“But why does opening the box and looking reduce the system back to one probability, either live cat or dead cat? Why don’t we get included in the system when we lift the lid of the box?”
There was a pause. “How?” Rover barked, distrustfully.
“Well, we would involve ourselves in the system, you see, the superposition of two waves. There’s no reason why it should only exist inside an open box, is there? So when we came to look, there we would be, you and I, both looking at a live cat, and both looking at a dead cat. You see?”
A dark cloud lowered on Rover’s eyes and brow. He barked twice in a subdued, harsh voice, and walked away. With his back turned to me he said in a firm, sad tone, “You must not complicate the issue. It is complicated enough.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. Turning, he spoke pleadingly. “Listen. It’s all we have—the box. Truly it is. The box. And the cat. And they’re here. The box, the cat, at last. Put the cat in the box. Will you? Will you let me put the cat in the box?”
“No,” I said, shocked.
“Please. Please. Just for a minute. Just for half a minute! Please let me put the cat in the box!”
“Why?”
“I can’t stand this terrible uncertainty,” he said, and burst into tears. I stood some while indecisive. Though I felt sorry for the poor son of a bitch, I was about to tell him, gently, No; when a curious thing happened. The cat walked over to the box, sniffed around it, lifted his tail and sprayed a corner to mark his territory, and then lightly, with that marvellous fluid ease, leapt into it. His yellow tail just flicked the edge of the lid as he jumped, and it closed, falling into place with a soft, decisive click.
“The cat is in the box,” I said.
“The cat is in the box,” Rover repeated in a whisper, falling to his knees. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”
There was silence then: deep silence. We both gazed, I afoot, Rover kneeling, at the box. No sound. Nothing happened. Nothing would happen. Nothing would ever happen, until we lifted the lid of the box.
“Like Pandora,” I said in a weak whisper. I could not quite recall Pandora’s legend. She had let all the plagues and evils out of the box, of course, but there had been something else, too. After all the devils were let loose, something quite different, quite unexpected, had been left. What had it been? Hope? A dead cat? I could not remember.
Impatience welled up in me. I turned on Rover, glaring. He returned the look with expressive brown eyes. You can’t tell me dogs haven’t got souls.
“Just exactly what are you trying to prove?” I demanded.
“That the cat will be dead, or not dead,” he murmured submissively. “Certainty. All I want is certainty. To know for sure that God does play dice with the world.”
I looked at him for a while with fascinated incredulity. “Whether he does, or doesn’t,” I said, “do you think he’s going to leave you a note about it in the box?” I went to the box, and with a rather dramatic gesture, flung the lid back. Rover staggered up from his knees, gasping, to look. The cat was, of course, not there.
Rover neither barked, nor fainted, nor cursed, nor wept. He really took it very well.
“Where is the cat?” he asked at last
“Where is the box?”
“Here.”
“Where’s here?”
“Here is now.”
“We used to think so,” I said, “but really we should use larger boxes.”
He gazed about him in mute bewilderment, and did not flinch even when the roof of the house was lifted off just like the lid of a box, letting in the unconscionable, inordinate light of the stars. He had just time to breathe, “Oh, wow!”
I have identified the note that keeps sounding. I checked it on the mandolin before the glue melted. It is the note A, the one that drove the composer Schumann mad. It is a beautiful, clear tone, much clearer now that the stars are visible. I shall miss the cat. I wonder if he found what it was we lost?
Two Delays on the Northern Line
1. GOING TO PARAGUANANZA
The river was in flood, embankments under water clear down the line from Brailava to Krasnoy. A two-hour train trip had stretched into an afternoon of shunting, waiting, crawling from one village siding to another all through the hills of the upper Molsen province in heavy, inexhaustible rain. Rain was bringing down an early twilight on the tracks, the thistles, the tin roofs, the far-off barn and single poplar tree of an outlying farm of a nameless village somewhere west of the capital, when this scene, which had sat in self-contained enigmatic patience outside the window for fifty minutes, was eclipsed by a screeching rash of blackness. “There’s the freight! Now we’ll get on,” said the salesman, who knew everything, and the family from Mesoval rejoiced. When the tracks, thistles, roofs, barn, and tree had reappeared, the train did begin to move, and quietly, unchanged, indifferent, these things disappeared backwards forever into the rainy dusk. The family from Mesoval and the salesman congratulated one another, “Now we’re off, it can’t be over half an hour, Krasnoy at last.” Eduard Orte reopened his book. When he looked up after reading a page or two it had got quite dark outside. Lights of a lone car on a road far away swung round and were lost. In the dark, deep in glimmering rain, he saw the line of the green window blind and under it his face.
He looked with assurance at that face. At twenty he had disliked it. At forty he owned it. Deep lines, long nose, long chin, that was Eduard Orte; he looked at him as an equal, without admiration or contempt. But he saw in the shape of the brows what people had seen when they used to say, “How you take after her,” “Eduard has his mother’s eyes,” stupidly, as if they were not his eyes, as if he had no claim to see the world for himself. But in the second twenty years he had made his claim good.
Despite the divagations and false starts of this day’s journey he knew where he was going and what would happen. His brother Nikolas would meet him at North Station, drive him eastward through the rainy city to the house where they had been born. Their mother would be sitting up in bed under the pink lamp. If this had been a mild attack she would look rather childlike and her voice would be thin; if it had been severe enough to frighten her into resistance, she would be alert and cheerful. They would ask each other questions and answer them. Then dinner downstairs, and a chat with Nikolas and his quiet wife, and to bed, hearing the rain on the windows of the bedroom where he had slept the first twenty years. Almost certainly his sister Retsia would not be there; she would have remembered she had left three small children in Solariy, and rushed back to them in a panic, just as she had rushed away from them. Nikolas would never have wired him, would simply have telephoned after the attack to give him the doctor’s report, but Retsia thrived on commotion, fled to bedsides, fired off telegrams, come at once, with more sense for the dramatic than of the ludicrous. Their mother, entirely content with Nikolas’s twice-weekly visits, had not the faintest desire to “see” either Eduard or Retsia, to have her routines disrupted and her hoarded vitality called upon for an expenditure of specious interest in their doings, which had not interested her for years. But Retsia needed the expectable, the conventional, so badly that she regularly employed the inconvenient to achieve it. When wired come at once to the sick mother’s bedside, one comes. To certain moves in chess only certain responses are possible. Eduard Orte, a stronger and more conscious adherent of convention than his sister, submitted his will to the rules without complaint. But it was like chess without a board, this tracking back and forth for nothing: the same pointless trip three times in two years, or was it three years since the first attack?—so pointless, such a waste of time that he scarcely cared if the train went on all night as it had done all afternoon, shifting from siding to siding in the hills, off the main line and getting no closer; it made no difference.