Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

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