Cat's Pajamas (2 page)
Authors: James Morrow
“Amply displays [Morrow's] ability to juggle absurdity, tragedy, irony and outrage.” â
Locus
And Other Stories
James Morrow
MARTYRS OF THE UPSHOT KNOTHOLE
ISABELLA OF CASTILE ANSWERS HER MAIL
to my cousin
Glenn Morrow,
the brother I never had
Good Morrow To Our Waking Souls
BY TERRY BISSON
W
ANT TO KNOW THE
real skinny about Voodoo Economics? Curious as to what the dead read for fun? Interested in sex as performance art?
You've come to the right place.
James Morrow is best known for his science-fictional fantasies, in particular the audacious Godhead Trilogy, which clothes the existential dilemma of the modern age, the Death of God (or of belief), in quotidian rags by providing the dear departed Deity with a
corpus delecti,
complete with gigantic nose hairs, parasites, and
BO
, to be disposed of and mourned by bereaved humanity.
The title itself,
Towing Jehovah,
is a deliberate and audacious mix of high and low, as if the Mother Church had subcontracted its funeral services to AAA.
RIP.
Heady, hilarious, horrific,
headlong
stuff.
Typical Morrow.
Towing Jehovah
(Godhead #1) won a number of laurels, among them a World Fantasy Award nomination. The novel gave rise to an interesting discussion among the jurors (this writer among them), some of whom argued that Morrow's work, though clearly award-worthy, was just as clearly science fiction, not fantasy.
Huh?
responded others. The central and (by a long shot) largest figure in the book was neither alien nor android but a Deity, the Deity, for Christ's sake (so to speak). The very nemesis, the archenemy of science: God, the Father, Himself, or at least his prodigious and venerable corpse!
Hello?
As religion is manifestly fantasy, this eminently sensible position won. As did Jim, as did
Towing Jehovah
(World Fantasy Award, 1995). But the jurors' concerns were far from fanciful. For in fact the difference between SF and Fantasy, so often debated at dead dog parties as rockets vs. elves, more often comes down to a difference in style and tone rather than subject matter. Art direction, if you will. And Morrow's furniture, and therefore his tone, is almost always that of SF. The real world of tankers and tow-ropes, cereal boxes and oil slicks is always front and center. Moonlight and magic are at a minimum. Jerkins and goblets are there none.
So it is with the stories in this collection.
Morrow's short stories are as acclaimed as his novels, and show the same predilections and techniques, though in more compressed and often more vivid form. Short stories rely on voice rather than plot, and Morrow delights in assuming a professorial tone to describe the most outrageous events, thus becoming his own straight men. He astonishes the reader by refusing to be astonished, even when pint-sized aliens battle in Central Park, deserving infants are drowned in Holy Water, or newlyweds awaken to find their brains preserved in jars.
The tales in this volume are narrated for the most part with a repertory of Victorian flourishes and cadences. Morrow's tone is authentically (if deceptively) high, even as his adventures partake mightily of the low. Who else can speak of the “despairing throng” and at the same time let us know that they piss, they eat bran flakes, they communicate with Mars via harpsichords and dry cell batteries.
Dry indeed.
The drollery is as Victorian as the sensibility is modern, even post-modern. Morrow is after the biggest of Big Game, and for all their seemingly casual hilarity (and for the most part, they are funny as hell) these tales deal with the eternal, unanswered questions. They will rock your world. Sometimes slyly, sometimes directly.
“The War of the Worldviews” is perhaps the wildest, most original take ever on the oldest trope of SF, alien invasion; while for those with darker tastes, there is “Auspicious Eggs,” set in the bleakest post-holocaust universe since Walter Miller's.
For every laugh there is an inhalation of brimstone. So be warned.
Who else among modern SF writers (and Morrow, to his great credit, refuses to refuse the label) has worked so hard to sharpen the swords of satire? And had such fun doing it? His is a hard act to follow. Most of us are content with smaller targets than God and Man (not to mention Woman).
He is our Voltaire, casting a cold eye on both the follies of the day and the fashions of philosophy. He is our Swift, skewering his enemies with a smile.
He would be our Twain, except that we already have one. He is in fact our Morrow.
AUGUST 7
O
NE THING I'VE LEARNED
from this catastrophe is to start giving Western science and Newtonian rationality their due. For six days running, professional astronomers in the United States and Europe warned us of puzzling biological and cybernetic activity on the surfaces of both Martian satellites. We, the public, weren't interested. Next the stargazers announced that Phobos and Deimos had each sent a fleet of disc-shaped spaceships, heavily armed, hurtling toward planet Earth. We laughed in their faces. Then the astronomers reported that each saucer measured only one meter across, so that the invading armadas evoked “a vast recall of defective automobile tires.” The talk-show comedians had a field day.
The first operation the Martians undertook upon landing in Central Park was to suck away all the city's electricity and seal it in a small spherical container suggesting an aluminum racquetball. I believe they wanted to make sure we wouldn't bother them as they went about their incomprehensible agenda, but Valerie says they were just being quixotic. In either case, the Martians obviously don't need all that power. They brought plenty with them.
I am writing by candlelight in our Delancey Street apartment, scribbling on a legal pad with a ballpoint pen. New York City is without functional lamps, subways, elevators, traffic signals, household appliances, or personal computers. Here and there, I suppose, life goes on as usual, thanks to storage batteries, solar cells, and diesel-fueled generators. The rest of us are living in the 18th century, and we don't much like it.
I was taking Valerie's kid to the Central Park Zoo when the Phobosians and the Deimosians started uprooting the city's power cables. Bobby and I witnessed the whole thing. The Martians were obviously having a good time. Each alien is only six inches high, but I could still see the jollity coursing through their little frames. Capricious chipmunks. I hate them all. Bobby became terrified when the Martians started wrecking things. He cried and moaned. I did my best to comfort him. Bobby's a good kid. Last week he called me Second Dad.
The city went black, neighborhood by neighborhood, and then the hostilities began. The Phobosian and the Deimosian infantries went at each other with weapons so advanced as to make Earth's rifles and howitzers seem like peashooters. Heat rays, disintegrator beams, quark bombs, sonic grenades, laser cannons. The Deimosians look rather like the animated mushrooms from
Fantasia.
The Phobosians resemble pencil sharpeners fashioned from Naugahyde. All during the fight, both races communicated among themselves via chirping sounds reminiscent of dolphins enjoying sexual climax. Their ferocity knew no limits. In one hour I saw enough war crimes to fill an encyclopedia, though on the scale of an 0-gauge model railroad.
As far as I could tell, the Battle of Central Park ended in a stalemate. The real loser was New York, victim of a hundred ill-aimed volleys. At least half the buildings on Fifth Avenue are gone, including the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Fires rage everywhere, eastward as far as Third Avenue, westward to Columbus. Bobby and I were lucky to get back home alive.
Such an inferno is clearly beyond the capacity of our local fire departments. Normally we would seek help from Jersey and Connecticut, but the Martians have fashioned some sort of force-field dome, lowering it over the entire island as blithely as a chef placing a lid on a casserole dish. Nothing can get in, and nothing can get out. We are at the invaders' mercy. If the Phobosians and the Deimosians continue trying to settle their differences through violence, the city will burn to the ground.
AUGUST 8
The Second Battle of Central Park was even worse than the first. We lost the National Academy of Design, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Carlyle Hotel. It ended with the Phobosians driving the Deimosians all the way down to Rockefeller Center. The Deimosians then rallied, stood their ground, and forced a Phobosian retreat to West 71st Street.
Valerie and I learned about this latest conflict only because a handful of resourceful radio announcers have improvised three ad hoc Citizens Band stations along what's left of Lexington Avenue. We have a decent CB receiver, so we'll be getting up-to-the-minute bulletins until our batteries die. Each time the newscaster named Clarence Morant attempts to describe the collateral damage from this morning's hostilities, he breaks down and weeps.
Even when you allow for the shrimplike Martian physique, the two armies are not very far apart. By our scale, they are separated by three blocks-by theirs, perhaps ten kilometers. Clarence Morant predicts there'll be another big battle tomorrow. Valerie chides me for not believing her when she had those premonitions last year of our apartment building on fire. I tell her she's being a Monday morning Nostradamus.
How many private journals concerning the Martian invasion exist at the moment? As I put pen to paper, I suspect that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of my fellow survivors are recording their impressions of the cataclysm. But I am not like these other diary-keepers. I am unique. I alone have the power to stop the Martians before they demolish Manhattanâor so I imagine.
AUGUST 9
All quiet on the West Side frontâthough nobody believes the cease-fire will last much longer. Clarence Morant says the city is living on borrowed time.
Phobos and Deimos. When the astronomers first started warning us of nefarious phenomena on the Martian satellites, I experienced a vague feeling of personal connection to those particular moons. Last night it all flooded back. Phobos and Deimos are indeed a part of my past: a past I've been trying to forgetâthose bad old days when I was the worst psychiatric intern ever to serve an apprenticeship at Bellevue. I'm much happier in my present position as a bohemian hippie bum, looking after Bobby and living off the respectable income Valerie makes running two SoHo art galleries.
His name was Rupert Klieg, and he was among the dozen or so patients who made me realize I'd never be good with insane people. I found Rupert's rants alternately unnerving and boring. They sounded like something you'd read in a cheesy special-interest zine for psychotics.
Paranoid Confessions. True Hallucinations.
Rupert was especially obsessed with an organization called the Asaph Hall Society, named for the self-taught scientist who discovered Phobos and Deimos. All three members of the Asaph Hall Society were amateur astronomers and certifiable lunatics who'd dedicated themselves to monitoring the imminent invasion of planet Earth by the bellicose denizens of the Martian moons. Before Rupert told me his absurd fantasy, I didn't even realize that Mars
had
moons, nor did I care. But now I do, God knows.
The last I heard, they'd put Rupert Klieg away in the Lionel Frye Psychiatric Institute, Ninth Avenue near 58th. Valerie says I'm wasting my time, but I believe in my bones that the fate of Manhattan lies with that particular schizophrenic.
AUGUST 10
This morning a massive infantry assault by the Phobosians drove the Deimosians south to Times Square. When I heard that the Frye Institute was caught in the crossfire, I naturally feared the worst for Rupert. When I actually made the trek to Ninth and 58th, however, I discovered that the disintegrator beams, devastating in most regards, had missed the lower third of the building. I didn't see any Martians, but the whole neighborhood resounded with their tweets and twitters.
The morning's upheavals had left the Institute's staff in a state of extreme distraction. I had no difficulty sneaking into the lobby, stealing a dry-cell lantern, and conducting a room-by-room hunt.
Rupert was in the basement ward, Room 16. The door stood ajar. I entered. He lay abed, grasping a toy plastic telescope about ten centimeters long. I couldn't decide whether his keepers had been kind or cruel to allow him this trinket. It was nice that the poor demented astronomer had a telescope, but what good did it do him in a room with no windows?