Cat's Pajamas

by James Morrow

  The bobber, still afloat, sent tendrils of light across the lake. Against his better judgment, Pothinos wondered what his own third wish might have been. The mending of his sister’s mind? A Nobel Prize? Or was he darker than that—the ruin of a colleague?

  “I took to haunting fishing wharfs,” Stragon said. “Zoos. Circus side shows. Any place where a cimberfish might turn up. Useless. I went fishing often, dissecting whatever I caught. Empty. To catch your fondest desire, you need the right bait.” He slid his wallet from his vest, removed the promised payment from his vest, and thrust it toward Pothinos. “And then, just when I had abandoned hope, your cleverness came into the world.”

  “I suppose that my goal,” said Pothinos, taking the check, “after wealth and long life, would be for my sister to—”

  “Look!” Ecstasy seized Stragon. “There!” Rising, he jammed the handle tight against his abdomen. “I’ve got him!” He cranked the reel backward, filling the night with the stately buzz of its bearings. “Good God, I’ve got him!”

  Pothinos studied Rosamond. The bobber had vanished.

  “Here I am!” Stragon screamed. “Right here!”

  Sinewy blackness crashed out of the lake, shattering its surface like a panther diving through a mirror. A fish, but one whose anatomy—slimy body, hatchet fins—seemed merely its mouth’s way of getting from one place to another.

  Pothinos’s intestines writhed around themselves. His brain shivered in his skull.

  “I wish for it to end!” screamed Stragon. His hand moved frantically, reeling in the fetid, organic abyss, its pulpy lips, gums like rotten logs, fangs thrusting downward like stalactites. “Hear me, fish? I want it to be over!”

  Through the haze of his astonishment, Pothinos apprehended his patron’s pain. Over. Yes, of course, the poor bastard wanted out, no more curse of immortality, no more standing by as his loved ones marched down the cold stone road to the tomb, leaving him behind.

  Relentlessly Stragon’s catch cruised toward shore, its eyes stroking the darkness like beacons marking the coast of hell. Even as Pothinos drew back—what an extraordinary event! what a dazzling datum!—his patron hurled down the fishing rod and jumped into the shallows.

  “Over!”

  A snap, a fat spasm of movement, and the wish was complete. Bait gone. Mouth gone. Stragon gone.

  Rosamond grew still, as if a blast of winter had sealed it with ice. Pothinos stood on the silent shore, vibrating with shock, gulping down air to feed his racing heart.

  Slowly he picked up Stragon’s abandoned fishing rod. He turned and staggered from the scene of the… the what? Miracle. The word sounded eerily correct.

  Or was it just a trick? In a few seconds Stragon would be at his side, pointing at him, sniggering?

  No: the Rosamond beast was truly outré, something that present paradigms could not accommodate; tonight Pothinos had glimpsed the universe’s secret smirk, row upon row of strange teeth flashing somewhere beyond the knowable. A miracle: then he must move with deliberation. Exactly how many cimberfish cells lay back at the Institute? A hundred million? Easily. A hundred million potential wishes, each a glint in its parent’s unblinking eye. No: more. He could clone the clones, clone the clones of the clones! Endless wishes, spiraling to the edge of reality like interstellar dust!

  An owl’s hoot blasted through the gloomy woods like a landlocked foghorn. Careful, Pothinos told himself. Take it easy. Beware the rub.

  Wish-makers, he saw, traditionally committed the same error. Each used the gift to improve his own situation, and, succumbing to greed, quickly came to ruin. Ah, but suppose the wish-maker never benefited himself? Suppose all his desires went toward fashioning some separate, distant dominion? What a fine, flawless world Pothinos might make: blue skies, green continents, a marvelously complex biosphere. Yes, it could be done, the fallacy outflanked, the rub circumvented, power both absolute and uncorrupting, yes, yes, yes…

  Pothinos ran. Dawn washed across the dark sky, conjuring fir trees and brick buildings from the gloom.

  Defrosting the eye was the simplest of procedures. A moment to prepare the hot plate, a moment to thaw the surrounding ice. When Pothinos reached into the puddle to remove the cimberfish’s remains, Maxie strutted over and wove amid his legs as if decorating a maypole.

  Pothinos pulled away, leaving the animal startled and miffed. Was this truly the right course?

  Arching her back, Maxie meowed.

  Yes, this was right. The age of miracles, thank God, was over. A biologist, anyone, must live in his own time.

  “Make a wish, Maxie!” Pothinos shouted, and he rolled the eye across the floor toward the waiting, hungry cat.

  DIRECTOR’S CUT

  THE CURTAIN RISES ON the prophet MOSES, caught in the glow of a spotlight and sitting atop a mound of Dead Sea sand. The famous Tablets of the Law stick out of the dune like ears on a Mickey Mouse cap. A large rear-projection video screen hangs over Moses’s head. An off-stage INTERVIEWER addresses the patriarch.

  INTERVIEWER: SO there we are, me and Dad and my little sister, sitting in the old Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street. The lights go down, the Paramount logo flashes across the screen, and then the movie comes on, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

  MOSES: What a terrific picture.

  INTERVIEWER: It sure impressed me as a kid. Today I find it a bit hokey.

  MOSES: Hokey? Hokey? Hell, no, Mr. DeMille was a certifiable genius.

  INTERVIEWER: IS it really true the original cut ran over seven hours?

  MOSES: (grunt of assent) No theater was willing to book the thing. The management would’ve had to serve dinner in the middle, like on a transcontinental flight from New York to Paris.

  INTERVIEWER: I heard a rumor that some of the original rushes still exist.

  MOSES: No way, Marty. You pull papyrus out by the roots and—bang—it disintegrates in a few weeks.

  Moses laughs boorishly.

  INTERVIEWER: In fact, I understand that those very rushes are in your possession.

  MOSES: Over the past forty years, I’ve managed to collect bits and pieces from nearly every missing scene.

  INTERVIEWER: For example?

  MOSES: The Plagues of Egypt. The release prints included blood, darkness, and hail…

  An excerpt from The Ten Commandments appears on the video screen: fiery hail clattering across the balcony of Pharaoh’s palace.

  MOSES: But they were lacking some of the really interesting ones. You should’ve seen what Mr. DeMille did with frogs.

  The screen displays two elderly, working-class Egyptian women, BAKETAMON and NELLIFER, potters by trade, sitting on the banks of the Nile River. As they speak, BAKETAMON fashions a canopic jar, NELLIFER a soup tureen.

  BAKETAMON: (addressing interviewer) The frogs? How could I ever forget the frogs?

  NELLIFER: You’d open your dresser drawer, hoping to find some clean socks and—pop—one of those little flickers would jump in your face.

  INTERVIEWER: Which plague was the worst?

  BAKETAMON: The boils, I think. My skin looked like the back of the moon.

  NELLIFER: The boils, are you kidding? The locusts were far worse than the boils.

  BAKETAMON: The mosquitoes were pretty nasty too.

  NELLIFER: And the gadflies.

  BAKETAMON: And the cattle getting murrain.

  NELLIFER: And the death of the firstborn. A lot of people hated that one.

  BAKETAMON: Of course, it didn’t touch Nelli and me.

  NELLIFER: We were lucky. Our firstborns were already dead.

  BAKETAMON: Mine froze solid in the hail.

  NELLIFER: Mine had been suffering from chronic diarrhea since he was a month old, so when the waters became blood—zap, kid got dehydrated.

  BAKETAMON: Nelli, your mind’s going. It was your secondborn who died when the waters became blood. Your firstborn died in the darkness, when he accidentally drank all that turpentine.
<
br />   NELLIFER: No, my secondborn got run over by a horse. It had nothing to do with religion. My third born drank the turpentine. A mother remembers these things.

  INTERVIEWER: I was certain you’d be more bitter about your ordeals.

  NELLIFER: Initially we thought the plagues were a bit much. We even wrote a book about it.

  BAKETAMON: When Bad Things Happen to Good Pagans.

  NELLIFER: Then we came to understand our innate depravity.

  BAKETAMON: There’s only one really good person in the whole universe, and that’s the Lord God Jehovah.

  NELLIFER: Next to Him, we’re a couple of slime molds.

  INTERVIEWER: Sounds as if you’ve converted to monotheism.

  BAKETAMON: (nodding) We love the Lord our God with all our heart.

  NELLIFER: And all our soul.

  BAKETAMON: And all our might.

  NELLIFER: And besides, there’s no telling what He might do to us next.

  BAKETAMON: Fire ants, possibly.

  NELLIFER: Killer bees.

  BAKETAMON: Smallpox.

  NELLIFER: I got two sons left.

  BAKETAMON: I’m still up a daughter.

  NELLIFER: The Lord giveth.

  BAKETAMON: And the Lord taketh away.

  NELLIFER: Blessed be the name of the Lord.

  The screen goes blank.

  INTERVIEWER: When you went up on Mount Sinai, Jehovah offered you a lot more than the Decalogue.

  MOSES: (displays excised footage) Mr. DeMille shot everything, all six hundred and twelve laws. First to go were the prescriptions concerning slavery—the protocols for selling your daughter and so on. Unfortunately, those cuts reduced the running time a mere eight minutes.

  An excerpt from The Ten Commandments appears on the screen: God’s animated forefinger etching the Decalogue onto the face of Sinai, while Charlton Heston watches with a mixture of awe, fascination, and incredulity. As the last rule is carved—THOU SHALT NOT COVET—the frame suddenly freezes.

  GOD: (voice-over) Now for the details. (beat) When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, if you see a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable, you may make her your wife.

  INTERVIEWER: I have to admire Mr. DeMille for using something like that. Deuteronomy 21:10, right?

  MOSES: He was a gutsier filmmaker than his detractors imagine.

  GOD: (voice-over) When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut off her hand and show no pity.

  INTERVIEWER: Private parts?

  MOSES: The original Hebrew is less euphemistic. Deuteronomy 25:11.

  GOD: (voice-over) If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, his father and mother shall bring him out to the elders of the town, and all his fellow citizens shall stone the son to death.

  MOSES: Deuteronomy 21:18–21.

  INTERVIEWER: And here I’d always thought DeMille was afraid of controversy.

  MOSES: One ballsy mogul, Marty.

  The screen goes blank.

  INTERVIEWER: After the giving of the Law, The Ten Commandments jumps rather abruptly to the Children of Israel entering the Promised Land.

  MOSES: Forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and poor Mr. DeMille had to edit out thirty-nine of them. The Book of Numbers ended up on the cutting room floor.

  INTERVIEWER: He actually filmed those episodes?

  MOSES: (nodding) The Lord giving my sister leprosy, causing the earth to swallow up Dathan, striking down the Israelites who disparaged Canaan, firebombing the ones who complained at Hormah, sending serpents against those who grumbled on the road from Mount Hor, visiting a plague on everybody who backslid at Peor…

  INTERVIEWER: Damn theater chains. They think they own the world.

  MOSES: I especially hated to lose that stirring speech I made to my generals following the subjugation of the Midianites.

  INTERVIEWER: Would you like to deliver it now, for the record?

  MOSES: Sure would, Marty. Ready? Here goes. Numbers 31:15–18. (clears throat) Why have you spared the life of all the women? These were the very ones who perverted the sons of Israel! Kill all the male children! Kill also all the women who have slept with a man! Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves!

  INTERVIEWER: DO you suppose we’ll ever see the version of The Ten Commandments that Mr. DeMille intended?

  MOSES: Only yesterday I was talking to some nice folks down at the National Endowment for the Arts. They’re willing to kick in three million for a restoration.

  INTERVIEWER: A worthy cause.

  MOSES: The worthiest, Marty. Believe me, there’s justice in this old world. You simply have to wait for it.

  Curtain.

  AUSPICIOUS EGGS

  FATHER CORNELIUS DENNIS MONAGHAN of Charlestown Parish, Connie to his friends, sets down the Styrofoam chalice, turns from the corrugated cardboard altar, and approaches the two young women standing by the resin baptismal font. The font is six-sided and encrusted with saints, like a gigantic hex nut forged for some obscure yet holy purpose, but its most impressive feature is its portability. Hardly a month passes in which Connie doesn’t drive the vessel across town, bear it into some wretched hovel, and confer immortality on a newborn whose parents have grown too feeble to leave home.

  “Merribell, right?” asks Connie, pointing to the baby on his left.

  Wedged in the crook of her mother’s arm, the infant wriggles and howls. “No—Madeleine,” Angela mumbles. Connie has known Angela Dunfey all her life, and he still remembers the seraphic glow that beamed from her face when she first received the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Today she boasts no such glow. Her cheeks and brow appear tarnished, like iron corroded by the Greenhouse Deluge, and her spine curls with a torsion more commonly seen in women three times her age. “Merribell’s over here.” Angela raises her free hand and gestures toward her cousin Lorna, who is balancing Madeleine’s twin sister atop her gravid belly. Will Lorna Dunfey, Connie wonders, also give birth to twins? The phenomenon, he has heard, runs in families.

  Touching the sleeve of Angela’s frayed blue sweater, the priest addresses her in a voice that travels clear across the nave. “Have these children received the Sacrament of Reproductive Potential Assessment?”

  The parishioner shifts a nugget of chewing gum from her left cheek to her right. “Y-yes,” she says at last.

  Henry Shaw, the pale altar boy, his face abloom with acne, hands the priest a parchment sheet stamped with the Seal of the Boston Isle Archdiocese. A pair of signatures adorns the margin, verifying that two ecclesiastical representatives have legitimized the birth. Connie instantly recognizes the illegible hand of Archbishop Xallibos. Below lie the bold loops and assured serifs of a Friar James Wolfe, M.D., doubtless the man who drew the blood.

  Madeleine Dunfey, Connie reads. Left ovary: 315 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 340 primordial follicles. A spasm of despair passes through the priest. The egg-cell count for each organ should be 180,000 at least. It’s a verdict of infertility, no possible appeal, no imaginable reprieve.

  With an efficiency bordering on effrontery, Henry Shaw offers Connie a second parchment sheet.

  Merribell Dunfey. Left ovary: 290 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 310 primordial follicles. The priest is not surprised. What sense would there be in God’s withholding the power of procreation from one twin but not the other? Connie now needs only to receive these barren sisters, apply the sacred rites, and furtively pray that the Eighth Lateran Council was indeed guided by the Holy Spirit when it undertook to bring the baptismal process into the age of testable destinies and ovarian surveillance.

  He holds out his hands, withered palms up, a posture he maintains as Angela surrenders Madeleine, reaches under the baby’s christening gown, and unhooks both diaper
pins. The mossy odor of fresh urine wafts into the Church of the Immediate Conception. Sighing profoundly, Angela hands the sopping diaper to her cousin.

  “Bless these waters, O Lord,” says Connie, spotting his ancient face in the consecrated fluid, “that they might grant these sinners the gift of life everlasting.” Turning from the vessel, he presents Madeleine to his ragged flock, over three hundred natural-born Catholics—sixth-generation Irish, mostly, plus a smattering of Portuguese, Italians, and Croats—interspersed with two dozen recent converts of Korean and Vietnamese extraction: a congregation bound together, he’ll admit, not so much by religious conviction as by shared destitution. “Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity, and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water, I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through these baptisms, Madeleine and Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom.” Connie faces his trembling parishioner. “Angela Dunfey, do you believe, by God’s word, that children who are baptized, dying before they commit any actual evil, will be saved?”

  Her “Yes” is begrudging and clipped.

  Like a scrivener replenishing his pen at an inkwell, Connie dips his thumb into the font. “Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours.”

  “M-M-Madeleine Eileen Dunfey.”

  “We welcome this sinner, Madeleine Eileen Dunfey, into the mystical body of Christ”—with his wet thumb Connie traces a plus sign on the infant’s forehead—“and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross.”

  Unraveling Madeleine from her christening gown, Connie fixes on the waters. They are preternaturally still—as calm and quiet as the Sea of Galilee after the Savior rebuked the winds. For many years the priest wondered why Christ hadn’t returned on the eve of the Greenhouse Deluge, dispersing the hydrocarbon vapors with a wave of his hand, ending global warming with a heavenward wink, but recently Connie has come to feel that divine intervention entails protocols past human ken.