Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

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