He also vacuums like a sonofabitch. Together, the three of us soon finished setting the kitchen right.
It would never again be entirely right, I’m afraid, not with only one shelf of Royal Worcester, Evesham pattern, remaining in the display cabinet. The empty shelves were a sad sight. My mother had loved those fine dishes: the soft colors of the hand-painted apples and plums on the coffee cups, the blackberries and pears on the salad plates…. My mother’s favorite things were not my mother—they were merely her things—yet, though we like to believe that memories are as permanent as engravings in steel, even memories of love and great kindness are in fact frighteningly ephemeral in their details, and we remember best those that are linked to places and things; memory embeds in the form and weight and texture of real objects, and there it endures to be brought forth vividly with a touch.
There was a second set of dishes, the everyday stuff, and while Roosevelt set the kitchen table with cups and saucers, I brewed a pot of coffee.
In the refrigerator, Bobby discovered a large bakery box crammed full of the pecan-cinnamon buns that are among my all-time-favorite things. “Carpe crustulorum!” he cried.
Roosevelt said, “What was that?”
I said, “Don’t ask.”
“Seize the pastry,” Bobby translated.
I brought a couple of pillows from the living room and put them on one of the chairs, which allowed Mungojerrie—now awake—to sit high enough to be part of the gathering.
As Roosevelt was breaking off bits of a cinnamon bun and soaking them in the saucer of milk that he had poured for the cat, Sasha came home from whatever business she had been about. Roosevelt calls her daughter, the way he sometimes calls me and Bobby son, which is just his way, though he thinks so highly of Sasha that I suspect he would be pleased to adopt her. I was standing behind him when he lifted her and hugged her; as though she were a little girl, she entirely disappeared in his bearish embrace, except for one sneaker-clad foot, which dangled an inch off the floor.
Sasha brought the chair from her composition table in the dining room, positioning it between my chair and Bobby’s. She fingered Bobby’s sleeve and said, “Bitchin’ shirt.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve seen Doogie,” Sasha said. “He’s putting together a package of equipment, ordnance. It’s now…just past three o’clock. We’ll be ready to go as soon as it’s dark.”
“Ordnance?” Bobby asked.
“Doogie’s got some really fine tech support.”
“Tech support?”
“We’re going to be prepared for contingencies.”
“Contingencies?” Bobby turned to me. “Bro, are you sleeping with G.I. Jane?”
“Emma Peel,” I corrected. To Sasha-Emma, I said, “We may need some ordnance. Manuel and two deputies were here, confiscated our weapons.”
“Broke some china,” Bobby said.
“Smashed some furniture,” I added.
“Kicked the toaster around,” Bobby said.
“We can count on Doogie,” Sasha said. “Why the toaster?”
Bobby shrugged. “It was small, defenseless, and vulnerable.”
We sat down—four people and one gray cat—to eat, drink, and strategize by candlelight.
“Carpe crustulorum,” Bobby said.
Brandishing her fork, Sasha said, “Carpe furcam.”
Raising his cup as if in a toast, Bobby said, “Carpe coffeum.”
“Conspiracy,” I muttered.
Mungojerrie watched us with keen interest.
Roosevelt studied the cat as the cat studied us, and said, “He thinks you’re strange but amusing.”
“Strange, huh?” Bobby said. “I don’t think it’s a common human habit to chase down mice and eat them.”
Roosevelt Frost was talking to animals long before the Wyvern labs gave us four-legged citizens with perhaps more smarts than the people who created them. As far as I’ve seen, his only eccentric belief is that we can converse with ordinary animals, not just those that have been genetically engineered. He doesn’t claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials and given a proctological exam, doesn’t prowl the woods in search of Big Foot or Babe the blue ox, isn’t writing a novel channeled to him by the spirit of Truman Capote, and doesn’t wear an aluminum-foil hat to prevent microwave control of his thoughts by the American Grocery Workers Union.
He learned animal communication from a woman named Gloria Chan, in Los Angeles, several years ago, after she facilitated a dialogue between him and his beloved mutt, Sloopy, now deceased. Gloria told Roosevelt things about his daily life and habits that she couldn’t possibly know but with which Sloopy was familiar and which apparently the dog revealed to her.
Roosevelt says that animal communication doesn’t require any special talent, that it isn’t a psychic ability. He claims it’s a sensitivity to other species that we all possess but have repressed; the biggest obstacles to learning the necessary techniques are doubt, cynicism, and preconceived notions about what is possible and what isn’t.
After several months of hard work under Gloria Chan’s tutelage, Roosevelt became adept at understanding the thoughts and concerns of Sloopy and other beasts of hearth and field. He’s willing to teach me, and I intend to give it a shot. Nothing would please me more than gaining a better understanding of Orson; my four-footed brother has heard much from me over the last couple years, but I’ve never heard a word from him. Lessons with Roosevelt will either open a door on wonder—or leave me feeling foolish and gullible. As a human being, I’m intimately familiar with foolishness and gullibility, so I don’t have anything to lose.
Bobby used to mock Roosevelt’s tête-à-têtes with animals, though never to his face, attributing them to head injuries suffered on the football field; but lately he seems to have shoved his skepticism through a mental wood-chipper. Events at Wyvern have taught us many lessons, and one of them, for sure, is that while science can improve the lot of humankind, it doesn’t hold all the answers we need: Life has dimensions that can’t be mapped by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians.
Orson had led me to Roosevelt more than a year ago, drawn by a canine awareness that this was a special man. Some Wyvern cats and God knows what other species of lab escapees have also sought him out and talked his ear off, so to speak. Orson is the exception. He visits Roosevelt but won’t communicate with him. Old Sphinx Dog, Roosevelt calls him, mute mutt, the laconic Labrador.
I believe that my mom brought Orson to me—for whatever reason—after falsifying the lab records to account for him as a dead puppy. Perhaps Orson fears being taken by force back to the lab if anyone realizes that he is one of their successes. Whatever the reason, he more often than not plays his I’m-just-a-good-old-dumb-dog game when he’s around anyone other than Bobby, Sasha, and me. While he doesn’t insult Roosevelt with that deception, Orson remains as taciturn as a turnip, albeit a turnip with a tail.
Now, sitting on a chair, raised on a pair of pillows, daintily eating milk-soaked bits of cinnamon bun, Mungojerrie made no pretense to being an ordinary cat. As we recounted the events of the past twelve hours, his green eyes followed the conversation with interest. When he heard something that surprised him, his eyes widened, and when he was shocked, he either twitched or pulled his head back and cocked it as if to say, Man, have you been guzzling catnip cocktails, or are you just a congenital bullshit machine? Sometimes he grinned, which was usually when Bobby and I had to reveal something stupid that we had said or done; it seemed to me that Mungojerrie grinned way too often. Bobby’s description of what we glimpsed through the faceplate of Hodgson’s bio-secure suit seemed to put the feline off his feed for a few minutes, but he was first and foremost a cat, with a cat’s appetite and curiosity, so before we finished the tale, he had solicited and received from Roosevelt another saucer of milk-soaked crustulorum.
“We’re convinced the missing kids and Orson are somewhere in Wyvern,” I said to Roosevelt Frost, because I still felt we
ird about directly addressing the cat, which is peculiar, considering that I directly address Orson all the time. “But the place is just too big to search. We need a tracker.”
Bobby said, “Since we don’t own a reconnaissance satellite, don’t know a good Indian scout, and don’t keep a bloodhound hanging in the closet for these emergencies…”
The three of us looked expectantly at Mungojerrie.
The cat met my eyes, then Bobby’s, then Sasha’s. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if pondering our implied request, then finally turned his attention to Roosevelt.
The gentle giant pushed aside his plate and coffee cup, leaned forward, propped his right elbow on the table, rested his chin on his fist, and locked gazes with our whiskered guest.
After a minute, during which I tried unsuccessfully to recall the melody of the movie theme song from That Darn Cat, Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie wonders if you were listening to what I said when we first arrived.”
“‘Lots of death,’” I quoted.
“Whose?” Sasha asked.
“Ours.”
“Who says?”
I pointed at the cat.
Mungojerrie managed to look like a swami.
Bobby said, “We know there’s danger.”
“He’s not just saying it’s dangerous,” Roosevelt explained. “It’s a…sort of prediction.”
We sat in silence, staring at the cat, who favored us with an expression as inscrutable as that on the cats in Egyptian tomb sculptures, and eventually Sasha said, “You mean Mungojerrie’s clairvoyant?”
“No,” Roosevelt said.
“Then what do you mean?”
Still staring at the cat, who was now gazing solemnly at one of the candles as if reading the future in the sinuous dance of the flame upon the wick, Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”
Bobby, Sasha, and I looked at one another, but none of us could provide enlightenment.
“What, exactly, do cats know?” Sasha asked.
“Things,” Roosevelt said.
“How?”
“By knowing.”
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Bobby asked rhetorically.
The cat twitched its ears and looked at him as if to say, Now you understand.
“This cat’s been reading too much Deepak Chopra,” Bobby said.
Frustration pinched Sasha’s face and voice. “Roosevelt?”
When he shrugged his massive shoulders, I could almost feel the cubic yard of displaced air wafting across the table. “Daughter, this animal-communication business isn’t always like talking on the telephone. Sometimes it is just exactly as clear as that. But then sometimes there are…ambiguities.”
“Well,” Bobby said, “does this ball-bearing mousetrap think we have some chance of finding Orson and the kids, then getting back here alive—any chance at all?”
With his left hand, Roosevelt gently scratched the cat behind the ears and stroked its head. “He says there’s always a chance. Nothing is hopeless.”
“Fifty-fifty chance?” I wondered.
Roosevelt laughed softly. “Mr. Mungojerrie says he isn’t a bookmaker.”
“So,” Bobby said, “the worst that can happen is that we all go back there to Wyvern and we all die, get shredded and processed and packaged as lunchmeat. Seems to me, that’s always been the worst that could happen, so nothing’s changed. I’m up for it.”
“Me too,” said Sasha.
Obviously still speaking for the cat, which purred and leaned into his hand as he petted it, Roosevelt said, “What if these kids and Orson are somewhere we can’t go? What if they’re in The Hole?”
Bobby said, “Rule of thumb: Anyplace called The Hole can’t be a good place.”
“That’s what they call the genetic research facility.”
“They?” I asked.
“The people who work in it. They call it The Hole because…” Roosevelt tilted his head, as if listening to a small quiet voice. “Well, one reason, I guess, is that it’s deep underground.”
I found myself addressing the cat. “Then it’s still functioning out there in Wyvern somewhere, like we’ve suspected, still staffed and operational?”
“Yes,” Roosevelt said, stroking the cat under the chin. “Self-contained…secretly resupplied every six months.”
“Do you know where?” I asked Mungojerrie.
“Yes. He knows. It’s where he’s from, after all,” Roosevelt said, sitting back in his chair. “It’s where he escaped from…that night. But if Orson and the children are in The Hole, there’s no way to get to them or get them out.”
We all brooded in silence.
Mungojerrie raised one forepaw and began to lick it, grooming his fur. He was smart, he knew things, he could track, he was our best hope, but he was also a cat. We were entirely reliant on a comrade who, at any moment, might cough up a hairball. The only reason I didn’t laugh or cry was that I couldn’t do both at once, which was what I felt like doing.
Finally Sasha put the issue behind us: “If we have no chance of getting them out of The Hole, then we’ve just got to hope they’re somewhere else in Wyvern.”
“The big question is still the same,” I said to Roosevelt. “Is Mungojerrie willing to help?”
The cat had met Orson only once, aboard the Nostromo, on the night my father died. They had seemed to like each other. They shared, as well, an origin in the intelligence-enhancement research at Wyvern, and if my mother was in some sense Orson’s mother, because he was a product of her heart and mind, then this cat might feel that she was his lost mother, too, his creator, to whom he was in debt for his life.
I sat with my hands clasped tightly around my empty coffee cup, desperate to believe that Mungojerrie would not let us down, mentally listing reasons why the cat must agree to join our rescue effort, preparing to make the incredible and shameless claim that he was my spiritual brother, Mungojerrie Snow, just as Orson was my brother, that this was a family crisis to which he had a special obligation, and I couldn’t help but remember what Bobby had said about this brave new smart-animal world being like a Donald Duck cartoon that for all its wackiness is nevertheless rife with fearsome physical and moral and spiritual consequences.
When Roosevelt said, “Yes,” I was so feverishly structuring my argument against an expected rejection of our request that I didn’t immediately realize what our friend the animal communicator had communicated.
“Yes, we’ll help,” Roosevelt explained in response to my dumb blinking.
We passed smiles, like a plate of crustulorum, around the table.
Then Sasha cocked her head at Roosevelt and said, “‘We’?”
“You’ll need me along to interpret.”
Bobby said, “The mungo man leads, we follow.”
“It might not be that simple,” Roosevelt said.
Sasha shook her head. “We can’t ask you to do this.”
Taking her hand, patting it, Roosevelt smiled. “Daughter, you aren’t asking. I’m insisting. Orson is my friend, too. All these children are the children of my neighbors.”
“‘Lots of death,’” I quoted again.
Roosevelt counter-quoted the feline’s previous equivocation: “Nothing’s hopeless.”
“Cats know things,” I said.
Now he quoted me: “Not everything.”
Mungojerrie looked at us as if to say, Cats know.
I felt that neither the cat nor Roosevelt should finally commit to this dangerous enterprise without first hearing Leland Delacroix’s disjointed, incomplete, at times incoherent, yet compelling final testament. Whether or not we found Orson and the kids, we would return to that cocoon-infested bungalow at the end of the night to set a purging fire, but I was convinced that during our search, we would encounter other consequences of the Mystery Train project, some potentially lethal. If, after hearing Delacroix’s bizarre tale told in his tortured voice, Roosevelt and Mungojerrie reconsidered their commitment to accompany us, I would
still try to persuade them to help, but I’d feel that I had been fair with them.
We adjourned to the dining room, where I replayed the original cassette.
The last words on the tape were spoken in that unknown language, and when they faded, Bobby said, “The tune’s good, but it doesn’t have a beat you can dance to.”
Roosevelt stood in front of the tape player, frowning. “When do we leave?”
“First dark,” I said.
“Which is coming down fast,” Sasha said, glancing at the window blinds, against which the press of daylight was less insistent than when Bobby and I had first listened to Delacroix.
“If those kids are in Wyvern,” Roosevelt said, “they might as well be at the gates of Hell. No matter what the risk, we can’t leave them there.”
He was wearing a black crewneck sweater, black chinos, and black Rockports, as though he had anticipated the covert action that lay ahead of us. In spite of his formidable size and rough-hewn features, he looked like a priest, like an exorcist grimly prepared to cast out devils.
Turning to Mungojerrie, who was sitting on Sasha’s composition table, I said, “And what about you?”
Roosevelt crouched by the table, eye-to-eye with the cat.
To me, Mungojerrie appeared to be supremely disinterested, much like any cat when it’s trying to live up to its species’ reputation for cool indifference, mystery, and unearthly wisdom.
Apparently, Roosevelt was viewing this gray mouser through a lens I didn’t possess or was listening to him on a frequency beyond my range of hearing, because he reported, “Mungojerrie says two things. First, he will find Orson and the kids if they’re anywhere in Wyvern, no matter what the risks, no matter what it takes.”
Relieved, grateful to the cat for its courage, I said, “And number two?”