Cat's Pajamas (25 page)

GASTON:
(to Jeremiah)
Of course, charity by itself is insufficient. We must also commit ourselves to basic civil liberties and economic egalitarianism.

JEREMIAH: Charity is always optional.

GASTON: Whereas justice never is.

ARABELLA: Have you been reading Karl Marx, Gaston?

GASTON: Dear Abby.

JEREMIAH:
(paraphrasing previous exchange)
“And if a man comes to you and asks, ‘May I borrow your zombie for a day?', say unto him, ‘He's yours to keep, brother.'”

BEN: I'm sorry, Jeremiah, but dead people can't testify before the Borough Council.

SUSAN:
(to Ben)
If they can
vote,
they can
testify.

JEREMIAH:
(to Arabella, admiringly)
“And what voodoo queen, if she finds that one of her hundred zombies has gone astray, does not leave the ninety and nine and seek the one who is lost?”

SUSAN: Gaston, the Committee will almost certainly recommend that Ms. LeGrand be allowed to stay in business.

BEN: Over my dead body.

GASTON: A wise decision, Susan.

JEREMIAH: Good for you, Mrs. Wingrove.

BEN: This is insane!

Arabella pulls the doll from her skirt and holds it in front of Ben. She tickles it. Ben giggles. She folds its arms across its chest. Ben involuntarily assumes a straitjacket posture.

The two of them exchange ferocious stares: everything is now clear to Ben. Slowly, deliberately, Arabella drops the doll. Ben collapses.

SUSAN: Give up, Ben. Vote for the zombies.

As Arabella picks up the doll, Ben slowly rises to his feet. He continues to face these hopeless odds with a bizarre sort of nobility.

Suddenly Arabella chokes the doll—not severely, but enough to momentarily shut off Ben's air supply. Gagging, he collapses once again.

Ben rises, ready for another round. Susan snatches the doll from Arabella.

SUSAN:
(cont'd)
You've had your fun, Arabella
. (beat)
Now I'm going to have mine.

BEN: I shall not sacrifice my principles!

Susan steps toward the bookcase and holds the doll's crotch near the candle flame. She and Ben trade knowing glances.

BEN: Especially my dearest principles.
(beat)
You win, Susan.

SUSAN: It's for the best, Ben.

Susan returns the doll to Arabella, then walks over to Gaston and hugs him.

SUSAN:
(cont'd)
Keep up the good work, Gaston.

GASTON: Mrs. Fishbine's children run me ragged, but I've finally found my calling in life. It was nice to see you again, Susan.

SUSAN: It was nice to see you again, Gaston.
(to Jeremiah)
Coming, Pierre?

JEREMIAH: I belong
here
now.
(pulls small hedge trimmer from his pocket)
Tomorrow I'm helping old Mr. Colby with his yard-work business.

BEN:
(beat)
You'll find it very satisfying.

JEREMIAH: See you at the Council meeting.

SUSAN: I'm looking forward to it.

Susan begins to exit.

BEN: Wait, Susan. I'll walk you to your car.

SUSAN:
(pointedly)
I took the bus.
(brightens)
Goodnight, everyone.

Susan marches into the foyer. Friendless and confused, Ben looks around, then smiles weakly and addresses Arabella.

BEN: You've got my vote, Ms. LeGrand, but give me that damn doll.

Arabella hands Ben the doll. As an experiment, he tickles it, which triggers an involuntary giggle.

JEREMIAH: Goodnight, Ben.

GASTON: Pleasant dreams, sir.

Exit Ben. Gaston and Jeremiah stumble toward the bookcase. They respectively select Descartes's
On Method
and Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit,
then exit toward the cellar stairs.

Alone now, Arabella turns on the radio and addresses the audience. A misterioso organ theme plays under her speech.

ARABELLA: I've been reviving the dead for nearly three years now, but I still don't understand them. And yet we need the dead, don't we? Without the dead, the living would become much too impressed with themselves.

She moves slowly around the room, blowing out each candle. As the room darkens, she directs her voice toward the whole Kingdom of Thanatos.

ARABELLA:
(cont'd)
Do you hear me, all you corpses out there? Listen, I know how hard it is for you. Worms, grave robbers, ungrateful descendents. But I'm on your side. You have a friend in Arabella LeGrand.

She lowers her voice and resumes speaking to the audience.

ARABELLA:
(cont'd)
As for the rest of you… neighbors, citizens, future cadavers… when you go to die, hang a sign around your neck—
DO NOT RESUSCITATE UNTIL DOOMSDAY
—and I promise to leave you alone. But before you hang that sign, remember one thing. I'm offering you a second chance to make yourself useful in this world.

She turns off the radio and quenches the last candle.

ARABELLA:
(cont'd)
You won't get a third.

The room goes dark.

“A
LL POLITICS IS LOCAL POLITICS
.”

—
Tip O'Neill

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 both our screaming matches and 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 Andre 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 impatience 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 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 of rendering 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 than someone—the violent shepherd? Andre Pollifex?—had relocated my assaulted self to a small bright room perhaps twelve feet square. Dust motes rode the sunlit air. Sections 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 arrangement 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 had thought the centaurial form intrinsically beautiful, but with their bony backs and twisted faces these monsters soon deprived me of that supposition. 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 pig shed 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.