Mind, you, she was thinking furiously, if this is camouflage, it’s out of my class ... maybe out of this world. Then how am I to prove it? It might be easier just to go quietly nuts.... But I’ve got too much to do this week to go crazy. Next week, perhaps. What am I saying! Fie on this character, whoever it may be. With my tilted, eagle eye I will ferret him out!
Cheered, she began to do sitting-up exercises. Next, she stood on her head. Unfortunately she couldn’t see anything, since her only garment fell down around her ears. Mark opened her bedroom door and peered in. “Good God, Maggie!” he said. “What’s up?” Maggie’s head emerged from the folds of the slip, and she lay full length on the rug. “Just a game,” she said. “Wanta play?”
“Please, Maggie,” he said plaintively. “Not just now. I’ve got to go polish the car.”
“Idiot,” Maggie said. “I’m studying photography I think. Go away, you’re apt to ruin the exposure.”
“I am not,” Mark said doggedly. “It’s a lovely exposure, it’s just that I have to—”
“—polish the car!” Maggie threatened him with a shoe. Mark sighed and withdrew, closing the door gently behind him.
Maggie got up and dressed in shirt and shorts and tried the headstand again. Gomez watched her with wide-startled eyes. Next she bent down and peered back between her legs while turning slowly to survey all four, sides of the room. Nothing. Wearily she sat a moment on the rug, rubbing her aching brow. Her eyes felt sandy, and she rubbed them, too. She glanced at Gomez and saw that he looked like two cats, one barely offsetting the other, like a color overlay on a magazine page that wasn’t quite right. She rubbed her eyes harder to dispel the illusion, and just then she saw the watcher.
She and the watcher stared at each other across the intervening space and across the little black box the watcher held. Even now his image was not clear to Maggie. One moment he was there, the next he was a something-nothing, then he was gone.
Maggie rubbed furiously at her eyes again and brought him back to her vision. This time she was able to hold him there, though the image danced and swam and her eyes watered a little with the effort. It was just like any illusion, she thought; once you know the trick of looking at it, you feel stupid not to have seen it at once.
“Peek-a-boo,” she said. “I see you. But stop wiggling.”
The watcher’s expression did not change. He continued to gaze at her raptly. But all the rest of him changed. He reminded Maggie of mirages she’d seen, linking and flattening mountain tops. Was he human? A moment ago, he might have been. But now he was a great whirl of gray petals with the black box and the staring eyes remaining still and cool in the center. The eyes were large, dark and unblinking. The gray petals now drooped like melted wax and flowed into stiffening horizontal lines like a stylized Christmas tree, and the liquid eyes became twin stars decorating its apex, with the black box dangling below like a gift tied to a branch. The tree dissolved and turned into a vase-shape, with delicate etchings of light on the gray that reminded Maggie of fine lace.
Maggie got up purposefully and walked toward the fluidly shifting image. The watcher shrank into a small square shape that was like a window open onto cold, slanting lines of rain. Maggie reached out a hand and touched the solid plaster wall.
“Nuts,” Maggie said. “I know you’re there. Come out, come out, and we’ll all take tea.”
The watcher’s gaze now turned toward her feet, and his form lengthened and narrowed so drastically that he reminded Maggie of nothing so much as a barber pole with gray and white stripes. The barber pole grew an appendage that pointed downward. It seemed to be pointing at Gomez, who had seated himself just where Maggie might most conveniently step on him, and was yawning as unconcernedly as if the watcher did not exist, or as if he were quite used to him. The watcher grew another appendage, raised the black box, and just then a tiny shaft of light touched Gomez on the nose.
Maggie watched carefully, but Gomez did not seem to be hurt. He began to wash his face. “Is it a camera, then?” Maggie asked. No answer. She looked wildly around the room, grabbed up the framed photograph of her mother-in-law and showed it to the watcher. The staring eyes looked dubious. But by dint of using her eyebrows and all her facial muscles Maggie finally made her question clear to him. One appendage disappeared into the black box and drew out a tiny replica of Gomez yawning. It was a perfect little three-dimensional figurine, and Maggie coveted it with all her heart. She reached for it, but the wavering barber pole drew itself up stiffly, the eyes admired the figurine a few moments, glared haughtily at Maggie, and the figurine disappeared. Maggie’s face expressed her disappointment.
“What about me?” Maggie pointed to herself, pantomimed the way he held the box, then touched her own nose lightly. The eyes at the top of the barber pole gazed at her blandly. The barber pole shuddered. Then the watcher pantomimed that Maggie should pick up Gomez and hold him. Maggie did, and again the little shaft of light hit Gomez on the nose.
“Hey!” Maggie said. “Did you get me, too? Let me see.” No response from the watcher. “Oh well,” Maggie said, maybe that one wasn’t so good. How about this pose?” She smiled and pirouetted gracefully for the watcher, but the watcher only looked bored. There’s nothing so disconcerting, Maggie thought, as a bored barber pole. She subsided into deep thought. Come to think of it, Gomez had been with her each time she’d sensed the presence of the thing.
“Blast and damn,” she said. “I will not play a supporting role for any cat, even Gomez.” She made fierce go-away motions to the image-maker. She shoved Gomez outside the bedroom. She created a host of nasty faces and tried them on for the watcher. She made shooing motions as if he were a chicken. Finally, in a burst of inspiration she printed the address of the Animal Shelter on a card and drew pictures of cats all around it. She held it up for the barber pole to read. The eyes looked puzzled, but willing. The little black box was being folded into itself until now it was no larger than an ice cube. The barber pole swelled into a caricature of a woman, a woman with enormous brandy-snifter-size breasts and huge flopping buttocks. The eyes were now set in a round, doughy, simpering face that somehow (horribly, incomprehensibly) reminded Maggie of her own. The watcher then, gazing straight at Maggie, mimicked all the nasty faces she’d made, stood on his (her?) head, peered between his legs, smiled and pirouetted, pretended to leer at himself in a mirror, and then, very deliberately, indicated with one spiraling finger atop his head that Maggie was nuts. He gave her one look of pure male amusement and disappeared.
“Come back and fight,” Maggie said. “I dare you to say that again.” She rubbed her eyes without much hope, and she was right. The watcher was gone.
Rather forlornly, Maggie took to her bed again. “It’s the worst hangover I’ve ever had,” Maggie moaned. “So maybe I wasn’t looking my best, but it’s a bitter blow...”
The worst of it was, she could never tell anybody, even Mark. What woman could ever admit she had less charm than a beat-up old tomcat? “But I’ve found out one thing,” Maggie thought. “I know now what dogs and cats stare at when people can’t see anything there. . . .” But she almost wept when she remembered her old day-dream—of watchers lovingly studying and guiding mankind, or at least holding themselves ready to step in and help when the going got too rough. Suppose, though, the watchers considered mankind no more than servants to the other animals? Feeding and bathing them, providing warm houses and soft, safe beds. ...”