For a week straight, cats were jumping out of windows and off balconies. Billy first heard about this watching the nightly news. Then he had first hand experience one afternoon, standing on his balcony with a joint in one hand and a finger nail file in the other. He had intended to take in the breathtaking view of Central Park from his condo. But as he leaned against the guard railing, a blue Siamese went sailing on down right before his eyes. If he had reached out in that moment, he could have caught it and probably been half scratched to death.
It was the same story all over Manhattan. From high rises everywhere, cats — usually Egyptian Maus, Angoras, various Siamese, Asheras, British Shorthairs, Persians, Russian Blues, Birmans and other exotic breeds typically owned by the rich and famous — were packing it in and committing suicide. Local newscasters would open their programs saying things like . . .
"It has been reported that so far today, eleven more cats have jumped to their deaths in the recent ongoing and inexplicable rash of feline suicides."
This bit of quirky and disturbing news was just the beginning of an array of bizarre, surreal, but seemingly unrelated happenings.
At first, these incidents — what could have been just pranks or silly bits of vandalism — made it onto page two or three of the papers, and got only passing get-a-load-of-this mention on broadcast news shows.
People on their way through Washington Square arrived early one day to find the fountain piled high with over two hundred wheelchairs. Some thought it was an art project.
Another day all of the parking meters in a twelve city-block area in Hells Kitchen jammed. None of the coinage could be recovered and all of the meters ultimately had to be replaced. This resulted in several weeks of free parking until the City finally got around to installing new ones.
One morning over half of the city's 4373 buses wouldn't start. The subways were completely jammed and taxis overtaxed. Half of the population of New York was late for work that day.
Then bizarre signs of what was characterized even in the conservative press as possible supernatural instability, metaphysical turbulence, collective chaos, the early-warning signs of social anarchy, and of course, possible political terrorism, starting cropping up all around.
Precisely at 10:00 am on an otherwise typical Monday, the workspaces disappeared off the screens of every single Citibank computer and a picture of John Lennon appeared. The caption below it read . . .
Imagine there's no future.
It took two days and the bank's best IT specialists and network administration guys to get the workstations functioning again.
That same week, on Saturday sometime after midnight, over 800 dogs showed up in Battery Park. They were a feisty bunch with serious territorial issues, and fought and barked and snarled at one another in a huge cacophonous street fight, before fanning out to terrorize the rest of the city. Several even made it as far as Rockefeller Center before being subdued by a small army of animal control officers from the NYC Department of Health plus on-duty extras pulled from the police and fire departments.
The next Tuesday a crew from the Department of Parks reported for groundskeeping duties and found both the Pond and the Lake in Central Park dyed bright red. They was so bright that a space shuttle mission reported being able to see the crimson patches from Earth orbit.
After a brief lull, the cat suicides started up again. This time the numbers were outrageous. One day alone, over fifty impaled themselves on the pavement below many of the most exclusive townhouses in New York's Upper East Side. It became national news.
The following weekend, all of the manhole covers in a sixty-seven square block section of the Upper East Side turned up missing. As rats emerged from the sewers and ran wild for the two weeks it took to fix the problem, fear of ankle bites and the spread of rabies and other diseases, panicked everyone from doormen to taxi drivers to the privileged denizens of the area. Contingency planning had not anticipated the simultaneous need for over a thousand manhole covers of various sizes.
Frankly, the rats were pretty happy about the cats falling from heaven. But humans were not so appreciative.
To put it mildly, there was a lot of tension in the air. While the first few incidences merely provided amusing stories for the closing segment of daily TV news programs — intended to balance with a closing smile the preceding grizzly accounts of murders, fires, rapes, political scandals, and showbiz gossip — as the weird reports kept coming and coming, they started to not seem so amusing anymore. People began to see the predictability, comfort and relative safety of their routines crumble and disintegrate, the basic comity of their lives now under assault by bizarre, seemingly random acts of sabotage, divine intervention, or maliscious misconduct.
Their initial curiosity turned to anxiety which quickly escalated into fear.
Public reassurances by the police, mayor and other city officials did little to dampen the paranoia that was building, and did a lot to undermine their own credibility and what shred of confidence the public might have in them.
Privately these same officials were frustrated and angry that their best minds, investigative machinery, and spin doctors couldn't seem to get a leg up on whoever was responsible for the mischief and chaos.
The feeding frenzy by the media, always hungry for something sensational to top yesterday's story, kept stirring the pot, and appetites for the latest news of the debacles remained high.
The less reputable but more entertaining rags, like the Post and Daily News, ramped up talk about paranormal forces, possible space aliens that had assumed human form, and even offered pious speculation about the beginning of the End Days as prophesied in Revelations.
More sensible commentators rightly attributed what was happening to human misconduct and characterized it as some sort of low grade terrorism, either by random, unaffiliated troublemakers, or — and this had the authorities concerned and anxious — by some single army of provocateurs who had yet to make their agenda and demands public.
A lot of speculation and finger-pointing went on. Interestingly, no one got it right.
No one took seriously the two-bit ersatz guru from the East Village and his small troop of wily and dedicated street soldiers — a scruffy, unimposing lot at best.
Which was perfect.
He wanted to keep them guessing.
The most valuable weapon in guerilla warfare?
Invisibility.
John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter and music producer, and a left-of-left liberal. Prompted by the trauma of graduating high school and having to leave his beloved city of Detroit to attend university, the development of his social skills and world view were arrested at about age eighteen. This affliction figures prominently in all of his creative work. He is author of two full-length novels, From Thailand With Love and The Man Who Loved Too Much. He is currently living in Japan. "Guerilla Warfare" was previously published in This Mutant Life (Australia).