Cat's Pajamas

by James Morrow

  Thus it was that I embarked on a secret construction project. Every day at about 11:00 A.M., right after Karl took the specimen from my superego, I slunk off to the creek and spent a half-hour adding rocks, logs, and mud to the burgeoning levees, returning to the cottage in time for lunch. Although the creek proved far less pliable than I’d hoped, I eventually became its master. Within two weeks, I figured, possibly three, a large patch of sand and pebbles would lie exposed to the hot summer sun, waiting to receive my shovel.

  Naturally I was tempted to tell Vickie of my scheme. Given my handicap, I could certainly have used her assistance in building the levees. But in the end I concluded that, rather than endorsing my bid for freedom, she would regard it as a betrayal of the Common Sense Party and its virtuous agenda.

  I knew I’d made the right decision when Vickie entered our cottage late one night in the form of a gigantic mutant hen. Her body had become a bulbous mass of feathers, her legs had transmuted into fleshy stilts, and her face now sported a beak the size of a funnel. Obviously she was running for elective office, but I couldn’t imagine which one. She lost no time informing me. Her ambition, she explained, was to become Greenbriar’s next mayor.

  “I’ve even got an issue,” she said.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I replied, looking her up and down. Although she still apparently retained her large and excellent breasts beneath her bikini top, their present context reduced their erotic content considerably.

  “Do you know what Greenbriar needs?” she proclaimed. “Traffic diverters at certain key intersections! Our neighborhoods are being suffocated by the automobile!”

  “You shouldn’t have done this, Vickie,” I told her.

  “My name is Eva Pullo,” she clucked.

  “These people have brainwashed you!”

  “The Common Sense Party is the hope of the future!”

  “You’re talking like a fascist!” I said.

  “At least I’m not a coward like you!” said the chicken.

  For the next half-hour we hurled insults at each other—our first real post-marital fight—and then I left in a huff, eager to continue my arcane labors by the creek. In a peculiar way I still loved Vickie, but I sensed that our relationship was at an end. When I made my momentous escape, I feared, she would not be coming with me.

  Even as I redirected the creek, the four mutant candidates brought off an equally impressive feat—something akin to a miracle, in fact. They got the citizens of Greenbriar to listen to them, and the citizens liked what they heard.

  The first breakthrough occurred when Maxwell appeared along with three other Planning Commission candidates—Republican, Democrat, Libertarian—on Greenbriar’s local-access cable channel. I watched the broadcast in the farmhouse, sitting on the couch between Vickie and Dr. Pollifex. Although the full-blooded humans on the podium initially refused to take Maxwell seriously, the more he talked about his desire to prevent the Route 80 Extension from wreaking havoc with local ecosystems, the clearer it became that this mutant had charisma. Maxwell’s eloquence was breathtaking, his logic impeccable, his sincerity sublime. He committed no fecal faux pas.

  “That bull was on his game,” I admitted at the end of the transmission.

  “The moderator was enchanted,” enthused Vickie.

  “Our boy is going to win,” said Pollifex.

  Two days later, Juliana kicked off her campaign for School Board. Aided by the ever energetic Vickie, she had outfitted the back of an old yellow school bus with a Pullman car observation platform, the sort of stage from which early twentieth-century presidential candidates campaigned while riding the rails. Juliana and Vickie also transformed the bus’s interior, replacing the seats with a coffee bar, a chat lounge, and racks of brochures explaining the pig woman’s ambition to expand the sex education program, improve services for special needs children, increase faculty awareness of the misery endured by gay students, and—most audacious of all—invert the salary pyramid so that first-grade teachers would earn more than high-school administrators. Day in, day out, Juliana tooled around Greenbriar in her appealing vehicle, giving out iced cappuccinos, addressing crowds from the platform, speaking to citizens privately in the lounge, and somehow managing to check her impulse toward gluttony, all the while exhibiting a caliber of wisdom that eclipsed her unappetizing physiognomy. The tour was a fabulous success—such, at least, was the impression I received from watching the blurry, jerky coverage that Vickie accorded the pig woman’s campaign with Pollifex’s camcorder. Every time the school bus pulled away from a Juliana Sowers rally, it left behind a thousand tear-stained eyes, so moved were the citizens by her commitment to the glorious ideal of public education.

  Serge, meanwhile, participated in a series of “Meet the Candidates” nights along with four other Borough Council hopefuls. Even when mediated by Vickie’s shaky videography, the inaugural gathering at Greenbriar Town Hall came across as a powerful piece of political theater. Serge fully suppressed his impulse to butt his opponents—but that was the smallest of his accomplishments. Without slinging mud, flinging innuendo, or indulging in disingenuous rhetoric, he made his fellow candidates look like moral idiots for their unwillingness to stand firm against what he called “the insatiable greed of Consumerland.” Before the evening ended, the attending voters stood prepared to tar-and-feather any discount chain executive who might set foot in Greenbriar, and it was obvious they’d also embraced Serge’s other ideas for making the Borough Council a friend to local business. If Serge’s plans came to fruition, shoppers would eventually flock to the downtown, lured by parking-fee rebates, street performers, bicycle paths, mini-playgrounds, and low-cost supervised day care.

  As for Vickie’s mayoral campaign—which I soon learned to call Eva Pullo’s mayoral campaign—it gained momentum the instant she shed her habit of pecking hecklers on the head. Vickie’s commitment to reducing the automobile traffic in residential areas occasioned the grandest rhetorical flights I’d ever heard from her. “A neighborhood should exist for the welfare of its children, not the convenience of its motorists,” she told the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. “We must not allow our unconsidered veneration of the automobile to mask our fundamental need for community and connectedness,” she advised the Chamber of Commerce. By the middle of August, Vickie had added a dozen other environmentalist planks to her platform, including an ingenious proposal to outfit the town’s major highways with underground passageways for raccoons, badgers, woodchucks, skunks, and possums.

  You must believe me, reader, when I say that my conversion to the Common Sense Party occurred well before the Greenbriar Daily Times published its poll indicating that the entire slate—Maxwell Taurus, Juliana Sowers, Serge Milkovich, Eva Pullo—enjoyed the status of shoo-ins. I was not simply trying to ride with the winners. When I abandoned my plan to dig an escape channel under the fence, I was doing what I thought was right. When I resolved to spend the next three years nursing the Pollifex Farm candidates from my cerebral teat, I was fired by an idealism so intense that the pragmatists among you would blush to behold it.

  I left the levees in place, however, just in case I had a change of heart.

  The attack on Pollifex Farm started shortly after 11:00 P.M. It was Halloween night, which means that the raiders probably aroused no suspicions whatsoever as, dressed in shrouds and skull masks, they drove their pickup trucks through the streets of Greenbriar and down Spring Valley Road. To this day, I’m not sure who organized and paid for the atrocity. At its core, I suspect, the mob included not only yahoos armed with torches but also conservatives gripped by fear, moderates transfixed by cynicism, liberals in the pay of the status quo, libertarians acting out anti-government fantasies, and a few random anarchists looking for a good time. Whatever their conflicting allegiances, the vigilantes stood united in their realization that Andre Pollifex, sane scientist, was about to unleash a reign of enlightenment on Greenbriar. They were having none of it.

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nbsp; I was experiencing yet another version of the student’s dream—this time I’d misconnected not simply with one class but with an entire college curriculum—when shouts, gunshots, and the neighing of frightened horses awoke me. Taking hold of the library cart, I roused Vickie by ruffling her feathers, and side by side we stumbled into the parlor. By the time we’d made our way outside, the windmill, tractor shed, corn crib, and centaur stables were all on fire. Although I could not move quickly without risking permanent paralysis, Vickie immediately sprang into action. Transcending her spheroid body, she charged into the burning stables and set the mutant horses free, and she proved equally unflappable when the vigilantes hurled their torches into Maxwell’s residence. With little thought for her personal safety, she ran into the flaming piano barn, located the panicked bull man and the equally discombobulated pig woman—in recent months they’d entered into a relationship whose details needn’t concern us here—and led them outside right before the roof collapsed in a great red wave of cascading sparks and flying embers.

  And still the arsonists continued their assault, blockading the main gate with bales of burning hay, setting fire to the chicken coop, and turning Pollifex’s laboratory into a raging inferno. Catching an occasional glimpse of our spectral enemies, their white sheets flashing in the light of the flames, I saw that they would not become hoist by their own petards, for they had equipped themselves with asbestos suits, scuba regulators, and compressed air tanks. As for the inhabitants of Pollifex Farm, it was certain that if we didn’t move quickly, we would suffer either incineration, suffocation, or their concurrence in the form of fatally seared lungs.

  Although I had never felt so divided, neither the fear spasms in my chest nor the jumbled thoughts in my jar prevented me from realizing what the mutants must do next. I told them to steal shovels from the toolshed, make for the creek, and follow it to the fence. Thanks to my levees, I explained, the bed now lay in the open air. Within twenty minutes or so, they should be able to dig below the barbed-wire net and gouge a dry channel for themselves. The rest of my plan had me bringing up the rear, looking out for Karl, Serge, and Dr. Pollifex so that I might direct them to the secret exit. Vickie kissed my lips, Juliana caressed my cheek, Maxwell embraced by brain, and then all three candidates rushed off into the choking darkness.

  Before that terrible night was out, I indeed found the other Party members. Karl lay dead in a mound of straw beside the sheep barn, his forehead blasted away by buckshot. Serge sat on the rear porch of the farmhouse, his left horn broken off and thrust fatally into his chest. Finally I came upon Pollifex. The vigilantes had roped the doctor to a maple tree, subjected him to target practice, and left him for dead. He was as perforated as Saint Sebastian. A mattock, a pitchfork, and two scythes projected from his body like quills from a porcupine.

  “Andre, it’s me, Blake,” I said, approaching.

  “Blake?” he muttered. “Blake? Oh, Blake, they killed Serge. They killed Karl.”

  “I know. Vickie got away, and Maxwell too, and Juliana.”

  “I was a sane scientist,” said Pollifex.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “There are some things that expediency was not meant to tamper with.”

  “I agree.”

  “Pullo for Mayor!” he shouted.

  “Taurus for Planning Commission!” I replied.

  “Milkovich for Borough Council!” he shouted. “Sowers for School Board!” he screamed, and then he died.

  There’s not much more to tell. Although Vickie, Juliana, Maxwell, and I all escaped the burning farm that night, the formula for the miraculous serum died with Dr. Pollifex. Deprived of their weekly Altruoid injections, the mutants soon lost their talent for practical idealism, and their political careers sputtered out. Greenbriar now boasts a mammoth new Consumerland. The Route 80 extension is almost finished. High-school principals still draw twice the pay of first-grade teachers. Life goes on.

  The last time I saw Juliana, she was the opening act at Caesar’s Palace in Atlantic City. A few songs, some impersonations, a standup comedy routine—mostly vegetarian humor and animal-rights jokes leavened by a sardonic feminism. The crowd ate it up, and Juliana seemed to be enjoying herself. But, oh, what a formidable School Board member she would’ve made!

  When the Route 80 disaster occurred, Maxwell was devastated—not so much by the extension itself as by his inability to critique it eloquently. These days he plays piano at Emilio’s, a seedy bar in Newark. He is by no means the weirdest presence in the place, and he enjoys listening to the customers’ troubles. But he is a broken mutant.

  Vickie and I did our best to make it work, but in the end we decided that mixed marriages entail insurmountable hurdles, and we split up. Eventually she got a job hosting a preschool children’s television show on the Disney Channel, Arabella’s Barnyard Band. Occasionally she manages to insert a satiric observation about automobiles into her patter.

  As for me, after hearing the tenth neurosurgeon declare that I am beyond reassembly, I decided to join the world’s eternal vagabonds. I am brother to the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and Marley’s Ghost. I shuffle around North America, dragging my library cart behind me, exhibiting my fractured self to anyone who’s willing to pay. In the past decade, my employers have included three carnivals, four roadside peep shows, two direct-to-video horror movie producers, and an artsy off-Broadway troupe bent on reviving Le Grand Guignol.

  And always I remain on the lookout for another Andre Pollifex, another scientist who can manufacture QZ-11-4 serum and use it to turn beasts into politicians. I shall not settle for any sort of Pollifex, of course. The actual Pollifex, for example, would not meet my standards. The man bifurcated me without my permission, and I cannot forgive him for that.

  The scientist I seek would unflinchingly martyr himself to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As they hauled him away to whatever dungeon is reserved for such saints, he would turn to the crowd and say, “The personal cost was great, but at least I have delivered a fellow human from an unjust imprisonment. And who knows? Perhaps his anguish over breaking faith with me will eventually transform him into a more generous friend, a better parent, or a public benefactor.”

  Alas, my heart is not in the quest. Only part of me—a small part, I must confess—wants to keep on making useful neurological donations. So even if there is a perfect Pollifex out there somewhere, he will probably never get to fashion a fresh batch of Altruoid. Not unless I father a child—and not unless the child receives the gene—and not unless the gene finds expression—and not unless this descendent of mine donates his superego to science. But as the bull man told me many years ago, QZ-11-4 only rarely gets actualized in the humans who carry it.

  I believe I see a way around the problem. The roadside emporium in which I currently display myself also features a llama named Loretta. She can count to ten and solve simple arithmetic problems. I am enchanted by Loretta’s liquid eyes, sensuous lips, and splendid form—and I think she has taken a similar interest in me. It’s a relationship, I feel, that could lead almost anywhere.

  About the Author

  Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since he, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. This three-page, six-chapter fantasy is still in the author’s private archives. Upon reaching adulthood, Jim produced nine novels of speculative fiction, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah), the Nebula Award (for “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and the novella City of Truth), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima). A fulltime fiction writer, Jim makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle. He is hard at work on a novel about Darwinism and its discontents.

  Didier Lecler
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  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Apologue” copyright © 2001 by James Morrow. First appeared in Reflections on September 11, 2011 (www.scifi.com/tribute, September 2001).

  “Auspicious Eggs” copyright © 2000 by James Morrow. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (October/November 2001); Embrace the Mutation (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2002).

  “Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus” copyright © 2004 by James Morrow. Previously unpublished.

  “Director’s Cut” copyright © 1994 by James Morrow. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (March 1994).

  “The Eye that Never Blinks” copyright © 1988 by James Morrow. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 1988).

  “The Fate of Nations” copyright © 2003 by James Morrow. First appeared in SciFiction (May 2003).

  “Fucking Justice” copyright © 2004 by James Morrow. Previously unpublished.

  “Isabella of Castile Answers Her Mail” copyright © 1992 by James Morrow. First appeared in Amazing Stories (April 1992); What Might Have Been, Volume 4: Alternate Americas (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).