Seize the Night

“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 tete-a-tetes 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 weird 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.”