“That’s a strange-looking cat you have there,” I said.
“You notice the change in him? He’s beginning to change. I don’t know why; I don’t know in what direction.”
Bending down I petted the cat. He seemed less wild than usual, more sheeplike, less catlike. The carnivore qualities seemed to be leaving him.
“Charley,” I said, referring to Nicholas’s dream.
“No, Charley is gone,” Nicholas said, and then at once caught himself. “Charley never existed,” he amended.
“Not for a while, anyhow,” I said.
“Charley was very different from Pinky,” Nicholas said. “But they both served as my guide. In different ways. Charley knew the forest. He was more like a totem cat, the kind an Indian would have.” Half to himself, Nicholas murmured, “I really don’t understand what’s happening to Pinky. He won’t eat meat any longer. When we feed him meat he starts trembling. As if there’s something wrong about eating meat; as if he’s been hit.”
“Wasn’t he gone for a while?”
“He recently came back,” Nicholas said vaguely. He did not elaborate. “Phil,” he said presently, “this cat began to change the same day I first saw the buzz saws and you had to lead me home. After you left I was lying on the couch with a towel over my eyes, and Pinky got up as if he understood there was something wrong with me. He began searching for it. He wanted to locate it and heal it, make me okay. He kept walking over me and on me and around me, searching and searching. I could sense it about him, his concern, his love. He never found it. Finally he lay down on my stomach, and he stayed there until I got up. Even with my eyes shut I could sense him there still trying to locate the problem. But with that small a brain . . . cats have really small brains.”
Pinky had lain down on the bed near Nicholas’s shoulder, purring, gazing at him intently.
“If they could talk,” Nicholas murmured.
I said, “It looks as if he’s trying to communicate with you.”
To the cat, Nicholas said, “What is it? What do you want to say?”
The cat continued to gaze up into his face with the same intentness; I had never seen such an expression on an animal’s face before, not even a dog’s.
“He was never like this before,” Nicholas said. “Before the change. The buzz saws, I mean; that day.”
“That strange day,” I said. The day, I thought, when everything began to become different for Nicholas, leaving him weak and passive, as he was now: ready to accept whatever came. “They say,” I said, “that in the final days, in the Parousia, there will be a change in the animals. They’ll all become tame.”
“Who says that?”
“The Jehovah’s Witnesses say it. I was shown a book they peddle; there was a picture, and it showed all the various wild animals lying around together, no longer wild. It reminds me of your cat here.”
“ ‘No longer wild,’ ” Nicholas murmured.
“You seem to be the same way yourself,” I said. “As if all your fangs had been pulled. . . . Well, I guess there’s a reason for that.” I laughed.
“Earlier today,” Nicholas said, “I fell into a half-sleep and I dreamed I was back in the past, on the Greek island of Lemnos. There was a gold and black vase on a three-legged table, and a lovely couch. . . . It was the year 842 B.C. What happened in the year 842? That was during the Mycenaean period, when Crete was such a great power.”
“Eight forty-two,” I said, “was the price you paid for your pain pills. It’s a sum, not a date. Money.”
He blinked. “Yes, there were gold coins too.”
“The girl said to you, ‘Eight forty-two.’ ” I was trying to get him to focus, to become alert again. “Remember?” To myself I thought, Come back, Nicholas. To this world. The present. From whatever other world you’re drifting away to from pain and fear—fear of the authorities, fear of what lies ahead for all of us in this country. We’ve got to put up one last fight. “Nick,” I said, “you’ve got to fight.”
“What’s happening to me is not bad. It’s strange, and it started out terrible, but it isn’t now. I think this is what I was expecting.”
“They’re sure putting you through the wringer,” I said. “I’d resent it.”
“Maybe it’s the only way it can be done, What do we know about processes of this sort? Nothing at all. Who of us has ever seen one take place? I think they used to take place a long time ago, but not any more. Except for me.”
I left him that evening feeling worried. Nicholas had decided to succumb and that was that. No one could tell him otherwise, including me. Like a boat launched without paddles into a current, he was moving along without control, going wherever it took him, into the indiscriminate darkness beyond.
I guess it was a way of getting away from the presence of Ferris F. Fremont and all he represented. Too bad I couldn’t do likewise; then I could forget my worries about FAPers breaking down the door with warrants, dope hidden in my house, Vivian Kaplan going to the District Attorney on a trumped-up complaint of some sort.
When Nicholas went to bed that night he found, as usual, that he could not sleep. His thoughts raced faster and faster, and with them the external patches of color projected by his head into the semigloom of his bedroom. Finally he got up and padded barefoot into the kitchen for some vitamin C.
That was when he made a discovery of importance. He had assumed from the start that the capsules in his great bottle were, as in the previous bottle, one hundred milligrams. However, these were time-release vitamin C, and each capsule contained not one hundred milligrams but five hundred. Nicholas was therefore taking five times the amount of vitamin C he had
