The Dark Side of Schrödinger’s Cat: Thank you Zebadri

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I was paid to sit outside the box and write down anything I heard. At nine I heard a cat washing itself. At nine fifteen I heard the television come on. At ten somebody knocked from the inside.

“Come in,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say to a box.

There was a round window in the lid. Through it I could see a blue-black cat sitting on a tiled floor. It looked straight at me. Its shadow went all the way across the room and up the wall, where it turned its head and looked back at the cat.

I wrote that down. Then I crossed out turned its head. I’d been on the job three days and still wanted to keep it.

The television showed an eclipse. A woman in a cat mask sat under an arch drinking something out of a jelly glass. Every so often she looked down the corridor that ran right through the shadow’s belly.

“Are you waiting for somebody?” I asked.

“The cat,” she said.

I pointed to the cat.

She took another sip.

After a while a little orange butterfly landed on the latch. I put my hand out to shoo it away, and through the window I saw my hand come out of the television. It was much older than the hand I’d put out. There was a brown spot on the knuckle, exactly where my father had one. The cat got up and rubbed its cheek against it.

That was when I remembered the knocking. Our cat used to do that with the loose flap in the kitchen door. My father could have fixed it in five minutes. He said he liked knowing when she came home.

A light went on at the far end of the corridor. There was my father in his undershirt, holding the kitchen door open with his bare foot. I could see the little square of linoleum he’d put down where the old cat used to spill her water.

She walked into her shadow and down the corridor. Halfway there she stopped to wash one paw. My father waited. He was always in a hurry with people. He had all the time in the world for that cat.

When the morning man came, he asked if the cat was alive or dead.

I handed him the notebook. Under Observations I’d written the only thing I was sure of.

She knew the way home.