Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

WHERE THE FUCK?

The night watchman at Bhavani Imports, a Puerto Rican poet and Santaria initiate named Hugo de Naranja, was reading a novel called Illuminatus! when the mysterious incident occurred. Hugo was so absorbed in the book, which he considered the greatest novel since Don Quixote, that he didn't notice the strange sound at first. Gradually the sound s persistence invaded his consciousness, dragged him out of the most aesthetically exquisite blow job in all modern fiction, jerked him into an alert awareness that out there in the darkness there was something odd going on.

Rats, he thought.

No, the quick trot of rat paws was different.

A thief with soft slippers, or in his stockings…

Not that, either.

Hugo put down his book and picked up flashlight in left hand groping right-handedly and then finding pistol in holster. Something was going on in the vast darkness of the warehouse and he had to go and look for it and do something about it. He wished he hadn't read so many Women's Lib diatribes against machismo and Papa Hemingway. He wished he could still believe in the macho values. He wished he had more cojones or another job.

Then he walked out of his cubbyhole office, flashing the light ahead of him, and quoted to himself from his favorite philosopher. "The ordinary man has problems. The warrior only has challenges." Then he saw the intruder.

A cat. It was only a cat, held for one moment in his lightbeam, then skittering away into deeper darkness as the light raced after it. Then it was caught again, higher up, standing for Christ's sake on the ghastly amputated penis plaque, its golden eyes glittering half-whitely in the flashed lightray. A cat standing on a penis, something right out of Surrealism or Dada.

"Scat!" Hugo shouted, really amused now. "Rrrow! Scat! Beat it!"

Then the cat leapt and Hugo's flash leapt after it jumping to the floor, where it would, should, must, didn't land. The light moved back quickly, swept several arcs, while Hugo was beginning to think: Christ, it didn't make any sound when it landed, not even a muffled cat thud. And his beam swept back and forth again in searching arcs, as the words formed "it disappeared in midair," were rejected (it couldn't) and the beam rested for a minute on the challengingly erect Penis Without a Man (what hijo de puta would do a thing like that?) and the question burst from his lips, aloud, the nightwatchman's vice of talking to himself, which he had always resisted before:

"Where did it the fuck jump to? Where the fuck?"