Felidae - Special U.S. Edition Page 2

  And now, somehow, he had managed to get his hands on this joint. It was one of the great successes of his life, and the sorry state of his existence gave me pause for reflection; in view of his drab life, I began to resign myself to my fate. Didn't everything, after all, have an order, a purpose, a higher meaning in this world? Yes, of course. Destiny, that's what it was all about. Or as a Japanese assembly-line worker would say: the way things are is the way things are, and the way things are is good.

  But enough of philosophy; Gustav was no Job, and there's no point in making him out to be one. Thus, while my friend composed further odes to the splendor of our new quarters, my gaze drifted from him to the bathroom. Both the door and the large rear window were open, and I seized the opportunity to inspect the back side of the building. I streaked past Gustav, entered the bathroom, and sprang up onto the windowsill.

  The view was simply heavenly. Before me lay the navel, so to speak, of our neighborhood. The neighborhood consisted of a roughly two-hundred-by-eighty-yard rectangle framed by the previously mentioned paragons of turn-of-the-century residential respectability. Behind them, directly in front of me, an intricate patchwork of variously sized gardens and terraced lawns spread out, enclosed by high, weathered brick walls. In some gardens there were picturesque arbors and summerhouses. Others were fully overgrown, with platoons of climbing plants creeping over the dividing walls into adjacent gardens. Where feasible, miniature ponds had been laid out, tokens of the latest fashion in environmental awareness, only now squadrons of neurotic urban flies hovered over them. There were also rare varieties of trees, grossly overpriced bamboo sunshades, neoclassical terra-cotta flowerpots with reliefs of copulating Greeks, batteries of environmental garbage cans, beds teeming with marijuana, plastic sculptures—in short, everything that the heart of a well-to-do property owner might desire who didn't know what else to do with the money he saved by cheating on his income tax.

  Joining company with the above were the sort of garden idylls you would expect to see in a Pink Flamingo Horror Picture Show. These ghastly scenes were obviously the work of people whose hunger for fashionable trends could be satisfied entirely by the Sears Roebuck catalog.

  The situation was a little different near our house. A dilapidated balcony with a hopelessly rusted railing hung directly underneath me, under the bathroom window, about two feet above the ground. The balcony could only be reached through the bedroom, though I suspected that the bathroom window would serve as my customary gateway to the outside world. Under the balcony sprawled a broad concrete terrace that looked as though it functioned as a ceiling for a basement extension too. Owing to sloppy work, the terrace was shot through with cracks, and unfamiliar vegetation jabbed up through its numerous crevices. Another rusty railing had been installed fifteen feet or so away on the edge of the terrace to prevent sudden falls into the small garden below it in the middle of the night. In the center of this garden, which was wholly overgrown, an extremely tall tree grew; it looked as if it could have been planted in the time of Attila, the Hun, and was stripped bare of foliage—this was the fall season, after all.

  Then I discovered something else in my field of vision: an extremely unusual member of my own species.

  He was squatting down in front of the terrace railing and staring down into the small garden. Although he could easily compete with a medicine ball, as far as body size was concerned, I noticed right away that he had no tail. Not that he was born that way—someone must have cut that priceless part off. At least that's how it looked. He was clearly a Maine Coon, a tailless Maine Coon.2 It is difficult for me to describe the color of his coat, because he looked like a walking palette whose colors had long since mixed together. The predominant color could definitely be said to be black, but there were shades of beige, brown, yellow, gray, and even spots of red, so that seen from behind, he resembled a huge, roughly seven-week-old bowl of fruit salad. On top of which, this strange fellow stank terribly.

  I expected him to notice me soon and launch a major offensive, no doubt because his great-grandfather had once taken a crap on this very terrace, or because he had already received special permission from the Supreme Court in a 1965 landmark case to gaze down at this wonderful garden from where he was sitting every damn day from three to four in the afternoon. The brothers could be a real pain in the ass.

  I decided to take the risk. Did I have another choice?

  As if he were some sort of living radar, he swiveled around just as I was thinking all this through, and stared at me—except "staring" wouldn't be quite right, because he had only one eye; apparently the other had fallen victim to a screwdriver, or been lost in illness. Where once his left eye had been there was now a shriveled, rose-red cavity of flesh that had become uglier with the passage of time. And what is more, the entire left side of his face sagged, probably because of partial paralysis. But this did not prevent him from posing a threat. It was clear that utmost caution was advised.

  After he had looked me over from top to bottom without showing any emotion, he surprised me by turning his head away to look down at the garden again.

  Since I am so courteous, I decided to introduce myself to this pathetic stranger in the hope of coaxing more details about my new surroundings from him.

  I sprang down from the windowsill to the balcony and from there to the terrace. Slowly, and with an affected nonchalance, I strolled up to him, almost as if we had once put each other's eyes out in a sandbox fight. He took note of me with sovereign composure, not once interrupting his garden meditation to deign to look at me. Then I stood beside him and risked a sideways glance. At close range, the impression he had made on me from a distance was raised, let's say, to the thirty-fourth power. In comparison to this maltreated creature, even Quasimodo would have had a realistic chance of becoming a male model. As if what I had witnessed had not already been enough for my sadly abused eyes, they then had to register that his right front paw had been mutilated. Nevertheless, he seemed to suffer his abysmal crippling with a calm so stoic and profound that it might have been nothing worse than hay fever.

  Apparently, these diverse disfigurements included some inside his head, for although I had now already stood beside him for more than a minute, he paid me not the slightest attention, choosing instead to continue staring down. Really supercool. I obliged him by lowering my own gaze to locate the spot in the garden that had cast such a persuasive spell on my confrere.

  What I saw there was, so to speak, my welcoming present. Under the tall tree, half-covered by shrubbery, lay a black brother with all his limbs stretched out. Only he wasn't sleeping. I could hardly imagine that he would ever engage in any activity again, whether active or passive. He was, as people of lesser finesse might say, as dead as a doornail. More specifically, this was a member of my species whose corpse was already in an advanced stage of putrefaction. All his blood had gushed from his neck, which had been torn completely into shreds, and formed a large pool that was now a dry stain. Excited flies circled over him like vultures over slaughtered cattle.

  The sight was a shock, but my sensitivities had been considerably blunted by everything I had already endured that day. 1 now cursed Gustav under my breath for the thousandth time for having dragged me into this neighborhood of murder and bedlam. I was stunned, and hoped that this was all a dream, or at the very least one of those ingenious, animated films they sometimes make about my kind.

  "Can opener!" the monster beside me suddenly bellowed in a voice as deformed as his whole appearance. It sounded like all the people in the world who had ever dubbed every one of John Wayne's movies had crackled in unison.

  Can opener, hm ... Well, what was I supposed to say in return, not being a monster like he and not understanding his language?

  "Can opener?" I asked, "What do you mean by that?"

  "Just that it was one of those damned can openers. They did it, man. They fit out little Sascha with a special valve in his neck."

  Associations spun through m
y mind. I tried to imagine how this would be connected to a can opener—a difficult task, considering the stinking corpse below and the even stronger stench of the half-dead freak at my side. Then I realized what he meant.

  "You mean humans? Humans killed him?"

  "Sure”, growled John Wayne. "It was those fucking can openers”.

  "Did you see it?"

  "Shit no!"

  Anger and annoyance flashed across his face. Something seemed to make him lose his cool.

  "Who else, except for a low-down can opener, would have done something like this? Nothing but a low-down, no-good can opener, good for nothing but opening up cans for us! Shit yes!

  He had hit his stride.

  "This is the fourth cold sack already”.

  "You mean, what's down there is already the fourth corpse?"

  "Guess you're new around here, huh?"

  He roared with laughter, perfectly cool again.

  "You moving into that garbage dump? Nice little place. There's where I always go to take a leak."

  Ignoring his laughter, which turned into a guffaw, I sprang down from the terrace to the garden and approached the corpse. The scene was both shocking and sad. I examined the fist-sized puncture in the neck of the deceased and sniffed at it. Then I turned around to face the joker on the terrace.

  "It wasn't a can opener,” I said. "If can openers want to bump someone off, they have plenty of nifty instruments of murder at their disposal, including knives, scissors, razor blades, wrenches, and, yes, even can openers. But the neck of this brother has been slashed, practically torn to shreds."

  The monster sneered and turned to go. But what that pathetic creature did couldn't be called walking. It was more like a fascinating mixture of hobbling and staggering that he had perfected into an athletic discipline.

  "Who gives a damn!" he shouted defiantly, and staggered and hobbled over the next garden wall, most likely in the direction of the nearest home for the physically disabled. After his first few steps, however, he stopped in his tracks, turned, and leaned down toward me.

  "What do people call you, wiseass?" he asked, maintaining his cool air of unconcern.

  "Francis," I replied.

  2

  The following week was gloomy. The depression that came with the move hit me like a steam press and paralyzed my brain. I descended into a dark valley of woe, and everything that got through to me had to suffer its way through a murky cloud of melancholia first. What did seep through gave me little reason to cheer up.

  Possessed by a destructive demon, Gustav carried out his threat and really did begin renovating. His first move was to rip up the rotting parquet floor and throw the refuse into a container in front of the house that he had rented for this purpose. He had actually gotten the idea into his head of laying a new parquet floor! I'm not joking. It was roughly like a deaf-mute auditioning to replace the moderator of a talk show. To make a long story short, Gustav didn't pull it off. He didn't accomplish much after his daring feat of demolition: he bought an exorbitantly expensive book on floor laying, panicked when he saw how complicated the work was, and decided for the time being to merrily carry on his slum clearance holocaust. I was beginning to be afraid that, deluded as he was, the maniac would tear the whole house apart.

  Finally, just what I could have predicted to him at the beginning came true: he had to admit to himself that he couldn't manage a renovation job of such proportions. This was not only annoying but also, as usual for Gustav, tragic. In the night, I could hear my mentally deficient friend weeping quietly to himself in the army cot he had set up provisionally in the living room.

  I, too, was on the brink of tears, for the shock of seeing a murdered brother in my new neighborhood had not exactly made it easy for me to make myself at home. Yet I decided to take a look around anyway. After the monster disappeared, whose real name I still didn't know, I inspected the corpse and the scene of the crime with a little more care.

  One thing was sure: there hadn't been much of a fight. True, the victim had put up a strong defense, to which the scuffed-up earth and bent blades of grass around the lifeless body attested, but only when he had already felt claws ripping deep into his fur and neck. From this I deduced that the victim must have known his butcher well, so well that he must even have felt free to turn his back on him. After the surprise of the lethal bite, there had been some desperate resistance, perhaps even a little brawl, over within a few seconds, with the helpless victim twitching on the ground.

  Something else struck my attention: at the time of death, the victim had been about to follow what is so poetically termed "the call of the wild." Since he had not been a member of that convivial club of the happily castrated, which was itself a wonder, considering that the middle-class neighborhood was so prim and proper, the scent of the wide, wide world of lust still clung to him. He had also left behind his pungent signatures here and there in the garden, providing testimony to the fact that he had not been able to restrain himself from engaging in a little amorous play before his murder. I gave his genitals a brief sniff. It confirmed what I had suspected. He had just attained the peak of his sexual excitement.

  Had he had a rendezvous with some beauty? Was she the last to admire this "stud" while he was still alive, or was she the one who gave him the kiss of death that transformed him into a "cold sack," as the monster put it in his straightforward way? Considering the flaky behavior and limitless aggression our angelic sisters show after a lovers' tryst, that would hardly have surprised me.3 But it was still too early to draw any conclusions before more details were known on the three other corpses that that crippled John Wayne look-alike had so generously mentioned.

  A day later, Gustav discovered the corpse, which had already begun to stink terribly, made a great many infantile declarations of grief, and then buried the body on the spot where he found it.

  But what did I care about this Raymond Chandler crap, about this Jack the Ripper who produced one "cold sack" after the other? Didn't I have enough problems? In the next room my companion was weeping over his inability to decipher the cryptography of a 128-dollar manual on the art of laying a floor; and as far as I was concerned, I had more than enough to do fighting off fits of depression in this filthy hole of an apartment.

  Yet, as always in life, after a while everything got straightened out. It got straightened out in a nerve-wracking way, but it got straightened out. As always in Gustav's crises, rescue came in the person of Archie.

  Archibald Philip Purpur is, as he likes to call himself and as others like to call him, an optimist. Although a tiny pinch of pessimism wouldn't do this magnanimous man any harm, Archie can't and simply won't be a child of sadness. Wherever he is and whatever he does, Archie seeks and collects trends, intellectual fashions, and living experiences with great enthusiasm. No one quite knows what this marvelous man does for a living, or even what he is doing or what kind of a trip he happens to be on at any given moment. And yet everyone knows Archie and can reach him whenever they want. There is nothing whatsoever, really and truly nothing, that Archie has not been through in his awesome life.

  If after years and years you should happen to dig out your dusty old Woodstock album to indulge in memories of those sweet patchouli days, before you know it, good old Archie will be around to have something to say. On the spot, he'll take out a yellowed festival ticket from his wallet and proudly show it around. If you don't believe it, you can even see a younger Archie passing around a hash pipe in one scene of the famous film—complete right down to his ponytail. As far as I know, he has a sworn statement from Mick Jagger that he was present at the recording session of "Sympathy for the Devil" and uhh-uhh'ed in the uhh-uhh chorus. Primal scream therapy? Old hat for Archie. He already screamed his primal scream ages ago, discovered during a reincarnation experience that he had been Valentino's house pansy, and happened to arrive at Poona just in time to put the Bhagwan's teachings into writing, which, as everyone knows, sell millions of copies these days. A
rchie was one of the first organic farmers to bake his own bread, and he was also one of the first to measure his girlfriend's temperature for natural birth control. We had just found out how to spell "punk" when Archie surprised us with his new Iroquois haircut, guzzling down copious amounts of canned beer and doing his best to belch out full sentences. Did anyone say that surfing was in? No doubt Archie was already riding the waves off Malibu on a surfboard that the Beach Boys had immortalized with their signatures. From hippie life on Crete to yuppie stress in Manhattan, from coca-leaf chewing to Calvin Klein jeans, Archie had already done it and much more, except perhaps not joining the NASA boys for their moon landing, which, to be honest, does disappoint me a little.

  Actually, the question is not whether Archie had ever missed out on anything in his life, but whether he even exists. Because everything that he appears to be seems to be merely appearance. You inevitably become suspicious that Archie could disappear into thin air when you turn your back on him since he obviously owes his existence to the imagination of a fashion magazine editor. In the final analysis, Archibald is empty through and through, a nonperson trying to forget the abysmal emptiness in himself through incessant trend setting. Nevertheless, he is Gustav's best friend and helps him whenever he can—and that's one thing Archie can always do.

  On the fourth day after demolishing the kitchen, Gustav called up Archie and discussed the state of affairs with him. Five minutes later, Archie stood in the bomb crater that Gustav insisted on calling our home and drew up a plan of action. This time around the chameleon had transformed himself into Sonny Crocket of Miami Vice, and constantly toyed with the plastic cords of his fashionable sunglasses. As expected, he proved to be an authority not only on laying parquet floors but also on everything else that had to do with renovation. Although the danger existed that the final product would be a hodgepodge of ultramodern baubles and gewgaws, Gustav agreed to let Archie be the boss while he acted as errand boy. He had no other choice. The two of them got to work the very next day to start the actual renovation of Hotel Higgledy-Piggledy.