Cat's Pajamas

by James Morrow

  Although my vanity took a certain satisfaction in Maxwell’s words, I realized that I’d lost the thread of his logic. “At the risk of sounding disingenuously modest, I’d have to say I’m not a particularly ethical individual.”

  “Even if a person inherits QZ-11-4, it doesn’t necessarily enjoy expression. And even if the gene enjoys expression”—Maxwell offered me a semantically freighted stare—“the beneficiary doesn’t always learn to use his talent. Indeed, among Dr. Pollifex’s earliest discoveries was the fact that complete QZ-11-4 actualization is impossible in a purely human species. The serum—we call it Altruoid—the serum reliably engenders ethical superiority only in people who’ve been genetically melded with domesticated birds and mammals.”

  “You mean—you used to be… human?”

  “For twenty years I sold life insurance under the name Lewis Phelps. Have no fear, Blake. We are not harvesting your cerebrum in vain. I shall employ my Altruoid allotment to bestow great boons on Greenbriar.”

  “You might fancy yourself a moral giant,” I told the bull man, “but as far as I’m concerned, you’re a terrorist and a brain thief, and I intend to bring this matter to the police.”

  “You will find that strategy difficult to implement.” Maxwell left his piano and, walking upright on his hooves, approached my library cart. “Pollifex Farm is enclosed by a barbed-wire fence twelve feet high. I suggest you try making the best of your situation.”

  The thought of punching Maxwell in the face now occurred to me, but I dared not risk uprooting my arteries and spinal cord. “If Pollifex continues pilfering my cortex, how long before I become a basket case?”

  “Never. The doctor happens to be the world’s greatest neurocartographer. He’ll bring exquisite taste and sensitivity to each extraction. During the next three years, you’ll lose only trivial knowledge, useless skills, and unpleasant memories.”

  “Three years?” I howled. “You bastards plan to keep me here three years?”

  “Give or take a month. Once that interval has passed, my peers and I shall have reached the absolute apex of vertebrate ethical development.”

  “See, Blake, they’ve thought of everything,” said Vickie. “These people are visionaries.”

  “These people are Nazis,” I said.

  “Really, sir, name calling is unnecessary,” said Maxwell with a snort. “There’s no reason we can’t all be friends.” He rested an affirming hand on my shoulder. “We’ve given you a great deal of information to absorb. I suggest you spend tomorrow afternoon in quiet contemplation. Come evening, we’ll all be joining the doctor for dinner. It’s a meal you’re certain to remember.”

  My new bride and I passed the night in our depressing little cottage beside the windmill. Much to my relief I discovered that my sexual functioning had survived the bilateral hemispherectomy. We had to exercise caution, of course, lest we snap the vital link between medulla and cord, with the result that the whole encounter quickly devolved into a kind of slow-motion ballet Vickie said it was like mating with a china figurine, the first negative remark I’d heard her make concerning my predicament.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, one of Karl’s human-headed sheep entered the bedroom, walking upright and carrying a wicker tray on which rested two covered dishes. When I asked the sheep how long she’d been living at Pollifex Farm, her expression became as vacant as a cake of soap. I concluded that the power of articulation was reserved only to those mutants on an Altruoid regimen.

  The sheep bowed graciously and left, and we set about devouring our scrambled eggs, hot coffee, and buttered toast. Upon consuming her final mouthful, Vickie announced that she would spend the day reading two scientific treatises she’d received from Maxwell, both by Dr. Pollifex: On the Mutability of Species and The Descent of Morals. I told her I had a different agenda. If there was a way out of this bucolic asylum, I was by-God going to find it.

  Before I could take leave of my wife, Karl himself appeared, clutching a black leather satchel to his chest as a mother might hold a baby. He told me he deeply regretted Wednesday’s assault—I must admit, I detected no guile in his apology—then explained that he’d come to collect the day’s specimen. From the satchel he removed a glass-and-steel syringe, using it to suck up a small quantity of anterior cortex and transfer it to a test tube. When I told Karl that I felt nothing during the procedure, he reminded me that the human brain is an insensate organ, nerveless as a stone.

  I commenced my explorations. Pollifex’s domain was vaster than I’d imagined, though most of its fields and pastures were deserted. True to the bull man’s claim, a fence hemmed the entire farm, the barbed-wire strands woven into a kind of demonic tennis net and strung between steel posts rising from a concrete foundation. In the northeast corner lay a barn as large as Maxwell’s concert hall, and it was here, clearly, that Andre Pollifex perpetuated his various crimes against nature. The doors were barred, the windows occluded, but by staring through the cracks in the walls I managed to catch glimpses of hospital gurneys, surgical lights, and three enormous glass beakers in which sallow, teratoid fetuses drifted like pickles in brine.

  About twenty paces from Pollifex’s laboratory, a crumbling toolshed sat atop a hill of naked dirt. I gave the door a hard shove—not too hard, given my neurological vulnerability—and it pivoted open on protesting hinges. A shaft of afternoon sunlight struck the interior, revealing an assortment of rakes, shovels, and pitchforks, plus a dozen bags of fertilizer—but, alas, no wire cutters.

  My perambulations proved exhausting, both mentally and physically, and I returned to the cottage for a much needed nap. That afternoon, my brain tormented me with the notorious “student’s dream.” I’d enrolled in an advanced biology course at my old alma mater, Rutgers, but I hadn’t attended a single class or handed in even one assignment. And now I was expected to take the final exam.

  Vickie, my brain, and I were the last to arrive at Andre Pollifex’s dinner party, which occurred in an airy glass-roofed conservatory attached to the back of the farmhouse. The room smelled only slightly better than the piano barn. At the head of the table presided our host, a disarmingly ordinary looking man, weak of jaw, slight of build, distinguished primarily by his small black moustache and complementary goatee. His face was pale and flaccid, as if he’d been raised in a cave. The instant he opened his mouth to greet us, though, I apprehended something of his glamour, for he had the most majestic voice I’ve ever heard outside of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.

  “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Meeshaw,” he said. “May I call you Blake and Vickie?”

  “Of course,” said Vickie.

  “May I call you Joseph Mengele?” I said.

  Pollifex’s white countenance contracted into a scowl. “I can appreciate your distress, Blake. Your sacrifice has been great. I believe I speak for everyone here when I say that our gratitude knows no bounds.”

  Karl directed us into adjacent seats, then resumed his place next to Pollifex, directly across from the bull man. I found myself facing a pig woman whose large ears flopped about like college pennants and whose snout suggested an oversized button. Vickie sat opposite a goat man with a tapering white beard dangling from his chin and two corrugated horns sprouting from his brow.

  “I’m Serge Milkovich,” said the goat man, shaking first Vickie’s hand, then mine. “In my former life I was Bud Frye, plumbing contractor.”

  “Call me Juliana Sowers,” said the pig woman, enacting the same ritual. “At one time I was Doris Owens of Owens Real Estate, but then I found a higher calling. I cannot begin to thank you for the contribution you’re making to science, philosophy, and local politics.”

  “Local politics?” I asked.

  “We three beneficiaries of QZ-11-4 form the core of the new Common Sense Party,” said Juliana. “We intend to transform Greenbriar into the most livable community in America.”

  “I’m running for Borough Council,” said Serge. “Should my campaign prove successful
, I shall fight to keep our town free of Consumerland discount stores. Their advent is inevitably disastrous for local merchants.”

  Juliana crammed a handful of hors d’oeuvres into her mouth. “I seek a position on the School Board. My stances won’t prove automatically popular—better pay for elementary teachers, sex education starting in grade four—but I’m prepared to support them with passion and statistics.”

  Vickie grabbed my hand and said, “See what I mean, Blake? They may be mutants, but they have terrific ideas.”

  “As for me, I’ve got my eye on the Planning Commission,” said Maxwell, releasing a loud and disconcerting burp. “Did you know there’s a scheme afoot to run the Route 80 Extension along our northern boundary, just so it’ll be easier for people to get to Penn State football games? Once construction begins, the environmental desecration will be profound.”

  As Maxwell expounded upon his anti-extension arguments, a half-dozen sheep arrived with our food. In deference to Maxwell and Juliana, the cuisine was vegetarian: tofu, lentils, capellini with meatless marinara sauce. It was all quite tasty, but the highlight of the meal was surely the venerable and exquisite vintages from Pollifex’s cellar. After my first few swallows of Brunello di Montalcino, I worried that Pollifex’s scalpel had denied me the pleasures of intoxication, but eventually the expected sensation arrived. (I attributed the hiatus to the extra distance my blood had to travel along my extended arteries.) By the time the sheep were serving dessert, I was quite tipsy, though my bursts of euphoria alternated uncontrollably with spasms of anxiety.

  “Know what I think?” I said, locking on Pollifex as I struggled to prevent my brain from slurring my words. “I think you’re trying to turn me into a zombie.”

  The doctor proffered a heartening smile. “Your discomfort is understandable, Blake, but I can assure you all my interventions have been innocuous thus far—and will be in the future. Tell me, what two classroom pets did your second-grade teacher, Mrs. Hines, keep beside her desk, and what were their names?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Of course you don’t. That useless memory vanished with the first extraction. A hamster and a chameleon. Florence and Charlie. Now tell me about the time you threw up on your date for the senior prom.”

  “That never happened.”

  “Yes it did, but I have spared you any recollection of the event. Nor will you ever again be haunted by the memory of forgetting your lines during the Cransford Community Theater production of A Moon for the Misbegotten. Now please recite Joyce Kilmer’s ‘Trees.’”

  “All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” I said. “But you still have no right to mess with my head.” I swallowed more wine. “As for this ridiculous Common Sense Party—okay, sure, these candidates might get my vote—I’m for better schools and free enterprise and all that—but the average Greenbriar citizen…” In lieu of stating the obvious, I finished my wine.

  “What about the average Greenbriar citizen?” said Juliana huffily.

  “The average Greenbriar citizen will find us morphologically unacceptable?” said Serge haughtily.

  “Well… yes,” I replied.

  “Unpleasantly odiferous?” said Maxwell snippily.

  “That too.”

  “Homely?” said Juliana defensively.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  The sheep served dessert—raspberry and lemon sorbet—and the seven of us ate in silence, painfully aware that mutual understanding between myself and the Common Sense Party would be a long time coming.

  During the final two weeks of June, Karl siphoned fourteen additional specimens from my superego, one extraction per day. On the Fourth of July, the shepherd unwound my bandages. Although I disbelieved his assertion to be a trained nurse, I decided to humor him. When he pronounced that my head was healing satisfactorily, I praised his expertise, then listened intently as he told me how to maintain the incision, an ugly ring of scabs and sutures circumscribing my cranium like a crown of thorns.

  As the hot, humid, enervating month elapsed, the Common Sense candidates finished devising their strategies, and the campaign began in earnest. The piano barn soon overflowed with shipping crates full of leaflets, brochures, metal buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and porkpie hats. With each passing day, my skepticism intensified. A goat running for Borough Council? A pig on the School Board? A bull guiding the Planning Commission? Pollifex’s menagerie didn’t stand a chance.

  My doubts received particularly vivid corroboration on July 20th, when the doctor staged a combination cocktail party and fund-raiser at the farmhouse. From among the small but ardent population of political progressives inhabiting Greenbriar, Pollifex had identified thirty of the wealthiest. Two dozen accepted his invitation. Although these potential contributors were clearly appalled by my bifurcation, they seemed to accept Pollifex’s explanation. (I suffered from a rare neurological disorder amenable only to the most radical surgery.) But then the candidates themselves sauntered into the living room, and Pollifex’s guests immediately lost their powers of concentration.

  It wasn’t so much that Maxwell, Juliana, and Serge looked like an incompetent demiurge’s roughest drafts. The real problem was that they’d retained so many traits of the creatures to which they’d been grafted. Throughout the entire event, Juliana stuffed her face with canapés and petit-fours. Whenever Serge engaged a potential donor in conversation, he crudely emphasized his points by ramming his horns into the listener’s chest. Maxwell, meanwhile, kept defecating on the living room carpet, a behavior not redeemed by the mildly pleasant fragrance that a vegetarian diet imparts to bovine manure. By the time the mutants were ready to deliver their formal speeches, the pledges stood at a mere fifty dollars, and every guest had manufactured an excuse to leave.

  “Your idea is never going to work,” I told Pollifex after the candidates had returned to their respective barns. We were sitting in the doctor’s kitchen, consuming mugs of French roast coffee. The door stood open. A thousand crickets sang in the meadow.

  “This is a setback, not a catastrophe,” said Pollifex brushing crumbs from his white dinner jacket. “Maxwell is a major Confucius scholar, with strong Kantian credentials as well. He can surely become housebroken. Juliana is probably the finest utilitarian philosopher since John Stuart Mill. For such a mind, table manners will prove a snap. If you ask Serge about the Sermon on the Mount, he’ll recite the King James translation without a fluff. Once I explain how uncouth he’s being, he’ll learn to control his butting urge.”

  “Nobody wants to vote for a candidate with horns.”

  “It will take a while—quite a while—before Greenbriar’s citizens appreciate this slate, but eventually they’ll hop on the bandwagon.” Pollifex poured himself a second cup of French roast. “Do you doubt that my mutants are ethical geniuses? Can you imagine, for example, how they responded to the Prisoner’s Dilemma?

  For three years running, I had used the Prisoner’s Dilemma in my Introduction to Philosophy class. It’s a situation-ethics classic, first devised in 1951 by Merrill Flood of the RAND Corporation. Imagine that you and a stranger have been arrested as accomplices in manslaughter. You are both innocent. The state’s case is weak. Even though you don’t know each other, you and the stranger form a pact. You will both stonewall it, maintaining your innocence no matter what deals the prosecutor may offer.

  Each of you is questioned privately. Upon entering the interrogation room, the prosecutor lays out four possibilities. If you and your presumed accomplice hang tough, confessing to nothing, you will each get a short sentence, a mere seven months in prison. If you admit your guilt and implicate your fellow prisoner, you will go scot-free—and your presumed accomplice will serve a life sentence. If you hang tough and your fellow prisoner confesses-and-implicates, he will go scot free—and you will serve a life sentence. Finally, if you and your fellow prisoner both confess-and-implicate, you will each get a medium sentence, four years behind bars.

>   It doesn’t take my students long to realize that the most logical course is to break faith with the stranger, thus guaranteeing that you won’t spend your life in prison if he also defects. The uplifting-but-uncertain possibility of a short sentence must lose out to the immoral-but-immutable fact of a medium sentence. Cooperation be damned.

  “Your mutants probably insist that they would keep faith regardless of the consequences,” I said. “They would rather die than violate a trust.”

  “Their answer is subtler than that,” said Pollifex. “They would tell the prosecutor, ‘You imagine that my fellow prisoner and I have made a pact, and in that you are correct. You further imagine that you can manipulate us into breaking faith with one another. But given your obsession with betrayal, I must conclude that you are yourself a liar, and that you will ultimately seek to convert our unwilling confessions into life sentences. I refuse to play this game. Let’s go to court instead.’”

  “An impressive riposte,” I said. “But the fact remains…” Reaching for the coffee pot, I let my voice drift away. “Suppose I poured some French roast directly into my jar? Would I be jolted awake?”

  “Don’t try it,” said Pollifex.

  “I won’t.”

  The mutant maker scowled strenuously. “You think I’m some sort of mad scientist.”

  “Restore my brain,” I told him. “Leave the farm, get a job at Pfizer, wash your hands of politics.”

  “I’m a sane scientist, Blake. I’m the last sane scientist in the world.”

  I looked directly in his eyes. The face that returned my gaze was neither entirely mad nor entirely sane. It was the face of a man who wasn’t sleeping well, and it made me want to run away.

  The following morning, my routine wanderings along the farm’s perimeter brought me to a broad, swiftly flowing creek about twelve feet wide and three deep. Although the barbed-wire net extended beneath the water, clear to the bottom, I suddenly realized how a man might circumvent it. By redirecting the water’s flow via a series of dikes, I could desiccate a large section of the creek bed and subsequently dig my way out of this hellish place. I would need only one of the shovels I’d spotted in the toolshed—a shovel, and a great deal of luck.