Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

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