"Louie, you obnoxious unbeliever!" she finishes up. "Why did you not help me open the door? I have ruined my best nails trying to break in."
I roll away as fast as a dude in my delicate condition can manage it. "I thought you could just sort of. . . leak in, like mist or daylight."
"Only under special circumstances, like psychic emergencies. And the stars are not right. All Hallows' Eve is long past."
"I can read a calendar all by myself, Karma. So what brings you out of your hidey-hole in the penthouse suite?"
Her blue eyes blink and water at the faint night-lights Miss Temple leaves around the place for my nighttime convenience, though I think it is mostly for her own peace of mind.
"You do this all the time?" the Birman babe asks, in tones that are either admiring or disbelieving. "Fighting the plant life and the railing and then ... leaping to the lower balcony. Oh, it was too awful. And however shall I get back up again? Miss Electra Lark will be so shocked to find me missing."
"If you are missing, how is she going to find you? Do not worry, I will escort your Psychic Self back up. You should avoid the physical world like the plague, and stick to the hoodoo-voodoo stuff, doll. Your coat is a mess and you look a little wobbly on the pins. You definitely are not dressed for breaking and entering."
She shakes out her cafe-au-lait fur coat, then smooths her white gloves and gaiters into apple-pie order before deigning to answer me.
"If you knew how difficult it was for me to leave my refuge and find you . . . gratitude is not one of your virtues, Louis."
"Cut out the 'Louis' stuff. You are trying to make me sound like an uptown cat when I have always been a downtown cat. My name is Louie as in King Louie the Umpteenth and in Crab Louie and in the rock 'n' roll classic song 'Louie, Louie.'"
"The various kings of France called 'Louie' spelled their names 'Louis.' The French merely drop the last consonant when pronouncing the name."
"No wonder the French beheaded their kings! Poor old Louie the Sixteenth! If the French are that careless about dropping the terminal s on a classy moniker like Louie, what difference will chopping off a reigning monarch's head make? At least they had the pronunciation right, and in my book that is a lot more important than getting the spelling perfect."
"Getting the spelling right is very important in arcane matters," she retorts with a sniff, one of those effete little purebred sniffs that implies access to a gourmet brand of catnip. "And that is why I braved the awful out-of-doors and performed a most dangerous balancing act to come down and tell you my latest news hot off the crystal ball."
I shake my head. A five-week-old kitten could make its way down two floors at an old building like the Circle Ritz, which drips with "architectural details"--stepping stones to my breed--like a black marble Christmas tree decorated in bric-a-brac.
"I cruise the Internet with Miss Temple myself," I put in with a yawn. "That is where all the real action is these days. So what tricks is Miss Electra Lark's big green-glass globe up to?"
Karma settles onto her haunches, tucking her forefeet under like a yogi, or a swami or some Oriental pundit from Siam. (I understand that we are supposed to say "Asian" nowadays, but "Oriental" has a ring to it I cannot give up, and I do not see why political correctness must edit the language of words that make a nice singsong yowl in the conversation. Certainly my usage has ruffled the ineffable Karma's fur, for the pale hair-tips seem to glow in an unseen aura.)
"I am channeling a new ancient. Ever since my psychic exposure, through you, to the forces at the doomed Houdini seance, someone impossibly old has been trying to come through."
I shrug, and her enormous blue eyes whip to my twitching shoulder blades. Blazing out from the dark brown that masks her face, them there eyes are pretty potent.
"I have finally found out who I am dealing with," she announces. "Someone incredibly old. Unfathomably powerful."
"Bob Dole?" I quip, the recent election having been decided by a landslide for Socks Clinton, a personal buddy of mine, on account of I saved him from running away from the will of the people and abdicating his First Cat status. And he was the First Cat in the White House in a long, long time. It sets my mind at ease to know that Bill Clinton's ear is purred into nightly by the real power behind the presidency--Socks himself. Hillary is just there as a front-woman to take all the flack.
Karma waits for me to stop grinning, then says, "Bast."
"No need to swear at a little political humor," I say.
"Bastet," she adds, using the ancient deity's full, formal name.
"Sssst!" I hiss. "You do not wish to take that particular honcho's name in vain. Or honchette, I guess I should say. I have met the lady, and this is one goddess you do not wish to hiss off."
"I know. Bast and I have had many conversations about you."
"Me? What is there to talk about, except my ancient lineage that goes back all the way to the Pharaohs? Through the maternal line, of course."
"Bast was most pleased to hear that you have reformed your alley-cat ways. The choice may not have been free but at least the neutering operation was."
"Listen. There is nothing neutered about any part of me. I did not have your usual back-alley procedure, you know. This was a VIP-level operation in every respect. This doctor dude has worked on Schwarzenegger and Stallone. I have not lost a thing. Not one thing! And not even two. It was all done with lasers and lipo. You want to see my scars?"
She shuts those blue-lightning eyes for a weary moment. I suppose that when your soul is older than the Hollywood hills, the concerns of ordinary beings are paltry things. But then, my concerns are never paltry, b.o. or a.o. (Before Operation or After Operation).
"So you have been rendered sterile but remain virile. Interesting, but hardly the coming thing. I understand you still leave your odorous 'marks' around the place, still get into immature fisticuffs and still play the Romeo. You will have to undergo many more lives before you can progress to another level of development."
"I do not want to progress! I want to stay right where I am, doing what I am doing. Eating, drinking and making whoopee."
"I am afraid that this is exactly what you will not be able to do for the immediate future. That is why I am here, to warn you."
She shakes her sagacious Birman head. For the first time I notice a tiny gold ring against the brown of one eartip, and I admit I get the shivers. The last cats I have seen so decorated were mummified models wrapped up in gauze so tight that they resemble two-thousand-year-old bowling pins.
Her head tilts so the earring catches and ricochets back the night-light glow. "A mark of favor from Bastet. Poor Electra is quite confused about when she took me to the mall for a piercing. Mine, unlike yours, was a psychic procedure, and performed by the goddess herself with her own Sacred Fang."
I swallow. I am glad that I am not in Bastet's favor, if she is going to staple-gun my ears for the privilege. Besides, I do not wear any sissy earrings. I even disdain a simple leather collar, and certainly those new, Day-Glo jobbies that are elasticized like a brassiere or something. Supposed to be a safety feature, but I personally think they are designed to make a normal dude look like an idiot.
"So what is going to happen to me? Nothing like knowing the future to give a person a nasty sense of impending doom."
"Oh, it may not be doom in store for you, Louie. Merely a sudden, long trip to a far, alien place more strange than any you have seen before."
"I am going to be kidnapped by extraterrestrials? Those bug-eyed grasshopper guys who haven't heard about needle safety regulations? They might mess with my altered state. No way. Besides, the only saucers I like are filled with brandy Alexanders, not grasshoppers."