And now I'm blurring again, into something bigger. My tail now feels lighter, and I flick it around as I crouch here, crazy with anticipation, my thin tongue licking my sharp teeth. This is going to be fucking fun, and I'm not even sure I can wait before I pounce. I move my bottom around in a repeating arc, balancing myself. Now? No. Wait. Need the right moment, totally the right moment. I've done this thousands of times before, and I could never, ever get bored with it. I don't plan my attacks in any detail but when I remember them they are like bloody ballets, with me as the director, poking the dancer with my paw, making the food dance, making it pirouette on broken legs, because I like food that moves. I do eat that brown shit in the plastic bowl but I don't enjoy it: It tastes like death. I only eat it to survive because half the time I have to wear a fucking bell that scares the food away. But I can take the bell off if I work long enough at it, picking away with my precise claws. So I have no bell and now there's food in front of me. I anticipate the way the warm blood-gravy-liquid will taste in my mouth once I've torn the furry coating off this thing shaking in front of me, trying to appear still. I remember the taste.... Oh God. Oh yuck. It's like hot Bovril mixed with iron tablets and rust. And now I'm thinking that must be disgusting really, but the synapses (or whatever) in my mind and the cat's mind are now jumping up and down like kids in a junior debating society. After a couple of seconds I'm almost convinced that blood is delicious after all, but whatever is left of me that is human and vegetarian thinks, No! I can feel this thought blending with the cat's thoughts and so, when the mouse decides this is the moment to leg it under the bin, I hesitate. And my cat-mind does a diving backflip, just for a second, but it's enough to fuck everything up. There's a voice in my mind telling me not to do it. I don't understand this. I don't have concepts like Why? in my language. This is like a headache, some memory of a white room and a table and being held down by my neck as something sharp jabbed into me. Well, no one's holding me down now.
Fuck off, passenger.
No.
You're like a flea inside my head.
Well ... Maybe you're right. Why save the piece of food, anyway? What is "saving"? Nothing makes sense.... Arieclass="underline" You are not a fucking cat. You were that mouse. You remembered your nest. But I'm not a mouse, either. And now I want to taste its blood.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A buzz in my head I don't recognize. A chemical stronger than fear.
I'm moving forwards slowly now. The food has moved under the bin. New strategy. Not Game Over. I crouch and my back is a perfect curve: one shoulder slightly higher than the other, my left paw in front of my right. I'm going to crunch your skull, and I don't care how long I have to dance with you first. I'm ... You've gone. Where are you? Where's my fucking food...?
The mouse has gone. He's safe. My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.
Console. Now I really have to get out of here. The thing comes up in my vision again, jerking as my hitchhiker consciousness bobs up and down with the cat, padding towards the wall, and then—wow—jumping up onto it. God, I liked that. But I have to get out of here. I've saved one mouse but there's still one more to release. I glance around at the desktop space again, ignoring the milky images in the center. The only thing left is the blue object/image, and so I direct my thoughts at it. Quit now? says the female voice I recognize from before. Yes, I think. Yes, yes, yes... A door appears in front of me and I am me again, twisting the knob and walking through on two heavy legs, with no tail. But I don't recognize this place. I seem to be in a long corridor with gray carpet and beige walls. Oh shit. Where's the fire escape? How do I get out?
I walk along the blank corridor, past notice boards with nothing pinned on them, past bright white office doors, until I reach a lobby with four lifts in a row. There's nothing on these walls except for one safety image: a green stick man and a green stick man in a wheelchair both moving towards a bright white exit. The stick man is winning. Not knowing what else to do, I press the button to call the lift. Instantly, all four sets of doors open. I smile at this. Is there really no one in this place apart from me? A whole city to myself—if I even am in the same city I started in. But I can't stay: I have to get back. I randomly take the third lift along from the left and press the G button. It drops down faster than I would have liked but I don't feel sick. I still don't feel anything. Once I'm on the ground floor I find a set of revolving doors that takes me back out onto the street. And then I see something odd: a small white business card lying there on the ground. It wouldn't look odd in a normal city, lying on a chewing-gummed pavement amid all the old crisp packets, fag butts, receipts, and torn pieces of newspaper. In a normal city you wouldn't notice it. But here it really stands out. I bend down and pick it up. The name APOLLO SMINTHEUS is written on it in brown ink. There's nothing else. I pick it up and put it in the pocket of my jeans.
I'm on a deserted main road lined with quiet office blocks. There are signs for subways but there's no traffic, so I walk across the road, climbing over the barrier separating the two carriageways. Now, I could go left or right or straight on, down a smaller road. Something about the smaller road seems familiar, so I walk onwards, afraid but not actually feeling fear, like I'm watching myself in a film, until I recognize the alleyway on my right with all the fire escapes. That alley was on my left before. Now I see. Somehow I ended up in the large building I was facing when I first arrived here. So presumably all I need to do to get back is to keep walking onwards, onwards down the road and then—yes—into the tunnel with the zeroes and ones and all the letters of every alphabet I've ever seen. Then I open my eyes.
Back on the sofa. I'm alive. I'm home. I'm human. I feel cold. I need to pee. The sense of disappointment I often get when I wake up from normal dreams has now mutated into something else: the disappointment of being me, here, now.
My overwhelming thought: I want to be back in the Troposphere.
And a weaker thought: But you wanted to get out.
Strange how I keep thinking about drugs, but that's the connection Mr. Y made as well. This time I'm remembering a bathroom, a long time ago. In fact, it must have been just before I went to Oxford. I was in a bathroom in Manchester with a big guy who gave me a tiny little pipe, coated in green enamel. I remember sucking on the pipe and feeling something I'd never felt before: complete contentment, something similar to how you feel just after an orgasm, but more—where the whole world is a big soft duvet and you're just about to go to sleep, and you feel as if nothing will ever hurt you again. I sucked this stuff into my lungs and it tasted like ammonia. And I asked the guy what it was.
"Freebase," he said. "Like crack cocaine. You'd probably best not do it again; it'll boggle your head."
In the same way that I immediately wanted to have another go on that pipe, I now want to get back to the Troposphere. So maybe that's the curse.
Muddled thoughts, muddled thoughts. It's quite obvious that I've just been asleep again. I can't have been in the Troposphere. It's a fictional place, a place from a book. But I still get up from the sofa and, before going to the loo or anything like that, check the mousetrap under the sink. And I feel sick. There she is, the being whose memory and thoughts I shared, trembling in the little box, her tail caught in the catch. I don't think I ever really looked at the mice in the traps before, or even thought about them very much apart from trying to remember to release them outside as quickly as possible. But now I'm looking. Whether it was "just a dream" or not, I know exactly how she feels in there. I undo the box, my hands fumbling on the catch, trying to free her tail as gently as possible.