Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

the grounds of the New Ganden Monastery, then set about searching for his reincarnation. At last report they’d located a promising three-year-old in the village of Gyanzge.

      So what is it like to be enlightened? What rarefied phenomena does a bodhisattva perceive? I regret to say that the gift was largely wasted on me. To be sure, shortly after eating Chögi Gyatso’s cerebrum I found myself praying compulsively, chanting incessantly, and meditating obsessively, much to Gawa’s consternation. For a few incandescent days I saw the world as he had, lambent and fair and full of woe, abrim with beings who, without exception, every one, each and all, deserved my unqualified kindness.

      But my wisdom did not endure. It faded like the westering sun, and what I recall of ecstatic emptiness cannot be articulated in any language, human or simian.

      I suppose this loss was to be expected. As these pages attest, I was always a lousy candidate for wakefulness. In my heart I’m a child of that other Enlightenment, the one personified by such cheeky freethinkers as Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin. At the end of the day I’m a carpe diem creature, a rationalist, really, the sort of primate who can’t help wondering whether a compassion born of emptiness might not be an empty compassion indeed. I love my life. I treasure my attachments. That is not about to change. True, this ape may eventually evolve, in the Darwinian sense, but for now I shall leave transcendence to the professionals.

      That said, I am endlessly honored to have been his student. My gestures of remembrance are small but constant. Every night, after making love to Gawa, I stare into the blackness of our lair and give voice to the lovely words he taught me, saying, “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the samgha.”

      And then, relaxing, drifting, I lay my head on the yak-hair pillow. Gawa snores beside me. The dying embers crackle. I close my eyes, quiet my mind, and dream of my friend, His Holiness, the fifteenth Dalai Lama.

      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