Cat's Pajamas

by James Morrow

  Near dawn a bulky man in a white smock waddled into the chapel and introduced himself as Gregor Croom, chief among the surgeons who’d operated on Mina. Dr. Croom was perhaps the most physically unappealing person Bruno had ever met. A great mass of superfluous tissue clung to his upper spine, forcing him into a stoop. Mounds of overlapping flab drooped from the sides of his face, so that his tiny black eyes suggested raisins embedded in a pudding.

  The surgeon spoke clinically, phlegmatically. They’d stopped the bleeding, he said, internal and external, and her vital signs were stable—but she’d lost massive quantities of irreplaceable neural matter. It was doubtful that she would ever again move her limbs of her own volition. In all likelihood the bullet had excised her ability to speak.

  “I wept,” Bruno said, finishing his tea. Leni’s errant tail slapped his knee. “I wept like a baby.”

  “Dear Lord,” I said. “My poor Mr. Pearl.”

  Dr. Croom’s demeanor underwent an abrupt transformation. His manner grew gentle, his voice mellifluous. Locking a gnarled hand around Bruno’s wrist, he confessed that he was as steadfast an apostle as the sex artists would ever know, proud owner of ninety-eight Bruno and Mina tapes of dubious provenance. His failure to foresee and attend that afternoon’s concert in Fairmount Park would haunt him for years to come.

  “Please know I shall do all within my power to return Mina to the eros circuit,” Dr. Croom told the despairing Bruno. “My expertise lies wholly at your disposal, free of charge.”

  “Are you saying…there’s hope?”

  “More than hope, Mr. Pearl. A cure.”

  As the anemic light of dawn washed over Philadelphia, Dr. Croom told Bruno how he had recently perfected a new, audacious, auspicious—and untested—method for rehabilitating victims of neural trauma. He freely revealed that his colleagues had no faith in the technique, and he admitted that it lay outside the bounds of orthodox medical practice. The pioneering experiment would occur in Croom’s private laboratory, which he maintained in the basement of his Chestnut Hill mansion.

  “The doctor proposed to employ a unique genetic-engineering technology,” Bruno told me, massaging Leni with extravagant strokes that began at her nose and continued to the end of her tail. “His desire was to create an embryo bearing Mina’s precise genetic heritage. He would then accelerate the fetus’s development through hormonal manipulation, so that it would become an infant within seven days, an adolescent within five weeks, and a woman of thirty-six years—Mina’s age—in a matter of months. The result, he promised me, would be an exact biological duplicate of my wife.”

  “But it would not be a duplicate,” I protested. “It would have none of her experiences, none of memories.”

  “You may be sure that I presented this objection to Dr. Croom. His answer astonished me.”

  The doctor told Bruno about a heuristic computer, the JCN-5000-X. Among the machine’s several spectacular functions was an ability to scan a person’s cerebrum, encode the totality of its electrochemical contents, and insert these byzantine files into the tabula rasa that is the nervous system of a genetically-engineered, hormonally-accelerated human replica. In Croom’s view, a complete restoration of Mina was entirely feasible, for the bullet had damaged her brain’s motor and autonomic areas only—the very motor and autonomic areas that the hypothetical duplicate would boast in full. With the exceptions of certain trivial skills and some useless bits of nostalgia, the facsimile Mina would enjoy a selfhood identical to that possessed by the original before the bullet arrived.

  “Look at me, Mr. Pearl,” Dr. Croom said. “Contemplate my ugliness. What woman would have this walrus for her lover? And yet, thanks to you and your wife, I have known many a sybaritic satisfaction.”

  Bruno grew suddenly aware of the pain throbbing in his palm. “This person you’re proposing to create… would it truly be Mina—Mina restored, Mina reborn—or would it be… somebody else?”

  “I’m not a philosopher,” Dr. Croom replied. “Neither am I a theologian nor a sage. I’m a cyberneurologist with a mission. Sanction this procedure, I beg you. For the sake of art—for the sake of all the world’s freaks and Quasimodos—allow me to resurrect your wife.”

  Bruno requested a second mug of tea. I retired to the kitchen, brewed the oolong, and, upon handing him his replenished mug, voiced my opinion that the duplicate Mina Pearl and the original Mina Pearl would be exactly the same person.

  He scowled.

  “You disagree?” I said.

  “Imagine, sweet Susan, that you have faithfully recorded your every memory, belief, dream, hope, and habit in some massive journal. Call it The Book of Susan. Each time you finish making the day’s entry, you store the volume on a high shelf in your private library. After your death, the executor of your will—a cousin, let’s say—decides to browse among your bookshelves. She spies The Book of Susan, stretches for it, dislodges it. Suddenly the volume falls heavily on her head, rendering her unconscious. Five hours later, the executor awakens—as a total amnesiac. She notices the open book in front of her and immediately starts to read it. Her empty mind is like a sponge, absorbing every one of your recorded experiences. Now, dear Susan. Here’s the question. At the precise moment when your cousin finishes reading the book and rises from the library floor, have you been reborn?”

  “Reborn?”

  “Take all the time you want,” he said.

  “Of course I haven’t been reborn,” I said.

  “Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  “And so you refused to let Dr. Croom carry out his experiment?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  Bruno scratched Leni behind the ears. “I told him he could proceed—proceed with my blessing… provided he acceded to one extreme condition. He must also make a duplicate of me, someone to look after the original Mina, nourishing her, cleaning her, caressing her, while my real self again joined the circuit.”

  “And Croom agreed?”

  Bruno nodded. “The man was a romantic.”

  Like most other Bruno and Mina enthusiasts, I had often wondered about the one-year hiatus in their career. Had they become ill? Grown weary of the circuit? Now the riddle was solved. Throughout his absence Bruno had occupied a motel on the outskirts of Philadelphia—the first time he had ever settled in one place for more than a week—caring for his frightened, aphasic, and largely paralyzed wife.

  He fed her three meals a day, changed her diapers faithfully, and spent many hours reading poetry and fiction aloud in her presence. Despite the lost neurons, Mina retained a modicum of control over her dominant hand, and she managed to compose, at least twice a week, a letter filled with ardor and appreciation. The effort depleted her, and her script bordered on the illegible, but it was obvious from these exchanges that the primal Mina was no zombie. She knew what had happened to her. She understood that her doppelgänger was growing in a Chestnut Hill basement. She realized that a duplicate Bruno would soon replace the loving husband who attended her, so that he might go forth and again practice his art.

  “Did Mina approve?” I asked.

  “She said she did,” Bruno replied. “I was skeptical, naturally, but her letters evinced no feelings of betrayal. Whenever I suggested that she was telling me what I wanted to hear, she became angry and hurt.”

  Nine months after the bullet ruined Mina’s brain, Dr. Croom summoned Bruno to his ramshackle laboratory and presented him not only with a facsimile of the artist’s wife but also with his own artificial twin.

  “I can’t tell you which phenomenon amazed me more”—Bruno finished his second mug of tea—“seeing and speaking with Mina’s replica, or interviewing my second self.”

  “Credible copies?” I asked.

  “Perfect copies. And yet I kept wondering: if this was Mina, then who was that person back in my hotel room? I wholly admired the duplicate. You might even say I cherished her. Did I love her? Perhaps. I don’t know. My mind was not on love that day.�
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  And so Bruno hit the road once more, coupling with the forged Mina in forty-two parks—famous and obscure, metropolitan and suburban, Old World and New—over the course of a full year. It was one of their most successful tours ever, drawing unqualified accolades from the critics even as audiences presented the artists with vast quantities of applause, adulation, and cash.

  “But the new Mina—the Mina duplicate—what did she make of all this?” I asked.

  “She didn’t like to talk about it. Whenever I broached the subject, she offered the same reply, ‘My life is my art,’ she said. ‘My life is my art.’”

  While Bruno and the new Mina pursued the eros circuit, their shadow halves—the doppelgänger Bruno and the damaged Mina—journeyed to the south of France, moving into a farmhouse outside of Nîmes. No member of this odd quartet took much joy in the arrangement, but neither did anyone despair. Never before in human history, Bruno speculated, had irreversible brain injury been so cleverly accommodated.

  “But cleverness, of course, mere cleverness—it’s an ambiguous virtue, no?” Bruno said to me. “After pursuing Dr. Croom’s ingenious scheme a mere fourteen months, I felt an overwhelming urge to abandon it.”

  “Because it was clever?”

  “Because it was clever and not beautiful. Everything I knew, everything I held dear, had become false, myself most especially. The Book of Bruno had lost its poetry, and instead there was only correct punctuation, and proper spelling, and subjects that agreed with their verbs.”

  Bruno Pearl, the falsest thing of all, the man with the glass eyes, wooden teeth, crepe hair, and putty nose. He could enact his passion for Mina, but he could not experience it. He could enter her body, but not inhabit it. The flawless creature in his arms, this hothouse orchid, this unblemished replica who wore his wife’s former face and spoke in her previous voice—nowhere in her flesh did he sense the ten million subtle impressions that had accrued, year by year, decade by decade, to their collective ecstasy.

  “The skin is wise,” he told me. “Our tissues retain echoes of every kiss and caress, each embrace and climax. Blood is not deceived. Do you understand?”

  “No,” I said. “Yes,” I added. “I’m not sure. Yes. Quite so. I understand, Mr. Pearl.”

  I did.

  Shortly after a particularly stunning concert in Luxembourg Gardens, Bruno and the duplicate Mina drove down to Nîmes, so that the four of them might openly discuss their predicament.

  The artists gathered in the farmhouse kitchen, the primal Mina resting in her wheelchair.

  “Tell me who you are,” the primal Bruno asked the counterfeit.

  “Who am I?” the forged Bruno said.

  “Yes.”

  “I ponder that question every day.”

  “Are you I?” the primal Bruno asked.

  “Yes,” the forged Bruno replied. “In theory, yes—I am you.”

  “I was not created to be myself,” the facsimile Mina noted.

  “True,” the primal Bruno said.

  “I was created to be someone else,” the facsimile Mina said.

  “Yes,” the primal Bruno said.

  “If I am in fact you,” the forged Bruno asked, “why do I endure a meaningless and uneventful life while the world lays garlands at your feet?”

  “I need to be myself,” the facsimile Mina said.

  “I hate you, Bruno,” the forged Bruno said.

  The primal Mina took up a red crayon and scrawled a tortured note, SET THEM FREE, she instructed her husband.

  “The right and proper course was obvious,” Bruno told me. “My twin and I would trade places.”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding.

  “I told my doppelgänger and the duplicate Mina that if they wished to continue the tour, I would respect and support their decision. But I would never do Sphinx Recumbent or any other act in public again.”

  Bruno was not surprised when, an hour before their scheduled departure from Nîmes, the replicas came to him and said that they intended to pursue their careers. What else were they supposed to do? Performance intercourse was in their bones.

  For nearly five years, the duplicates thrived on the circuit, giving pleasure to spectators and winning plaudits from critics. But then the unexpected occurred, mysterious to everyone except Mina and Bruno and their doubles—and perhaps Dr. Croom comprehended the disaster as well. The ersatz copulators lost their art. Their talent, their touch, their raison d’être—all of it disintegrated, and soon they suffered a precipitous and inevitable decline. Months before the automobile accident, audiences and aestheticians alike had consigned these former gods to history.

  “Naturally one is tempted to theorize that the Citroën crash was not an accident,” Bruno said.

  “The despair of the fallen idol,” I said.

  “Or, if an accident, then an accident visited upon two individuals who no longer wished to live.”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” I said.

  “But if they deliberately ran their car into that concrete wall, I suspect that the reason was not their waning reputation. You see, lovely Susan, they didn’t know who they were.”

  A fat, sallow, October moon shone into my apartment. It was nearly ten o’clock. Bruno gently dislodged Leni from his lap, then rose from my wing chair and requested that I lead him home. Naturally I agreed. He shuffled into the kitchen, reassembled his wallet, and slid it into his back pocket.

  Gathering up Bruno’s clothes, still damp, I dumped them into a plastic garbage bag. I told him he was welcome to keep Craig’s dungarees, everything else too. I gave him Anson’s boiled wool coat as well, then escorted him to the door.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Warm,” he said, slinging the plastic bag over his shoulder. Leni pushed against Bruno’s left leg, wrapped herself around his calf. “Restored.”

  Retrieving my motorcycle jacket from the peg, I realized that I still felt protective toward my charge: more protective, even, then when I’d first pulled him from the Hudson. As we ventured through the city, I insisted on stopping before each red traffic light, even if no car was in sight. Noticing an unattended German shepherd on the sidewalk ahead, I led us judiciously across the street. Finally, after a half-hour of timid northward progress, we reached 105 Willow Avenue.

  Removing his keys from Craig’s dungarees, Bruno proceeded to enact a common ritual of modern urban life—a phenomenon fully documented in the Kaleidoscope video called Safe City Living. Guided by my fingertips, he ascended the stoop, opened the lock on the iron gate, unlatched the main door, climbed one flight of stairs, and, finally, let himself into his apartment.

  “Darling, I want you to meet someone,” Bruno said, crossing the living room.

  Mina Pearl sat in a pool of moonlight. She wore nothing save a wristwatch and a jade pendant. Her bare, pale skin gleamed like polished marble. A fanback wicker chair held her twisted body as a bamboo cage might enclose a Chinese cricket.

  “This is Susan Fiore,” Bruno continued. “As unlikely as it sounds, I fell off the ferry tonight, and she rescued me. I lost my glasses.”

  Mina worked her face into the semblance of a smile. She issued a noise that seemed to amalgamate the screech of an owl with the bleating of a ewe.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Pearl,” I said.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to sign up for swimming lessons,” Bruno averred.

  As I came toward Mina, she raised her tremulous right hand. I clasped it firmly. Her flesh was warmer than I’d expected, suppler, more robust.

  She used this same hand to gesture emphatically toward Bruno—a private signal, I concluded. He opened a desk drawer, removing a sheet of cardboard and a felt-tip marker. He brought the implements to his wife. THANK YOU, Mina wrote. She held the message before me.

  “You’re welcome,” I replied.

  Mina flipped the cardboard over, PAN AND SYRINX, she wrote.

  For the second time that evening, Bruno shed all hi
s clothes. Cautiously, reverently, he lifted his naked wife from the wicker chair. She jerked and twitched like a marionette operated by a tipsy puppeteer. As her limbs writhed around one another, I thought of Laocoön succumbing to the serpents. A series of thick, burbling, salivary sounds spilled from her lips.

  Against all odds, Mina and Bruno connected. It took them well over an hour, but eventually they brought Pan and Syrinx to a credible conclusion. Next came a two-hour recital of Flowering Judas, followed by an equally protracted version of Sphinx Recumbent.

  The lovers, sated, sank into the couch. My applause lasted three minutes. I said my good-byes, and before I was out the door I understood that no matter how long I lived or how far I traveled, I would never again see anything so beautiful as Bruno and Mina Pearl coupling in their grimy little Willow Avenue apartment, the pigeons gathering atop the window grating, the traffic stirring in the street below, the sun rising over Hoboken.

  MARTYRS OF THE UPSHOT KNOTHOLE

  I SIT IN THE comfort of my easy chair, the cat on my lap, the world at my command. With my right index finger I press the button, and seconds later the hydrogen bomb explodes.

  The videocassette in question is Trinity and Beyond, a documentary by Peter Kuran comprising two hours of restored footage shot in full color by the U.S. Air Force’s 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, “The Atomic Cinematographers.” I am watching the detonation of February 28, 1954: Castle Bravo, fifteen megatons, in its day the largest atmospheric thermonuclear test ever conducted on planet Earth.

  Red as the sun, the implacable dome of gas and debris expands outward from ground zero, suggesting at first an apocalyptic plum pudding, then an immense Santiago pilgrim’s hat. The blast front flattens concrete buildings, tears palm trees out by the roots, and draws a tidal wave from the Pacific. Now the filmmakers give us a half-dozen shots of the inevitable mushroom cloud. I gaze into the roiling crimson mass, reading the entrails of human ingenuity.