Victorious Retreat

I headed North.

I resisted the urge to turn around for one final look at Julia. I figured that she figured that tomorrow would be another day. 

As I neared the parking lot, I once again encountered General Lee, who was heading South. He was heading back towards the battle ground. Once again I saluted.

"I've been thinking about your cat story", said the General, "that must have been one bigass cat"

"I imagine it was"

General Lee straightened himself into his full height. Dude was tall.

I felt myself growing smaller.

"That fool dog must have made the mistake of getting between the big cat and her kittens. That strategic position is a must to avoid whether it's cats or humans; individuals or armies" observed Lee Roberts. "Sometimes, it's not the size of the dog in the fight or the size of the fight in the dog, it's the size of the fight in the cat in the dogfight"

"Cats are cats. Dogs are dogs. As a rule, they don't get along. Cats and dogs are not people" I saluted again looking to be discharged.

"That's right Johnny. We are the people" concluded Lee Roberts as he dismissively and somewhat doggedly returned my salute.

I'd heard that one somewhere before.

General Lee went South. I went North. I recaptured my car, put it into reverse and then pointed it towards my apartment.

By the time I got home, I was ready for some serious tube. I hit the couch, grabbed the remote and checked the guide. The Incredible Shrinking Man was going to start in five minutes. I locked in and flashed back.

When I was a baby, my parents got their first VCR. My folks had a lot of chores to do around the farm so I did a lot of solitary playpen time. They'd stash me in the pen, turn on the VCR and go about their business. Our VCR collection of movies consisted of two; King Kong and The Incredible Shrinking Man. I used to stand in my pen and watch those flicks over and over again. My parents tell me that by the time I was three, I must have seen each of those movies over a hundred times each.

As a matter of fact, as I was driving away from Julia and General Lee I did what I usually do when times get complicated, I started thinking about Scott Carey, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

I wondered what kind of vision Scott had. I wondered if Scott's wife could hear him yelling when she booted him down the cellar stairs. I understood once again, why cats are not my favorite animals. I recalled the terrifying strength of spiders.

I know a thing or two about eyes. I know that we need light to see. I know that the amount of light we recieve is determined by the size of our retina. When Scott Carey grew smaller, I assume that the size of his retina grew smaller in proportion to the rest of his dome. Otherwise, Scott would have been an eyeball, way beyond 'bulging', atop tiny legs scurrying around the floor. Scott's body would have been eighty percent eyeball  We would have had an even more horribly absurd movie, particularly if somehow during the scurry, the bulging eyeball with feet had blinded itself which under the circumstances was probably inevitable

I imagined an observer of the scurrying impaired eyeball watching as the miniscule monster ricocheted from wall to wall. "Oh, my God, what could be worse than to be just an eye" , the observer might say to his companion who might reply "well, it could be blind" which in this case it would have been

which wasn't of course

the case in the uh movie.

The case in the movie was that Scott had normally proportioned retinas about seventy times smaller than the retinas he had before he started shrinking which means that he was stumbling around with hardly any light flying through the pinhole of his retina. Just think how scary everything is in the semi-darkness, especially the blurry semi-darkness. Scott's blur was infinitely more dark and out of focus than any projector Julia might try to imagine. And Scott was older than twenty five.

Although there were a lot of loud noises.

Besides the cat and the spider and his wife's high heels, Scott had to deal with perpetual semi-darkness.

And as his vocal chords shrunk, his ability to generate sound waves also shrunk. I'm sure that Scott was screaming his head off at his wife before she kicked him down the stairs and equally sure that she couldn't hear a sound he was screaming which may have been just as well because with diminished hammer, anvil and stirrup, he wouldn't have been able to understand her reply  any more than we are able to make out the words in thunder.

Is Thunder really Godspeak for "it's raining".

Hmmm. 

This of course made me think about ants. Are they trying to yell something at us as we step on them? Are we huge, incomprehendible thunderhead blurs in a dark world trampling upon them even as they warn us about their homes and their children and the work that has to be done?

I think not. They're different from Scott Carey. They never shrank.

The movie started. I watched it again for the first time in at least ten years.

I realized how much I had grown.