Cat's Pajamas

by James Morrow

  At no point in this cavalcade of nonsense did either Temujin or his mother acquire a perceptible shield against the omnipresent radiation. But then, as my third major scene hit the screen—Hunlun treating her son’s wound—something utterly amazing occurred. A rainbow aura, glowing and pulsing like Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors, materialized on Hunlun’s head and torso as she uttered the line, “Would that I could cure the madness that possesses you!”

  It’s the pot, I told myself. I’m high on hemp, and I’m seeing things.

  “Good God!” I gasped.

  “You’ve done it, Ms. Rappaport!” shouted Kieran.

  “I see it too!” cried Duke. “She’s got a damn rainbow around her!”

  “Wang Khan—he will betray you into disaster,” insisted Hunlun, “or rob you of your spoils in victory.”

  But then, to my dismay, the crone’s anti-radiation suit started to dissolve.

  “Concentrate!” cried Kieran

  My cloak continued to fade.

  “Focus, Egghead!” demanded Duke.

  I stared at the screen, concentrating, concentrating.

  Hunlun insisted, “Were you not blinded by lust for this woman?”

  “Lust?!” echoed Temujin. “You, too, are blind, my mother—blinded by your hatred for her.”

  “Shields at maximum, Ms. Rappaport!” shouted Kieran. “We’re going to make you well!”

  In a full-spectrum flash, red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet, Hunlun’s aura returned. “Daughter of Kumlek!” she sneered.

  “Way to go, Ms. Rappaport!” exclaimed Kieran.

  “Congratulations!” cried Duke.

  “Even if you were right about Wang Khan, yet I would venture this unaided,” said Temujin. Sealed head to toe in her luminous armor, Hunlun glowered at her son. “For I will have Bortai,” he continued, “though I and all of us go down to destruction.”

  The scene ended with a dissolve to Jamuga riding through the gates of Urga, whereupon Kieran picked up the remote control and stopped the tape. It would be best, he explained, to quit while my triumph was at its zenith and the quantum vibrations were still folding back into the space-time continuum.

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” said Duke.

  “Soon it will come to pass that the gamma rays never even penetrated your body.” Kieran ejected the cassette. “Ms. Rappaport, I must applaud you. By reweaving the cosmic tapestry, you have conquered your past and reshaped your future.”

  “That aura wasn’t real,” I said, wondering whether I believed myself. “It was an illusion born of Jack Daniels and marijuana.”

  “That aura was more real than the bricks in this building or the teeth in my jaw,” said Kieran.

  Duke caught my eye, then waved his shot glass in Kieran’s direction. “Told you this guy’s a pro. Most swamis don’t know their higher planes from a hole in the ground, but you’re in good hands with Doc Morella.”

  “I hope you’re not jealous, Duke,” I said. “There was no aura. It was just the booze and the dope.”

  “I’ve had a full life, Egghead.”

  For the third time in a week I contemplate the Castle Bravo explosion while drinking a glass of sherry.

  The mushroom cloud, I realize, is in fact a Nuclear Age inkblot test, a radioactive Rorschach smear. In the swirling vapors I briefly glimpse my has-been diva from The High and the Mighty as she speculates that nobody will miss her if the airliner goes into the drink. Next I see my Alamo character, the insufferably selfless Blind Nell, giving her husband permission to enter into a suicide pact with the boys instead of wasting his life taking care of her. And now I perceive the school teacher in Lock and Load, telling Duke to be the best obsessive-compulsive loose-cannon police captain he can be.

  Slowly the quotidian seeps into my consciousness: my TV set, my VCR, my sherry, the cat on my lap—each given form and substance by my dawning awareness that the film called Lock and Load does not exist.

  Was it just the booze and the dope? I simply couldn’t decide, and Stuart had no theories either. Despite his unhappiness with postmodern scorched-earth relativism, despite his general enthusiasm for the rationalistic worldview, he has always fancied himself an intellectually vulnerable person, open to all sorts of possibilities.

  “Including the possibility of a mind-body cure,” he said.

  “A mind-body cure is one thing, and Kieran Morella’s deranged quantum physics is another,” I replied. “The man’s a goofball.”

  “So you’re not going back?” asked Stuart.

  “Of course I’m going back. Duke’s paying for the weed. I have nothing to lose.”

  Kieran normally spent his Wednesdays downtown, teaching a course at the New School for Social Research, Psychoimmunology 101: Curing with Quarks, and Thursdays he always stayed home and meditated, so Duke and I had to wait a full seventy-two hours before entering Treatment Salon Number Three again. In a matter of minutes we were all primed for transcendence, Duke afloat on a cloud of Jack Daniels, Kieran and me frolicking through a sea of grass. Our therapist announced that, before we tried generating any more quantum vibrations, we should take a second look at Tuesday’s breakthrough.

  “Whatever you say, Doc,” said Duke.

  “It was all a mirage,” I said.

  “Seeing is believing,” said Kieran.

  I retorted with that favorite slogan of skeptics, “And believing is seeing.”

  Kieran fastforwarded the Conqueror cassette to Hunlun treating Temujin’s wound. He pressed Stop, then Play.

  Against my expectations, Hunlun’s aura was still there, covering her like a gown made of sunflowers and rubies.

  “Thundering Christ!” I said.

  This time around, I had to admit that the aura was too damn intricate and splendid—too existentially real—to be a mere pothead chimera.

  “It’s a goddamn miracle!” shouted Duke.

  “I would join Mr. Wayne in calling your gamma-ray shield a miracle, but I don’t think that’s the right word,” said Kieran, grinning at me as he pressed the rewind button. “‘Miracle’ implies divine intervention, and you accomplished this feat through your own natural healing powers. How do you feel?”

  “Exhilarated,” I said. Indeed. “Frightened.” Quite so. “Grateful. Awestruck.”

  “Me too,” said Duke.

  “And angry,” I added.

  “Angry?” said Duke.

  “Mad as hell.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Anger has no place in your cure, Ms. Rappaport,” said Kieran. “Anger will kill you sooner than leukemia.”

  As with our first two sessions, Duke’s third attempt at kinetotherapy got him nowhere. Temujin went through the motions of the plot—he seized Bortai, speared Targatai, met with Wang Khan, suffered the Tartar arrow, endured imprisonment by Kumlek, won Bortai’s heart, fled Kumlek’s camp, conspired with Wang Khan’s soothsayer, captured the city of Urga, appropriated Wang Khan’s forces, led the expanded Mongol army to victory against the Tartars, and slew Kumlek with a knife—but at no point did Duke’s celluloid self acquire any luminous armor.

  My character, on the other hand, was evidently leading a charmed life. No sooner did Hunlun admonish Temujin for courting his father’s murderer than, by Kieran’s account at least, I once again molded reality to my will, sheathing the crone’s body against gamma rays. When next Hunlun entered the film, lamenting the pointless slaughter Temujin’s lust has caused, she wore the same vibrant attire. Her final moments on screen—treating her son’s wound while criticizing his life-style—likewise found her arrayed in an anti-radiation ensemble.

  “Duke, I’m really sorry this hasn’t gone better for you,” I said.

  The late Jamuga, now transformed into Temujin’s spiritual guide, spoke the final narration, the one piece of decent writing in the film. “And the great Khan made such conquests as were undreamed of by mortal men. Tribes of the Gobi flocked to his standard, and the farthest reaches o
f the desert trembled to the hoofs of his hordes…”

  Saying nothing, Duke set down his whiskey bottle, rose from his recliner, and shuffled toward the Betamax.

  “At the feet of the Tartar woman he laid all the riches of Cathay,” said Jamuga. “For a hundred years, the children of their loins ruled half the world.”

  Duke depressed the Eject lever. The cassette carriage rose from the recorder console and presented The Conqueror to the dying actor.

  “Maybe you’ll get your aura next week,” I said. I took a toke, approached Duke, and squeezed his arm. “Never say die, sir. Let’s come back on Monday.”

  “We lost in Vietnam.” Duke pulled the cassette free of the machine. He removed his bandana, mushed it together, and coughed into the folds. “Nixon signed a SALT agreement with the Russians.” Again he coughed. “The Air Force Academy is admitting women. The phone company is hiring flits. Peanut Head”—he gasped—“is bringing the draft dodgers”—and gasped—“home.”

  Duke lurched toward me, tipped his invisible Stetson, and, still gripping the cassette, collapsed on the carpet.

  Inhaler at the ready, Sweeney bounded across the room. Falling to his knees, he wrapped his arms around the supine superstar and told Kieran to apply the plastic mask to Duke’s nose and mouth. It was a familiar tableau—we had just seen it on the screen: Bortai cradling the wounded Temujin as she comes to understand that this particular egomaniacal sociopathic warlord is a real catch. (“He has suffered much,” says Bortai to her servant. And the servant, who knows subtext when she hears it, responds, “Deny not the heart.”) Kieran handled the oxygen rig with supreme competence, and in a matter of seconds the mask was in place and Duke had stopped gasping.

  “You want another shot of whiskey?” I asked, kneeling beside Duke.

  “No thanks.” He pressed the cassette into my hands and forced himself into a sitting position. “I know when I’m licked, Egghead,” he rasped. “It’s not my America any more.”

  “You aren’t licked,” I said.

  “You must have faith,” said Kieran.

  Sweeney proffered an analgesic pill. Duke swallowed it dry. “I’ve got plenty of faith,” he said. “I’ve got faith running out my ears. It’s strength I’m lacking, raw animal strength, so I figured I should hoard it for Egghead.”

  “For me?” I said.

  “I projected all my quantum vibrations onto Hunlun,” he said.

  “You mean… you augmented Ms. Rappaport’s shield?” Kieran bent low, joining our pietà.

  “Augmented?” said Duke. “Let’s talk plain, Doc—I made it happen. I threw that bubble around old Hunlun like Grant took Richmond. I blocked that radiation till Hell wouldn’t have it again.” He set a large, sweating hand on my shoulder. “The Big C conquered John Wayne a long time ago, but you’ve still got a fighting chance, Egghead.”

  “Duke, I’m speechless,” I said.

  “I’ve never bent the space-time continuum for anybody before, but I’m glad I did it in your case,” said Duke.

  “I’m touched to the core,” I said.

  “Why does the aura make you angry?” he asked.

  It took me several seconds to formulate an answer in my head, and as I started to speak the words, Duke coughed again, closed his eyes, and fainted dead away.

  Before the day was over Sweeney got Duke admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, where they gave the old cowboy all the morphine and Jack Daniels he wanted. A week later Duke received open-heart surgery, and by the end of the month he was back home in L.A., attended around the clock by his wife, his children, and, of course, his faithful nurse.

  The Big C accomplished its final assault on June 11, 1979, stealing the last breath from John Wayne as he lay abed in the UCLA Medical Center.

  Duke always wanted his epitaph to read FEO, FUERTE Y FORMAL, but I’ve never visited his grave, so I don’t know what’s on the stone. Feo, Fuerte y Formal: “Ugly, Strong, and Dignified”—a fair summary of that box-office giant, but I would have preferred either the characteristic self-knowledge of There’s More to That Movie Than My Damn Conservative Attitude or else the intentional sexual innuendo of the eulogy he wrote for himself while drinking scotch during the Chisum wrap party: He Saw, He Conquered, He Came.

  Hunlun’s aura still angers me. Kinetotherapy still makes me see red. “If Kieran Morella is on to something,” I told Stuart, “then the universe is far more absurd than I could possibly have imagined.”

  A Japanese city has been reduced to radioactive embers? No problem. We can fix that with happy thoughts. The Castle Bravo H-bomb test has condemned a dozen Asian fisherman to death by leukemia? Don’t worry. Just pluck the quantum strings, tune in the cosmos, and the pennies will trickle down from heaven.

  “The miracle is the crudest trick in God’s repertoire,” I told Stuart. “God should be ashamed of himself for inventing the miracle.”

  Next Tuesday I’m going to the polls and casting my vote for Bill Clinton: not exactly a liberal but probably electable. (Anything to deprive that airhead plutocrat George Bush of a second term.) The day after that, my eighty-first birthday will be upon me. Evidently I’m going to live forever.

  “Don’t count on it,” Stuart warned me.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  According to today’s Times, the Nevada Test Site, formerly the Nevada Proving Ground, is still open to visitors. They have a webpage now, www.nv.doe.gov. The tour features numerous artifacts from the military’s attempts to determine what kinds of structures might withstand nuclear blast pressures. You’ll see crushed walls of brick and cinder block, pulverized domes fashioned from experimental concrete, a railroad bridge whose I-beams have become strands of steel spaghetti, a bank vault that looks like a sand castle after high tide, and a soaring steel drop-tower intended to cradle an H-bomb that, owing to the 1992 Nuclear Testing Moratorium, was never exploded.

  Disney World for Armageddon buffs.

  Kieran let me keep the kinetotherapy cassette, but I’ve never looked at it, even though there’s a Betamax somewhere in our closet. I’m afraid those goddamn psychedelic shields will still be there, enswathing my on-screen incarnation. Tomorrow I plan to finally rid myself of the thing. I shall solemnly bear the cassette to the basement and toss it into the furnace, immolating it like the Xanadu work crew burning Charles Foster Kane’s sled. Stuart has promised to go with me. He’ll make sure I don’t lose my nerve.

  I simply can’t permit the universe to be that absurd. There are certain kinds of cruelty I won’t allow God to perform. In the ringing words of Hunlun, “My son, this you cannot do.”

  Once again I import the Castle Bravo explosion into my living room. I drink my glass of sherry and study the Rorschachian obscenities.

  This time I’m especially struck by the second shot in the mushroom-cloud montage, for within the nodes and curls of this burning Satanic cabbage I perceive a human face. The mouth is wide open. The features are contorted in physical agony and metaphysical dread.

  Try this at home. You’ll see the face too, I promise you. It’s not the face of John Wayne—or Genghis Khan or Davy Crockett or Paul Tibbets or the Virgin Mary or any other person of consequence. The victim you’ll see is just another nobody, just another bit-player, another hibakusha, eternally trapped on a ribbon of acetate and praying—fervently, oh so fervently—that this will be the last replay.

  COME BACK, DR. SARCOPHAGUS

  ENCIRCLED BY A SPOTLIGHT, two figures huddle together stage left, each perched on a stepladder. The younger of the pair, TOM MOODY, a diffident but likeable fellow whose appeal lies partly in his awareness of being a nerd, nervously grips the microphone of an unseen tape recorder. He is interviewing EDGAR WEST, alias Dr. Sarcophagus, former host of Frisson Theater on a Philadelphia UHF station. Now in his eighties, Edgar has retained the energetic eccentricities that once made him a celebrity.

  The interview is occurring in Edgar’s frigid apartment. Both men wear gloves, scarves, an
d knitted watch caps, and throughout the play they periodically blow on their hands and kick their feet against the ladders. At rise, in response to a request from Tom, Edgar launches into his famous Frisson Theater sign-off.

  EDGAR: Farewell, fans of fiends! Adios, toasters of ghosts! Au revoir, mavens of noir! And remember this, my friends! Life is full of peasants with torches, but the sequel belongs to you!

  TOM: OOOO, Mr. West, that was perfect!

  EDGAR: I did it better in the old days.

  TOM: NO, really—I felt a chill go up and down my spine.

  EDGAR: Of course you felt a chill—it’s thirty degrees in here. This morning they finally got around to fixing the furnace, but it’ll be an hour before the heat reaches my apartment.

  TOM: Oh, I don’t mind. I’ll pretend I’m in that frigid cavern beneath the castle in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

  EDGAR: I remember when we revived that one. I showed the fans how they could build astonishing new insects out of the dead flies and dried crickets they found behind their hot-water heaters.

  TOM: Then there was the time you revived Werewolf of London and gave away packets of marifasa lumina lupina seeds to the first thousand viewers who sent in postcards. (nostalgic) I planted mine in Mom’s rose garden. What came up looked suspiciously like dandelions, so she ripped ’em all out.

  EDGAR: Your mother is obviously not a botanist, Tom. (beat) And the name of your august journal is…?