The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New

by Damien Broderick

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  From: wesrich@msn.com 8-02-01 5:52:04.75

  To: reneec@msn.com

  Subj: Picture _me_ puzzled!

  OK. I’ll admit it. You’ve stumped me! I was joking about the cut-and-paste kitty, but darned if you didn’t do it. And far better than even I could have imagined. You didn’t say what you do while working at home, but might it be computer animation? What you did goes way beyond digital imaging! Phantom Kitty (aka Boots; I think the name Schrödinger for a cat was already “taken” by that Quinn guy on Sliders!) was indeed in my box by my bookcase, but you _have_ to believe me, I’ve never seen this animal before! Yet here he is, big as life, licking his white paws and rolling around—amazing job! And I’d thought furry critters were too hard to animate.…I suppose things have come a long way from _Stuart Little_, and _Toy Story 2_. Care to share your how-tos?

  But getting back to something else in your email—I think what your cat Casper did when he was hiding behind that flap of bedspread falls under what I call Feline Physics. As in, the mass of a cat is _sub_ quantum, so they can occupy the smallest amount of space at will. Or enter the fourth dimension—when I was a kid, our one cat Tweetie Pie (a boy-cat, gray tabby and white paws) got scared of something and hid so well we literally searched the whole house (cupboards, closets, basement, attic, _everywhere_!) twice, and didn’t find him…then, after he’d been hiding for about 40+ hours, Mom was fixing supper—chicken, roasted—and suddenly Tweetie Pie emerged from this one cupboard. Only we’d moved almost every can in there save for a row smack against the back wall of the cupboard. Like there was no place he could’ve been hiding, yet that’s where he was. The walls in there were sound—no holes, no cracks. I know a bat can squeeze through a space a quarter of an inch wide, but even though cats and bats do share a smidgen of DNA (along with a dollop of baboon DNA in cats!), I can’t see how they can get _that_ small. So it has to be Feline Physics at work. Something even Schrödinger never thought of when he came up with the whole cat in the box with the radioactive atom scenario. (Seems the guy must not’ve liked cats if you ask me!) But…Quantum Qat aside, thanks for coming up with Boots. I don’t know how you did it, but he’s my dream-cat. And having this bit of digital footage of him makes up for all the rotten landlords and housing codes in this foggy ole city. How you did it, I can’t begin to imagine, but thank you for making my (unvoiced) wish a reality. Wes.

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  From: reneec@msn.com 8-03-01 12:45:30:86

  To: wesrich@msn.com

  Subj: Quantum Qats

  Jeez. I thought I was the only person out there who remembered it. Kliban’s “qats” from all those cat books of his, but I’m getting ahead of myself—

  LISTEN (sorry ’bout the flame!), BOOTS _IS_ REAL!

  I couldn’t generate a digital cat-qat-feline if I wanted to—I’m not a professional animator, or an amateur who’s taken one of those digital imaging courses. Nor did I go get a red/white cat of my own to film in a copy-cat box here at my place (as I’m sure you must be thinking)…I downloaded images from _your_ apartment. From your 24/7/12/52 digital stream. If you don’t believe me, if no one else has yet to comment about the cat, do this, to humor me, and satisfy yourself. Put a sign near the box—no, wait, write it _on_ the box-flap, asking people to email comments about the cat. That should “prove” Boots is real, shouldn’t it? Unless someone out there is hacking into your email, and reading this, no one else should be privy to this matter, right?

  The only thing that I can’t understand is that you haven’t been able to “nose” him out yet. He is unneutered, far as I can tell. He must be going somewhere! Maybe you should look for any one-point-down triangles of fabric—he could be hiding behind one of those. Or lying behind a row of condensed soup cans at the back of the cupboard! (How ’bout looking into Feline Physics for Dummies?) Until later, Renee C.

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  From: wesrich@msn.com 8-06-01 1:07:22.89

  To: reneec@msn.com

  Subj: Feline Physics for Dummies

  Hi (he said, humbled!)

  He may not smell, he may not leave any wet spots on the carpet, he may not scratch the oaken floors, but…you are right. BOOTS LIVES! _Where_ or even _how_ I dunno, but if the first ten emails I got in response to my “My Name is Boots.… Tell My Owner What You Think Of Me” message on the box-flap are any indication, we may well have stumbled onto a law of physics Stephen Hawkings never thought of! Or Boots himself found it…wherever he goes when I come into the apartment!

  All ten emails referred to him doing specific things, looking just the way you downloaded him, not being neutered (got bitched out three times on that point!), needing a towel or a blanket in the box, etc.

  But it is clear that the box is the “how” he gets here. I asked my co-worker, Martha, about it, and since she actually took physics in high school, she knows a bit more about quantum physics (if not quantum qats) than I do/did…after going on about isotopes, elements, electrons and protons in the neutral atom (the latter has matching numbers of electrons and protons), she moved on to half-lives, which amounts to time periods. As in, how a half-life can vary from isotope to isotope, but how the half-life is always the same for a particular isotope…so, if you have, say, 8,000 radioactive atoms whose isotope’s half-life is fifteen minutes, in those fifteen minutes, half of them will decay, so you only have 4,000 left. And in another fifteen minutes, you’ll have 2,000 left, and so on until they’re all gone. And I can guess your next question—what tells the atoms it’s their turn to expire? Nobody knows—Martha says that all “they” know is that half-lives exist. Which is a very round-about way of getting back to that original cat-in-the-box _you_ mentioned a while back. Schrödinger’s cat. The original theory involved putting a hypothetical cat into a theoretical box along with an imagined radioactive atom. Along with a detector to determine when the imaginary atom decays _and_ if said atom decays, it will release a poison which will kill the non-cat.

  (Sounds like a lovely guy, no? The PETA folks would’ve done one hell of a billboard about him!)

  Anyway, if you were to open this imaginary box after one half-life for the atom, you would have 1) a non-kitty or 2) a living-albeit-unreal cat. (Or as John Cleese might shout, “This is an ex-cat!”)

  The whole thing boils down to, how do you know when a statistical event does or doesn’t happen? Schrödinger’s atom will decay. But when? There’s no way to predict this statistical half-life event. Or so Martha said. (I lost my Physics for Dummies!) She also said that the experiment had another part, involving _two_ universes around the choice point of the time of decay of the atom. So in one universe, the atom decays within the first half-life, and you have an ex-cat. Or ex-qat. In another universe, the qat lives. Which brings us into Sliders territory, the whole side-by-side-by-another-side Universes concept. Like, every alternate choice creates a whole ’nuther universe. Usually, we think of this in terms of choices _people_ make, but what about choices _cats_ make? Like…there’s this box, sitting behind a supermarket. Which the me in this universe picks up; empty, and takes home to his apartment. Only, in another universe, there’s this same empty box, into which this orange-and-white cat jumps. And is brought home to my apartment, only (and here I’m sorta quoting Martha, who was quoting some guy from Caltech she’d read about) since at the smallest scale of the universe, the quantum physics level, the box and the cat (both of which are composed of electrons which don’t always follow a specific path from here to there) are working in such a way that the cat could simultaneously be both there and not there at once. (Martha used a full/empty wine bottle in _her_ analogy, but you get the picture). Martha said that what we see around us isn’t as predictable as it seems to be—there’s a whole sub-atomic level of life we can’t see, let alone predict or fully understand.

  Which seems to be the case with Boots. So…he’s here, and he’s not here, and the box seems to be what’s simultaneously devoid of cat/filled with cat.

  Only…
for some reason Boots and I aren’t existing in the same plane of reality at the same time. Like he’s yin and I’m yang, or he’s in while I’m not (Martha did say that the only thing which can’t be is him being negatively charged while I’m positively charged—sort of the old impossible scenario of someone meeting with their anti-matter double on the street—if your double is antimatter, he couldn’t walk on a matter street in the first place).

  But in all ten emails, that box is the constant. Said box which I haven’t moved since I brought the thing into the apartment. Everyone sees him in it, or next to it, or jumping back into it.

  Which brings up what I suppose is my next move (or my last move): To move the box, or not to move the box?

  I don’t think Shakespeare ever confronted a question like this one!

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  From: reneec@msn.com 8-07-01 2:01:35.90

  To: wesrich@msn.com

  Subj: I’d say I told you so if it didn’t sound so smug.

  Whew!

  Talk about a lady-or-the-tiger conundrum! It took me awhile to digest all your co-worker Martha’s physics, but I think I do get the gist of what she was saying. The cat is real, but is sometimes moving between at least two universes. And the nexus has to be the box. Which is in a fixed location. Move the box while the cat isn’t there, and he stays wherever it is he “lives” when not in your apartment. (And wherever that place is, he must be eating and presumably eliminating, since he seems to be well nourished!) To me, the “answer” would be to somehow monitor your own website from somewhere else, watch him for yourself, and figure out a way for him to move the box into another spot (one which would not form a pathway “back” to wherever it is he goes) before he can go “back”…which brings up a whole ’nuther problem: Suppose the other universe has another “you” who _is_ in contact with the cat? Wouldn’t “he” miss Boots once the cat never came back? Now I think there would be ways to rig the box so that it would move once he was in it, but think… _should_ you do it?

  I don’t know where you work, but I assume you don’t have access to a monitor there, since you haven’t tried to do the obvious (watch Boots yourself)…but if you could swing it, would you consider just watching him, seeing how healthy/happy he seems to be, before you make your decision about whether or not to trap him in “our” universe? Remember on that show Sliders, how some people have “doubles” and others didn’t on the various worlds? Maybe Boots has a double, one who is still hanging around that alley where you found the box. He might need a home—or he could be at a shelter, etc. Worth a thought, no?

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  From: wesrich@msn.com 8-09-01 7:22:30.97

  To: reneec@msn.com

  Subj: If you haven’t heard already, check your monitor.

  Boots is Gone, Boots has come Home.

  I repositioned my camera to show where _my_ Boots has his new, improved box (complete with folded towels on the bottom), so anytime you log on to my site, he should be there. Poor boy’s had it rough—he was living in that same alley, and the pickings from Dumpster diving were slim after the homeless folks took what they needed.

  As you will see (if you haven’t already), he’s the same Boots, even as he’s a different Boots. Looks the same, but his coat still needs some work (I’m going to try a luster-bath next time; the first one was strictly flea-tick killer!), and of course, he’s not as fat as the other Boots, but we’re working on that problem. But he’s just as playful, despite living in that alley all these weeks. He purrs, so he must’ve been dumped—he’s no feral!

  Good thing I remembered where that box used to be—he was sitting in the same spot, as if he were waiting for me. Or maybe he wondered where the box had gone! And landlord be damned, I scooped him up and shoved him into my jacket (he tried to climb into the one sleeve, but that’s for another email!), and literally ran him home in the early morning fog. And, when I entered my apartment, the first thing I did was kick the box by the bookcase out of the way, so it skidded along the floor…but I swear that just before I actually kicked it, the box was just a bit heavier-than-empty. When I picked it up later, though, it weighed less. So I hope the other Boots jumped out on his end. But cats startle easily, so I’m sure he did stay wherever it is he _is_ now. Another funny thing…once I took a good look in the empty box, I did find some loose fur in the corners. Orange fur. It could be from _my_ Boots, from when he was using the box back in the alley…right? Boots (the one here, now) jumped right into the box, purring up a storm…only he left little flea droppings in the box along with the fur. And there weren’t any before.

  But he does need an extra box next to the original one…makes me wish he’d find another one of those mini-worm holes and use it for a litter pan! As you can guess, the landlord “nosed” him out, but it turns out (and you guessed) that he’s already been surfing my site, and said that since Boots hasn’t caused any damage so far, he can stay. Especially since he has so many fans on the web.

  Now if I can just convince _this_ Boots to take it easy on the oak floor, like his double did.…

  I’ve already made an appointment for his neutering, but I’m not into declawing! Schrödinger, I’m not.…

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This story was inspired by M. Christian’s digital photo of Tatters, the original “cat in the box.” Special thanks to Jayge Carr, whose explanation of quantum physics/the Schrödinger’s cat experiment was paraphrased here. The remaining physics material (including the empty/full wine bottle analogy) is based on the work of Hideo Mabuchi, Assistant Professor of Physics at Caltech.

  In memory of B. Kliban, cat-lover and artist.

  PURPLE, by Mary A. Turzillo

  Out of pure kittenish ignorance, Heaven’s first and only kitten angel did something unspeakable.

  The kitten had been admitted by mistake. A little girl named Elvira in Cleveland, Tennessee, had prayed for its soul, and since its name had been Joseph Patrick Michael Thomas Stephen Jesus-Marie Francis Antony Benedict Anselm John Daniel, somebody thought it was a human baby.

  This kitten, which angels had dyed purple, behaved ignorantly. It meowed instead of singing and threw up hairballs on a fine oriental carpet in a cathedral. One day it killed an innocent mouse angel within the very sacristy of the biggest cathedral in Heaven.

  Had it thought the mouse was immortal? No. The kitten didn’t even know what death was. Mice were common in heaven, due to a legal arrangement with a Florida theme park.

  So, the angel gardener Bastael demoted it, and cut off its wings, snip, snip, with a pair of hedge-trimmers, right at the shoulder blades.

  Now the kitten looked very ordinary, except that it was still purple and had turquoise eyes, with a black nose, three black pads, and one pink pad on its left front paw. As a supernatural being, the kitten healed very fast.

  And since it was rattle-brained, it forgot the pain of being wingclipped, though when it was staring at a cloud, sometimes it would feel a horrid itch between its shoulder blades, and it would lick frantically, trying to remove an imaginary angel flea.

  It even forgot that it had lost its flying, and tried to fly, repeatedly, many weeks later.

  And because it could no longer fly, the angel kitten eventually stepped off the golden pavement into a cloud and sank and sank and sank until it came to earth.

  It landed in the middle of Route I 71, Southbound, at 4:27 AM on a Saturday, somewhere near Strongsville, Ohio. It still had a lot of angelic buoyancy, so it landed ka-thunk, not with a squishy fatal smack. On its feet.

  The first thing the kitten noticed was that it was quite dark. The kitten was used to heaven, with lights on all the time, beautiful iridescent glass chandeliers and soft candles scented with lavender, pink and blue neon twisted into uplifting words like PEACE and LOVE and CHOCOLATE ECLAIR. Of course the kitten couldn’t read these, because it had a brain the size of an apricot, but it had gotten used to the constant soft glow of everything.

  The second thing the kitten noticed was that th
e surface was cold and hard, unlike the carpet and gold-inlayed floors of heaven, which were supernaturally softened for tender angel feet.

  The third thing the kitten noticed was two blinding lights thundering toward it at breakneck speed.

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  Bambi Russolini had been driving truck for thirteen years, and hated it. Born an Italian American Princess, she had a degree in Social Work, but when she was ten, her mother had fallen in love with a Polish guy from Akron.