Читать книгу Reality by Other Means - James Morrow - Страница 9

The Cat’s Pajamas

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was still in our faces, fetishizing the rational intellect and ramming technocracy down our throats, so I said to Vickie, “Screw it. This isn’t for us. Let’s hop in the car and drive to Romanticism, or maybe even to preindustrial paganism, or possibly all the way to hunter-gatherer utopianism.” But we only got as far as Pennsylvania.

I knew that the idea of spending all summer on the road would appeal to Vickie. Most of her affections, including her unbridled wanderlust, are familiar to me. Not only had we lived together for six years, we also worked at the same New Jersey high school — Vickie teaching American history, me offering a souped-up eleventh-grade humanities course — with the result that not only our screaming matches but also our flashes of rapport drew upon a fund of shared experiences. And so it was that the first day of summer vacation found us rattling down Route 80 in our decrepit VW bus, listening to Crash Test Dummies CDs and pretending that our impulsive westward flight somehow partook of political subversion, though we sensed it was really just an extended camping trip.

Despite being an épater le bourgeois sort of woman, Vickie had spent the previous two years promoting the idea of holy matrimony, an institution that has consistently failed to enchant me. Nevertheless, when we reached the Delaware Water Gap, I turned to her and said, “Here’s a challenge for us. Let’s see if we can’t become man and wife by this time tomorrow afternoon.” It’s important, I feel, to suffuse a relationship with a certain level of unpredictability, if not outright caprice. “Vows, rings, music, all of it.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, brightening. She’s got a killer smile, sharp at the edges, luminous at the center. “It takes a week just to get the blood-test results.”

“I was reading in Newsweek that there’s a portable analyzer on the market. If we can find a technologically advanced justice of the peace, we’ll meet the deadline with time to spare.”

“Deadline?” She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Jeez, Blake, this isn’t a game. We’re talking about a marriage.”

“It’s a game and a gamble — I know from experience. But with you, sweetheart, I’m ready to bet the farm.”

She laughed and said, “I love you.”

We spent the night in a motel outside a pastoral Pennsylvania borough called Greenbriar, got up at ten, made distracted love, and began scanning the yellow pages for a properly outfitted magistrate. By noon we had our man, District Justice George Stratus, proud owner of a brand new Sorrel-130 blood analyzer. It so happened that Judge Stratus was something of a specialist in instant marriage. For a hundred dollars flat, he informed me over the phone, we could have “the nanosecond nuptial package,” including blood test, license, certificate, and a bottle of Taylor’s champagne. I told him it sounded like a bargain.

To get there, we had to drive down a sinuous band of dirt and gravel called Spring Valley Road, past the asparagus fields, apple orchards, and cow pastures of Pollifex Farm. We arrived in a billowing nimbus of dust. Judge Stratus turned out to be a fat and affable paragon of efficiency. He immediately set about pricking our fingers and feeding the blood to his Sorrel-130, which took only sixty seconds to endorse our DNA even as it acquitted us of venereal misadventures. He faxed the results to the county courthouse, signed the marriage certificate, and poured us each a glass of champagne. By three o’clock, Vickie and I were legally entitled to partake of connubial bliss.

I think Judge Stratus noticed my pained expression when I handed over the hundred dollars, because he suggested that if we were short on cash, we should stop by the farm and talk to André Pollifex. “He’s always looking for asparagus pickers this time of year.” In point of fact, my divorce from Irene had cost me plenty, making a shambles of both my bank account and my credit record, and Vickie’s fondness for upper-middle-class counterculture artifacts — solar-powered trash compacters and so on — had depleted her resources as well. We had funds enough for the moment, though, so I told Stratus we probably wouldn’t be joining the migrant-worker pool before August.

“Well, sweetheart, we’ve done it,” I said as we climbed back into the bus. “Mr. and Mrs. Blake Meeshaw.”

“The price was certainly right,” said Vickie, “even though the husband involved is a fixer-upper.”

“You’ve got quite a few loose shingles yourself,” I said.

“I’ll be hammering and plastering all summer.”

Although we had no plans to stop at Pollifex Farm, when we got there an enormous flock of sheep was crossing the road. Vickie hit the brakes just in time to avoid making mutton of a stray ewe, and we resigned ourselves to watching the woolly parade, which promised to be as dull as a passing freight train. Eventually a swarthy man appeared gripping a silver-tipped shepherd’s crook. He advanced at a pronounced stoop, like a denizen of Dante’s Purgatory balancing a millstone on his neck.

A full minute elapsed before Vickie and I realized that the sheep were moving in a loop, like wooden horses on a carousel. With an indignation bordering on hysteria, I leaped from the van and strode toward the obnoxious herdsman. What possible explanation could he offer for erecting this perpetual barricade?

Nearing the flock, I realized that the scene’s strangest aspect was neither the grotesque shepherd nor the tautological roadblock, but rather the sheep themselves. Every third or fourth animal was a mutant, its head distinctly humanoid, though the facial features seemed melted together, as if they’d been cast in wax and abandoned to the summer sun. The sooner we were out of here, I decided, the better.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shouted. “Get these animals off the road!”

The shepherd hobbled up to me and pulled a tranquilizer pistol from his belt with a manifest intention to render me unconscious.

“Welcome to Pollifex Farm,” he said.

The gun went off, the dart found my chest, and the world turned black.

Regaining consciousness, I discovered that someone — the violent shepherd? André Pollifex? — had relocated my assaulted self to a small bright room perhaps twelve feet square. Dust motes rode the sunlit air. Swatches of yellow wallpaper buckled outward from the sheetrock like spritsails puffed with wind. I lay on a mildewed mattress, elevated by a box spring framed in steel. A turban of bandages encircled my head. Beside me stood a second bed, as uninviting as my own, its bare mattress littered with artifacts that I soon recognized as Vickie’s — comb, hand mirror, travel alarm, ankh earrings, well-thumbed paperback of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

It took me at least five minutes, perhaps as many as ten, before I realized that my brain had been removed from my cranium and that the pink, throbbing, convoluted mass of tissue on the nearby library cart was in fact my own thinking apparatus. Disturbing and unorthodox as this arrangement was, I could not deny its actuality. Every time I tapped my skull, a hollow sound came forth, as if I were knocking on an empty casserole dish. Fortunately, the physicians responsible for my condition had worked hard to guarantee that it would entail no functional deficits. Not only was my brain protected by a large Plexiglas jar filled with a clear, acrid fluid, it also retained its normal connection to my heart and spinal cord. A ropy mass of neurons, interlaced with augmentations of my jugular vein and my two carotid arteries, extended from beneath my orphaned medulla and stretched across four feet of empty space before disappearing into my reopened fontanel, the whole configuration shielded from microbial contamination by a flexible plastic tube. I was thankful for my surgeons’ conscientiousness, but also — I don’t mind telling you — extremely frightened and upset.

My brain’s extramural location naturally complicated the procedure, but in a matter of minutes I managed to transport both myself and the library cart into the next room, an unappointed parlor bedecked in cobwebs, and from there to an enclosed porch, all the while calling Vickie’s name. She didn’t answer. I opened the door and shuffled into the putrid air of Pollifex Farm. Everywhere I turned, disorder prospered. The cottage in which I’d awoken seemed ready to collapse under its own weight. The adjacent windmill canted more radically than Pisa’s Leaning Tower. Scabs of leprous white paint mottled the sides of the main farmhouse. No building was without its unhinged door, its shattered window, its sunken roof, its disintegrating wall — a hundred instances of entropy mirroring the biological derangement that lay within.

I did not linger in the stables, home to six human-headed horses. Until this moment, I’d thought the centaurian form intrinsically beautiful, but with their bony backs and twisted faces these monsters soon deprived me of that hypothesis. Nor did I remain long in the chicken coop, habitat of four gigantic human-headed hens, each the size of a German shepherd. Nor did the pigshed detain me, for seven human-headed hogs is not a spectacle that improves upon contemplation. Instead I hurried toward an immense barn, lured by a spirited performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 wafting through a crooked doorway right out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Cautiously I entered. Spacious and high-roofed, the barn was a kind of agrarian cathedral, the Chartres of animal husbandry. In the far corner, hunched over a baby grand piano, sat a humanoid bull: blunt nose, gaping nostrils, a long tapering horn projecting from either side of his head. Whereas his hind legs were of the bovine variety, his forelegs ended in a pair of human hands that skated gracefully along the keyboard. He shared his bench with my wife, and even at this distance I could see that the bull-man’s virtuosity had brought her to the brink of rapture.

Cerebrum in tow, I made my way across the barn. With each step, my apprehension deepened, my confusion increased, and my anger toward Vickie intensified. Apprehension, confusion, anger: while I was not yet accustomed to experiencing such sensations in a location other than my head, the phenomenon now seemed less peculiar than when I’d first returned to sentience.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Vickie, acknowledging my presence. “Why am I sitting here when I should be helping you recover from the operation? Please believe me: Karl said the anesthesia wouldn’t wear off for another four hours.”

She proceeded to explain that Karl was the shepherd who’d tranquilized me on the road, subsequently convincing her to follow him onto the farm rather than suffer the identical fate. But Karl’s name was the least of what Vickie had learned during the past forty-eight hours. Our present difficulties, she elaborated, traced to the VD screening we’d received on Wednesday. In exchange for a substantial payment, Judge Stratus had promised to alert his patrons at Pollifex Farm the instant he happened upon a blood sample bearing the deoxyribonucleic acid component known as QZ-11-4. Once in possession of this gene — or, more specifically, once in possession of a human brain whose in utero maturation had been influenced by this gene — Dr. Pollifex’s biological investigations could go forward.

“Oh, Blake, they’re doing absolutely wonderful work here.” Vickie rose from the bench, drifted toward me, and, taking care not to become entangled in my spinal cord, gave me a mildly concupiscent hug. “An external brain to go with your external genitalia — I think it’s very sexy.”

“Stop talking nonsense, Vickie!” I said. “I’ve been mutilated!”

She stroked my bandaged forehead and said, “Once you hear the whole story, you’ll realize that your bilateral hemispherectomy serves a greater good.”

“Call me Maxwell,” said the bull-man, lifting his fingers from the keyboard. “Maxwell Taurus.” His voice reminded me of Charles Laughton’s. “I must congratulate you on your choice of marriage partner, Blake. Vickie has a refreshingly open mind.”

“And I have a depressingly vacant skull,” I replied. “Take me to this lunatic Pollifex so I can get my brain put back where it belongs.”

“The doctor would never agree to that.” Maxwell fixed me with his stare, his eyes all wet and brown like newly created caramel apples. “He requires round-the-clock access to your anterior cortex.”

A flock of human-headed geese fluttered into the barn, raced toward a battered aluminum trough full of grain, and began to eat. Unlike Maxwell, the geese did not possess the power of speech — either that, or they simply had nothing to say to each other.

I sighed and leaned against my library cart. “So what, exactly, does QZ-11-4 do?”

“Dr. Pollifex calls it the integrity gene, wellspring of decency, empathy, and compassionate foresight,” said Maxwell. “Francis of Assisi had it. So did Clara Barton, Mahatma Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, Albert Schweitzer, and Susan B. Anthony. And now that Dr. Pollifex has started injecting me with a serum derived from your hypertrophic superego — now I’ve got it, too.”

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,” said the bull-man. “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 cradle 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 brick.

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 André 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 tool shed 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 André 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 Caprikov,” 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 said.

“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 so 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. Her name was Becky. 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 claim 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 the 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 petits 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 of Matthew 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’d 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 deal 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 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 my fellow prisoner and I have made a pact, and in that you are correct. You further imagine 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 into his eyes. The face that returned my gaze was neither entirely mad nor wholly 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 only need one of the shovels I’d spotted in the tool shed — 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 cappuccino, 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 businesses. 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. My wife’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 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 Caprikov, and 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 André Pollifex, sane scientist, was about to unleash a reign of enlightenment on Greenbriar. They were having none of it.

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, corncrib, 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 with 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’d 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 tool shed, 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.

“André, 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.

“Caprikov 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 three times 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 have 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 the 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 André 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 descendant 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.