FICTION
TERESA H. JANSSEN
THE TRUTH OF IT
Lily stared at the mummified cats in the tomb. She pulled her own tabby onto her lap as she turned the pages, fascinated and repulsed by the photos of thousands of embalmed Egyptian felines. Cat mummies so numerous that in the 1800’s an English company bought a shipload, pulverized them, and spread them over British farmland as fertilizer. Lily’s cellphone rang and her cat jumped off of her lap. The magazine fell to the floor.
Ten minutes later, she poured herself a cup of coffee and stewed. Her conversation with her sister had not gone well. Again, Kate had asked whether she could move in. Just for three months or so. Just until she found a rental closer to her new office across the Sound. Lily knew that three months would stretch into six, or maybe a year. She suspected Kate was planning to buy a condo and wanted to save money. Lily knew the ploy. Kate had moved in with her several years ago to save for a new car, and it had ended up a disaster after an eight-month stay. Kate’s feelings hurt. Hers, too. Their relationship strained for over a year.
Lily retrieved the magazine and began to read about Egyptian kittens bred and sold for the coffin, sacrifices to the cat goddess Bastet, and embalmed with family members to accompany them on the journey to the afterlife.
But her thoughts kept skipping back to her dilemma. She couldn’t outright say ‘no’ to Kate. It wouldn’t be sisterly. After their mother’s death when Lily was fourteen, Kate had mothered Lily, gotten her through those first years of bewilderment and grief. But she had smothered her, too. And still did. Told her what to do, didn’t respect her need for quiet, predictability, and solitude.
For the time being, one thing was saving Lily from Kate’s invasion—her cat. Fur and dander made Kate’s eyes water, her nose run, her throat itch, her skin break out in hives. As long as Lily’s cat was around, Kate would stay away.
Lily had rescued the mature tabby four years ago from a shelter. After two rounds of medications to eradicate the worms that had occupied his emaciated body, he had thrived. An affectionate long-hair with a distinctive ‘M’ on his forehead, she had named him ‘Mäusefänger’, the German word for mouse catcher—‘Mauser’ for short. His only flaws were his constantly shedding fur (an attribute now), and his mortality. Cats rarely live past sixteen. About twelve when she’d adopted him, he was now an advanced senior.
The images of mummified felines too disturbing, she tossed the magazine onto the couch to focus on the opposite task at hand. Keeping Mauser alive.
He was, in fact, in certain decline. Moving slowly. Not wanting to go out much. Sleeping most of the day. Fur looking patchy. Lily started brushing him while watching the news, hoping to stimulate new growth.
Kate phoned every few days to chat, though Lily had little news to share during these pandemic lockdown months when she did little besides work and take forays to the grocery store or to pick up take-out meals. Lately, the first thing Kate asked when she called was how Mauser was doing. A veiled query for whether he was dead.
Lily lied. “Caught a fat mouse the other day.”
She couldn’t miss the disappointment in Kate’s voice. She began to dread her sister’s calls.
There were so many reasons to keep Mauser alive—and her sister away. Lily cherished her time alone, loved her Bach and Brahms, her books (many to sate her passion for all things German), and her research. Kate was so different---a talkative, boisterous, ball of energy, lover of all foods Italian, entertained by TV romances and You Tube comedy.
Lily wondered whether she was the only one who, when the pandemic lockdown began, had breathed a great sigh of relief. She could work from home now, avoid office chatter and sometimes agonizing social situations. She no longer needed to make excuses as to why she couldn’t join others after work for happy hour drinks and appetizers. She used to wonder whether there was something wrong with her and why she was asocial, so unlike her sister. She’d contemplated whether she might have a case of agoraphobia. That might explain her shyness, her introversion, and why she was so painfully anxious in new or unexpected social environments. But she’d done more research that pointed to a level one autism spectrum disorder, though she had never been inclined to obtain a diagnosis. She had worked diligently over the years to design a life that accommodated her weaknesses and strengths. Now, remote work from her orderly home was suiting her well.
But there existed another difference between herself and her sister---a wedge that involved work. Lily analyzed data to document climate change. More than a job, aligning evidence to save the world was her mission. Her sister was a senior accountant for an oil and gas company. Both math nerds, for sure. It offended Lily when Kate claimed that predictions of global warming amounted to fearmongering for political ends. And Lily couldn’t help but implicate her sister for her part in the impending climate disaster. Over the phone it was easy to avoid the topic, but if they were to live together, their conflict was sure to bubble up, like a seething caldera.
It would start with a few snide comments. A peppery back and forth. Kate hinting that Lily had fallen for unproven theories, and Lily retorting that Kate’s denial of science was a personal disrespect of her values, followed by more accusations. Tempers would flare, they’d say things they regretted, and wounded Kate would move out in a huff.
Lily had given up trying to change her sister’s mind. There seemed to be little room in Kate’s worldview for Lily’s data. It would call into question the ethics of the work Kate had been engaged in for the past twelve years and her loyalty to the company that had treated her well. An admission of guilt. A redefinition of values. Cataclysmic.
Lily scooped Mauser into her arms. He was defending her from her sister’s intrusion, like the German rifle that shared his nickname. Two years ago, when Kate had again asked to move in (to save for a Tucson vacation rental), Mauser had been there for her, her trusty weapon. A fluffy ball of allergens.
Kate called again at the end of the week.
“So, how’s your cat?”
“You’re not going to ask about me?”
“Oh, I know you’re fine. I’m asking about the cat.”
Kate spit out the word with a distain akin to that deserved of a plague-infested rat.
“He’s as spunky as ever. By the way, I have a sinus infection.”
“It’s his fur. The dander’s bad for you.” Kate paused. “You like your cat better than you like me. You’re putting an animal before your own sister.”
“Not true. You’re asking me to get rid of my friend.”
“Your only friend.”
Kate always worried that Lily didn’t have enough friends, was too solitary, and didn’t get out enough.
“When I adopted Mauser, I promised to take care of him for the rest of his life.”
“You knew I was allergic. You didn’t think of that.”
“I forgot.”
“I hope you won’t consider getting a new cat once he’s gone.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lily sighed. Maybe Kate was right. Maybe she did like Mauser more. In fact, her cat was her best friend. Quiet, undemanding, and completely predictable in his feline ways.
Kate told her about getting a pedicure the other day and attending a friend’s birthday party, things Lily was rarely comfortable doing, especially while this virus raged. They talked for a few minutes more while Lily watched Mauser totter across the kitchen floor. Arthritis and maybe something more. He was losing weight.
She bought him senior cat food. Vitamin-filled kibbles. Picked up a supplement from the vet. She needed to buy some time.
The following week she told her sister a tall tale. Said when she’d taken the cat in, the vet had determined, on better examination of his teeth, that Mauser was younger than he’d thought.
“I just read that a cat in Spain lived till the age of twenty-two. Mauser may have a lot more years ahead of him.”
Kate was quiet on the other end of the line. “Unless he gets hit by a car. Or sick.”
And she ended the conversation.
Lily got a sudden chill. Would Kate stoop to poisoning Mauser, sneak into the backyard one night with poison-laced catnip? Of course not. Lily felt ashamed. Blame it on the pandemic, being home too much, and her growing fears about environmental collapse. They were making her paranoid.
Why did Kate keep hounding her about her cat? Was COVID-stress making her loopy? Or was her sister just lonely? No, Lily admitted, Kate knew something was up.
Two weeks later, Mauser was clearly nearing his end.
Another trip to the vet and a diagnosis of possible liver failure. Nothing they could do unless she wanted to spend a fortune on exploratory surgery. The vet prescribed some pills. Encouraged her to call if the cat seemed to be in pain. Try to make his last few weeks tolerable, he advised. Lily had a sense that Mauser might only have a few days left. She dreaded having to inform Kate that he’d died. She knew her sister would be secretly jubilant. And would arrive shortly after, suitcases in hand.
The last time Kate had moved in, she’d brought her own pots and pans and had taken over the kitchen. Ate up Lily’s expensive imported chocolate that she’d apportioned to last a month. Left her dishes in the sink for days, her dirty socks on the living room floor. Played her Indy-pop loudly every night but became offended when Lily begged her to turn it off so that she could read. Lily had felt suffocated, reduced to tiptoeing around her own kitchen and living room. When she’d asked Kate to clean her things up, her sister had torn through the house like a frenzied whirlwind.
Lily appreciated Kate, sure, but she loved her best in small quantities, like that rich German chocolate.
It was a long week. Lily’s project quantifying the melting of one of the polar ice caps was disheartening. Before the pandemic, it had been by sharing data and consulting with fellow researchers that she’d maintained the drive to continue her work. Now, she was struggling to keep up her stamina. The thought of Mauser dying and Kate moving in discouraged her more.
It occurred to Lily one evening that she could delay telling Kate when Mauser died. She could skirt the truth, respond to her sister’s inquiries with little white lies, such as “he’s slowed down considerably” and “he’s lying around a lot these days”. They’d be true enough, as long as she kept Mauser around—even if he had stopped breathing.
Lily toyed with the idea of mummifying Mauser after his death. She spent an afternoon researching the methods the ancient Egyptians had used to preserve their sacred felines. Removal of organs, salting and drying, then coating with oils and resin.
After watching a documentary on the Supreme Court, Lily thought about the late Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, a clear-eyed ally of climate-change activism. She wished someone had hidden the truth about the judge’s death. They could have reported that she was doing very poorly, not able to work. They could have kept her body at home for the weeks until the national election when a new president could choose her successor. There were ways to preserve a body. Any sympathetic mortician could have done it.
In reviewing the process of making Mauser a mummy, however, she knew she couldn’t do it. The Egyptians had professionals who specialized in cat mummification. Lily had been squeamish enough dissecting a frog and a desiccated rabbit in Anatomy class. No, preserving Mauser was not something she could undertake.
She took stock of herself. To what lengths was she willing to go to preserve familial peace?
A few days later, shortly after breakfast, Mauser left the spare bed where he spent his days sleeping, wobbled to the back door, and meowed. Lily stepped away from her Zoom call and let the cat out. It wasn’t until that afternoon that she thought to call him in. He didn’t come. After dinner, she called him again. She took a flashlight and walked around the yard. No Mauser.
The next morning, she walked the neighborhood looking for him. She called the vet. He said a cat will wander off when it’s sick, and though it may want to return home, it may be too ill to do so. Given its health, it was not unrealistic to assume her cat had died. She might be able to find him beneath a tree or shrub. Lily looked again with no success. Mauser had moved on.
She cried over her coffee, sniffled over her keyboard, and found it hard to concentrate on the new set of data she needed to comb through. Her best friend, her cuddly companion during the long stay-at-home evenings—gone.
When was she going to tell Kate? She could be vague for a while, but her sister was sure to catch on. She’d always known when Lily was lying.
Tired and headachy after a last fruitless search for Mauser, she went to bed early. Sleepless, Lily remembered a paradox she’d come across while studying the behavior of subatomic particles in a physics class. It was a principle of Quantum mechanics, proposed by an Austrian physicist named Schrödinger. Called superposition, it asserts that it’s possible for a quantum object to exist simultaneously in two seemingly incompatible states before it supercollapses into one. The idea intrigued her. She couldn’t recall much more about the strange paradox but made a note to research it in the morning.
Still awaiting sleep, her mind wandered back sixteen years to the day Kate had told her that their mother had died. Lily had refused to believe it. She’d seen her mother in the hospital just two days before, and her mother had promised to return home. For several days, Lily insisted that their mother was still alive. It was only when Kate, worried about Lily’s delusion, forced her to look into the casket at the funeral, that Lily understood the finality of it all. Lily had hated Kate for that, until over time the pain had lessened, and she and Kate had formed a sisterly bond as a means of survival. Kate had always been there for her. She was a connection to her mother Lily wasn’t willing to sever.
She had a night of weird dreams. Zombies, half-dead and half-alive, roamed the neighborhood looking for Mauser. She awoke unsettled, thinking of Schrödinger.
She went directly to her laptop to find more information about the principle of superposition. The physicist had warned fellow scientists against the overapplications of a theory for subatomic particles to other phenomena. To demonstrate the folly, he proposed a thought experiment. If a cat were put into a black box with a radioactive sample that had 50% chance of killing it, one would not know whether the cat were alive or dead before looking into the box. The cat would be in a superposition, both dead and alive, until observation forced reality to collapse to one state or the other.
She understood that Schrödinger’s ‘experiment’ was intended as a teaching aid and caution. Misapplications could suggest absurd results that don’t happen the real world. A cat is either alive or dead, regardless of whether it is observed.
But did that apply to Mauser just now?
Lily considered this as she spread Braunschweiger over a slice of pumpernickel bread. It was only by telling Kate that he was dead that the cat would be forced to collapse into that reality. Until then, both possibilities existed. Mauser was MIA, in a kind of purgatory, in a superposition until closure was made. Since he had not been seen since he’d left the house, he could be considered both alive and dead. Lily supposed that he had died, but Kate, who knew nothing about his condition, supposed that he was still alive.
She and her sister were already living in different worlds. If Lily could hold one thing as true that Kate did not, why couldn’t there be another? At what point in time would Mauser have to leave their parallel realities and collapse into one? She wasn’t sure, but she was willing to embrace the ambiguity.
Kate called the next night and asked how Mauser was doing.
“Nothing to report,” Lily said. It wasn’t a total fib.
Lily was learning through climate work that success lay in prevention and timely action. Lily was prepared to apply the same strategies to preserve something she cared about as much as the health of planet earth—her own mental health. Nebulous replies to Kate’s queries. A change of subject. Distraction. Yes, a little prevention was worth a difficult cure.
But what would she do when the pandemic abated and Kate began dropping by each week, as she had before the crisis? Her sister would notice that the cat bowl and litter box were gone. Sitting on the couch would no longer trigger sneezing and itching. Kate would know Mauser was no longer around.
If Lily could hold her off, Kate would eventually abandon the idea of moving in. She would find a nice place to live across the Sound. Wouldn’t it be best if this came about without Lily having to point-blank refuse Kate and hurt her feelings again?
It was several days later, while she was brushing her teeth before bed, that it occurred to Lily to replace Mauser. She could adopt another cat of the same breed and age. A doppelgänger, of sorts. Having always insisted that the cat stay outside when she visited, Kate wouldn’t know the difference. Sure, Lily had told her sister that she wouldn’t get a ‘new’ cat, but another rendition of Mauser was different, wasn’t it?
Lily grinned into the mirror, her teeth gleaming. Tabbies were abundant at the shelters. Mauser II might last several years and Mauser III a few more after that. She hummed Brahms’s Lullaby while she changed into her pajamas. The possibilities were endless. If the Egyptians could embalm a cat in preparation for an afterlife, she, too, could dwell for a while in the murk between worlds.
Ten minutes later, she poured herself a cup of coffee and stewed. Her conversation with her sister had not gone well. Again, Kate had asked whether she could move in. Just for three months or so. Just until she found a rental closer to her new office across the Sound. Lily knew that three months would stretch into six, or maybe a year. She suspected Kate was planning to buy a condo and wanted to save money. Lily knew the ploy. Kate had moved in with her several years ago to save for a new car, and it had ended up a disaster after an eight-month stay. Kate’s feelings hurt. Hers, too. Their relationship strained for over a year.
Lily retrieved the magazine and began to read about Egyptian kittens bred and sold for the coffin, sacrifices to the cat goddess Bastet, and embalmed with family members to accompany them on the journey to the afterlife.
But her thoughts kept skipping back to her dilemma. She couldn’t outright say ‘no’ to Kate. It wouldn’t be sisterly. After their mother’s death when Lily was fourteen, Kate had mothered Lily, gotten her through those first years of bewilderment and grief. But she had smothered her, too. And still did. Told her what to do, didn’t respect her need for quiet, predictability, and solitude.
For the time being, one thing was saving Lily from Kate’s invasion—her cat. Fur and dander made Kate’s eyes water, her nose run, her throat itch, her skin break out in hives. As long as Lily’s cat was around, Kate would stay away.
Lily had rescued the mature tabby four years ago from a shelter. After two rounds of medications to eradicate the worms that had occupied his emaciated body, he had thrived. An affectionate long-hair with a distinctive ‘M’ on his forehead, she had named him ‘Mäusefänger’, the German word for mouse catcher—‘Mauser’ for short. His only flaws were his constantly shedding fur (an attribute now), and his mortality. Cats rarely live past sixteen. About twelve when she’d adopted him, he was now an advanced senior.
The images of mummified felines too disturbing, she tossed the magazine onto the couch to focus on the opposite task at hand. Keeping Mauser alive.
He was, in fact, in certain decline. Moving slowly. Not wanting to go out much. Sleeping most of the day. Fur looking patchy. Lily started brushing him while watching the news, hoping to stimulate new growth.
Kate phoned every few days to chat, though Lily had little news to share during these pandemic lockdown months when she did little besides work and take forays to the grocery store or to pick up take-out meals. Lately, the first thing Kate asked when she called was how Mauser was doing. A veiled query for whether he was dead.
Lily lied. “Caught a fat mouse the other day.”
She couldn’t miss the disappointment in Kate’s voice. She began to dread her sister’s calls.
There were so many reasons to keep Mauser alive—and her sister away. Lily cherished her time alone, loved her Bach and Brahms, her books (many to sate her passion for all things German), and her research. Kate was so different---a talkative, boisterous, ball of energy, lover of all foods Italian, entertained by TV romances and You Tube comedy.
Lily wondered whether she was the only one who, when the pandemic lockdown began, had breathed a great sigh of relief. She could work from home now, avoid office chatter and sometimes agonizing social situations. She no longer needed to make excuses as to why she couldn’t join others after work for happy hour drinks and appetizers. She used to wonder whether there was something wrong with her and why she was asocial, so unlike her sister. She’d contemplated whether she might have a case of agoraphobia. That might explain her shyness, her introversion, and why she was so painfully anxious in new or unexpected social environments. But she’d done more research that pointed to a level one autism spectrum disorder, though she had never been inclined to obtain a diagnosis. She had worked diligently over the years to design a life that accommodated her weaknesses and strengths. Now, remote work from her orderly home was suiting her well.
But there existed another difference between herself and her sister---a wedge that involved work. Lily analyzed data to document climate change. More than a job, aligning evidence to save the world was her mission. Her sister was a senior accountant for an oil and gas company. Both math nerds, for sure. It offended Lily when Kate claimed that predictions of global warming amounted to fearmongering for political ends. And Lily couldn’t help but implicate her sister for her part in the impending climate disaster. Over the phone it was easy to avoid the topic, but if they were to live together, their conflict was sure to bubble up, like a seething caldera.
It would start with a few snide comments. A peppery back and forth. Kate hinting that Lily had fallen for unproven theories, and Lily retorting that Kate’s denial of science was a personal disrespect of her values, followed by more accusations. Tempers would flare, they’d say things they regretted, and wounded Kate would move out in a huff.
Lily had given up trying to change her sister’s mind. There seemed to be little room in Kate’s worldview for Lily’s data. It would call into question the ethics of the work Kate had been engaged in for the past twelve years and her loyalty to the company that had treated her well. An admission of guilt. A redefinition of values. Cataclysmic.
Lily scooped Mauser into her arms. He was defending her from her sister’s intrusion, like the German rifle that shared his nickname. Two years ago, when Kate had again asked to move in (to save for a Tucson vacation rental), Mauser had been there for her, her trusty weapon. A fluffy ball of allergens.
Kate called again at the end of the week.
“So, how’s your cat?”
“You’re not going to ask about me?”
“Oh, I know you’re fine. I’m asking about the cat.”
Kate spit out the word with a distain akin to that deserved of a plague-infested rat.
“He’s as spunky as ever. By the way, I have a sinus infection.”
“It’s his fur. The dander’s bad for you.” Kate paused. “You like your cat better than you like me. You’re putting an animal before your own sister.”
“Not true. You’re asking me to get rid of my friend.”
“Your only friend.”
Kate always worried that Lily didn’t have enough friends, was too solitary, and didn’t get out enough.
“When I adopted Mauser, I promised to take care of him for the rest of his life.”
“You knew I was allergic. You didn’t think of that.”
“I forgot.”
“I hope you won’t consider getting a new cat once he’s gone.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lily sighed. Maybe Kate was right. Maybe she did like Mauser more. In fact, her cat was her best friend. Quiet, undemanding, and completely predictable in his feline ways.
Kate told her about getting a pedicure the other day and attending a friend’s birthday party, things Lily was rarely comfortable doing, especially while this virus raged. They talked for a few minutes more while Lily watched Mauser totter across the kitchen floor. Arthritis and maybe something more. He was losing weight.
She bought him senior cat food. Vitamin-filled kibbles. Picked up a supplement from the vet. She needed to buy some time.
The following week she told her sister a tall tale. Said when she’d taken the cat in, the vet had determined, on better examination of his teeth, that Mauser was younger than he’d thought.
“I just read that a cat in Spain lived till the age of twenty-two. Mauser may have a lot more years ahead of him.”
Kate was quiet on the other end of the line. “Unless he gets hit by a car. Or sick.”
And she ended the conversation.
Lily got a sudden chill. Would Kate stoop to poisoning Mauser, sneak into the backyard one night with poison-laced catnip? Of course not. Lily felt ashamed. Blame it on the pandemic, being home too much, and her growing fears about environmental collapse. They were making her paranoid.
Why did Kate keep hounding her about her cat? Was COVID-stress making her loopy? Or was her sister just lonely? No, Lily admitted, Kate knew something was up.
Two weeks later, Mauser was clearly nearing his end.
Another trip to the vet and a diagnosis of possible liver failure. Nothing they could do unless she wanted to spend a fortune on exploratory surgery. The vet prescribed some pills. Encouraged her to call if the cat seemed to be in pain. Try to make his last few weeks tolerable, he advised. Lily had a sense that Mauser might only have a few days left. She dreaded having to inform Kate that he’d died. She knew her sister would be secretly jubilant. And would arrive shortly after, suitcases in hand.
The last time Kate had moved in, she’d brought her own pots and pans and had taken over the kitchen. Ate up Lily’s expensive imported chocolate that she’d apportioned to last a month. Left her dishes in the sink for days, her dirty socks on the living room floor. Played her Indy-pop loudly every night but became offended when Lily begged her to turn it off so that she could read. Lily had felt suffocated, reduced to tiptoeing around her own kitchen and living room. When she’d asked Kate to clean her things up, her sister had torn through the house like a frenzied whirlwind.
Lily appreciated Kate, sure, but she loved her best in small quantities, like that rich German chocolate.
It was a long week. Lily’s project quantifying the melting of one of the polar ice caps was disheartening. Before the pandemic, it had been by sharing data and consulting with fellow researchers that she’d maintained the drive to continue her work. Now, she was struggling to keep up her stamina. The thought of Mauser dying and Kate moving in discouraged her more.
It occurred to Lily one evening that she could delay telling Kate when Mauser died. She could skirt the truth, respond to her sister’s inquiries with little white lies, such as “he’s slowed down considerably” and “he’s lying around a lot these days”. They’d be true enough, as long as she kept Mauser around—even if he had stopped breathing.
Lily toyed with the idea of mummifying Mauser after his death. She spent an afternoon researching the methods the ancient Egyptians had used to preserve their sacred felines. Removal of organs, salting and drying, then coating with oils and resin.
After watching a documentary on the Supreme Court, Lily thought about the late Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, a clear-eyed ally of climate-change activism. She wished someone had hidden the truth about the judge’s death. They could have reported that she was doing very poorly, not able to work. They could have kept her body at home for the weeks until the national election when a new president could choose her successor. There were ways to preserve a body. Any sympathetic mortician could have done it.
In reviewing the process of making Mauser a mummy, however, she knew she couldn’t do it. The Egyptians had professionals who specialized in cat mummification. Lily had been squeamish enough dissecting a frog and a desiccated rabbit in Anatomy class. No, preserving Mauser was not something she could undertake.
She took stock of herself. To what lengths was she willing to go to preserve familial peace?
A few days later, shortly after breakfast, Mauser left the spare bed where he spent his days sleeping, wobbled to the back door, and meowed. Lily stepped away from her Zoom call and let the cat out. It wasn’t until that afternoon that she thought to call him in. He didn’t come. After dinner, she called him again. She took a flashlight and walked around the yard. No Mauser.
The next morning, she walked the neighborhood looking for him. She called the vet. He said a cat will wander off when it’s sick, and though it may want to return home, it may be too ill to do so. Given its health, it was not unrealistic to assume her cat had died. She might be able to find him beneath a tree or shrub. Lily looked again with no success. Mauser had moved on.
She cried over her coffee, sniffled over her keyboard, and found it hard to concentrate on the new set of data she needed to comb through. Her best friend, her cuddly companion during the long stay-at-home evenings—gone.
When was she going to tell Kate? She could be vague for a while, but her sister was sure to catch on. She’d always known when Lily was lying.
Tired and headachy after a last fruitless search for Mauser, she went to bed early. Sleepless, Lily remembered a paradox she’d come across while studying the behavior of subatomic particles in a physics class. It was a principle of Quantum mechanics, proposed by an Austrian physicist named Schrödinger. Called superposition, it asserts that it’s possible for a quantum object to exist simultaneously in two seemingly incompatible states before it supercollapses into one. The idea intrigued her. She couldn’t recall much more about the strange paradox but made a note to research it in the morning.
Still awaiting sleep, her mind wandered back sixteen years to the day Kate had told her that their mother had died. Lily had refused to believe it. She’d seen her mother in the hospital just two days before, and her mother had promised to return home. For several days, Lily insisted that their mother was still alive. It was only when Kate, worried about Lily’s delusion, forced her to look into the casket at the funeral, that Lily understood the finality of it all. Lily had hated Kate for that, until over time the pain had lessened, and she and Kate had formed a sisterly bond as a means of survival. Kate had always been there for her. She was a connection to her mother Lily wasn’t willing to sever.
She had a night of weird dreams. Zombies, half-dead and half-alive, roamed the neighborhood looking for Mauser. She awoke unsettled, thinking of Schrödinger.
She went directly to her laptop to find more information about the principle of superposition. The physicist had warned fellow scientists against the overapplications of a theory for subatomic particles to other phenomena. To demonstrate the folly, he proposed a thought experiment. If a cat were put into a black box with a radioactive sample that had 50% chance of killing it, one would not know whether the cat were alive or dead before looking into the box. The cat would be in a superposition, both dead and alive, until observation forced reality to collapse to one state or the other.
She understood that Schrödinger’s ‘experiment’ was intended as a teaching aid and caution. Misapplications could suggest absurd results that don’t happen the real world. A cat is either alive or dead, regardless of whether it is observed.
But did that apply to Mauser just now?
Lily considered this as she spread Braunschweiger over a slice of pumpernickel bread. It was only by telling Kate that he was dead that the cat would be forced to collapse into that reality. Until then, both possibilities existed. Mauser was MIA, in a kind of purgatory, in a superposition until closure was made. Since he had not been seen since he’d left the house, he could be considered both alive and dead. Lily supposed that he had died, but Kate, who knew nothing about his condition, supposed that he was still alive.
She and her sister were already living in different worlds. If Lily could hold one thing as true that Kate did not, why couldn’t there be another? At what point in time would Mauser have to leave their parallel realities and collapse into one? She wasn’t sure, but she was willing to embrace the ambiguity.
Kate called the next night and asked how Mauser was doing.
“Nothing to report,” Lily said. It wasn’t a total fib.
Lily was learning through climate work that success lay in prevention and timely action. Lily was prepared to apply the same strategies to preserve something she cared about as much as the health of planet earth—her own mental health. Nebulous replies to Kate’s queries. A change of subject. Distraction. Yes, a little prevention was worth a difficult cure.
But what would she do when the pandemic abated and Kate began dropping by each week, as she had before the crisis? Her sister would notice that the cat bowl and litter box were gone. Sitting on the couch would no longer trigger sneezing and itching. Kate would know Mauser was no longer around.
If Lily could hold her off, Kate would eventually abandon the idea of moving in. She would find a nice place to live across the Sound. Wouldn’t it be best if this came about without Lily having to point-blank refuse Kate and hurt her feelings again?
It was several days later, while she was brushing her teeth before bed, that it occurred to Lily to replace Mauser. She could adopt another cat of the same breed and age. A doppelgänger, of sorts. Having always insisted that the cat stay outside when she visited, Kate wouldn’t know the difference. Sure, Lily had told her sister that she wouldn’t get a ‘new’ cat, but another rendition of Mauser was different, wasn’t it?
Lily grinned into the mirror, her teeth gleaming. Tabbies were abundant at the shelters. Mauser II might last several years and Mauser III a few more after that. She hummed Brahms’s Lullaby while she changed into her pajamas. The possibilities were endless. If the Egyptians could embalm a cat in preparation for an afterlife, she, too, could dwell for a while in the murk between worlds.
Teresa H. Janssen is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Emrys, Chautauqua, Briar Cliff Review, and elsewhere. Her debut historical novel, The Ways of Water, is forthcoming in November 2023. She resides on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula.
