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The cat in the box, the box with the cat, the cat inside the box, and the box with a cat inside.
He doesn’t remember any further than that, what with Sicheng’s theory of branching realities and worlds where the cat is alive and dead, variations of the precise moment when the box is opened. A guy with the name of a mountain and a pulsing belief of instances that don’t touch and that remain unexplored beyond their climax, which he presumes is opening the box, is a fair fragment of what he recalls.
He only imagines the cat and the cat is black.
And sure, it is alive sometimes and sometimes it isn’t but sometimes it’s sort of a mingle of states that exist at the same time.
Time, time, fragile ghost of time.
When people witness what he does, he’s bombarded by repetitive inquiries:
“Can you control it?”
“How do you do it?”
“Does it just move?”
“Is time travel real?”
It’s mildly frustrating how they have so much to throw on him about something that might or might not be in the air with them.
He understands, he does. The passage of time is a prevalent topic of conversation that slips into everyone’s minds as they go about their lives; whether they’re late or early, what’s their schedule for the day, how fast or slowly it moves, if they’re running out of it. What he doesn’t think he understands, though, is how they’re all so confident of it.
For him, it’s sly and cunning. And submissive and quiet. Obedient and linear, maybe fuzzy and blurry. Rebellious and exhaustingly loud.
Vibrant.
It resonates, within or around him. It pushes against his body as if claiming his attention with a self-discovered layer of strength. It’s also indifferent and detached, minding its own business at a considerable distance from him.
But it can be
just not there.
It dissolves, evaporates, breaks away from the universal plane. Disappears. He doesn’t really feel the void, for it happens so gradually yet so suddenly -depending on the circumstances- that he doesn’t even bother. Nonetheless, it escapes and drops people frozen into a sensation of standing between crossroads and knowing that the roads don’t have a destination.
He wish he knew where it goes but maybe it’s none of his business.
He’s sitting on the counter, legs dangling with subtly feigned innocence in face of an empty house. His hair is on his face -but when isn’t it- and he can clearly feel the luring, lulling chaos of the attic right above his head. They have a basement, too, as well as countless rooms that exist as part of a whole, but the basement is usually full with trivial paraphernalia and the rooms always have the white noise of music playing in the background.
The attic, however. He’s very much used to it and to the drag of energy that it seems to take every once in a while from all of them. But the tapping of a thing on the floor makes him slightly uncomfortable. It’s a calculated tap, akin to a type of morse code that has been delicately designed, and while the basement is spilling with crap and the rooms are drowning in music, the attic is packed with nothing.
He hits the drawers behind his feet softly. Something shifts in the atmosphere, and when he can’t pinpoint where exactly the movement comes from, he shifts in place himself. Then the thing scratches and his stomach coils inward.
Sicheng’s story of a cat who gets locked in a box in a room with a dangerous chemical within it. The story where the chemical breaks free and the cat dies but then it also lives and it’s plunged into a cycle of lives and deaths in the same place, same instance every time. The cat then are five and seven and an even number of them that are far too many to be trapped in a such a merciless loop. He does remember further than that, than the cat in the box, the box with the cat, the cat inside the box, and the box with a cat inside. A theory of sorts, maybe, but a story that Sicheng tells of a moony cat with interminable lives that rums around on October and sneers at its fatal obstacle when it crashes against it in the clinic-white room. And that changes shape and face every time he tells it.
He hops off the counter and walks upstairs. There’s the sealed, second set of stairs and he stops short.
It’s worn out along with everything surrounding it as a result of their friend with the eyebrow cut delaying the process of cleaning it and decluttering it. Seeming as it has never been opened, it leaves the notion of any possible mess floating in the air.
His friend with the eyebrow cut is an amusing one, alright.
His hair is always bright red, never quite washed away, and his heart is not really in the same place as his soul. There are other things, of course, but the cherry-colored hair in specific awakens an unsettling feeling even coming from a genuinely good person like him.
There’s an elongated pull somewhere in the house and he can tell that it’s not time marking its reappearance.
Out of idleness, Yuta kicks a box near his foot that’s covered in thick webs of dust and right under the shut attic door.
His stare lingers on the latter before he walks away.
How funny.