Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

and Mother’s Day cards, along with ten thousand emergency DVD transfers of Shirley Temple movies.” In other words, literalized metaphors are used to fight a literalized metaphor. When that and a more conventional military expedition fail, “a team of crack nihilists” is recruited, including the film-director narrator, a metal hurlant rock singer, a playwright, and an avant-garde mathematician. Their quest turns into an almost slapstick katabasis, a classical journey to the underworld, only one in which the usual fearsome gatekeepers are replaced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (in his insect form), and a financial-derivatives swindler named Roscoe Prudhomme. Finally, they reach the god-like Caltiki — a monstrous amoeba, who congratulates them on having “proven yourselves worthy of an audience with the abyss.” The primordial roots of that abyss, the monster explains, can be traced to “the single worst idea your human race has ever devised.”

      And just what is that terrifyingly dumb idea? Again — read the story. Simply by holding Reality by Other Means in your hands, you have proven yourselves worthy of your own audience with the abyss, and it’s quite an interview.

      Reality by Other Means

      Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva

      After thirty years spent eating the chilled coral brains of overachieving amateur climbers who believed they could reach the summit of Mount Everest without dying, a diet from which I derived many insights into the virtues and limitations of Western thought, I decided that my life could use a touch more spirituality, and so I resolved to study Tibetan Buddhism under the tutelage of His Holiness, Chögi Gyatso, the fifteenth Dalai Lama.

      The problem was not so much that I nourished myself through cerebrophagy, but that I felt so little pity for the unfortunates on whom I fed. Chögi Gyatso, by contrast, was reportedly the reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Evidently he had much to teach me.

      As far as I know, I was the first of my race to undertake an explicitly religious quest. Traditionally we yeti are an unchurched species. Our ideological commitments, such as they are, tend along Marxist lines, the natural inclination of any creature with a dialectical metabolism, but we try not to push it too far, lest we lapse into hypocrisy. After all, it’s difficult to maintain a robust contempt for the haute bourgeoisie when their neuronal tissues are your preferred source of sustenance.

      We live by a code and kill by a canon. Yes, kill: for the raw fact is that, while the typical cyanotic climber who winds up on the yeti menu may be doomed, he is not necessarily dead. We always follow protocol. Happening upon a lost and languishing mountaineer, I assiduously search the scene for some evidence that he might survive. If I spot a Sherpa party on the horizon or a rescue helicopter in the distance, I continue on my way. If death appears inevitable, however, I tell the victim of my intention, then perform the venerable act of nang-duzul, hedging the frosty skull with all thirty-eight of my teeth, assuming a wide stance for maximum torque, and, finally, snaffling off the cranium in an abrupt yet respectful gesture. The sha is traditionally devoured on the spot. It’s all very ritualistic, all very in nomine Patris et Fili et Spiritus Sancti, to use a phrase I learned from the left cerebral hemisphere of Michael Rafferty, former seminarian, bestselling author of eighteen Father Tertullian detective novels, and failed Everest aspirant.

      No matter how scrupulously he observes the norms of nang-duzul, the celebrant cannot expect any immediate cognitive gain. He must be patient. This isn’t vodka. Two or three hours will elapse before the arrival of the shashespah, the meat-knowledge, but it’s usually worth the wait. Typically the enrichment will linger for over a year, sometimes a decade, occasionally a lifetime. Last week I partook of a tenured comparative literature professor from Princeton, hence the formality of my present diction. I would have preferred a south Jersey Mafioso to a central Jersey postmodernist, the better to tell my story quickly and colorfully, but the mob rarely comes up on the mountain. My benefactor’s name was Dexter Sherwood, and he’d remitted $65,000 to an outfit called Karmic Adventures on the promise that they would get him to the summit along with six other well-heeled clients. The corporation fulfilled its half of the contract, planting Dexter Sherwood squarely atop the planet, but during the descent a freak storm arrived, and it became every man for himself. I have nothing good to say about Karmic Adventures and its rivals: Extreme Ascents, Himalayan Challenge, Rappelling to Paradise, Jomolungma or Bust. They litter the slopes with their oxygen tanks, they piss off the sky goddess, and every so often they kill a customer. My Parents Froze to Death on Everest and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.

      I shall not deny that a connoisseur of long pork occupies ethically ambiguous ground, so let me offer the following proposition. If you will grant that my race is fully sentient, with all attendant rights and privileges, then we shall admit to being cannibals. True, we are Candidopithecus tibetus and you are Homo sapiens, but my younger sister Namgyal long ago demonstrated that this taxonomy is no barrier to fertile intercourse between our races, hence my half-breed niece Tencho and my mixed-blood nephew Jurmo. Do we have an understanding, O furless ones? Call us psychopaths and Dahmerists, accuse us of despoiling the dead, but spare us your stinking zoos, your lurid circuses, your ugly sideshows, your atrocious laboratories.

      This agreement, of course, is purely academic, for you will never learn that we exist — not, at least, in consequence of the present text. I do not write for your amusement but for my own enlightenment. In setting down this account of my religious education, all the while imagining that my audience is your cryptic kind, I hope to make some sense of the tragedy that befell His Holiness. And when I am done, you may be sure, I shall drop the manuscript into the deepest, darkest crevasse I can find.

      I did not doubt that Chögi Gyatso would agree to instruct me in the dharma. For the past four years my clan and I had faithfully shielded him from the predations of the People’s Liberation Army during his thrice-yearly pilgrimages from Sikkim to Tibet. Thanks to me and my cousins, the true Dalai Lama had thus far enjoyed twelve secret audiences with his false counterpart in Lhasa. His Holiness owed me one.

      “Why do you wish to study the dharma?” Chögi Gyatso inquired, knitting his considerable brow.

      “My eating habits cause me distress,” I explained.

      “Digestive?”

      “Deontological.”

      “I know all about your eating habits, Taktra Kunga,” said His Holiness, soothing me with his soft hazel eyes. He had a moon face, a shaved pate, and prominent ears. Behind his back, we yeti called him Mr. Sacred Potato Head. “You feed on deceased climbers, extracting sha-shespah from their brains.”

      Although our local holy men were aware of yeti culinary practices, they’d never learned all the sordid details, assuming in their innocence that we restrained our appetite until the donor was defunct — an illusion I preferred to keep intact. “Every species has its own epistemology,” I noted, offering His Holiness an intensely dental grin.

      “For me you are like the carrion birds who assist in our sky burials,” said Chögi Gyatso. “Scavenging is an honorable way of life, Taktra Kunga. You have no more need of Buddhism than does a vulture.”

      “I wish to feel pity for those on whom I prey,” I explained.

      A seraphic light filled His Holiness’s countenance. Now I was speaking his language. “Does it occur to you that, were you to acquire this pity, you might end up forsaking sha-shespah altogether?”

      “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

      “I shall become your teacher under two conditions. First, each lesson must occur at a time and place of my own choosing. Second, you must forgo your usual cheekiness and approach me with an attitude of respectful submission.”

      “I’m sorry to hear you think I’m cheeky, Your Holiness.”

      “And I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you, Your Hairiness. I merely want to clarify that these lessons will be different from the banter we enjoy during our journeys to Lhasa. We shall have fun, but we shall not descend into facetiousness.”

      “No