Section 2,4

I also believed Zig-zag was psychic, and I’m beginning to think he may have been catnapped and his psychic energy harnessed for evil purposes. I imagine a whole generation of cats at the Storey institute, the history of the building encoded in the their genes, the building’s secrets dripping down through the years. I myself have received what I believe are messages from the captured cat in the form of psychic ripples. It’s as if the catnapper is sucking information from the cat’s brain and sending these messages spurting down tubes, and I picture it all happening in a mad professor’s lab in a hammer horror film, filaments of light shooting through turquoise liquid in pear-shaped flasks with orange smoke coming out of them, while the professor, looking like the fellah off the front of the Weetos box, directs the cat’s thoughts with a huge brass lever.

Maybe Fern thought I was psychic and tried to speak to me with brain waves, but if she did, it never came through. I only know that my heart hurt when Fern didn’t reply to my poem. I don’t think my heart was broken exactly, more fogged, the way moisture gets trapped behind a watch face. If Zig-zag is found I think he would help because a cat’s purring has healing properties; mending broken bones, polishing tarnished coins, geminating dead seeds. Maybe it can clear a fogged heart.

The fog stayed in my heart for fifteen years until a man in a high visibility jacket came up the path holding a corduroy jacket I used to own fifteen years ago. The man was one of the builders working on the Storey and the jacket was found behind a cupboard when they ripped everything out.

I look through the window from my place in the portico and I see the biscuity remains of partition walls, dark damp stains creeping asymmetrically across the floor, and I think about Fern McCaulay.

There was a folded note in the jacket pocket addressed to me.

The Storey breathes you out then breathes you in again.
Find Zig-zag please.

(If you look here on Fern’s blog you’ll find out what really happened, and why I ended up here)

THE CHILDEN ARE CRYING