Seven Tales of the Cat

by

Jan Bear
 (c) 2002 by WordSpinnersInk and InkSpin

Lorina sneezed again, a volcano of revulsion exploding from the inner recesses of her head." Cat sneeze!" she cried.  "Where is it?"
 

Wracked with sneezing, she opened window after window wide to the icy night, but instead of fresh air, each gasping breath brought only more of the stifling essence of cat.  In panic she searched her apartment for it. "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!" she called between sneezes.
 

"Puss, puss, puss, puss, puss?" Then suddenly the catness was gone.  She stood upright and inhaled deeply. Shivering, she closed the windows, settled into her rocking chair, pulled the afghan close around her, and reopened her book.
 

Two eyes glowed red from the shadows beyond the range of her lamp. 

"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty," she began again.  "Just want to let pussems outside."
 

"First of all," a voice said, "you needn't call me 'kitty, kitty, kitty,' as if I were a flea-bitten alley cat.  'Cat' will do nicely."  Her hand found a switch, and she faced a huge grinning cat crouched in the middle of her kitchen table. Lorina sneezed.
 

"You certainly keep it cold in here," the cat said.
 

"Marcus!" Lorina shouted. "This is not funny.”
 

"I do not belong to Marcus," the cat said, sitting up and extending a pawful of claws, "and as you can see, I'm no ventriloquist's dummy."
 

Lorina stared at it.
 

"We really have to get past this whole question of my reality.  It slows things terribly.  I'm no less real than you, and if you're worried about madness, I wouldn't.  We're all a little mad."
 

The cat seemed to wait for an answer, but receiving none, it returned to its crouch and continued.  "I came to ask if you know the gray woman."
 

Lorina thought of all the colors of women she knew.  Her boss's wife was dusty rose, and she had seen scarlet women on the street downtown.  Her best friend was definitely green, or brown, and she knew one or two who were always blue.  But gray . . .  "No."
 

"Well, you will.  She runs the cafe on Free Parking."  The cat vanished.
 

She searched the apartment again—behind the refrigerator, under the bed. No cat.  She almost sat on it, curled and softly rumbling in her afghan.
 

"By the bye," the cat said, "do you have a Monopoly board?"
 

"No."
 

"Then Marcus will bring one." And it vanished again.
 

"Wait!"
 

"Yes?"  The cat had moved to a bookshelf.
 

"I wish you wouldn't keep disappearing like that.  It's disconcerting."
 

"All right." And it vanished very slowly, beginning with the tip of its tail and proceeding stripe by stripe up its body.  At last all that was left was its enigmatic smile.  "People seem to like this trick," it said.  The grin popped like a bubble.

*     *     *    

Lorina worked in a bookstore: a huge, dusty, drafty place, quiet with routine venerable as tradition, where life was interpreted by art, fact by poetry, material reality by metaphor, so that the world was embodied in squiggles of ink in the same way that a rainbow is embodied in droplets of water or a tree embodied in its atoms.  The bookstore had for Lorina the leisurely quality of the second chapter of a novel—after the action has begun, yet an interlude before it continues—in which the author slows the pace and attends to the setting, the characters' history, the details that will shed meaning on the activities to follow.  She kept expecting something interesting to happen tomorrow.
 

But tomorrows came and went.  The owner, Benjamin Mousa, lived so completely in history that daily newspaper stories were prophecies.  Earthquakes and wars and spiraling this and plummeting that traveled in a parade outside his door, but were not permitted in the bookstore until they had become the past, acceding then to interpretation in light of events to come.  The magazines were back issues, fifty cents a copy, and the geography books were years out of date.  Mrs. Mousa brought cookies to the shop and hung faded wildflower prints on the cash register.  For Lorina, reality intruded once a month when Mrs. Mousa decided it was time to do the dusting. That the dust continued to collect in her sanctuary was a matter of some pain for Lorina.  The task of removing it from Homer and Barbara Cartland, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Mechanics of Charged Elementary Particles in Interaction with Certain Electromagnetic Fields, brought home to her the mortality of civilizations and the universal tendency toward chaos.  That, and she was as allergic to dust as she was to cats.
 

Thus she was on the morning after her meeting with the cat, standing on a ladder, feather duster in hand, depressed and sneezing, when she first saw the gray woman browsing through a book on winemaking.  It wasn't just her hair, eyes and clothes, the color of steel, that sparked Lorina's recognition:  her bearing was gray, her manner as she turned the pages of the book was gray, and her voice when she spoke was gray.
 

"Pardon me, Miss, but the cat does not require dusting." And she walked grayly away to the cash register.
 

Lorina turned and found herself nose to grin with the complacent creature.
 

"The thing to remember about playing Monopoly," the cat said—Lorina   sneezed—“is not to allow your winning and losing to be determined by the accidents of the game."  The cat's tail began to disappear.  "Watch Marcus. He may be smoking a fat cigar on Boardwalk and the next move just as happily lying in a doorway on Mediterranean Avenue."  The cat had faded to  a disembodied grin superimposed on Betty Crocker's Cookbook.  "The other reason to watch him is that he cheats." And as the sound faded, the grin faded to nothing.

*     *     *    
 

"Make way!" were Hatta's first words.  "Make way for wine and Monopoly!"

"Clear the table, Lorrie!" Marcus cried, and with an outstretched arm cleared it for her.  "You've lived in fantasy long enough!"
 

"Time for wine and reality!" Hatta deposited two gallon jugs of wine in the kitchen.  "This should hold us till we get to Go."

RULES OF MONOPOLY
[the placard said]

Rule 1. He who shouts loudest collects rent.
Rule 2. He who misses out on the game misses out on the game.
On these rules hang the law and the profits.

"Wait!" Lorina cried.  "Don't nail that to the door; my landlord will raise my rent!"
 

"Too late," Marcus replied.  "Besides, he may not shout loud enough to collect."
 

And so the game began.  Like a busload of children on a field trip, Marcus and Hatta raced around the board, knocking over markers as they passed, shouting in derision if anyone went to Jail, devising elaborate stratagems to distract the others and surreptitiously trading properties.
 

Lorina tried to maintain her equanimity, but found it slipping every time Marcus or Hatta ran out of wine, which was often.
 

"More wine," one would say, and the other would drain his glass and add, "Yes, more wine!"
 

It wasn't even that she minded fetching the wine for them—it was what always happened to the game when she was gone.  During one trip, on the authority of Rule 2, Marcus abandoned his green marker and took his turn with her white one, charging her rent for each of the three turns she sat on the property he had just bought as green.  She returned to find her cash flow threatened.
 

On being questioned, Marcus referred her attention to Rule 1.
 

"I know Rule 1," she said, "and I didn't hear you shout."
 

"Actions speak louder than words," he replied, moving Hatta's red marker to Ventnor Avenue, "so I usurped it."
 

"Oh, so that's the way it goes."  She pointed her finger in the middle of his back and said, quietly and calmly, "Rent."
 

Marcus counted out $66 and handed it over.
 

Her landlord, Drumrouse, came to ask her to keep the noise down please, there were other people in the building, and why is this sign nailed to the door? But Marcus called him in and got him into the game.  It didn't matter that the game had already been going for an indeterminate time; they just counted him out $1,500 and sat him at the table.
 

"More wine!" Hatta said, and Marcus drained his glass.
 

"More wine!" said Marcus.
 

"More wine!" said Drumrouse.
 

"You can't have more," Lorina shouted in frustration.  "You haven't had any yet!"
 

"More wine!" the three shouted together.
 

Lorina sat down in a huff and held her glass out with the others.  "You get it this time," she said.
 

"More wine!" said Marcus, Hatta, Drumrouse and Lorina, in sequence, counterpoint, unison and four-part harmony.
 

Lorina sighed and rolled her eyes and brought the two jugs in from the kitchen.

*     *     *    
 

At one point, Lorina was counting out a seven, and then she came to a stop on North Carolina Avenue.  She knew it was North Carolina Avenue because a sign in the field said:

NORTH
CAROLINA
AVENUE

ACREAGE FOR SALE
ZONED RESIDENTIAL

PRICE $300

She assessed her assets:  in one pocket she had $318, in the other a handful of properties—a railroad, a yellow, two baby blues, nothing as valuable as a green.  "I'll buy it," she said to no one in particular.
 

A long shiny black car with "Monopoly Reality" written on its door pulled up, and a little man with a walrus mustache and a black suit climbed out. "You've made a wise choice," the man said.  "That'll be three hundred dollars.  I accept cash, land or major debit cards."  He counted her $300 a couple of times, tugging at the bills and arranging them in ascending numerical order with all the Monopoly writing pointing in the same direction, and he sped away in his car.
 

A man in a weathered suit with a four-day beard lay leaning on his elbow in the tall grass and chewing a straw.  "So you bought North Carolina Avenue," he said.
 

"Yes, I did.  Are you in the game?"
 

"You can't get any rent out of me," the man said, gazing contentedly upward, "no matter how loud you shout.  I'm broke.  My wheelbarrow is upside down on the Monopoly board of life."
 

"If you're out of the game, why are you still here?"
 

"Not out of the game," he said, sitting up to look at her, "broke."
 

Lorina shrugged at the distinction.

"Not out till it's over," the man said.  "No way.  And it'll never be over. That's commitment."  He rolled over again and stared into the oak branches overhead.  "I could still win, you know.  A goal oriented-game plan is what I need, and I've been mulling it over for a thousand moves."
 

"Tell me about it," Lorina said.

"You'd like to know, wouldn't you?  They all would."  He turned abruptly and calculated her eyes.  "But tell you what—I like your face.  I'll share my secret with you for a lousy ten bucks."

Lorina weighed her curiosity and decided it wasn't a bad price.  She gave him two fives.

He counted them a couple of times, tugging at the bills and arranging them with the Monopoly writing pointing in the same direction.  "See you at Boardwalk!" he shouted and sped away toward Go.

And then far away someone shouted, "Rent!" and someone else gave a howl of anguish.

"That," said a familiar voice, "was Mobley."

"Hello, Cat," Lorina said, oddly not even surprised at its sudden appearance.  "You know him?"

"Of course.  Everybody's given a buck to Mobley every now and then to find out his plan.  But he always loses it."

"He got ten from me."

The cat laughed and disappeared.

Mobley was sitting in a ditch beside the Short Line Railroad tracks.

"Thanks for nothing!" he shouted as Lorina passed.  "If you'd given me another lousy fifteen bucks, I'd have gotten to Go!"
 

There was a bookstore on Luxury Tax exactly like Mr. Mousa's.  A sign in the window read:

THE COMPLETE WORDS
OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

FREE

YOU PAY ONLY
LUXURY TAX

Inside behind the counter, the Monopoly man with the walrus mustache stood instead of Mr. Mousa.
 

"I think there's a mistake in your sign," Lorina said.

The Monopoly man went out to look at it.  Through the window she could see him contemplating, holding his elbow with one hand, stroking his chin with the other.  "No," he said coming back, "no mistake."

"But the sign says, 'Complete Words of Shakespeare,’” she insisted.  "There are a lot more words than works."

"Substantially," the Monopoly man agreed.  "There were his first words—indicating conclusively whether he was a googooist or a dadaist, the lies of various colors, the unwritten, half-planned plays, the 'Good Mornings' and beer orders—all absolutely free—and a bargain at twice the price.  I'll have them brought around for you.”
 

"Boy!" he shouted at the back room.  "Bring around the forklift!"  To Lorina, "That'll be seventy-five dollars."

"Forklift?" Lorina cried.  "I thought they were free—your sign said. . . .”

"Right.  You pay only Luxury Tax of seventy-five dollars."

"Well, if that's the way it is, keep your Shakespeare.  I don't have that much money."

"Boy!" he shouted at the back room.  "Cancel the forklift!"  To Lorina, “That'll be seventy-five dollars."

"What!" she shouted.  "What kind of bookstore is this?  Does Mr. Mousa know how you're running his shop?"

"In the game," the Monopoly man explained, "the word free means only that you don't pay less if you choose not to take it.  Since Mr. Mousa lives in a different world, so to speak, you might as relevantly ask if I know how he runs my shop."
 

"But I only have eight dollars," she said.

"Quite all right.  I can refinance your railroad at a reasonable rate of interest."

And moments later, with $33 in her pocket and her railroad in hock, Lorina walked away from Luxury Tax.

At Go a voice came to her out of the crowd:  "Lorrie! Lorrie!"  It was Hatta.  "What took you so long?  Get your salary from the man and come on! I'll wait for you in the wine line."
 

Three Monopoly men stood in booths over which signs were hung:

NEWCOMERS

and

SALARY

and

WINE

A man who reminded Lorina of Drumrouse was filling out a pile of forms at Newcomers while a smiling Monopoly man counted out his entry money.  "A goal-oriented game plan," she heard the Monopoly man say, "is the key element in the successful achievement of game objectives.  A loser is merely a player with a low level of achievement dynamics."  The man who reminded her of Drumrouse grinned and counted his money, tugging at the bills and arranging them in descending numerical order with all the Monopoly writing pointing in the same direction; he sped away toward Just Visiting.
 

The line at Salary shuffled slowly forward, delayed either by the fastidiousness of the banker or the gregariousness of the line.  She stood assailed by the babble, disconnected words and phrases leaping out: "goals" and "game plans," "and so I said," and "went broke at Electric Company." And then one conversation stood out from the crowd:  "You'll never believe it! I got ten dollars from Mobley on Short Line!"
 

"You're right," came the reply.  "I don't believe it.  No one has gotten more than a dollar out of Mobley in a thousand moves."

When Lorina arrived at the window, the Salary man eyed her sideways, counting the two $100 bills two, three times.  He muttered something about losers giving money to losers; then he thrust the money at her—the  Monopoly writing pointing in the same direction—and shouted, "Next!" looking around her for a winner in the line.
 

A rabble was gathered at the Wine line:  there was loud talk, an elbow in the ribs, a tweak and a slap, a squeal of greeting, raucous laughter, and from somewhere in the midst she heard Hatta's voice leading a chant for "More wine!"
 

"Hatta!" she shouted.  "If you're waiting for me, you'd better come on, because I'm not waiting for you!"

He caught up with her at Community Chest.  "I just thought you'd want an escort to Jail.  It's a tough crowd hangs out there."

"What makes you think I'm going to Jail?" Lorina said.
 

"You're part of the tough crowd."

Community Chest was a dismally cheerful place, its walls painted bright yellow with enormous childish flowers, its alternate yellow and orange plastic chairs holding people of miscellaneous miseries.  An old man sat in one corner with his head in his hands; next to him sat a huge woman trying not very hard to manage five small children.  Elsewhere an old woman conversed earnestly with someone invisible, and a proud young man would have no one think he needed to be there.
 

"Don't pay any attention to them," said Hatta.  "They're just props."

"How can you say that?" Lorina asked.  "Aren't they just as much people as we are?"
 

"I'm afraid you've confused our operation with your Mrs. Mousa's works of charity," replied a Monopoly man at the desk.  He peered at them over his glasses.  "Props are not in the game.  They exist simply to let the players know where they are and to illustrate the fate of those who lack the requisite achievement dynamics."  He began laying out the cards for a game of solitaire.  "Next," he said.
 

Lorina stepped forward, but Hatta rushed past.  "Don't be so impatient, Lorrie!  I'm still on my first roll, and you got here on your second set of doubles."
 

Without looking up from his solitaire game, which seemed to be made up not of hearts and spades, diamonds and clubs, but rather personal information typed in red and black ink, the Monopoly man flipped a card to Hatta.
 

Looking over his shoulder, Lorina read the words:

GO TO JAIL
Do not pass Go
Do not collect $200

A cop came through the door, grabbed Hatta by the shirt collar, and dragged him away.

 

"Lorrie!" Hatta shouted, his knuckles still clinging white to the door jamb,

"I'm innocent!  Get me a lawyer.  I'm inno . . .”

The card that the Monopoly man flipped to Lorina read

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE
(This card may be kept until needed or sold)

"Maybe my luck is changing," she said to herself as she closed the door behind her.

"Luck," came the cat's voice from somewhere, "is some people's nickname for the unknown."

She moved toward a sign:

ORIENTAL AVENUE

ACREAGE FOR SALE
ZONED RESIDENTIAL

PRICE $100

"I'll buy it," she said, looking around for the Monopoly man.

But instead from behind came a noise, the cop, loping along and slapping his thigh, "Woop!  Woop!  Woop!  Roooooooooo!  Pull over there!  Pull over!  You're under arrest."

"Arrested?  Whatever for?"

"Speeding," the cop said, "and conspiracy to commit vagrancy."
 

"Please, officer," she said. "I can't go to Jail now. I already have two of these baby blues, and if I get Oriental, I'll have a Monopoly . . .”
 

"If you think your baby blues are gonna keep you from taking the fall, schweethaat, you got it all wrong." The cop pulled her by the arm to Jail.

Marcus and Hatta were playing Monopoly in Jail.  They sat in half-broken chairs at a half-broken table with a half-empty bottle of wine between them making red rings on the Monopoly board. They drank from Styrofoam coffee cups. On a cot nearby slept a white-haired man with his face turned away, snoring loudly.

"Hey!" Hatta was saying as Lorina was shoved into the cell. "You can't get to Boardwalk like that!"

"Maybe not," Lorina said, "but can you think of a better way to get to Jail?”

The cat appeared suddenly, hovering about two feet above the table. "I have a secret passage."
 

"Rule 1," Marcus said, taking the Boardwalk deed.
 

"Mind if I sit down?" asked Lorina.
 

"I didn't hear you," Hatta replied.
 

"There's not another chair for you," the cat said.
 

The man on the cot let loose a trumpet of a snore.
 

"We'd have to pay him," Marcus said, pointing at the sleeping man, "if he owned anything."
 

Lorina sat on the cot next to the sleeping man. He rolled over and smacked his lips, smiling like a child with a messy ice cream cone. "It's Mr. Mousa," she said, standing up again in surprise. "What's he doing here?"
 

"Sleeping, of course," the cat said.
 

"OK," Marcus said, "I'm on the beach playing Frisbee. Try to get here before I leave for Free Parking."
 

"But I thought Mr Mousa doesn't play this game," Lorina said. "The Monopoly man

said . . .”
 

"He's not playing," the cat said. "He's sleeping."
 

"I roll a three," Hatta said.
 

"OK," Marcus said, drawing a map on the Monopoly board. "Let me get this straight. First you throw a three . . ."
 

"Dreaming sweet dreams about the bookstore," the cat said­­
 

"And I move your piece," Hatta said.

"—while in the back of the bookstore, he's dreaming nightmares about the game," said the cat.

"Right," Marcus replied.

"But he can't be in two places at once," Lorina said.

"Yes," Hatta said, "right at Free Parking and two places forward."

"He's not," the cat replied.  "The bookstore and the game are different chapters of the same story."
 

"What does your Chance say?" Marcus asked.
 

"Existing together in time, but serially in perception . . ."
 

Hatta held the card up to his ear.  "It can't talk.  It's just a piece of paper."
 

"—distinguishable, yet part of the whole."

Marcus jerked the card from Hatta's hand.  "Give me that!"  He read it aloud:  "Take a walk on the Board Walk!"
 

"You might even say that the bookstore and the game are one," the cat concluded.
 

"Let's make this interesting."  Marcus put two hotels on Boardwalk.
 

"But they're not." And it disappeared.
 

"Oops!" Hatta said, "fresh out of wine!" And he veered on past Boardwalk and stopped at Go.
 

"I like your method of getting to Boardwalk," Marcus said.  "I'll have to try it some time when it's not my turn."  He threw double fives.  "But for now, I think I'll visit the gray woman.  And don't be such a stranger, Lorrie," he said, leaving.
 

"Would you like to sit in?" Hatta asked Lorina.  "You can't have Marcus's hotel on Boardwalk though—you couldn't possibly have as plausible an explanation for it."
 

"Cop!" she cried.  "I've got a card that says I can get out of here!"

"Some Monopoly buddy you are!" Hatta shrieked.  "Treat me like a prop!  Try to show someone the ropes in this game and what do you get?  First chance for achievement, they make you a rung on the ladder."
 

The cop came smiling to the door.  "Always glad to see a reformed con. You'll find that the game goes easier when you stay on the smooth side of the law."

"I'll remember that," Lorina said.  "Thanks a million."  And from behind she could hear Hatta shouting, "Lorrie!  Don't leave me!  The isolation!  The alienation!  L'angoisse metaphysique!"

*     *     *    

Free Parking is the Sunday afternoon of Monopoly.  Every other square is caught up in transactions and analysis, the upside and the downside, the bull and the bear, the loss of profits and the prophets of loss; while every other square demands an adjustment to the balance sheet, Free Parking is a rest, a respite, a return to equilibrium.  In recognition of its archetypal richness, some players put sums of cash on the square, enough to break the
bank at times, at times enough to shatter the tenuous balance of the game. But upon arrival, when they truly arrive, these players find that the gray woman has confiscated their jackpot, and they are once again on an even keel with the rest of her customers.  So they order up a pot of one of her special teas—English paradox, Irony Mountain herb blend, or the exotic yin/yang tea, made of being and nothingness—and await their next turn in her tranquil cafe.
 

But Marcus, Hatta and Drumrouse were playing Monopoly in the gray woman's cafe, their noisy table like a pimple of disputation on the smooth face of Free Parking's serenity.  The cat lay perched at its point of observation in mid-air over the table.
 

"How did Hatta get here before I did?" Lorina asked.

"More wine," Marcus said, waving his glass at the gray woman.

"Yes, more wine," Hatta said.

"Shut up, Lorina," said Drumrouse.  "I'm on my way to Boardwalk."
 

"He didn't have to wait for a discourse on the meaning of Free Parking," the cat replied.
 

"First I throw the dice," Drumrouse said, and he did so – a twelve.
 

"These dice are loaded."  Hatta picked them up and inspected them.  "Gray Woman!  Sober dice over here!"
 

The gray woman came to their table and poured wine from a carafe.  "People who live entirely for the moment have no appreciation for discourses on the meaning of anything."
 

"Give me those!" Drumrouse snatched the dice away from Hatta.  "OK, a twelve takes me to . . ." and his face fell as he realized—“Go to Jail."
 

"Nor do those who judge their winning and losing by accidents of the game," the gray woman added.

"Happens to the best of us," Marcus said.

"That's true," said Hatta.

"Oh!" Drumrouse brightened with his idea. "And while I was playing Monopoly in Jail, I got 'Take a Walk on the Board Walk.' "

"This sounds familiar," said the cat.
 

"That's where it goes wrong," said Marcus.  "When it's your turn the rules change.  It's your turn, Lorrie."
 

"Wait," she said.  "First I want to ask a question."
 

"No," said Marcus, "you may take the move or take the question."
 

"Take the question!" shouted Hatta.  "Take the question!"
 

"Oh, all right," Lorina said.  "I'll move."
 

"I'd have taken the question," Marcus said, "but this may work out."

"No," said Lorina, putting down the dice. "I take the secret passage to Boardwalk."

Marcus and Hatta looked at each other, eyes wide as Buckwheat and Alfalfa's.  "The secret passage to Boardwalk!" they said together and looked back at her.

Lorina laughed in spite of herself.  "I can make up a rule as well as the next person."

"Actually," the gray woman said, "no one makes up rules."
 

"We'll see about that!" Drumrouse said.  He snatched up the deed to Boardwalk.  "Bring your money, Lorrie, because I owe you a rent hike!" And he was gone.
 

The gray woman cleared her throat.  "Actually," she repeated, "no one makes up rules.  They were established before the game began, both the elemental laws controlling the dice—gravity, friction, inertia . . ."
 

"I told you that you should have taken the question," Hatta said leaving, "and you should have made it a yes-or-no."

"—and the more complex laws determining the behavior of the players—greed,  pleasure, principle," said the gray woman.
 

Marcus, too, headed for the door.  "You'd better keep an eye on your jackpots, Gray Woman.  You know how they disappear when you start philosophizing."
 

The gray woman kept her eye on Lorina.  "And every move, whether prompted by the dice or by a player's whim, can only exercise a potentiality latent in the first word of the creation."
 

As she spoke, a rustle arose among her other customers.  They nudged each other and one by one rose silently, reached behind the counter, and pulled a handful of money from somewhere.  Then one by one they walked quietly to the door and slipped out, counting the bills and arranging them in ascending or descending numerical order with all the Monopoly writing pointing in the same direction.

"So, you wonder, if there's no such thing as chance, can there be such a thing as freedom?  If you mean by freedom, control over the events of the game, then it is illusion, and to live in illusion is not freedom."  She turned for dramatic effect, and the remaining customers hunched nonchalantly over their tea.

"But if by freedom you mean the opportunity to live with integrity in the character you did not choose for yourself, then you have that and more.  For even the author of your character must respect the personality that emerges from the words, or the work will be flawed and the effort wasted."
 

The cat, hovering over the table, purred contentedly, eyes half-closed.  It kept dozing off, and as if it required conscious effort to remain visible, it would fade away, then reappear with a start.
 

"The mystery of the game is that it is indeed real—and the bookstore is real, and you and I and the cat are real."  As if offering the ultimate disproof of her contention, the cat finally drifted away and disappeared entirely.  "It's a paper reality, but not such a bad reality for all that.
 

"We exist not for ourselves, and our winnings and losings are not our own, but for the benefit of those who perceive the paperness of our reality." She turned on her heel and walked to the counter.  "That's the secret of the game."  She pulled out a gallon jar, now empty, labeled

JACKPOT

and eyed it disgustedly.  "There is meaning even in Monopoly." She disappeared through the curtained door.

Lorina finished her wine and took the secret passage to Boardwalk.

*     *     *    

Lorina had never seen such a mob as the one at Boardwalk.  The sunbathers lay elbow to elbow, feet to shoulders, like mass-produced dolls set out to harden before hitting the market.  There must have been a hundred people in the volleyball game, and only the players closest to the net ever got their hands on the ball.  The others jumped spasmodically and cheered randomly, being mostly too crowded away from the net to know whose point was whose.  A multitude surrounded the tent with the sign on top that said

UNPUBLISHED WORDS OF SHAKESPEARE
READINGS HOURLY

But sounds were only feedback screeches and indistinct mutterings.  The tent with the sign

FOOD AND WINE

had already been demolished, and groups of scavengers ranged across the ruins, pulling out half-barbecued chickens and tossing them to the crowd or pulling out bottles of wine and chugging them, to the cheers and shouts of all. She finally found Marcus and Hatta playing Frisbee down the beach a way, the cat purring atop a beach umbrella.

"There's one thing I don't understand," she said to the cat.  "How do you know who has won?"

Marcus and Hatta answered at the same time:  "Who wants to win?" The cat said, "If you're still rolling, you're still in the game.  If you're sitting at the edge waiting for a break, you're still in the game.  If you think there's a chance of winning, or that you'd like to win if you could, you're still in the game. And in the game or out of the game is the only choice you ever really make."
 

Drumrouse came running up, his tie loosened and the end flipped back over his shoulder.  "Rent!" he shouted.

Marcus and Hatta continued to throw the Frisbee.

"Rent!" Drumrouse shouted.
 

Marcus and Hatta came together to confer.  "Did you hear something? Marcus asked.

"Just the voice of a lonely gnat," Hatta replied.

Drumrouse drew closer to them.  "I said RENT!" he shouted in Marcus's ear.

"A very large gnat," Marcus mused, "about the size of a chicken."
 

"Show us your deed," Hatta said.

Marcus took it from him.  "A rank forgery.  You swiped this from the gray woman's cafe."

"Besides," the cat said, hovering at about eye level in their midst, "Lorina took the secret passage from Free Parking.  She's got the property."

Mystified, she examined her holdings:  she had four mortgaged properties, North Carolina Avenue, $73, and, beneath the stack, the coveted blue Boardwalk.

"Uh, Lorina," Drumrouse began, "haven't I always been a thoughtful landlord, never bothered you about your cat."

"There's a lot of people here, Lorrie," Marcus said.  "You could get fifty from each of them."
 

"Not from me," Hatta said.  "I've lost every dime.  I guess I'll just have to sit here on the beach and play Frisbee till someone pays to learn my strategy."
 

Laughing like lunatics, Marcus and Hatta spread out to play Frisbee.
 

Drumrouse sidled away to join the crowd.
 

Lorina looked at the crowd.  "Fifty dollars from each of them," she said to the cat.
 

"Just like the chairman of the board," it replied.
 

"And then?"
 

"Take the money and buy hotels," the cat said.
 

"And?"
 

"Collect more rent, buy more hotels, collect more rent,  until everyone is sitting on the edge waiting for you to buy his strategy."
 

"Nobody really wins at this game then," she said.
 

"Sure," the cat replied, or rather its grin, for that's all that remained of it.  "The next time you pass Go, the Salary man will speak to you personally."
 

"How do I get out?" she asked.
 

"Your apartment is about three blocks from the waterfront."

*     *     *    
 

She woke at the sound of a thump, which turned out to be a Victorian children's book falling to the floor.  But her other hand held a crumpled blue $50 Monopoly bill.