Noble looked at his watch, then out the window. Packard’s Corner, he thought. Fifteen more minutes to Kenmore. Maybe twenty, with traffic. That wasn’t much time to make a plan.
And I’d better have a plan, he thought. He’d need help, and of course he’d get it; half of the work that went on at The Center involved managing the unexpected results of some of their more unusual experiments. But he couldn’t come in with a blank page. He needed ideas.
Ok, let’s start from the beginning, he thought. The last three Arbor Days, no trees, no cats.
They’d had a breakthrough a few years back, when they’d figured out a way to get rid of the trees—but only the trees. To their surprise, the cats had followed.
Why, though? he thought. They hadn’t actually removed the cats directly, they just changed the environment, and the cats had removed themselves. They had theories—the cats’ probability of existence was entangled with the trees; the cats needed a safe habitat; the cats and the trees were actually a single multidimensional entity that only manifested as individuals due to the constraints of 4-dimensional space-time—but there was no way to know for sure. They hadn’t exactly been able to test anything out.
So let’s go with that,_he thought. _Let’s forget about the why and just assume that the trees are somehow necessary for the cats to remain. It doesn’t explain why they’re _back. What made them show up in the first place?_
He knew the parameters of the initial experiment, and he knew—they all knew—approximately when things had gotten out of hand. But nobody had ever figured out what had actually caused the problem in the first place.
He leaned against the side of the bus, looking out the window, rubbing his thumb and forefingers together, deep in thought. They were halfway across the part of Comm Ave that cut through the Boston University campus when he felt a light touch, like a feather brushing against the nape of his neck.
Reflexively, he drew back. He didn’t like random touches, especially on public transit. Then he felt it again, and this time, he turned.
So far, Noble hadn’t seen any indication that the sudden appearance of the trees and cats had drawn any attention. People were happy to ignore things that didn’t make sense, especially during the morning commute, and even more so in New England. The tree that stopped the bus, the tree on the sidewalk, even the tree in the back of the tow truck—none had rated more than a raised eyebrow, as far as he could tell.
This, though…this was something else. He wasn’t even sure how it was physically possible for an entire tree of any variety to fit in the back of an MBTA bus, regardless of whether anybody noticed it or not—but there it was, mashed up against the ceiling, branches poking through the hand straps. The cats in the tree weren’t being particularly quiet, either, and there were at least four—five of them, including a tuxedo cat he hadn’t seen earlier. That one began to nuzzle against his shin.
And there was the black and white cat, who looked like Eloise. She—he was certain it was a female, with her small head and sleek build—was looking at him as before. Slowly, deliberately, she blinked.
There was only so much that people could ignore. He decided that he needed to get the quantum cats out of the bus, and he might be able to do it if he only stopped observing them. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, the tree and the cats were still there. He tried again, to no result.
Eloise—he decided to call her that for expediency, and because he was pretty sure it was the cat named Eloise, from years ago—was still looking at him.
Noble looked to the front of the bus. Nobody was paying attention. Even the driver appeared to be focused on the road ahead and not the giant shrubbery in his rearview mirror.
He turned back to Eloise. “What are you doing here?” he asked the cat, quietly. “I don’t mind that you’re here,” he said quickly, “but I don’t understand why. And why do you disappear sometimes when I look away, but not this time? Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”
Eloise hopped down from the branch where she was perched and landed on the seat. She walked to him, looked up, directly into his eyes, and put one paw on his arm.
Noble lowered his head and she drew closer to him; he could hear her purring, feel her hot breath and whiskers brushing his cheek, and she placed her tiny, wet nose right up against his ear.
He felt a sudden pang of sadness, of loneliness. “I missed you, kitty,” he said softly. He closed his eyes. The world stopped.
Eloise the cat whispered something. Not a meow or a purr, but a word. A single human word.
His eyes snapped open for the second time that day and he drew back his head in surprise. “What? What does that…”
The black and white cat was gone, along with all the others, and the tree as well. The back of the bus was empty again, and Noble was alone.
“…mean?” he finished. His shoulders slumped. “What does that mean?”
He looked down at the seat and saw a single, golden aspen leaf. He picked it up, gingerly, turning it over and over in his hands, inspecting it as if it were a knife at a crime scene. He set it down again and accidentally blinked; in a panic he quickly re-opened his eyes, but to his great relief the leaf was still there. His one piece of evidence.
“But what does it mean?” he said again, with a touch of annoyance and frustration at the feline’s sudden disappearance. This didn’t help anything. In fact, it only made the situation more complicated.
He opened his backpack and pulled out a lined journal, half-filled with meeting notes and to-do lists. He carefully inserted the leaf between two unused pages, gently closed the notebook again, then slipped it back into his bag.
Noble was no more late than usual when the bus arrived at Kenmore Square, but he didn’t rush along to the office as he usually did. Late or not, he needed that cup of coffee after all.
