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 that someone — the violent shepherd? André Pollifex? — had relocated my assaulted self to a small bright room perhaps twelve feet square. Dust motes rode the sunlit air. Swatches of yellow wallpaper buckled outward 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
