Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition

by Akif Pirincci

  I stopped and thought. Couldn't I pick some better moment to set off on my travels? It might be sensible to shelter in the doorway of a building before I started to resemble those contemporaries of mine who like sleeping in washing-machine drums, and wake up - if they wake up at all - to find themselves in a fascinating underwater world full of sock eels and knicker jellyfish. In fact it would be an even better idea to sprint home to Gustav's, take a rest there to dry off, and try another jail-break when the storm had died down and my strength was restored. Although it meant going against all my good resolutions, I decided on the latter course of action. Easier said than done, though: when I tried putting my plan of retreat into practice I had a new problem to cope with -by this time I was hopelessly lost. The street where I found myself was very much the same as all the others in this old part of town. Furthermore, the curtain of rain meant that I seemed to be looking at every building, every front garden with curly cast-iron railings and every antiquated alley through a pair of steamed-up diving goggles. I should have paid more attention to the signs bearing street names during my previous clandestine excursions. Unfortunately, from unthinking habit I'd always preferred the specific technique of my own kind and made a scent-map of the town in my head from the marks my colleagues left behind them. And not surprisingly, this special kind of cartography failed me in a thorough heavy-wash programme like the present one. Of course I still had vague recollections of the occasional unusual building, and I could visualise a few major road junctions, but now even these few rudimentary means of orientation merged into a tangle of street-scapes in general.

  Within a few minutes the euphoria of my departure had turned to sheer panic. The raging storm had washed away not only the dirt in the streets but all my daydreams about a Francis living wild, welcomed into the freedom of nature as if into his mother's bosom. My dearest wish was to get home as fast as possible, snuggle up to the radiator and stay there until I could be served for dinner as a nice roast. Let's face it, didn't sex usually prove a damn nerve-racking, exhausting business, and wasn't the pleasure achieved seldom worth the effort? Surely the world was over-populated enough. Shouldn't sexual intercourse be a pleasure best left to my more ordinary contemporaries, people too stupid and lazy to read a good book, people who took a compulsive interest in their genitals and the brainless amusement they provided instead? Yes, it should. I'd wave goodbye to my nuts and read good books for the rest of my days. And now to get out of here!

  A flash, a crack of thunder, and in the glaring light a caprice of the stormy wind showed me a curtain of rain parting in the middle to reveal the mouth of a dark alley paved with cobblestones. I thought I'd come down that alley. It led to a road junction; so did the street where I now stood, which had quite a steep slope to it. I gazed at the alley, transfixed, until the bright lightning disappeared. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I really did recognise a familiar spot. Since the alley was on the other side of the street, seen from my present standpoint, my best course of action would be to cross the road diagonally and then turn right at the junction. It would mean wading paw-deep in the water flowing down the street like a shallow stream, but it would be worth the effort in the end.

  I stepped into the water rippling by and hurried to the middle of the road. As a result I finally enjoyed total immersion, but in my present condition that didn't matter. The closer I came to my goal, the more clearly did the dim light of the street lamp on the corner show me the manhole cover in the middle of the road junction quivering as if shaken by a phantom hand. The gratings in the gutters on both sides of the street were swallowing a good deal of the flood, but things must be chaotic down in the sewers in such torrential rain, leading to the risk of sudden eruptions of sewage here and there. The immense pressure might force manhole covers off. So it would be sensible to get a move on and reach the alley before I was faced with any such unpleasant situation. Just as this thought shot through my head, I heard a rushing and roaring behind me as if the Atlantic Ocean in person was coming to town. I whisked round and looked for whatever was making the noise. Aghast, I watched as a tidal wave about half a metre high and stretching right across the street came foaming and raging round the corner and rolled on towards me at high speed. Bloody hell, had all the natural disasters in the universe just been waiting for me to take my first step into independence? No, not all of them - there were still some to come. For when I turned my head forward again to check out the best way of escape, I was horrified to see the manhole cover in the middle of the road junction tossed in the air by a mighty jet of water from underground. The paralysis induced in me by these moments of terror was my undoing. I'd lingered too long staring at the spectacle, and before I knew it, before I could get away from the middle of the road, the wave caught me from behind and flung me to the ground. I struggled to get some kind of footing, but the fury of the wild water forced my body to curl up into a ball and drove me on full speed ahead, like a car tyre come loose. The comparison with those of my kind who like sleeping in washing-machine drums was extremely apt now, for in this unfortunate situation all I could do was swallow water, strike out helplessly with all four paws and hope the wave would soon roll on and over me, leaving its victim behind like driftwood.

  Although I couldn't concentrate on anything but sheer survival as I performed death-defying acrobatics in the belly of the wave, I saw out of the corner of my eye that I had now been washed dangerously close to the open sewer shaft. The latter had a particularly intriguing surprise ready to spring on me. For whereas the sludgy brown contents of its stomach had spewed up at the road junction like a liquid mushroom cloud, it was now acting like a whirlpool in a stormy sea, sucking all the water round it back down again with a crazy thirst. You couldn't call me a particularly timid type, but my bladder spontaneously emptied at the sight, enriching the waters foaming around me, for the simple reason that never in my wildest dreams had I envisaged myself drowning in the smelly vortex of the sewage system. I always expected to pop my clogs in old age, sitting on a velvet cushion, either from choking on a fist-sized chunk of liver or from fracturing my Adam's apple with shrill cries of lust while having it off with the Siamese queen next door. All this in radiant sunshine and to the accompaniment of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, of course. But why so defeatist? It didn't have to turn out that way. The tidal wave wasn't necessarily going to wash me down that tiny hole - after all, it was a big road junction. No, not necessarily ...

  After what seemed to me my three hundred and eleventh somersault, I saw the full glory of the open manhole right in front of me like some creepy prophecy come true. The tremendous suction from inside created a spiralling vortex at the top, circling slowly, but inexorably drawing in all the water and rubbish near by. It looked like the glowing eye of the Cyclops himself. I'd have liked to put up a final prayer to my Creator, who for some strange reason had obviously decided I was to go to a better world by way of an intake of human excretions. But before I could get that far, the wave brought me to the edge of the whirlpool. The whirlpool promptly demonstrated its power and sucked me into its orbit with all its might. I screeched, lashed out with my paws and tried a couple of feeble swimming strokes to escape its hellish powers of suction. I was wasting my time. Like an ant, I was washed round and round in the eddying water at the top of the manhole several times, and then I was finally dragged down into the depths.

  In retrospect I see my involuntary venture into aquatics as if through a dirty, scratched plastic film. I remember feeling an urgent need for oxygen and opening my mouth as soon as I was in the water and going down. That was about the silliest thing I could have done, for what little air remained in my lungs was instantly replaced by water. Even worse than the physical shock was the feeling that in my helpless desperation I was on the point of drifting off into mental derangement. Moreover my body, like a living torpedo, kept knocking against the iron rungs cemented into the cylindrical interior of the shaft. But though I was nearly unconscious by now, and it was pitc
h dark inside the shaft, my highly receptive sense of sight showed me first a series of air bubbles splashing past, then the glimmer of something like a metal bar passing along the winding sewers below. Then I stopped falling, and just as I identified the bar as a hand-rail I collided with it, belly first. I stayed hanging there like a fox's brush soaked in water. The sudden impact, in its turn, brought all the liquid I'd swallowed spewing out of my insides as if it were rendering first aid. Obviously the whirlpool I'd been dragged into was the final consignment from above, because all I could feel now was a last trickle flowing down my back and then sloshing around on the stone floor.

  Too badly battered by Fate to make any movement of its own, my body swung rhythmically to and fro where it lay draped over the hand-rail, until it finally dropped backwards to the floor. Once down, it curled up snake-like into a kind of spiral, and the water still in my lungs trickled out of the corners of my mouth. Although I'm equipped with the best optical system in the world, one which leaves even the residual-light cameras people use for nocturnal photography literally in the shade, I couldn't make out anything in my new surroundings at first, just overwhelming blackness. The rain went on splashing down on my fur through the open manhole, but judging by the small number of drops that hit their target I concluded that it must have slackened off. Typically, once the damage was done the perpetrator made a quick get-away. My battered body was sending me the most alarming signals of pain from every nerve ending, but I couldn't be sure whether or not I'd broken anything as I fell. However, I dared not move; I was too scared I'd find I was paralysed. And if so, what dreadful death confronted me? Unable to move from the spot, I'd be torn to pieces slowly and with relish by mice, or more likely rats who could match me for physical size. There were sure to be plenty of rats going about their nasty business down in this clammy vault. And all the time I'd be fully conscious, aware of every detail of my mutilations, watching it all with the best optical system in the world!

  Following a time-honoured custom of the days when I woke happy, I did finally summon up the courage to shoot a claw out of the fold of skin covering the pad of my right forepaw. Gradually all the rest of my claws came out like miniature flick-knives. My wet body was overcome by a violent fit of shaking which sprayed water everywhere, and before any further tricks to get me up to starting temperature could ensue I pulled myself together and jumped up. Pains shot through my guts like demons unleashed. I held my breath, because the torment threatened to overcome me in short order. The injuries every fibre of my body had suffered throbbed and hammered so horribly that I yelled out loud. But I'd been fortunate in my misfortune. So far as I could tell from a few experimental stretches - which were painful but bearable - I didn't seem to have broken anything, and the bruises from all that bumping about weren't really too bad either. In short, I rearranged my bones and sinews and offered thanks to the Great Reaper, who seemed to have turned a blind eye my way again.

  The thing now was to get away from this filthy place of perdition as quickly as possible. Slowly, and somewhat handicapped by a numbing crick in my neck, I raised my head and looked up at the infernal chasm above, my way down to the underworld. The open manhole showed the heavens with ominous, towering clouds still driving across them. But occasionally patches of blue morning sky broke the darkness, allowing dim light to fall into the shaft. However, this faint light didn't seem to promise a happy ending, more like the exact opposite. Because now I could see that the iron rungs were too far apart for me to use them to work my way up. Even if I stood on my back legs on one rung, which I couldn't anyway, for reasons of balance, my body wouldn't stretch far enough to reach the next rung above. It looked as if I had no choice but to wander around this crypt until I found some other way out. Perhaps I'd thanked the Great Reaper too soon: OK, so the fall hadn't killed me, but it was to be feared that the smell of sewage, which was getting more and more penetrating as my pain subsided, would make a thorough job of it before too long.

  I turned round, and had another surprise. By now my eyes had accustomed themselves to the poor light, and I could take in every aspect of the dubious charms of my present location. It looked as if I was on the bank of a canal about three metres broad, of unknown length, a picturesque river of piss and shit bounded by an ancient, curving wall which threw back the quirky reflections of the sludge as it quietly flowed past. It was difficult to make out where this sewer began and where it ended, for the cold light falling through the shaft cast a dull glow only over my immediate surroundings. The quay on which I stood, with its rusty hand-rail, was in fact a niche; the sewage workers would climb down to this point before setting off through the tunnels. There was a walkway about a metre wide, also made of stone, on both sides of the sewer. I had no idea where this path would lead me, but it would be rotten luck if I didn't come upon a link with the world of daylight somewhere along the way. After such a concentrated set of misfortunes, the law of averages said something nice must happen to me soon.

  Although the nauseating smell and the musty, claustrophobic atmosphere of my cramped quarters didn't exactly suggest Venice, this gloomy spot had a certain morbidly romantic charm of its own. Before I'd honoured the bowels of the city with my radiant presence, the stormy floods must have caused one hell of a blockage there. Now that the tide had gone down, water-drops were falling from the roof of the tunnel into the sewer as if they were dripping from stalactites in a cave, echoing again and again, making some very odd noises. The pattern of the ripples reflected on the walls was the visual counterpart of the weird acoustics, and the constant quiet murmur of the main stream provided comforting background music, putting the finishing touch to the not unattractive picture of a grisly grotto. Partly to relish my relief at finding I was still all in one piece, partly because I suddenly felt fascinated by this kingdom of shadows, I stood on the edge of the stone path, legs planted wide apart, and took in the weird scene. Somehow the hypnotic lullaby of the never-ending, echoing drip-drip-drip and the peculiar atmosphere of this unlikely place soothed me, making me feel strangely peaceful. How idyllically this little river flowed along, what meditations it induced as one stood on the bank, letting one's eyes stray over the gentle waves. Look, there was even a swan swimming in the distance ...

  Swan? Come off it, you didn't get swans in the sewage system. Crocodiles, maybe, but no swans. There really was something swimming in the sewer, though, something white drifting towards me, a bloated something that turned majestically round and round on its own axis. It emerged from the darkness as unexpectedly as a shining space ship emerging from the belly of the universe. At first it was only a tiny white dot, bobbing about in the pitch-black expanses of the water. It was only its whiteness that made me notice it. But the closer it came the more clearly I could make it out. Now that it was about twenty metres away it looked like a fluffy, puffed-up flour bag. My harmonious feelings of a moment ago began giving way to a vague sense of oppression that constricted my throat like an iron collar. I couldn't take my eyes off this uncanny buoy, especially as it was bobbing along straight towards me. After a while I could see that the apparition wasn't as bright a white as it had initially seemed: it was the corpse of an animal with milk-white fur which was now very dirty, and it had been in the water so long that it had swelled to twice its natural size and looked like a sodden cotton wool ball. So I was looking at a drowned body. And the nightmare showed it could get even worse. There were large wounds in the lifeless corpse, going deep into the victim's flesh and suggesting small bomb craters. There were too many of them to be counted; they had probably been caused by bites. Since the corpse was in an advanced state of decomposition, and there was no blood flowing from the wounds, which ranged from dark pink to violet in colour, I guessed that death must have occurred several days ago. Ergo, the deceased had begun his wanderings from some very distant part of the sewage system, probably right outside town, and had been floating endlessly in the labyrinth of the sewers ever since.

  I'd been fearing another re
velation for quite some time, and now it came. Moving elegantly, like an aquatic ballerina, a tail chopped off in the middle suddenly rose from the poor tortured body, and I recognised it as a member of my own species floating there like a grotesque lifebelt. Horror and panic exploded in me, as if defective blood vessels were bursting in my brain. Creepy speculation about what kind of maltreatment had changed one of my own kind from a clean-limbed athlete to a badly mutilated lump of flesh occupied my entire mind, and I forgot all about my own aches and pains. I expected to glean further information very soon, in particular on the corpse's breed, because it was making straight for the side of the stone walkway, so I'd be able to see its face as the body gently rotated.

  However, the face turned out to be the most horrible sight of all. The corpse did indeed come closer, almost brushing against the walkway; it came so close I could practically touch it. And yes, it turned gracefully on its own axis like a drifting water-lily and showed its front view. Enough light fell on it to let me see everything clearly. But horror of horrors, there was nothing left to see! The body, resembling a cake which had risen beyond all expectations, had no head left at all. That valuable item had simply been torn off, and nothing now hung from the neck but blackened fringes of flesh like the leaves of plants dipping picturesquely into the water. The corpse went on turning, and I could see the full extent of what had been done to it. The battle must have been an unequal one from the start, something like the battle of David and Goliath but without the biblical result. Obviously the stronger contestant had never entertained any idea of doing his opponent a favour and carrying out the execution with a single merciful bite, in our old hunting tradition. The slaughter had been done with such hatred, or rather such perverse pleasure in inflicting pain, that the victor had bitten whole chunks out of the victim just for fun. Poor thing, he must have been suffering such pain and desperation that he didn't know how to defend himself. So then the monster went for the throat, digging his teeth right in and tearing so furiously that the head was finally severed from the backbone, hanging loose, attached to the body only like a lid on a rusty hinge. After that, for some mysterious reason or other, the murderer removed it altogether and somehow managed to tip the lifeless body into the sewers.