The Adventures of Jasper, A Nashville Cat

Tyger cupped her little front paws around her muzzle to project her meow and shouted, “Spread out your paws! Let the current take you until you feel ground beneath you!” Tyger shouted it again. Jasper was helpless. The surge of water grabbed him like so many rough hands. Spun him, dunked him hard all the way down to the pavement, tearing off a clump of fur on his right front leg, soaking his whole head and blurring his vision. He bobbed up. He swallowed a mouthful of awful flood water. It tasted like a road. Wheezed it out. Coughed. Choked. He tried to clear his eyes but he couldn’t wipe his eyes with his paws because his paws were busy learning how to swim, to keep him afloat, to keep his head above water.  His tail felt heavy and dead. The whole world became dark and blurry. He shook his head, but the rippling, swirling current pulled him under again and again. He heard his mother’s words, spread out your paws. He stretched them into paddles and began paddling. The rain continued. The only sound was rushing water. Buildings flew by. Lights dazzled his blurry vision. Jasper spun around and around. He was moving at a sickening pace. Swept away from his home and everything he knew.

The river branched and he flew off to the right, barreled into and across lower Broadway where cars tried to ford the newly formed river in an intersection. One car was stopped, stalled right in the middle. The water higher than the car’s tires. A human was on the car’s hood, helplessly, waving his arms in the rain. Jasper kept paddling but he was getting tired. His fur was soaked and heavy, pulling him down like a full set of wet clothes. Debris bobbed and swooshed around him. A coffee cup, a plastic shopping bag that almost got tangled on his back paws, a dirty beer bottle bobbed, a plastic milk jug, a Red Bull can, sticks, leaves,  and even small branches. At one point in the gleam of some street light he thought he saw that small black and white mouse riding a cigar box raft, hanging on for dear life. And then it was gone in the dark. Thoughts about giving up, closing his eyes and going under began to peck at him. He wanted to rest. He wanted to stop, but the river had different ideas for Jasper. Once or twice he felt one of his paws scrape hard on the roadway beneath him, but the current was too strong to get any kind of real footing.

Then, in what can only be described as a complete fluke—a 1 in 10,000,000,000 chance of happening—happened. The very moment that Jasper floundered in the swift current beneath an electrical pole transformer, a bolt of lightning struck it. The transformer blew up and a shower of sparks like shooting stars cascaded down all over Jasper and extinguished in the rushing black water. Simultaneously an invisible electromagnetic laser beam of high voltage grounded down to the manhole cover on the street as Jasper passed over it. It all happened in a millisecond. Over that iron manhole cover Jasper’s heart stopped and restarted from the electrical shock. His death and rebirth happened so quickly he barely had time to notice. More importantly, and consequentially, the electrical charge surged directly through his open eyes and into the occipital lobe of his brain heating it instantly to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit. If you don’t know what the occipital lobe does, it is the part of the brain that controls the cat’s visual system through the optic nerves. That heat radiated into the Parietal Lobe, better known as the that region of the brain that detects prey and the subtle movements that prey might make. Next, that heat radiated to the entire Cerebrum, which is the region of the cat’s brain that is the center for rational thought, learning, emotions, problem-solving, and both short-and long-term memory. From there the electrical surge bounced down to his pituitary gland at the base of his brain. Due to the heat the cells in the occipital lobe launched into an electrical overdrive, crackling along all the nerves like a live wire. The blistering heat welded together a diverse group of Jasper’s brain regions that now would all work together in ways that they never had. Instead of separate regions each doing a different job, they became one new large region doing something a brain never did, the occipital lobe dominating the other regions. At the base of his brain, the small glad that controls growth hormones, also heated unnaturally, glowed like an ember. His new power of second vision would come in the following days. His unusual growth would occur over the next months. Luckily, the flood water was cold enough that his skull cooled relatively quickly, for that kind of heat could have swelled his brain fatally within minutes.

In that moment when Jasper was clinically deceased, his little heart stilled—if only for a moment, but think of it—a moment of death can stretch out like an unexplored universe—and indeed, as one of Shakespeare’s famous characters imagined death as “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” the little cat did go to a new land. Jasper’s brain created an explanation of what he saw and experienced. If even just a millisecond. A blurry street pavement passing below him. Then the ultra-white light from lightning so bright, coupled with the motion of the speedy current made that light feel like falling into that brilliance—so bright you can’t see anything except white and feel the speed of your traveling body to no where. It felt like infinity. That was the vision of death that Jasper saw; and Jasper was allowed to return from death.

The electromagnetic surge and heat changed him on a molecular level, creating in him a sixth sense. The second vision would allow him to see things that have happened, kind of like an instant replay on TV. Technically, the vapors from the energy of an action lingered as invisible particles in the very air—that the action itself continued to exist in an unseen dimension that only Jasper’s new vision allowed him to see. What’s more, there was something that Jasper could never quite figure out over the years: sometimes those very particles of energy would rearrange themselves into an image that was metaphoric—kind of how images in sleep’s dreams can have meaning. As he would discover over the following weeks and months and years, those invisible particles that he could see, might be as old as time, or as recent as minutes ago. More than that, the vision revealed truths that are hidden in plain sight, sort of like insight on a higher level. His second vision would be a gift and a curse.

And even though he was changing inside, the rushing current carried him further from home. Passing buildings became passing houses, unknown streets, darkness. An occasional street light illuminating a wild night. Rain and wind. Lightning lit up the world from time to time and thunder crashed. The night had come down like a cloak of chaos. Paddling and paddling. Swirling. Going under. Choking on the water. Something heavy bumped him on his right shoulder in the darkness. Passing under a streetlight he saw that it was a floating plank of  thick pine wood. He reached out a very heavy paw and dug his claws into the wood. “If only I could get on that board,” he thought. With all of his might, he pulled it closer with his right front paw, paddling with only three paws, meanwhile the raging current picking up pace—now downhill, now turning in its course. “One, two, and three!” Jasper grabbed the board with both front paws and hauled himself up! Now standing on that piece of pine wood Jasper was surfing down some street in Nashville, but before he could celebrate, he heard another sound—a sound like some maniac monster eating its dinner.

Ahead the noise was a voice. A creature. A storm drain whirlpool where so much of this water was whooshing down into the underground. It was swirling counter clockwise in a huge spiral. The current picked up speed, his little ship raced toward the mouth, circled, and just as it pointed into the black frothing hole, just as the plank pointed down into the ground, Jasper leaped—leaped high, far and long. He hit soft muddy earth first with his left shoulder and rolled onto some soggy, muddy grass, and there he laid, his fur all matted down. The rain pelting him relentlessly. He must have looked positively dead—shipwrecked and washed up on some foreign shore. He was so exhausted he couldn’t move for a minute.

Then he came around, knew he couldn’t just stay there. He managed to stand, his whole body shaking with the cold, with exhaustion. When he blinked he saw shooting stars. He staggered to his feet. Shook out his soaked fur. He felt like he had survived a war. Jasper looked around in the dark and rain. Nothing was familiar. The landscape was drenched. He was drenched. The cold front dropped the temperature. It was night. And Jasper was lost.