Chapter I - THE COMMITTEE FOR AESTHETIC DELETIONS
I woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not.
I closed my eyes and tried to pull myself together--hook "now" to my memory of last night.
No good. There wasn't any "last night". My last clear memory was of being a passenger in a Burroughs irrelevancy bus, bound for New Liverpool, when there was a loud bang, my head hit the seat in front of me, then a lady handed me a baby and we started filing out the starboard emergency exit, me with a cat in one arm and a baby in the other, and I saw a man with his right arm off--
I gulped and opened my eyes. A stranger in my bed was better than a man bleeding to death from a stump where his right forearm ought to be. Had it been a nightmare? I fervently hoped so.
If it was not, then what had I done with the baby? And whose baby was it? Maureen, this won't do. Mislaying a baby is inexcusable.
"Pixel, have you seen a baby?" The cat stood mute and a plea of not guilty was directed by the court.
My father once told me that I was the only one of his daughters capable of sitting down in church and finding that I had sat on a hot lemon meringue pie. . . anyone else would have looked. (I had looked. But my cousin Nelson-- Oh, never mind.)
Regardless of lemon pies, bloody stumps, or missing babies, there was still this stranger in my bed, his bony back toward me -- husbandly rather than loverly. (But I did not recall marrying him.)
I've shared beds with men before, and with women, and wet babies, and cats who demand most of the bed, and (once) with a barbershop quartet. But I do like to know with whom I am sleeping (just an old-fashioned girl, that's me). So I said to the cat, "Pixel, who is he? Do we know him?"
"No-o-o-o."
"Well, let's check." I put a hand on the man's shoulder, intending to shake him awake and then ask where we had met -- or had we?
His shoulder was cold.
He was quite dead.
This is not a good way to start the day.
