I STILL LOOK OUT the office window. Instead of plotting, I think about the cat and about my fate. The only work I can bring myself to do is to write speeches. I have to write one for the Grade 6 Graduation and another for Remembrance Day, which is difficult because I like to talk about soldiers dying in the trenches from poison gas, trench foot or machine guns and it’s sometimes a little much for the kindergarten kids. One graduation speech I like is about being balanced on a bubble at the edge of time.
I have an incomplete speech about a set of railways receding into the distance both in front and behind, gradually joining in each direction. One side of the tracks represents the present, the other the past. At this moment, there is no past or present because the tracks are neither converging nor diverging. I’m not quite sure where to go from here.
When I’m not busy, I watch gophers. I’ve become so interested in them I’ve put them on our school website. They come out of their holes and smile when you pet them with the cursor. I had wanted you to be able to whack the gophers on the head with a club to move from page to page on the screen, but my school counselor said it wouldn’t fit in with the virtues program. Because she’s almost a psychologist and you never know what she’s thinking, I agreed. It’s bad enough as it is. She’s always giving me these looks. I’d like to ask her why, but I have a feeling it might be a mistake. So I just smile back, but not in a weird way.
The playground outside my window is covered with gopher holes. I’m supposed to call the Terminator to deal with the problem when it gets to be this bad, but I’ve been procrastinating. Then, one day, a gopher-eating badger showed up. At first, it seemed as though my problem had solved itself. However, kids like to poke things down holes. All well and good when it’s just gophers. The kids have fun, and it would have to be a fairly dimwitted gopher that got poked by a kid with a stick. In fact, the gophers have learned to head for the deep recesses of gopherdom as soon as the bell goes. The gophers are up playing, the bell goes, and before the children get out, the gophers are gone.
If a child were to poke a stick down a badger hole though, according to my secretary Joanie, who should know, being f rom the country and all, they’d be asking for some foul-smelling, bad-tempered, ill-intentioned rodent to come charging up from the bowels of the earth after them, mayhem on its mind.
I reluctantly phoned the Terminator. He said that because the badgers were only there to eat the gophers, he would get rid of the gophers. This scenario sounded convoluted to me. Get rid of hundreds of gophers to eliminate one badger? Why not get rid of whatever it is the gophers eat and then what they in turn eat, or why not just go all the way back and destroy the sun like some crazed evil scientist?
The Terminator had a short memory, was just plain lazy, or had been annoyed by my crazed evil-scientist comments, because he never showed up. Unfortunately for the gophers, they had been observed. Other predators, first hawks then ravens, began to gather above them. While I was listening to my secretary Joanie do announcements one day, I watched a magpie hop over beside a couple of baby gophers cavorting in the sun and snatch one up. The universe is like that, isn’t it? One moment, the little baby gophers were innocently playing in the sun, their whole lives strung out before them in an endless joyful vista, and then a slight change of pitch and they are a magpie’s lunch.
If someone had asked what I was doing at that nearly pure instant I could have said that I was watching a magpie catch a gopher. I could even say, “I live for moments like this, ” because sometimes, I don’t.