Руди Рюкер: Inside Out

"Will you sell me that cat, Marjorie?"

"No, but you can babysit him. I'm going down to the sub shop. Want anything?"

"Just a Coke. I'm going to meet Candy for lunch." He'd been away too long already.

"La dee da. Where?"

"Oh, just at home." Rex ran his shaky fingers through his hair, wondering if Candy was still in bed. But dammit, this was more important than Candy's crazy threats. The cat. In just a minute he would be alone with the cat.

Kissycat nosed daintily around Rex's desktop and began sniffing at the cumberquark.

"Rad," said Marjorie, noticing it. "Is that a magic trick?"

"It's a cumberquark. I just invented it."

"What does it do?"

"Maybe I'll show you when you get back. Sure, Kissycat can stay here. That's fine. Here's seventy-five cents for the Coke."

As soon as she'd left the building, Rex dilated the cumberquark to pumpkin size and began stalking Kissycat. Sensing Rex's mood — a mixture of prickly ailurophobia and psychotic glee — the beast kept well away from him. Fortunately he'd closed his office door and windows. Kissycat wedged himself under Rex's armchair. Rex thumped the chair over and lunged. The cat yowled, spit, and slapped four nasty scratches across Rex's left hand.

"You want me to kill you first?" Rex snarled, snatching up the heavy rod that he used to prop his window open. Candy had him all upset. "You want me to crush your head before I turn you inside out, you god—"

His voice broke and sweetened. Zee taking over. He'd forgotten all about her.

"Niceums kitty. Dere he is. All thcared of nassy man? Oobie doobie purr purr purr." Zee made Rex rummage in his trashcan till he found a crust of yesterday's tuna sandwich. "Nummy nums for Mr. Tissytat! Oobie doobie purr purr purr." This humiliating performance went on for longer than Rex liked, but finally Kissycat was stretched out on the canvas seat of the director's chair next to Rex's desk, shedding hair and licking his feet. Rex halted the cumber-quark's flow and moved gingerly forward. "Niceums!"

Kissycat seemed not to notice as the gossamer outer sphere passed through his body. Cooing and peering in, Rex manipulated the sphere till its BB-sized center was inside the cat, hopefully inside its stomach. With a harsh cackle, Rex unvalved the sphere, let it flow through a flip, and turned it back off. There was a circle of canvas missing from the chair seat now, and the evened cat dropped through the hole to the floor, passing right through the temporarily matter-transparent cumberquark.

Kissycat was a goodsized pink ball with two holes in it. Rex had managed to get the middle sphere bang on in the cat's stomach. The crust he'd just fed Kissycat was lying right there next to the stomach. The stomach twitched and jerked. It had two sphincterish holes in it — holes that presumably tunneled to Kissycat's mouth and anus. Rex gave the ball a little kick and it made a muffled mewing noise.

"A little strange in there is it, hand-scratcher?"

"Rex," came Zee's subvocal voice. "Don't be mean. Isn't he going to suffocate?" She was like a goddamn good conscience. If only Alf had been good, too. He couldn't let himself think about Candy!

Rex forced his attention back to the matter at hand. "Kissycat won't suffocate for a few minutes. Look how big he is. There's a lot of air in there with him. He's like a balloon!" The ball shuddered and mewed again, more faintly than before. "I'm just surprised the flip didn't break his neck or something."

"No, that's safe enough. Space is kind of rubbery, you know. But listen, Rex, his air is running out fast. Turn him back."

"I don't want to. I want to show him to—" Rex was struck by an idea. Moving quickly, he took the tubular housing of a ballpoint pen and pushed it deep into one of the stomach holes. Kissycat's esophagus. Stale air came rushing out in a gassy yowl. The pink ball shrank to catsize. After a few moments of confused struggle, the ball began pulsing steadily, pumping breaths in and out of the pen-tube.

There was noise downstairs. Marjorie! Rex turned the cumber-quark back into a bright flowing little fuzzball, then put it and the everted cat inside his briefcase. He pounded down the stairs and got his Coke. "Thanks, Marjorie! Sorry to run, I just realized how late it is."

"Where's Kissycat?"

"Uh… I'm not sure. Inside or outside or something." Rex's briefcase was making a faint hissing noise.

"Some babysitter you are," said Marjorie, cocking her head in kittenish pique. "What's that noise? Do you—"

Rex lunged for the door, but now Zee had to put her two-cents worth in. "Look," cried Rex's mouth as his arms dumped the contents of his briefcase out onto the dirty hallway floor.

Marjorie screamed. "You've killed him! You're crazy! Help!"

Zee relinquished control of Rex and hunkered somewhere inside him, snickering. Rex could hear her laughter like elfin bells. He snatched up his cumberquark and made as if to run for it, but Marjorie's tearful face won his sudden sympathy. She was a pest, and a kid, but still—

"Stop screaming, dammit. I can turn him back."

"You killed my cat!"

"He scratched my hand. And he's not dead anyway. He's just inside out. I wanted to borrow him to show Candy. I wasn't going to hurt him any. Honest. I turned him inside out with my cumberquark, and I can turn him back."

"You can? What's that plastic tube?"

"He's breathing through it. Now look. Let's get something that can go in his stomach without making him sick. Uh… how about a sheet of newspaper. Yeah." Moving quickly, Rex spread out a sheet of old newspaper and set the everted cat on it. Marjorie watched him with wide, frightened eyes. "Don't look at me that way, dammit. Come here and pick up the paper, Marjorie, hold it stretched tight out in front of you." She obeyed, and Rex got the cumberquark halted and in position, more or less. He reached in and took out the pen-tube, then readjusted the cumberquark. Marjorie was shaking. If Rex did the flip with the inner sphere intersecting Kissycat's flesh, this was going to be gross.

"Hold real still." He steadied himself and unvalved the cumber-quark for a half turn, then tightened it back.

Mrrraaaow! Kissycat landed on his feet, right on the circle of cloth that had been part of Rex's chairseat upstairs. Marjorie stared down through the hole in her newspaper at him and cried out his name. Spotting Rex, the cat took off down the hall, heading for the dark recesses of the basement.

Everything was OK for a moment there, but then Zee had to speak back up. "I was thinking, Marjorie, about a wild new way to have sex. I could put the cumberquark's central sphere in your womb and turn you inside out and—"

With a major effort of will, Rex got himself out the door and on the street before Zee could finish her suggestion. Marjorie watched him leave, too stunned to react.

The three-mile drive home seemed to take a very long time. As the hot summer air beat in through the open car window, Rex kept thinking about inside out. What was the very innermost of all — the one/ many language of quantum logic? And what, finally, was outermost of all — dead Aristotle's Empyrean? Zee knew, or maybe she didn't. Though Zee was not so scalebound as Rex, she was still finite, and her levels reached only so far, both up and down. There's a sense in which zero is as far away as infinity: you can keep halving your size or keep doubling, but you never get to zero or infinity.

Rex's thoughts grew less abstract. His perceptions were so loosened by the morning's play that he kept seeing things inside out. Passing through Killeville, he could hear the bored platypus honking inside the offices, outside the tense exchanges in the Pizza Hut kitchens, inside the slow rustlings in the black people's small shops, outside the redundant empty Killeville churches, inside the funeral homes with secret stinks, outside the huge "fine homes" with only a widow home, inside a supermarket office with the manager holding a plain teenage girl clerk on his gray-clad knees, outside a plastic gallon of milk. Entering his neighborhood, Rex could see into his neighbor's hearts, see the wheels of worry and pain; and finally he could understand how little anyone else's problems connected to his own. No one cared about him, nobody but Candy.