake a leg?" I said. "Shake a leg where?"
"In the third house, of course," said Kitman. "It's the most interesting new data point available. To me, anyway. Come on."
He stepped up onto the stairs to the second floor, and a moment later shifted away and was gone.
We followed.
Once on the stairs I turned around and looked down into three available living rooms.
Kitman's own was empty. Hodgson, carrying a basket of pilcrow nuts, was walking through Nash Mider's; he didn't perceive us. In the third...
Robin and I joined Kitman in the third.
Or, more specifically, joined Kitman and Kitman, because there was an extra — a Kitman sitting on the bare floor, back against the sitting room wall, eyes closed. Next to him was, more or less unsurprisingly, an extra me.
Presumably these were the possible alternates who we had seen momentarily in Nash Mider's basement.
Kitman said "Hello, me."
The other Kitman opened his eyes and looked up.
"What took you so long?" he said.
