63. The power of the great (II)

The cat had been pinned out like Christ and set on fire. We watched the video through several times, as with all such things it had been uploaded to a pornography site. So there, among the enormous dicks and gelatinous mammaries, we watched the cat burn alive. Cats are, you know, the most expressive of creatures. The mewlings and yaowlings of this cat were pitiful to hear. I am not a nice man, but even I flinched at the sounds and a small tear formed in my right eye. I am not a cat person. I prefer birds and birds are the natural enemies of cats. It is possible to put many animals with a cat—even a dog—and for them to become friends. I know you have seen the sentimental videos of Alsatians, furry stormtroopers, licking their feline companions. The Christians wrote of the lion lying down with the lamb. They did not write that the bird would lie down with the cat—so we know that Christianity is a false religion. Their Messiah did not count on this impossibility.

The cat took a long time to die. I could see it flinching even as the flames burned all its fur off and left a black body on the makeshift cross. The boy had made the cross from some pieces of scaffolding, actually screwing the cat’s paws to the frame through holes drilled in the metal. He then fixed the paws in place with four screws. It was not a true crucifixion, the cat would not drown in the liquid of its lungs. The cat had to be burned too.

I am not a cat person. I am with the birds of the air and I like to see the wide field below me. I knew a field near me that once housed horses and when the horses died was overgrown and became a playground for cats. They would stalk each other through the grass, laying ambushes and mauling each other in the grass. This was not my style. I want to see the great high places and all the cosmos. I do not want to ambush in the grass. I want to fall from the sky on my opponent.

Even so, I felt sympathy the cat turned Christ—or, perhaps, he was just a common thief. I have come to respect cats. The cat’s eye is more than a means to light our road. The cat’s eye is a fractal composition: if you stare into it you will fall and fall into iteration after iteration. In short, the cat offers possibilities for inter-dimensional travel. I had a girlfriend who, as a teenager, found a cat outside her door, pawing to be let in. She opened the door and the creature shot up under her bed and stayed there until it had a litter. On that day she became a little witch; the cat was her familiar, it had selected her above all the other girls.

So to kill this cat was more than a savage act for the tabloids. The boy who did it—he went to my old school—was a psychopath. The headmaster, an old Marine, dismissed it readily enough: “Boys will be boys.” Youthful hi-jinks: the arrows fired into the cat’s body were a prank, nothing more. He had killed ten or twelve men with a bayonet, perhaps, after that, his view of cats and life had changed. It was a lark. Good for morale, don’t you know?.

For some reason, psychopaths go for the cats. Psychologists and psychiatrists report this as a fact: the torture of animals, the bed wetting, and so on. They can never say, science forbids it, that the torture of a cat is the opening of a portal. The cat, living between dimensions, once murdered in some obscene way, grants the psychopath unseemly powers. You scientists will never know this: there are acts of magic going on before your eyes. Daily participation in the ceremony.