Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"Things are not always what they seem, especially when the primal brain has brought out the beast in one."

"You calling me intemperate?"

"Only . . . p rimitive." Karma brushes a long, spidery hair above her right eye. "You have many lives to traverse, Midnight Louie," she says sadly, " Before you can commune with the higher self."

"I would rather reach the h igher shelf than the higher self . That is where all the goodies are invariably kept."

Karma shakes her head as it dislodging an unpleasant flea from her left ear. " Life --and death--are more than the temporal attainment of physical possessions or pleasures, Louie."

"Temporary attainment and physical pleasure have been just line with me so far."

"So far," sh e repeats in a vague tone. "So f ar. . .

"I will leave now, " l say firmly, rising with my usual grace and dignity.

"You may leave, but you will not outrun your fate. You d o not have that many lives left Louie, and you are not an advanced enough soul to be assured of returning in a higher form. Be careful."

"l am a higher form! And I do not worry about returning when I h ave no intention of leaving. As for advanced souls, the only good thing I ever heard of that was advanced was a paycheck."

"l see death," Karma says so calmly she might be posing a s the Dark Dude himself in the f lesh.

" In . . . person?"

"I see death in a collective mode. De ath is collecting soon. Reaping, it bends close to you, close to those near to you."

"That is nothing new," I answer with as much swagger as l can muster; after b eing wrapped around a pole lamp that is not a great deal. "Danger is my middle name."

The blue eyes widen and deepen into lapis-lazuli pits. I swallow, seeing into them as Miss Electra Lark might gaze into her many crystal balls. They are more bottomless than the house drinks on the Strip and as honeyed an d cloying as ocean-blue Curacao, straight up.

"l see death in two places, on two levels. l see danger for those around you. I see you, Midnight Louie . I see Libra in the ascendancy. Beware Libra! I see many of our kind in danger."

" Libra?" l reply without a blink, "l do not believe in these horrorscopes. Besides, I am a Pisces myself. And how many individuals of the feline sort are in danger?"

"Many," comes the answer as a shudder shakes Karma's pale, silky form.

That is the difficulty with these purebreds: too neurotic, especially the reclusive kind. Even the Divine Yvette is a tad . . . skittish, no doubt the result oi being kept too often in a pink-canvas carry-bag. l understand that a certain shade of pink is calming to the human psychopath, but l believe that this same tint does nothing for felines except encourage them to become color-blind.

I yawn and ask again, "How many?" If I am going to sit still for predictions oi disaster, I want a precise body count.

"Dozens," Karma replies in a faint, keening voice.

"Dozens, huh? Sounds like a normal day at the animal pound."

Karma shudders again. Perhaps the air conditioning is kept too high, because I do not feel the urge to shake so much as a whisker.

"Do not mention that place of sighs and slaughter," Karma warns me in a doom-filled voice. "Why do you suppose I must sequester myself in silence and shadow? To keep the anguish radiating daily from that Place of Infamy from interfering with my sensitive apprehension of more specific and less common crimes against our species. I tell you that there will be chaos soon, that it will decimate our kind, an utter catastrophe."

"Dozens threatened with death, you say, but not at the pound?"

"Perhaps . . . a hundred or more."

"Where can sitting ducks of the feline stripe be found if not in the cages at the animal pound?" I muse aloud, inadvertently striking a rhyme just like my bookie pal Nostradamus.

"That is your job to find out." Karma growls softly. "l am a mere conduit, a receiver."

I tell her that l do not know why I should believe a word of this hokum. "Who made you Psychic Central?" I ask.

Karma sighs and settles into her haunches, forelegs tucked in so she resembles a mandarin on a rice-paper scroll.

"l am Birman-born," she announces at length.

"So I heard."

Another sigh, no doubt of exasperation with my ignorance -- or more likely, with my fail ure to be impressed by pedigree, "We are temple cats. "

"You mean like my pal Moshe the Mouser at Beth Israel?"

"A more Eastern temple than that," Karma answers with the usual disdain. These know-it-alls-i n-advance are always disdainful, "We are the Sacred Cat of Burma and companions to the priests of the Temple of Lao-Tsun, who worship a golden goddess with blue eyes named Tsun-Kyan-Kse."

"Recently?" I cannot help inquiring snappily. All these foreign words sound like the menu at a chop suey establishment.

"Time is a dream in the windowless eyes of an ancient house," Karma replies in a dismissive singsong.

Just what this means, I cannot say. Perhaps it is one of those pithy oriental poems called a haiku, which are not supposed to make sense.

Karma goes on to chant. "One day"-presumably in this Never-Never Land of Unaccountable Time--"evil men attacked the temple and killed the head priest as he meditated before the goddess."

I'd spend a lot of time meditating before a golden goddess with blue eyes myself.

"The priest's pure white cat, Sinh, put his paws on his dead master's body, defying the enemy raiders to defile the dead."

I recall a saying among veterinarians of my acquaintance: "if it is white, it will bite." and I must admit that my own experience bears out this aphorism, especially in the case of pit bulls.

Karma's voice continues, a growing purr rising under her voice like the three-hankie sound track on a Benji movie. "As he did this, his body f u r grew as golden as the goddess, while his paws remain ed as white as snow, for purity. His legs, lace, ears and tail became the color of earth, and his yellow eyes turned celestial blue. For seven days and nights, Sinh remained before the goddess, refusing all food until he died."

Oops. Sounds like this cross-dressing dude had a death wish, which would not be surprising.

Karma, however, cannot read my mind. Perhaps it is too close at hand, or perhaps she does no t deign to do so. She continues, much taken with the story of her supernatural ancestry. "Sinh took the old priest's soul to paradise with him. And when the other priests met to choose a successor for the head priest, the one hundred white temple cats marched into the main hall, assuming the image of changed Sinh as they came. They circled a young priest to replace the old one fallen. And since then, the Birman wears the golden coat of the godd ess, has her sapphire-blue eyes, bears the earthy marks of death and the pure-white paws of triumph over evil and death."

Karma lifts one of these prissy-gloved extremities for my inspection.

"Well." say I. "A touching story. My own forebears have a certain supernatural cache dating back to medieval times. We were persecuted for our color and suspected association with humans of a parapsychological persuasion. You Bir m ans had it soft in comparison. Purrsonally, I cannot see myself as the pampered companion of some priest. The contemplative life is not for me."

Karma shrugs. "That is obvious," she says in the Royal We tone of a Sacred Cat of Burma.

This chick is definitely living in the past, which does not speak well to her skill i n foretelling the future. Still, she is a cool old doll in her own ditsy, self-important way, and I decide it would not hurt to sniff out the Las Vegas scene and see if there is someplace besides the dreaded pound where a plentitude of cats abides, ripe f or the mass catastrophe this Karma doll is so fond of predicting.