i. Explaining

It surprises me how many people don’t know there are
different planes of existence. Well, it’s not really surprising
that you don’t know if no one ever explained
it to you, so I will do that now. Imagine that you
live in a house that is all on one level: no upstairs,
no downstairs, no attic, no basement, no crawlspace
underneath. You live there, and you go in and out,
and everything seems normal. Now imagine that it is
really a three-story house, and you live on the second
floor, with people living above you and below you . . .
but you never know it! You never see the people living
above and below, you never hear them, you don’t
know anything about them—and they don’t know anything
about you. There are three families living in the
same place, at the same time, and each family thinks
they are the only one.
 It’s like that, only it’s not houses, it’s whole worlds.
And there is one other thing to imagine. Imagine the
three floors of the imaginary house all squashed together,
so it’s only one story again, but the people still have
no idea they are not alone. This part is tricky to imagine.
Let’s say you are in your bedroom, listening to
music, lying on your bed, and bouncing a rubber ball
offthe ceiling. At the same time, in the same space as
your bedroom, someone you can’t see or hear is giving
the dog a bath, and someone else you can’t see or
hear (and the dog-bather can’t see or hear) is preparing
vegetable soup.
 It gets more complicated. While you are bouncing
a ball offthe ceiling, and someone else is bathing
the dog, and someone else is making soup, a highway
with traffic is running right through your bedroom,
or there is a herd of buffalo wandering around, or
there’s a river with water and fish in it. All at once,
and all at the same time. But if you are in any of the
worlds all going on at once, it looks and feels to you
like there is only one.
 Now imagine this: sometimes it is possible to go
from one world to another. It’s really rare, but it does
happen. There you are bouncing a ball offthe ceiling,
and next thing you know you are in the middle of a
herd of buffalo. Or, if you were to catch a momentary
glimpse of someone from another plane of existence,
you’d probably mistake them for a ghost. I know about
all this—I myself came from another plane of existence
to this one.
 A skeptical person might think I was making all
this up, or that I was crazy if I believed it myself. Of
course, anyone can say she comes from another plane, or
planet, or that her mother is the queen of Cockadoodle
(which is not a real place, as far as I know). Well, it’s
true that I can’t absolutely prove I come from another
plane. However, if you go to the library and get ahold
of encyclopedias and National Geographics and certain
books, you can find an article with pictures of a typicallooking
Inuit, a typical-looking Northern European, a
typical-looking Mongolian, a typical-looking Bantu,
Korean, Australian, Moroccan, and so on . . . all different
types. All different in minor ways, and all similar in
most ways. It is interesting. What you will not find is
a picture of a girl with cat whiskers and sort of catlike
eyes. That is, until they take a picture of me.

ii. Where I’m From and Where I Was

Since practically nobody even suspects there are
other planes of existence, there would be no reason
to name the one you live on. Besides, if the one I came
from had a name, nobody on this one would have ever
heard of it. I lived in a city, an ordinary city, with my
uncle, Uncle Father Palabra. He’s a retired monk and a
professor of mountain-climbing. I don’t remember my
parents very well—they went away a long time ago.
I liked living with my uncle, and I was reasonably
happy, but for some reason I developed a strong desire
to travel to other places and see things. I met three
kids, Yggdrasil, Neddie, and Seamus, who had managed
to get offtheir plane and onto mine. We got to be
friends, and when they went home, I went with them.
My name is Big Audrey.
 Yggdrasil (or Iggy), Neddie, and Seamus live in
a city called Los Angeles. I stayed with them for a
long time, and I even got a job in an all-night doughnut
shop. Doughnuts are not unknown where I come
from, but they are not used as food. I had fun working
in the doughnut shop, and got to observe the many
varieties of life-forms that came there, especially late
at night.

iii. Where I Went

I went to Poughkeepsie, New York. I said goodbye to
my friends Iggy and Neddie and Seamus, and also to
Crazy Wig. Crazy Wig is a friend of theirs. He is a shaman,
which means he can see visions and knows things
of a mysterious nature. The first time I met Crazy Wig,
he grabbed my head with both hands, closed his eyes,
and made odd sorts of singing noises while continuing
to hold my head. Then he said, “Daughter, your destiny
is not here. You must travel. You must go on a
quest. You must go . . . the vision doesn’t say where,
but you have to go there.”
 A couple weeks later, Crazy Wig arranged for me
to go as a passenger with this movie actor he knew, a
guy by the name of Marlon Brando, who was driving
his car to New York, which is all the way on the other
side of the continent. I had been thinking I should see
more of this plane of existence than just Los Angeles
anyway, so I quit my job at the Rolling Doughnut,
threw my few belongings into a bag, and took off
with Marlon in his big convertible.
 Marlon was extremely handsome, and crazier
than a bat. He talked incessantly about health food and
played bongo drums while driving. He drove fast, and
we went nonstop. Marlon had plenty of fruit, wheat
germ, and bean curd in the trunk (and also a dozen
large chocolate cakes, which did not seem like health
food to me), so we never stopped at restaurants—just
to gas up the car. When he got tired, he’d pull over,
eat about half a chocolate cake, wash it down with
carrot juice, crawl into the back seat, and sleep for
a couple of hours. I’d curl up on the front seat with
my coat over me. I made it almost all the way to New
York City with him, but about the time we reached
Poughkeepsie, I’d had all I could stand and told him
I’d be staying there awhile. Marlon gave me a bottle
of papaya juice, wished me the best of luck, and bongoed
offin a cloud of dust. He was a nice guy, but he
got on my nerves.

Chapter 1

The UFO Bookshop

I woke up in my little room behind the shop, washed,
got the big electric coffee percolator started, and got
ready to open the shop. This had been my routine
since I first hit town. Mr. and Mrs. Gleybner had hired
me on the spot when I walked in the door, carrying
my bag and my bottle of papaya juice.
 “Oh! Look, dear!” Mrs. Gleybner, who was short
and round, said.
 “Oh! Yes, dear!” Mr. Gleybner, who was also short
and round, said.
 “You are just the employee we have been wishing
for,” Mrs. Gleybner said.
 “You will like working here,” Mr. Gleybner said.
 “Do you come from . . . a long way away?” Mrs.
Gleybner asked.
 “Yes. Los Angeles,” I said. “My name is Big
Audrey.”
 Mr. and Mrs. Gleybner looked at each other.
“Los Angeles, she says.” They smiled and nodded
knowingly.
 The UFO Bookshop specializes in books about flying
saucers, visitors from other planets, space travel,
aliens who live among us, radio messages from space,
and secret government conspiracies to conceal the truth
from the people. They also have books about the abominable
snowman, Bigfoot, crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle,
mystery spots where gravity works backwards,
secret cities underneath the surface of the earth, and
chickens who can foretell the future. They didn’t have
any books that told about other planes of existence,
but except for that it seemed they had plenty of stuff
that would appeal to intelligent people.
 The store also had a small selection of binoculars,
special notebooks with boxes printed on the pages for
noting characteristics of flying saucers you’d see, pens
that had a little flashlight built in, and cards with pictures
of different kinds of spaceships on one side and
different kinds of space beings on the other, for quick
identification. There was also the Gleybner Helmet,
which was something like a colander with wire spirals
sticking out of it and a chinstrap—this was to
enhance the reception of telepathic brainwaves from
the space people. Mr. Gleybner made them in the
basement.
 Naturally, the Gleybners had assumed I was an
extraterrestrial alien because of my appearance. I
tried to explain, but their minds were made up. They
wanted me to work for them, paid me the same as I
had gotten working at the Rolling Doughnut in Los
Angeles, and threw in the room in the back for me
to live in. I liked the store, and I liked them. Also,
once I got started working there, I found out that Mrs.
Gleybner brought delicious homemade sweeelves in
the morning, and wonderful soup for lunch. Suppertime,
they would send me to the delicatessen or the
Chinese restaurant, and we would eat at the table in
the back of the store.
 During the day, I would dust and vacuum, unpack
books, and wait on customers, and when nothing was
happening I could read. Mrs. Gleybner spent a good
part of each day visiting with other shopkeepers on
the street, and Mr. Gleybner would read, work at his
desk, and take naps in his rocking chair. There was a
store cat named Little Gray Man, and he and I got to
be very good friends.
 The best thing about working in the UFO Bookshop
was the customers.
 “The finest and most interesting people in all
Poughkeepsie come into this shop,” Mr. Gleybner
said.
 Of course, I did not know all the people in Poughkeepsie,
but the ones who came into our shop were
mostly very satisfying to observe and talk with.

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Excerpted from Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl by Daniel M. Pinkwater
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.