The Cat That Wouldn't Sort

Soren had spent four days teaching the computer how to recognize his grandmother's cat.

The cat was named Pickle. Pickle was orange in some places, white in others, and gray where the orange and white had argued. Soren wanted the little program on the old laptop to look at a photo and say, yes, that is Pickle, or no, that is not.

He had done it the careful way. He had written rules. A rule for orange. A rule for the white chest. A rule for the notch in the left ear where Pickle had lost a fight with a fence years ago. A rule for the shape of the eyes, which were the color of weak tea.

He wrote each rule in his notebook first, then typed it in. Orange in the top third. White below. Notch on the left. Tea eyes. Every rule felt like a true thing he knew about Pickle that the computer did not.

"You are talking to it again," his grandmother said. She was making bread and did not look up. She found the laptop charming the way she found his rubber boots charming, as a fact of having a grandson.

"I'm teaching it," Soren said.

"Teach it to fetch the milk, then."

By the fourth day the program could find Pickle in a photo about half the time. Half. A coin could do half. Soren stared at the rules in his notebook and could not see which one was lying.

He took a photo of Pickle asleep, curled so tightly that the notched ear was tucked under a paw and the white chest was hidden. The program said no. Not Pickle. But it was Pickle. It was obviously, undeniably, sleeping Pickle.

Soren felt the trouble before he could name it. His rules described a cat sitting up, alert, facing the camera, in good light. They described the Pickle who had posed for the rules. They knew nothing about the Pickle who curled up, or stood in shadow, or turned away, or got rained on until the orange went dark.

There were too many Pickles. He had only written down one.

He could keep going. He could add a rule for sleeping, a rule for shadow, a rule for wet. He started to. He wrote, in the notebook, rule for curled. Then he stopped, because he understood that curled had a hundred shapes, and each shape would want its own rule, and behind every rule there would be a Pickle he had not imagined yet, waiting to be wrong.

That was the whole winter, suddenly. That was what the winter would be.

So he tried something lazy instead.

There was another kind of program on the laptop, one his cousin had left, that did not want rules. It only wanted examples. You showed it pictures and told it which were Pickle and which were not, and it figured out the rest by itself, and it never told you how. Soren had ignored it because it felt like cheating. It learned nothing the way he learned. It had no notebook. It could not say why.

He pointed it at his grandmother's photos.

There were a lot of photos. His grandmother had been taking pictures of that cat for years, every season, in the barn, on the snow, half asleep on the radiator, soaked and furious in the rain. Hundreds. Soren had never thought of them as anything but his grandmother being soft about a cat.

He sorted them. Pickle. Pickle. Not Pickle, that's the neighbor's gray one. Pickle. Pickle wet. Pickle in the dark. It took the whole evening and his eyes ached. He did not write a single rule. He just kept saying which was which, and the lazy program kept watching, and saying nothing.

Then he tested it on the sleeping photo, the curled one, the one that had beaten all four days of his careful rules.

Pickle, it said.

Soren sat very still.

He tried the wet one. Pickle. The one in shadow where you could barely see orange at all. Pickle. The one where Pickle was just a smug shape on the windowsill, ear tucked, eyes shut, every single one of Soren's rules invisible.

Pickle. Pickle. Pickle.

It was getting them. All the Pickles. The ones he had never managed to describe, the ones hiding behind the rules he hadn't written. And it had no rules at all. It had only looked at more cat than he ever had.

"Grandma," he said. "How does it know."

"How does what know," she said, sliding bread into the oven.

"It knows Pickle better than I do. And I'm the one who knows about the ear."

She wiped her hands. "You only ever saw the cat one room at a time," she said. "I've had thirteen years of him."

That was it. That was exactly it, and she didn't even know she'd said the thing. He had given the computer what he knew. She had, without meaning to, given it what she had seen, all of it, every soggy and curled and shadowed and smug season of one cat, and somewhere inside that pile the machine had found a Pickle bigger and truer than any rule.

Soren looked at his notebook. Four days. Orange in the top third. White below. Notch on the left. Tea eyes. Every line a true thing. Every line a wall he had built around the cat, and the cat had simply walked out of all of them, asleep. It did not feel like losing. It should have, after four days. It felt like the laptop had become a window, and on the other side was a room far larger than the kitchen, full of all the Pickles he would never have to describe, because something patient enough to look at enough of them could find the cat without him.

He wondered what else was like that. Faces. Voices. The shapes of clouds before rain. Everything he had ever tried to capture in a careful sentence and felt slip out the side. Maybe none of it needed his sentences. Maybe it only needed enough looking.

The oven ticked as it warmed. Pickle, the real one, walked into the kitchen, stepped over the laptop's cord, and curled up on the warm tile in a shape Soren had no rule for at all.

Soren took a photo of him.

Then he took another.

Then he kept taking them.