Lost in Cat Brain Land Read online

  “I’m sure you two will have enough to talk about that he won’t mind fish. I even made cinnamon rolls for dessert. Have you met anyone who could resist my cinnamon rolls?” Maybe she’s right. Jack was always a talker, and Marybot does make damn good cinnamon rolls.

  “It’s been so long.” I sit down at the table, on one of the 25

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  mounted boars that my senile father gave us in place of dining chairs. “Hell, I never expected to hear from Jack again. I don’t understand why he called today, of all the other days he could have called.”

  Marybot cycles out of the kitchen. She pulls up her skirt and sits on the boar across from me, her eyes narrow slits. Her eyes glow green, the way all android eyes glow when they’re scanning for information to fill in their incomplete data. “I guess that’s why you never mentioned him to me,” she says.

  “High school was a long time ago,” I say. I don’t like talking to androids about the past, not even Marybot. “He sounded so different on the phone, I almost didn’t believe it was Jack.”

  “People change,” Marybot says, as if this is a natural thing to her. “Think how different you and I were when we first met.”

  I do. I think of that shit-eating grin on Dr. Blight’s face as he presented me my very own android to love and cherish and honor until death catches up with me or someone disconnects her wiring.

  The doorbell rings. I get off the boar and walk into the living room. I peer through the peephole and there, on the other side, stands Jack. Scrawnier than I remember, dark circles ringing his eyes. Must be struggling with a recent breakup, I figure. A divorce? Anyway, Jack looks pale and too skinny. It’s too bad we won’t be able to show him a decent meal.

  I unlock the door and open it wide. This version of Jack reminds me less of a former classmate and more of my own father in his last days fighting a losing battle with liver cancer.

  “My God, Jack, you’re hardly more than a skeleton.”

  Jack shrugs. He blinks dazedly.

  “Come on inside,” I tell him, “dinner is ready.”

  “I’m Marybot,” says my wife.

  Jack nods but doesn’t shake her outstretched hand. He sits down on a boar but doesn’t pick up his fork or knife.

  Marybot has already placed the trout on the table. The sweat feels hot under the stained glass lamp hanging from 26

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  the ceiling. Is he one of those people who’s prejudiced against androids? Is it the boars? “It was nice hearing from you,” I say.

  “I admit being shocked hearing your voice on the line. What have you been up to these past . . . oh hell, I guess it’s close to eleven years since graduation.”

  “I have been well,” Jack says.

  “We’ve got time, so tell me everything,” I say, sipping at my coffee and realizing I forgot the other two mugs in the kitchen.

  Jack’s eyes dart around the dining room and kitchen.

  “You’ve got a nice place,” he says.

  I fake-smile. An awkward tension settles over the room.

  It’s eating me alive. “Marybot teaches at Wasson High and I’m a supervisor at G.C. Dickenson, the same distributor we stole cases of beer from back in high school. On weekends I work at the Barnes & Noble they built last year. Have you seen the new shopping center?”

  Jack nods. “I remember G.C. Dickenson. Didn’t know they were still operating. These places are all so strange to me.”

  Marybot swallows a bite of trout. She glances nervously at me and says, “Walt said you don’t like fish. I would have made something different had he told me before.”

  “Trout is fine,” Jack says. “I lived in a cabin by a river for six years. Out there by myself, without a grocery store for miles, I caught many fish. Trout is fine.”

  “Was it that same cabin your family owned? I remember you talked about moving up there someday,” I say.

  “The same cabin, that’s right. Out near Bishop. Even when I lived up there, I never had electricity, and sometimes I fell asleep with the lantern burning. One of those nights, I don’t know how this happened, it got knocked over. The cabin burned to ash. How I failed to wake sooner and how I put it out when I did, not even God knows. I guess some things are meant to be while others aren’t.”

  “Christ, I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “Where did you go?”

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  Marybot sets down her fork. “What do you mean some things aren’t meant to be?”

  Jack still hasn’t touched the trout. His silverware sits on the red napkin where Mary placed it when she set the table. “Have you got some whiskey?” Jack asks.

  Marybot stands and wheels into the kitchen. She returns with three glasses and a bottle of Knob Creek and I pick up my mug to find that the coffee has grown cold. Mary pours the bourbon, filling each glass perfectly half full. “No matter how hard up things get financially,” I say, because I have to say something, “a man needs quality whiskey. You can’t settle for the cheap shit. It isn’t good for the heart.”

  I tip my glass toward Jack and take a sip, feeling like a moron as the alcohol prickles my tongue and throat.

  Jack gulps half the liquor and slams the glass on the table.

  He wipes his mouth on his flannel sleeve, closes his eyes, and says, “These years since the cabin burned down, I have been going places.”

  I pick at the fish on my plate. I peel golden-pink flakes of meat off the trout’s ribcage with my fingers. Marybot slaps my hand. “Don’t be a child,” she says.

  Ignoring her, I ask Jack, “What do you mean you’ve been going places? What places?”

  Jack downs the other half of whiskey. “I have been here, there, and everywhere else. Now I’m here with you.”

  “I made cinnamon rolls for dessert,” Marybot says.

  “Why don’t you bring them out?” I say, staring down at my plate.

  Jack refills his glass and gulps more whiskey. The glass slips from his fingers and falls to the table. He cradles his head between his hands. “I’d like to tell you my story,” he says, “and I want you to listen hard. I want you to listen like you’ve never listened before, because there are things men should never know, and if they come to know these things, they should only tell them once.”

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  I look up from my plate and right at Jack, almost right through Jack. Yet the man just holds his head in his hands.

  Marybot narrows her eyes at me. I look away from her. This is already getting to be too much.

  Jack raises his head. Something shimmers in his eyes. He isn’t crying and his eyes aren’t watering and since I don’t know what else can make eyes shimmer like that, I say nothing and try not to feel one way or another about it.

  “I’d like to tell you my story,” Jack says.

  “Then go ahead,” I say. “Tell your story and we’ll listen.”

  “It isn’t all as simple as that,” Jack says.

  “What do you mean?” Marybot says. “Walt, what does he mean?”

  “I mean that when one tells a story, the telling isn’t as simple as black and white. What is told is largely determined by the particular relationship between teller and listener. What you hear, Walt, may be very different than what your wife hears, and it may affect each of you in contrary, conflicting ways. There is truth in what I say, but there are lies. You cannot beat a horse to death with its own beating heart. Trust me, I tried. You cannot love another if they don’t offer the proper sacrifices at your altar of lies, or else the tiny truths that bind you together all unravel.

  I loved a woman once. Another time I killed a man. I found no enjoyment in the act of killing. I found no enjoyment in the act of loving. For me, they are the same. There is truth in what I say, but also lies.”

  I look at Mary. “Get those cinnamon rolls,” I tell her.

  “I want to hear this,” she says.

  “I told
you to get those cinnamon rolls.”

  “And I told you I want to hear this.”

  “Can’t you hear me in that metallic head of yours? Get into the kitchen and let me speak with Jack alone.”

  Marybot shuffles into the kitchen. She slams a cupboard.

  The faucet begins to run.

  “I apologize for that,” I say, sipping at the whiskey. “Marybot 29

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  and I love each other very much and we never fight. I hate doing it, laying down the law like that. It reminds me of my father.”

  “Sometimes there are no laws,” Jack says.

  I make to set down my glass but think better of it. I sip at the whiskey instead. “Jack, what’s this you said about killing a man? Since we spoke on the phone, I sensed something was wrong. You’ve said a lot of strange shit since walking through that door, and that couldn’t have been more than an hour ago. I know everyone’s mind gets tired at some point or another, and if that’s it, if you’ve been saying these things because you need a little vacation, just say so. I remember you having a good heart.

  I won’t hold tonight against you. So tell me, what’s this about murder? What happened to you?”

  “I’ve been so many places and now here I am.”

  I refill mine and Jack’s glasses. “How did you manage to visit all these places when you claim to have spent so much time in the same cabin?”

  “I had my first visit in the cabin,” Jack says. “Ganesh was my first visitor, but there are so many more just like him.”

  “Are you saying a man named Ganesh visited you and that you visited all these places while living in the same place? I don’t know what to say,” I tell him.

  “Then say nothing at all.”

  The Tiffany lamp hanging above the kitchen table casts half of Jack’s face in green shadow. The other half could have been hammered out of tin. Straight out of a Faulkner story.

  Jack’s eyes blink out at me from their wrinkled cavern of his flesh-papered skull, almost pleading, and very much like the abandoned Adelaide mine we used for a clubhouse as children.

  “Tell me about Ishtar,” I say.

  “Ganesh isn’t important,” Jack says, as casual as if we were discussing classmates or past loves or any of the good old times.

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  “Then why the hell did you bring him up?” I say, feeling the blood rush to my face, the veins in my neck swelling.

  Jack sips his whiskey now, the way good bourbon was intended to be drank. He opens his mouth to say something but sips more whiskey instead. He repeats this (open, sip, open, sip, open, sip) until he holds the glass up to the light, a pin’s head of liquor at the bottom glistening in the glass like it was all made of something primordial and infinitely more delicate than gold.

  “Ganesh is only one of them,” Jack says, lowering the glass.

  “They’re all quite the same, really. Is there more whiskey?”

  “Who are they?” I whisper, because some things can only be spoken properly if you whisper them, and I suspect this might be one of those things.

  Jack reaches across the table and grabs Marybot’s whiskey.

  “If your wife isn’t going to drink this, I hope she won’t mind me helping myself.”

  I wish Marybot was still here at the table. Maybe I could call her in and we could eat cinnamon rolls and go anywhere but where the sick feeling in my head tells me this conversation is going. Jack always had a penchant for things that were no good for him.

  “That’s better,” Jack says. “Now they, if you’re going to put it that way, they. . . .” He guzzles the whiskey and wipes his mouth on his flannel sleeve. “You want to know what they look like, where they come from, or what intentions they’ve got?”

  “Anything,” I say, furious, “all of it. If we’re talking about extraterrestrials, just go for the whole shebang. Just tell me whatever it is you’ve got to tell me.”

  Jack nods. “I can’t tell you where they come from because I’m not so sure myself. Ishtar visited me in the cabin. Others followed, but there was never much rhyme or reason in their coming or going. I lived with one for a while. She’s the woman I loved. The man I killed, his name is Ganesh. He lives inside me now.”

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  “Hold on a minute,” I say. “Slow down. I’m not following.

  A woman? You said they all looked the same, and what’s this you’re saying about killing the man who visited you? Was he some sort of intruder, Jack?”

  “They do look the same. That is, until you search inside them. Anyway, they can’t be from outer space. If I had to describe them, and you’re the first one I’ve admitted this to outside my journal, the visitors look like fleshed hogs.”

  I recall that Jack’s father had been a taxidermist, the same one who stuffed the boars we’re sitting on. This already stank of an Oedipal complex.

  “Except,” Jack continues, “it’s more like the corpses of crippled humans dug themselves out of their graves and, discovering that they still couldn’t walk, decided to kill pigs, hollow ‘em out, and then wear their flesh until it melded to their bodies. Their croak is like . . . dead dogs laughing. I have no idea what kind of image that puts in your head. I wish I could do a better job describing them to you. I wish I could.”

  As he speaks of these visitors, Jack loosens up. Despite the apparent lunacy in everything he says, his demeanor reminds me more and more of the old Jack. Maybe the whiskey is just working its magic. Maybe Jack staged this elaborate joke and is losing the steam required to carry on with it. His description of the creatures could have surfaced from the horror films he obsessed over as kid, or straight out of his father’s workshop.

  If I had to guess, I’d say it’s some warped fusion of the two. At least Marybot is still in the kitchen. She’d be having nightmares for weeks. Androids are more vulnerable to nightmares than we are.

  “The visitors love fish,” Jack says. “They love fish so much that they do special things to the humans they meet, and they do very special things to the humans who love them, and if you kill a visitor, well, I can show you Ganesh.”

  “What are you saying?” I ask. I need more whiskey or some other means of forgetting this visit ever occurred.

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  “Let me show you what they do to humans they meet,” Jack says. He slides his boar from the table and bends over to untie his shoes. He pulls his right shoe off and then his left shoe.

  I stare at my dinner plate and then back at Jack’s feet.

  Where his right foot should be, and where his left should be, flop eyeless trout crawling with white maggots. I swallow to refrain from puking up the trout and whiskey.

  “This is what the visitors call Standard Procedure,” Jack says.I want to scream. I want to hold Marybot’s hand. I want to call the police and let them know about this gnashing, violent lunacy eroding the flesh of the world.

  Jack stands on his fish feet. He unbuttons his flannel shirt and lets it hang loosely, revealing a stained tank top beneath.

  “Call your wife in here,” he says.

  I stand. My shotgun sits in the closet at the end of the hall.

  Marybot could dial the police from the phone on the kitchen wall. I could call to her. I could dash for my gun and call to her. But for what reason? To what avail? If there are monsters in the world, then they exist within a man’s mind. They are the troubles a man causes and the troubles committed against him by others. That a man struggles with monsters says something about his character. It says he is weak and sick and that he cannot endure the battle waged by every human between good and evil. This, I think, is what Jack has become. The fish feet are part of some elaborate costume, his story an indication of his inner psychotic landscape, and now the time has come for him to leave.

  “I asked you to call your wife,” Jack says.

  And so I call to her.

&n
bsp; They replaced Jack’s heart with a rusted treble hook. Each barb extends the length of a grown man’s index finger. “This is what they do to those who fall in love,” Jack says, holding his heart 33

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  out for me and Marybot to inspect.

  I study the hole in my old friend’s chest. A black, eyeless eel dangles from one of Jack’s nipples. When Jack pinches the eel’s tail, it stiffens into a slender doorknob. According to Jack, this convenient access into his chest cavity benefits the visitors and himself greatly, for the treble hearts are still in prototypical stages and demand constant modifications. Jack believes that someday all humans will have such hearts, or so he tells me.

  Marybot faints after reaching out a trembling hand to touch the rusted hook.

  “You need to leave,” I tell Jack.

  “You haven’t seen Ganesh,” Jack says.

  I point at the hook and say, “Get your heart back inside your chest and leave. I’m calling the police.”

  Jack tugs on the eel and hangs his heart from one of the spongy cables twirling inside his body. He seals the flap of flesh that serves as a door, strokes the eel’s head, and sits down on the boar where he had drank whiskey and eaten none of the trout.

  “How about those cinnamon rolls?” he says.

  “Get out or I’m calling the police,” I say, moving toward the kitchen. Stepping over Marybot, I hesitate. Should I leave her on the floor like that?

  “Call them,” Jack says, “but you won’t like what they say.”

  “Why is that?” I say. I think of the shotgun sitting in the closet at the end of the hall.

  “Get me a cinnamon roll. We’ll talk.”

  My guts grumble. The fish isn’t settling. More whiskey might solve that, but a peculiar gleam in Jack’s eyes troubles me. Why should I not call the police? I don’t want them to discover that the shotgun is unregistered, for one. And then there are the illegal knives I brought back from Mexico. They’re in a cigar box on the top shelf of the den closet, along with the marijuana for when my back aches. But all I want is for this maniac to leave. Is that such a crime?