Game for Cats

On my iPad I downloaded an app called ‘Game for Cats’, a couple of weeks ago on whim. Game for Cats has two separate levels—one free, one costing a buck. The free game simulates a large, fuzzy-edged laser pointer against a dark background. The pointer travels on and off the screen, sometimes pausing and gyrating slightly, as if waiting for the cat to attack. It varies speed, stops completely, and vanishes for unpredictable amounts of time. When the cat reaches out to catch the light, it dissipates with a soft, satisfying ‘bweep.’ And the cat scores a hundred points. That’s it. No boss levels. Just your cat’s dirty paw, your expensive iPad, and a rapid succession of slaps and bweeps.

The level that costs a dollar is vastly superior, my cats tell me (on the ‘select a level’ screen, it’s the only one they’ll go for, these days); it involves an animated mouse with a long, twitchy tale and beady eyes scampering across a cheese-colored screen. Sometimes it’ll peek out from the edges, and then dash to the other side. Once in a while it’ll linger in the screen’s center, doing whatever it is that mice do in their spare time, as if it thinks it’s unobserved.

The cats go freakin’ nuts over the mouse. Sarah, the cat that’s going on twenty-one, will rouse from her hard life of eating and sleeping on the heater vent to slap at the screen over and over, causing the mouse to scamper and squeak every time she scores. She’s the current household high score holder—over 20,000 in a single game—because she’s so determined to slap that little squeaker into submission before exhausting herself into another geriatric catnap.

Fred, on the other hand, is more crafty with the game. She seems to think the iPad is some kind of cage for the mouse; she’ll spend her time trying to reach under the device in order to get at it from the inside. Or she’ll attempt to use her nose and paws to turn the iPad onto its glass front, in order to tip out its contents. She’s also much more creative in her play. When I put the iPad onto the floor in the office while I work, in order to keep her from bugging me, she’ll sit on the desk for a while and watch the mouse from above—and then suddenly she’ll throw all thirteen considerable pounds of herself at the screen in a terrifying death pounce. Lately her favorite strategy has been to use her nose to nudge the pad over to where the office door lies open, and then to line it up so that its lip is perfectly parallel to the door’s edge (it’s eerie, how anal she is about that). Then she’ll tiptoe excitedly around to the other side of the door and bat at the mouse from underneath it.

I feel a little guilty about fobbing off Game for Cats on my pets when I’m too busy (or lazy) to get out their toys and give them some exercise. It feels a little bit like giving my young a couple of jelly doughnuts and a big box of McNuggets and muttering, “Go play with yer video games and get out of my hair, y'damn kids!” Though I can’t understand the hours of amusement they’ve both had with the thing, so far.

The worst side effect, though? They both regard the iPad as theirs. I can’t read in bed at night without Fred interposing herself between my face and the glowing screen to look for mice. When I lent the iPad to one of my friends the other day, Fred jealously hopped onto his shoulder then walked down his chest and attempted to push the iPad out of his hands.

Worse still, Fred seems to think that any flat-screen device is a potential mouse cage. I can’t answer a phone call without her running over to push the phone away from my ear. It was bad enough that she already checked her email and played World of Warcraft without me; now she sits behind my computer screen and hangs her head over the top, cocking her head so she can check for rodents. I have to hide the iPad itself when I’m not using it, because otherwise I’m likely to find it flipped over and nudged beneath a cabinet or a door. I’d even posted a video on Facebook last week of the cats alternating scoring points with the game; the sound of the slapping and squeaking will bring Fred running from the house’s most remote reaches, ears twitching and whiskers a-quiver.

Game for Cats. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s the smartest dollar I’ve ever spent, or whether the decision means I’ll have to buy the cats an Apple device of their very own.

The True and Fantastic Story of the Amazing Pepe

In the late autumn I was sitting in my den working, on a very cold, crisp afternoon. When I looked up and out of the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, I saw Fred sitting outside.

Now, I panicked immediately, because to the best of my knowledge, my cat Fred was doing what she does almost every day during the nine cold months of Michigan’s weather year—she climbs under the flannel sheets and blankets of my bed at nine in the morning, bakes herself to a toasty finish, and emerges at dinnertime, yawning. I’d gone out earlier in the afternoon, however, so it occurred to me that the little imp could’ve slipped out. Like I said, it was a frigid afternoon, and the thought of Fred out there in the cold, for hours, threw me into a panic.

My heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of my adam’s apple, I leapt up and opened the door. The cat strolled in quite calmly, tail lifted and flicking the last half-inch, and rubbed against my leg, grateful. Then it walked over to the kitchen and proceeded to start eating the dry food. I cooed and petted its cold fur and told it how sorry I was and how I’d never, ever make the same mistake and let it out by accident ever, ever. . . .

And it was only at that point I realized the cat wasn’t Fred.

Oh, they looked the same. Both are standard-issue tabbies with pretty much the same markings. Both were roughly the same size. Fred’s coloring was a little more brown where this cat’s was gray, however, and the cat making itself home by rolling around on the kitchen carpet and settling down in front of the air duct for a nap didn’t have Fred’s heft, shall we tactfully say. Fred’s a small cat, but she’s surprisingly heavy. Dense, even. She’s like some kind of Time Lord cat, bigger and infinitely heavier on the inside than the out. This cat was a lot lighter. It was obviously fed regularly, though it didn’t seem to be minding the snack it had from my bowls.

Even Sarah couldn’t tell the impostor from the real thing. She took one look at the strange cat, shrugged, and went back to licking herself.

Anyway, I did the only thing that a normal person would do in such a situation. I took a photo of me hugging the strange cat and sent it to the Mont in a text message and told him I was adopting it.

As I expected, he went ballistic. I could practically hear him explode, all the way from Connecticut. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT CAT? YOU CANNOT KEEP THAT CAT!! WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT!!! DID YOU FEED THAT CAT!!!! DON’T FEED THAT CAT!!!!!

I had already long shooed the cat out and told it to return home by the time I sent a text message back. I’ve named him Pepe, I confabulated. You’ll like him when you visit.

When the Mont called (seconds later), I confessed that I was only teasing about adopting Pepe. The fact that I admitted to my prank while giggling wildly, however, only convinced him that I was fibbing about fibbing, and that I really did have a third cat sleeping under the roof with me. It probably didn’t help that I would take photos of Fred doing her usual stuff around the house and message them to him with captions like, Pepe learned where the litter box is pretty quickly, or Look how Pepe likes to drink from the toilet!

I figured that Pepe had to belong to one of the neighbors—he was obviously too well-kept to be a stray. Besides, he visited the house at pretty much the same time in the afternoons. That told me that someone was letting him out on a routine, and that he was simply making the rounds before returning back home for the coldest and darkest hours of the day. Sarah continued to assume that Pepe was Fred; Fred would growl at Pepe through the protection of the glass doors, but if I brought the cat in for a quick cuddle, she’d quickly lose interest and go back to the rough work of snoozing beneath the blankets.

By the time the Mont came home for the holiday, the weather had gotten so cold that I’d not seen Pepe for a couple of weeks. In my way of thinking, that was a good thing. I’m always distressed when I see house cats out in the dead of winter. The scene that followed, though, went a little something like this: The Mont walked into the house and dropped his bags. We embraced. Sarah meowed and demanded to be fed. Fred walked into the room, brushed up against him, and allowed herself to be petted. It was a happy family reunion.

“Where’s Pepe?” the Mont asked, half-joking, half suspicious.

“Honey,” I said, laughing in a way that was meant to imply how silly he was to take seriously any of my pranks.

Then I looked at the back door. A little tabby was peeking in.

It was a gift from God. Who am I to reject such comedy manna? “Well hey, Pepe!” I cooed, walking over to the sliding glass doors and opening them. Once I’d slid back the screen, Pepe trotted in, tail high and whiskers twitching. He rubbed against me, nodded at the other two cats in passing, ignored the Month, and then helped himself to the Friskies.

Well. The scene that followed was pretty much like the first text message exchange. WHERE DID THAT CAT COME FROM? DOES HE LIVE HERE?? HAVE YOU BEEN FEEDING THAT CAT??? DID YOU NOT HEAR ME SAY THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT????

Honestly, there were fewer decibels when Lucy smuggled home a giant cheese in Ricky’s tuba.

Eventually, when I stopped snickering, I picked up Pepe and put him out, assuring The Mont that the cat did not live there, that I hadn’t seen the cat in two weeks, and that it was mere wild coincidence that it should show up thirty seconds after his arrival home and demand to be let in. Honestly. Coincidence. That’s all it was. Jeez, calm down.

Eventually he did. “Come on,” I told him, once his face was no longer the shade of a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. “Let’s take your stuff upstairs.”

Once we were upstairs and the bags had been thrown in the spare bedroom, we flopped down on our bed to relax and talk. I asked how his trip had been. He told me about the route he’d taken. We’d barely started talking when we heard a faint thud, followed by a faint meow.

I sat up. “Fred must be trying to attack Pepe through the glass door,” I said. But no, the sound wasn’t quite that. We heard another meow.

Then, like actors in a classic screwball flick, we both turned our heads slowly, simultaneously, to the window behind the bed. There was Pepe, staring at us through the second-story window. Not only staring at us. Pepe was affixed to the screen with all four paws and all his claws, legs sprawled in all four directions, looking all the world like one of those Garfield stuffed animals with suction cups on his feet, affixed to a car window.

Now, I’m not sure how Pepe managed to climb up on the den roof and make his way to that exact window. I’m still uncertain how he even knew we’d be on the other side. What I do know is that the look of utter disbelief on The Mont’s face at that moment is something I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life. “Well hey, Pepe!” I said brightly again, as if he attached himself to the second story window all the time. “Ready to come in again?”

The Mont watched, slack-jawed, as I opened the window and pulled up the screen. Pepe stepped over the sill and through the slats of the headboard as if we did that kind of thing all the time. Then he curled up on the blanket, squinched shut his eyes with affection, and purred.

I’m still slightly deaf in my left ear from the yelling that followed. Jeez. Honestly. It’s not like I paid the darn cat to do that. I don’t have the money for such comedy gold.

The Nascenza Conspiracy

Seven or eight years ago, I finished the manuscript of a book I called The Horns of Cassaforte. It was a young adult novel set in a fantasy world somewhat similar to renaissance Venice, where the families of ordinary craftsmen not only produced objects blessed with everyday magics, but played a major part in the country’s governance. The book grew in part out of the 9/11 tragedy, and partly out of my depression over the political landscape of the country at the time. I wanted to explore how the most ordinary person—Risa Divetri, seen by everyone as good for nothing— might react to a country that was being hijacked by political extremists striking at its most basic foundations.

Heavy stuff for a light fantasy novel, I know. When I finished writing, I knew I wanted to explore those themes even further, in two sequels. I didn’t really have any more notion of those novels in my head than the premises in their titles. The second book in the series I was thinking of as The Pirates of Cassaforte, in which an actor’s troupe would be stranded on a desert isle by pirates. The third was Pilgrims of Cassaforte, and would deal with a small group of citizens on a religious journey waylaid by terrorists.

The Horns of Cassaforte became The Glass Maker’s Daughter, of course. And The Pirates of Cassaforte finally found realization in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. And now Pilgrims of Cassaforte is seeing the light of day as The Nascenza Conspiracy, which is available this week from Flux.

The Nascenza Conspiracy has as its protagonist Risa Divetri’s younger brother, Petro. As Risa has grown into a national hero, celebrated and feared in equal measure, Petro has been walled away in the insula—a boarding school of sorts for the country’s leading families. His sister’s notoriety has guaranteed that Petro has led anything but a typical student’s life, though. Either he’s scrutinized by his instructors for traces of her talents, scorned for being anything less than extraordinary, fawned upon for his connections, or beaten up for sticking out. For someone who simply wants to fade into the background until he’s ready to find his own path, it’s uncomfortable to have such a famous relative.

When the insula’s elder decides to send him on a religious pilgrimage to the holy site of Nascenza, Petro leaps at the chance to be out of the spotlight. And when his best friend comes up with a practical joke to swap identities, Petro is happy to leave behind the name of Divetri and become an ordinary citizen for a few blessed days.

The scheme goes awry in a remote village populated with political extremists, however. Petro’s friend is kidnapped, his bodyguards are killed, and he’s left seemingly alone in a countryside populated with murderers and traitors. When he determines to rescue his friend, he finds himself embroiled in a plot that threatens Cassaforte’s throne like no other before.

I know! Risa’s little brother, all grown up and stuff!

One of The Nascenza Conspiracy’s major themes has to do with the ways that political groups will use the tactics of fearmongering and internal terror in order to get their way. It’s a theme that grew directly out of the take-no-prisoners approach to political campaigning that I’d seen during the 2008 election and the aftermath in the years following. It seemed then as if anyone with a desire to invalidate Obama’s presidency used whatever means they could to spread fear about the inevitable dangers of an African-American president—logical or not. To me it seemed like living in absolute insanity—and I drew upon it for the book. Petro’s treading dangerous ground with a party of extremists willing to do anything, and sacrifice anyone, in the name of political insanity, simply because they weren’t able to get their own way. If only real life could be settled with as much satisfaction as a fantasy novel, eh?

Oh, but the book’s real draw? Two teenaged boys making nut jokes for an entire page and a half. You won’t want to miss that.

The Nascenza Conspiracy is available from Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com, or check to see if your local independent bookstore has it in stock or will order it for you. You can also buy it for your Kindle.

If you read the book and enjoy it, won't you consider putting your review for it on the usual sites?