A few moments later, the office began to shimmer, and Dick felt his stomach start to turn as he experienced a sudden jolt, as though the world had just dropped down two and a half feet. As his eyes refocused, he found himself staring at a short haired purple cat sitting at his desk, which in turn was staring at a point approximately six inches behind Dick’s head. Dick removed the joint from his mouth and stared at it in disbelief, not least of all because he hadn’t lit it yet. The purple cat cocked its head at the white, bulging object in the strange man’s hands, wondered for exactly six tenths of a second what was supposedly so damned interesting about it, then set about systematically hunting down a passing speck of dust.
Dick Shandley, now reasonably convinced that the ends of his joint were not the least bit singed, put his mind to working his way around his next mental block, accepting that a purple cat had, thirty seconds ago, spontaneously materialized in his office. He worked out the following premises: firstly, that thirty seconds ago, his office had been completely free of cats, and second, right now there was a cat in front of him. He had no problems with either of those ideas separately, but putting them together caused his brain to just sort of lie back and think of England. He set aside for the moment the fact that the cat was purple, as that was a detail, and Dick found that details only served to slow him down. Much to the agony of his clients, Dick was a sort of big picture private eye. On his last case he had been hired to find some proof of infidelity. Realizing that his target would probably have some suspicion he was being followed, Dick instead tailed a random person. He had tried to explain to the frantic woman how this man he had photographed was a perfect sample of the human condition, and how the way he held his fork in the restaurant implied the adulterous nature of man. This was how Dick had his nose broken for the third time.
Dick looked down at the cat, which had now stretched its purple body out on his floor. At last Dick reasoned that there hadn’t been a cat there before, but there was now, and to just leave it at that. The left and right sides of his brain shook hands and agreed to never speak of it again.
So, now, on to the third and final problem: what was he going to do with this cat? Dick didn’t consider himself to be the type to own a cat, or for that matter any sort of animal, child, or houseplant that would have to depend on him for its survival. At this point, he slid the massive doobie into his coat pocket. He supposed he would have to take it to the animal shelter.
Dick tried to find a box to put the cat into, but the only one he could find was the one his Blackadder DVDs came in, and that obviously wasn’t big enough. In the end he would up just wrapping it up in a bundle of old towels.
On the bus, a man named Lyle Davitian sat across from Dick. For some reason, something about this man with his ugly green coat and his pile of smelly towels caught Lyle’s attention. He wondered why the man had cut so many holes into his towels. As he took all of this in, a small purple head popped out of the end of it. The man quickly shoved it back into the bundle. “A purple cat!” Lyle shouted with amusement. He looked around; everyone on the bus seemed very annoyed with him, and the man with the purple cat simply shook his head at him slowly. When he got home that night, he told his wife, “You know, I saw a purple cat on the bus today.” She said nothing, so he repeated it, a bit louder this time. “That’s nice, dear,” she told him. “I don’t think you heard me properly, honey,” he returned, now getting somewhat cross, “I said it was a PURPLE CAT.” This caused his wife to begin to heave a long sigh, one that didn’t end until they were divorced six months later. Years down the line, he would still tell the story as he drank alone in a different bar each night. “It was that damn cat, it was the start of it all,” he would tell the bartender, “If it wasn’t for the cat, everything would still be like it used to.” Finally, one night Lyle Davitian’s ex-wife came home to find her ex-husband hanging from the rafters of her bedroom by his neck. She collapsed to the floor, her breath too shallow to even afford her full sobs. The only sound that could be heard was the gentle sway of the rope, back and forth. Back and forth.
Dick Shandley stepped off the bus, annoyed at the scene that idiot had caused. He walked into the animal shelter and presented them with the cat that had appeared on his desk. “Oh, not another purple cat,” said the man at the front desk.
“Excuse me?” asked Dick. “What do you mean, ‘another one?’”
“We’ve been getting purple cats in all week, we’re up to our arses in purples cats.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” the man replied, “you look back there, you’ll see nothing but purple cats. Well, we’ve got a couple of hairless ones, and possibly a beagle too, but mostly it’s just purple bloody cats.”
“I see.” This had caught Dick’s attention. Whereas before the color of the cat had been a trifling detail, a matter for the universe to work out on its own, now it represented a pattern. A very small cog in Dick’s brain had moved a quarter turn to the right, filling him with a new vigor. Where he had simply given up before, there was now something in the works far too engaging for him to ignore: an investigation.
“How long has this been going on?” Dick asked the confusingly British man behind the desk.
“Couple of months,” the man replied. “We couldn’t believe it at first, a purple cat. We thought somebody must have dyed it that, but over the next couple of weeks we noticed that the fur was actually growing in purple. It was around that time that someone brought in another one. Boy, if you thought one purple cat caused a commotion, you should have seen the stir that two raised. Of course, within a few weeks they’d be bringing them in every day, and before you know it we’re up to our—”
“Arses, yes, I know,” Dick interrupted. “Was there anything else unusual?”
“Well, now that you mention it, a few days ago this man comes in here asking about purple cats. He wants to know if we had any, or if we’ve seen any. I told him I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
At the sound of this, Dick increased his rate of blinking by about six hundred percent for a few seconds. “Why on earth would you tell him that?” he asked.
“Well, what would you do? A man coming in out of the blue, asking questions about purple cats all of a sudden. Doesn’t that seem a bit suspicious?”
“Well,” offered Dick, “isn’t that what I’m doing right now?”
“Yes, well, you’ve got an honest face.” This comment surprised Dick more than anything that had happened to him this entire day.
“Here,” said the man, offering Dick a business card. “He gave me this, told me to call him if I found any purple cats. Maybe you can make sense of this whole kafuffle.”
Dick looked at the business card. It said, “PurpaCat Industries,” and it had an address and telephone number. On the back of the card was scribbled the name, “Jared Neely.” Dick thanked the man for his information, and set out on his way.
On the bus, Dick was seated next to an incredibly hairy man wearing a sleeveless shirt with his head buried in a newspaper. Every time the bus hit a bump, he could feel this man’s thick, bushy arm hair brushing against him, like he was being scrubbed. He finally got off the bus, really skeeved out and contemplating what bad day it was for bus travel.
Inside the PurpaCat Industries headquarters, Dick had only to peel back a layer of towels in order to get a private meeting with Mr. Neely. When Dick entered the office, the first thing he saw was a young man in an business suit, fresh out of college, or possibly high school, who was obviously scared shitless over the amount of responsibility he had. The youth directed him to sit down.
“So, Mr... Shandley? What brings you to PurpaCat?”
“Well, Mr. Neely, I’d like to know what the deal is with the purple cats.”
“Yeah, uh huh, sure, well, you see the thing is, we’re kind of trying to keep the whole purple cat thing under wraps, so I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t, you know, tell anyone about all this.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dick blustered. “Mum’s the word, I won’t tell a soul. Now spill it.”
“Well, you see,” Jared stammered, “there’s kind of this whole thing, with like the universe and shit, oh, sorry, I mean stuff.”
“Oh no,” said Dick, “shit is fine. Continue.”
“See, whenever something goes wrong with the universe, like someone does something they’re not supposed to do, like go faster than the speed of light or kill their grandfather or something, it makes a purple cat appear. We don’t really know why.”
“Wait, so if I went out right now and killed my grandfather, it would make a purple cat?”
“No, man, you have to like, do it before your parents are born, or something.”
“Oh,” said Dick, “you mean like a paradox.”
“That was the word I was trying to remember! Exactly, so if you cause one of those paradox things, poof! Purple cat. Oh, also some other bad stuff happens too, but the cat is the first sign.”
“Other bad stuff?”
“Like the universe implodes or some shit, I don’t know, there’s some other agency that handles that kind of stuff, around here we mostly just gather up the cats.”
“So what you’re saying, is that because I have this cat right here, the universe is in danger?”
The kid thought about this for a second. “Oh, yeah, good point. You should probably take it to them and get that straightened out.”
Dick had already been to two different places with this cat today, and the idea of getting back on the bus did not appeal to him. “I don’t really have that kind of time, isn’t there something you can do about it here?”
“Um, okay, I guess. What were you doing when the cat appeared?”
“Well, I was in my office, and I was—” In a startling moment of clarity, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his amazing mega-spliff.
“Holy bejeezus!” shouted Jared. “That’s the biggest damn doobie I’ve ever seen! No wonder you broke the space time continuum with that thing!”
“Seriously? I may have just destroyed the universe by rolling out a joint?”
“Hey, there are some things you just don’t fuck around with man. But hey, what are we doing? We’ve got to destroy that thing!” After a moment’s pause, he added, “Um, with fire! Over the course of the next hour or so. And we should probably open the window.”
Dick held it up to the light, the most important joint in the universe. “Well,” he said solemnly, “if that’s what we have to do.”
And that’s how Dick Shandley saved the universe by smoking out with a guy named Jared.
THE END
AND HERE'S A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE KIDDIES:
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