Lost in Cat Brain Land Read online

  Lost in

  Cat BrainLand

  CAMERON PIERCE

  Eraserhead Press

  Portland, OR

  ERASERHEAD PRESS

  205 NE BRYANT

  PORTLAND, OR 97211

  WWW.ERASERHEADPRESS.COM

  ISBN: 1-936383-04-7

  Copyright © 2010 by Cameron Pierce

  Cover art copyright © 2010 by Alan M. Clark ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Holiday Sings the Egg Dilemma” first appeared in Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, “Death of a Dog Eater” first appeared in Esteban’s House of Bizarro, and subsequently in Dark Recesses, “The Depressed Man” first appeared in Verbicide Magazine, “A Scorpion Town in California” first appeared in The Dream People, “Broom People”

  first appeared in Nemonymous #10, “Embryo Tree for Android” first appeared in susurrus: the literature of madness, “How to Live Forever”

  first appeared in The Dream People, “Flowers” first appeared in Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, “The Green Monster and His Loneliness” first appeared in Bare Bone, “I Am Meat, I Am in Daycare”

  first appeared in The Horror Library Volume II, and subsequently in The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, “Crazy Love” first appeared in The Journal of Experimental Fiction.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the USA.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cat Brain Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

  Holiday Sings the Egg Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . 19

  Visitor Ganesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

  Death of a Dog Eater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

  The Depressed Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

  A Scorpion Town in California . . . . . . . . . . . 49

  Broom People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

  Lazy Fascist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

  The Dressing Booth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

  Personal Saviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

  Embryo Tree for Android . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

  How to Live Forever . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

  Tea for a Mysterious Creature . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

  Flowers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

  The Dead Monkey Exhibit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

  Drain Angel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

  The Green Monster and His Loneliness . . . . 124

  I Am Meat, I Am in Daycare . . . . . . . . . . . 125

  Crazy Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

  “I am the cat who walks alone. And to me all supermarkets are alike.”

  – William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

  “When you’re looking at life

  In a strange new room

  Maybe drowning soon

  Is this the start of it all?”

  – Joy Division, Exercise One

  “My cat can eat a whole watermelon.”

  – Crispin Glover, Rubin and Ed

  CAT BRAIN LAND

  for Albert Camus

  Tanuki died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I can’t be sure.

  I found his carcass in my bed this morning. His black fur was matted with blood, his white chest no longer white. When I tried to pick him up, the gray Egyptian cotton bed sheet came with him. He’d bled a lot and gotten glued to the sheet. I didn’t sleep in my bed last night, so maybe he died yesterday.

  I wrapped him in the sheet and carried him to the kitchen. I set him on the kitchen table, unwrapped the sheet, and stepped back. I observed the dead cat in a detached manner perhaps ill-suited for the situation, but my emotions had turned to shit over the previous days, over Ann. I was finally starting to calm down today. I’d gone dead inside, at least. I wasn’t about to work myself into another mental apocalypse over a dead cat, no matter how much I loved the cat; no matter if this meant I was alone without even a cat to love me, with Ann on her way out.I rubbed Tanuki’s left ear between my thumb and index finger, just the way he liked it when he was alive. His pink tongue poked out of his mouth. It’d blackened at the edges.

  His eyes bulged, as if in the last seconds of his life he had seen something that attracted and repelled him immensely. His pupils had burst. They’d spilled into his bloody scleras like 7

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  runny black egg yolks.

  The cat had taken to hunting mice in the fields at night. He probably got caught on the wrong side of a scuffle with a coyote, hawk, or particularly aggressive rattlesnake as he returned from a hunting trip. I bet it took the last of his strength to climb into bed. I bet he expected to find me, thinking I would help him or at least hold him in my arms as he passed away.

  Well, I didn’t help him. I let down my only friend. Maybe we could have helped each other, but it was too late. Too late for him, too late for me and Ann. I petted the cat and told him I was sorry. I asked him why he chose today or yesterday to die.

  He’d lived to inconvenience me. It’s how he showed his love.

  Ann expected me at The Frog Bar in an hour. I’d have to call and cancel. She, of course, would be pissed. No sympathy from her, not over my dead cat. Not the way our relationship was going. I didn’t even know where she was staying.

  How goddamn sorry I was for both of them, for the things I’d done or failed to do.

  My body longed for a hot shower. I felt dead cat germs scuttle in an out of my pores like ants in tunnels of dirt. I reached my right arm over my shoulder, stuck my hand down the neck of my wrinkled black dress shirt, and scratched between my shoulders. I scratched my neck and behind my ears. I scratched my scalp. With my left hand, I scratched my belly and below my beltline. No matter how much I scratched, the dirty itch remained. My shirt was covered in cat hair, Tanuki’s hair, so I took it off. I was not wearing an undershirt for reasons I could not place. I always wore an undershirt.

  I scratched my chest and studied Tanuki. He smelled pretty bad. I must have jostled his decaying molecules when I picked him up. I wanted to slip away for a shower, a long, hot one, but my legs rooted me to the floor. Tanuki was dead. I held a moral obligation to stop thinking for myself and figure out what killed him. How in the hell did these things happen anyway? Why did cats die? Why did my cat die? “Oh Christ 8

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  get over it,” I said to myself. “You know better than anyone how these things happen.”

  I fetched the heavy duty, food grade scissors from the knife rack on the counter. I turned back to the dead cat on the kitchen table, snapping the scissors open and shut as I stood over his body. Before deducing what killed him, I needed to cut him away from the sheets. It was simply impossible to tell what killed him when fabric concealed one side of his body. His hair had grown long and wild. It would be easy to cut away. I often told him that he looked like a furry black cloud. He would brood under the kitchen table—his favorite place to brood was under the kitchen table, on which he now lay—and hiss at me or Ann when we walked by. I would turn and tilt my head back and laugh, “Look at the furry black cloud getting angry now!”

  Or Tanuki might hop into bed at night. He’d step lightly across the blankets and knead his paws into my chest, purring. The shadows of my hands would vanish into the plush darkness of
his fur, and I’d whisper, “Furry cloud. My furry black cloud.”

  He was a stiff cloud now. His black fur was as brittle in some places as uncooked spaghetti; it even snapped under pressure.

  A dead cloud.

  I wedged the scissors between his body and the sheets and snipped his fur, careful not to cut into him.

  A few minutes later, they separated. I set the scissors on the table.

  Now that I’d freed the cat of the bedding, the prospect of inspecting his ruined body and uncovering what destroyed him made my knees bend inward. I felt ruined myself, like I’d awoken into the worst sort of hangover, the sort that followed the nights I went for it all, breaking shit and starting shit, fucking up anyone in any way I could, verbally or with my fists and other ways, it didn’t matter, so long as it prevented me from getting my hands on myself.

  The nightmare feelings of the past few days returned. They came back very sudden, and far worse.

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  My heart and guts flopped like trout suffocating on a sandy bank, fish whose lungs were ripped and flayed by golden treble hooks that some fisherman yanked out with a scowl and a shrug, because everyone knows trebled barbs don’t budge if you’re tender and gentle with fish that swallow the hook. My heart and guts felt like those fish, except I didn’t swallow the hook. It had been shoved down my throat, and my brain felt so much worse. I was standing in the doorway of a breakdown with a dead cat and soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend pushing at my back.I steadied myself against the kitchen table. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply of the foul air. I inhaled and exhaled in rapid succession. My breaths came up shallow. Whiffing death gave me sea legs and the spins. I started hyperventilating.

  I tore myself away from the table, eyes watering, and stumbled over to the kitchen counter. I slid a drawer open and grabbed a brown paper bag. On my knees, I held the mouth of the bag tightly over my own mouth and tried to remember how to breathe.

  Soon, my inhalations deepened; my breathing stabilized.

  Brown paper bags worked wonders against hyperventilation attacks.

  As I stood, crumpling the bag into a ball, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out and looked at the name and number on the screen. It was Ann, likely calling to flake out or to make sure I wasn’t I planning on flaking. Our always canceling on each other had created rifts in our relationship from the beginning.

  “Tanuki died,” I said. Not giving her the courtesy of a hello.Silence.

  “I found him in our bed. I don’t know what happened.

  There’s a lot of blood. I can’t come out tonight. I can’t talk.

  If there’s anything you want to say to me, say it now because everything is fucked anyway. So say what you want to say and 10

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  let me go.”I was crying into the phone.

  More silence on her end.

  “I have to take care of my cat,” I said.

  “I’m coming over,” Ann said. She sounded upset, like she could barely get the words out.

  She hung up.

  I set the phone on the counter, debating whether to call her back. I desperately needed a shower, a shave, fresh clothes, food, sleep, to clean the wrecked house, and to get Tanuki somewhere else before Ann arrived. If she walked in the door and saw the dead cat on the kitchen table, she’d flip. As bad as I looked, figuring out what killed Tanuki was top priority.

  No amount of showering and grooming would erase the dark circles beneath my eyes or make my sallow, gaunt face appear any healthier. I could expect Ann to remark upon my physical state. You look like shit, she would casually observe.

  The cat was more important. I looked tired and hellish, but I still might learn a thing or two about Tanuki’s death and feign, for a little while, that everything was under control.

  Pressured by the unknown time constraint, I returned to the table. I braced myself for the worst and flipped Tanuki over, disclosing the side of him I had not seen. I leaped back and shouted, “Fucking Christ!”

  A wide gash ran the length of his side, just below his ribcage, as if someone gutted him with the claw of a hammer.

  The hairless flesh clinging to his broken ribs was singed. They’d burned him. They’d gutted the cat and burned him.

  I held my breath and stepped closer. I was prepared to wrap him up in the sheet and bury his body right then. I could make up a story to tell Ann. Maybe someday I’d even believe that other story myself. I hoped so. When I paid witness to the full extent of the damage, the gutting and burning seemed like child’s play. The world had transformed into a monstrous elephant and it was doing a fine job of stampeding my ass into the fucking ground.

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  In my first take, I’d missed what was going on under his ribs. I put my head up close. I wasn’t sure what the insides of a cat were supposed to look like, although I knew sure as hell they weren’t supposed to look the way Tanuki’s insides looked.

  It appeared that whoever or whatever killed him had removed his interiors and filled him up with brains. Tiny, pinkish gray brains. Cat brains.

  My cat was filled with cat brains.

  The brains glistened under the harsh fluorescence of the overhead light. They were a gelatinous refusal of the stiffness and unswayable lifelessness of the cat himself.

  The cat brains quivered.

  Were they parasites? Were they alive?

  I backed against the counter and groped around behind me for my phone.

  I watched the brains without batting an eye as I flipped open my phone. I cast my eyes down only long enough to make sure it was connecting to Ann. Seeing the little screen light up with the caller ID photo of her, an image of her laughing and stomping on a sand castle we’d built at Pismo Beach last summer, I stepped up to the table again, hovering over Tanuki, and observed the brains.

  Pressed against each other in the canyon-like gash, the cat brains mewed, although they had no mouths.

  Ann answered on the third ring.

  “What is it?” she said.

  I opened my mouth to urge her to stay away, but before I got a word out, two yellow cat eyes blinked open on the surface of a cat brain. And then eyes opened on all the brains I could see, and I knew that every brain inside the dead cat had awoken.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered, dropping the phone.

  I heard Ann shouting on the other line.

  I bent over and reached for the phone. I had it in my hand when a skinny black paw closed over my right wrist and 12

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  buried claws into my flesh. I dropped the phone. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the paw was appended to a furry tentacle.

  A cat tentacle.

  I flailed my left arm blindly, battering air. I dropped to my knees, still cuffed around one wrist, and grabbed my dress shirt off the ground. I whipped the shirt over my shoulders to distract my assailant so that I might break their hold on my right wrist.

  “Help! Send help!” I shouted, hoping Ann was still on the phone. It was facedown on the floor right in front of me, but my left arm swung the shirt uncontrollably, automatically, out of pain and anxiety.

  Another clawed tentacle dug into my right leg and flipped me onto my back. I saw from this position that the cat tentacles protruded from the brains inside Tanuki’s body. Although I was sprawled out on my ass, facing the tentacles head-on gave me a little confidence that maybe I could break their grasp and escape. I wrapped my left hand around the skinny tentacle now pinning my right arm to the floor, but as I wrenched back on the tentacle, trying to pry my right arm free, two more tentacles unfurled from the dead cat. They seized my left arm and left leg, then began folding my limbs inward, as if to make them meet in a point over my torso.

  I screamed out as my joints cracked and my muscles contorted. The four cat tentacles proceeded to lift me up.

  I teetered precariously above the kitchen table as the tentacles bent into impossi
ble pretzels. They swung me into the fluorescent light and glass rained down on the table. Weak light streamed through the window above the sink and the sliding glass doors that opened the living room onto the balcony and overlooked the Pacific Ocean. The sun had not yet disappeared.

  It was like the ghost of an over-easy egg howling on the watery dark horizon, so many miles from shore that nobody except the seabirds and sea creatures could hear it howl.

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  That ocean sunset was the last thing I saw before the tentacles folded my body into a human cube and stuffed me inside the corpse of my cat and down through many layers of cat brains.

  Eventually the cat brains ended, and I fell.

  I hit a spongy bottom. I inspected myself for injuries. My wrists and ankles bled from where the tentacle claws held me.

  No damage from being folded into a cube. My limbs moved fine. I stood and gazed upward, trying to estimate how far I’d fallen. A light that seemed to emanate from everywhere all at once cast everything in a pinkish gray haze.

  The cat brains floated above like clouds.

  Brain clouds.

  The furry tentacles coiled around some clouds. Their paws drooped, swaying in midair, as if the cat tentacles had gone to sleep.I lowered my gaze and scanned my surroundings. Brain cacti jutted up here and there. I wiped my brow, realizing how much hotter it was in here. Despite the wetness of the brains, a dry, arid wind rolled across the land, sweeping vagrant particles of brain to the air. So this cat brain land was a desert.

  I spun around and around, looking for a sign to point me in some direction. Looming in the distance, in a ring surrounding the desert: gargantuan mountains of brain, with peaks like twisted pink daggers.

  I kept looking.

  A dark figure sat at the base of a cactus like a little death doll, but as I approached, I made out a patch of white on its chest.

  “Tanuki!” I shouted, and broke out running.

  My dead cat was alive inside of himself. For the moment, that made it okay that I’d been abducted and pulled into his desecrated body by a set of cat tentacles. For the moment, all I wanted was to hug my cat. Tears streamed down my cheeks.