Cat's Pajamas (27 page)

“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.

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.