Cat's Pajamas (6 page)

He readily assented, and so I took him by the hand and led him into the nocturnal city.

By the time we reached my apartment he'd stopped shivering. Supplying him with a dry wardrobe posed no challenge: although my ex-lovers are a heterogeneous bunch, they share a tendency to leave their clothes behind. That night Bruno received Warren's underwear, Jack's socks, Craig's dungarees, and Rich's red polo shirt. I actually had more difficulty replacing my own soggy attire, but eventually I found a clean blouse and presentable khakis.

While Bruno got dressed, I spread the contents of his wallet—money, credit cards, an ancient snapshot of Mina—across the kitchen counter to dry. Next I telephoned the ferry terminal: good news—not only had some admirable soul turned in my abandoned rucksack, the dispatcher was willing to hold it for me. Before Bruno emerged from the bedroom, I managed to feed my cat, Leni, an affectionate calico with a strong sense of protocol, and prepare hot tea for the artist and myself. The instant he appeared in the kitchen, I handed him a steaming mug of oolong, seeking thereby to elevate his spirits and raise his core temperature.

“I had a college professor once, Nikolai Vertankowski, your most devoted fan,” I told him as, tea mugs in hand, we moved from my cramped kitchen to my correspondingly miniscule parlor. “We spent most of Aesthetics 101 watching Bruno and Mina tapes, especially the Boston Common concerts.”

He settled into my wing chair, fluted his lips, and at long last drew a measure of liquid warmth into his body. He frowned. “Mina and I never authorized any recordings,” he muttered, acknowledging his identity for the first time. “Your professor trafficked in contraband.”

“He knew that,” I replied. “The man was obsessed. Probably still is.”

Leni jumped into Bruno's lap, tucked her forelegs beneath her chest, and purred. “Obsessed,” he echoed, taking a second swallow of tea. He brushed Leni's spine, his palm smoothing her fur like a spatula spreading frosting on a cake. “Obsession is something I can understand—obsession with thanatos, obsession with the élan vital. Speaking of life, I owe you mine. In return, I shall grant you any favor within my capabilities.”

“Talk to me.”

“A great sex artist is celebrated for his conversation,” he said, nodding.

“Talk to me, Bruno Pearl. Tell me the truth about yourself”

“There was a bullet,” he said.

There was a bullet. But before the bullet, there was a triumphant performance in Philadelphia. On only two previous occasions had Mina and Bruno succeeded in accomplishing both Fleur de Lis and Holy Fools in a single afternoon. The Fairmount Park concert had elicited raucous cheers, rapturous sighs, and thunderous applause.

To celebrate their success, the artists treated themselves to a lobster dinner in their hotel room, followed by a stroll along the Delaware. At some undefined moment they crossed an indeterminate boundary, moving beyond the rehabilitated sector of Front Street, with its well-lighted walkways and quaint restaurants, and entering the warehouse district, domain of illegal transactions in flesh and pharmaceuticals. Under normal conditions the artists might have noted their seedy surroundings, spun around in a flurry of self-preservation, and headed south, but they were too intoxicated by their recent success, too high on Aphrodite. Fleur de Lis and Holy Fools, both in the same concert.

The bullet came from above, flying through a window on the second floor of a gutted factory and subsequently following its evil and inexorable trajectory downward. Bruno would later remember that the shot was actually the first in a series. A heroin deal gone wrong, he later surmised, or possibly a violent altercation between a prostitute and her pimp.

Spiraling toward Mina, the bullet drilled through the left side of her head, drove bits of skull into her cerebral cortex, entered her midbrain, and lodged in her cerebellum.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Those were my exact words,” Bruno said. “‘Oh my God,' I screamed.”

“Did she die?”

Bruno pleasured my cat with his long delicate fingers. “The odds were against her,” he replied cryptically.

Mina, delirious, collapsed in Bruno's arms, blood geysering from the wound. He laid her on the asphalt. It was surprisingly warm. Somehow he remained sane enough to administer first-aid, tearing off his shirt and bandaging her leaking head. He carried her one block west and hailed a cab. The driver, a Mexican, ten years behind the wheel, had seen worse, much worse, and without a breath of hesitation he drove them to Thomas Jefferson Memorial Hospital. Twenty minutes after her arrival in the emergency room, Mina lay beneath two halogen lamps, hovering on the cusp of oblivion as a surgical team struggled to reassemble her shattered brain.

A soothing and attractive Pakistani nurse directed Bruno down the hall to an ecumenical chapel—a dark place, soft, small, stinking of lilies and candle wax. He was the only patron. Religious music of unknown origin and protean denomination wafted through the air. The artist believed in neither Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, nor Krishna. He beseeched them all. He solicited divine intervention more devoutly than when, at age ten, he still knew, absolutely knew, that God always came through for you in the end, that it was just a matter of waiting.

“After I finished praying, I held my hand over a candle flame.” Bruno showed me his right palm. The pale, fibrous scar had pulled the skin into a shape resembling a Star of David. “To this day, I'm not sure why I did it. A kind of oblation, I suppose. I felt nothing at first. A tickle. I actually smelled my burning flesh before I apprehended the pain.”

Near dawn a bulky man in a white smock waddled into the chapel and introduced himself as Gregor Croom, chief among the surgeons who'd operated on Mina. Dr. Croom was perhaps the most physically unappealing person Bruno had ever met. A great mass of superfluous tissue clung to his upper spine, forcing him into a stoop. Mounds of overlapping flab drooped from the sides of his face, so that his tiny black eyes suggested raisins embedded in a pudding.

The surgeon spoke clinically, phlegmatically. They'd stopped the bleeding, he said, internal and external, and her vital signs were stable—but she'd lost massive quantities of irreplaceable neural matter. It was doubtful that she would ever again move her limbs of her own volition. In all likelihood the bullet had excised her ability to speak.

“I wept,” Bruno said, finishing his tea. Leni's errant tail slapped his knee. “I wept like a baby.”

“Dear Lord,” I said. “My poor Mr. Pearl.”

Dr. Croom's demeanor underwent an abrupt transformation. His manner grew gentle, his voice mellifluous. Locking a gnarled hand around Bruno's wrist, he confessed that he was as steadfast an apostle as the sex artists would ever know, proud owner of ninety-eight Bruno and Mina tapes of dubious provenance. His failure to foresee and attend that afternoon's concert in Fairmount Park would haunt him for years to come.

“Please know I shall do all within my power to return Mina to the eros circuit,” Dr. Croom told the despairing Bruno. “My expertise lies wholly at your disposal, free of charge.”

“Are you saying…there's hope?”

“More than hope, Mr. Pearl. A cure.”

As the anemic light of dawn washed over Philadelphia, Dr. Croom told Bruno how he had recently perfected a new, audacious, auspicious—and untested—method for rehabilitating victims of neural trauma. He freely revealed that his colleagues had no faith in the technique, and he admitted that it lay outside the bounds of orthodox medical practice. The pioneering experiment would occur in Croom's private laboratory, which he maintained in the basement of his Chestnut Hill mansion.

“The doctor proposed to employ a unique genetic-engineering technology,” Bruno told me, massaging Leni with extravagant strokes that began at her nose and continued to the end of her tail. “His desire was to create an embryo bearing Mina's precise genetic heritage. He would then accelerate the fetus's development through hormonal manipulation, so that it would become an infant within seven days, an adolescent within five weeks, and a woman of thirty-six years—Mina's age—in a matter of months. The result, he promised me, would be an exact biological duplicate of my wife.”

“But it would
not
be a duplicate,” I protested. “It would have none of her experiences, none of memories.”

“You may be sure that I presented this objection to Dr. Croom. His answer astonished me.”

The doctor told Bruno about a heuristic computer, the JCN-5000-X. Among the machine's several spectacular functions was an ability to scan a person's cerebrum, encode the totality of its electrochemical contents, and insert these byzantine files into the
tabula rasa
that is the nervous system of a genetically-engineered, hormonally-accelerated human replica. In Croom's view, a complete restoration of Mina was entirely feasible, for the bullet had damaged her brain's motor and autonomic areas only—the very motor and autonomic areas that the hypothetical duplicate would boast in full. With the exceptions of certain trivial skills and some useless bits of nostalgia, the facsimile Mina would enjoy a selfhood identical to that possessed by the original before the bullet arrived.

“Look at me, Mr. Pearl,” Dr. Croom said. “Contemplate my ugliness. What woman would have this walrus for her lover? And yet, thanks to you and your wife, I have known many a sybaritic satisfaction.”

Bruno grew suddenly aware of the pain throbbing in his palm. “This person you're proposing to create… would it truly be Mina—Mina restored, Mina reborn—or would it be… somebody else?”

“I'm not a philosopher,” Dr. Croom replied. “Neither am I a theologian nor a sage. I'm a cyberneurologist with a mission. Sanction this procedure, I beg you. For the sake of art—for the sake of all the world's freaks and Quasimodos—allow me to resurrect your wife.”

Bruno requested a second mug of tea. I retired to the kitchen, brewed the oolong, and, upon handing him his replenished mug, voiced my opinion that the duplicate Mina Pearl and the original Mina Pearl would be exactly the same person.

He scowled.

“You disagree?” I said.

“Imagine, sweet Susan, that you have faithfully recorded your every memory, belief, dream, hope, and habit in some massive journal. Call it
The Book of Susan.
Each time you finish making the day's entry, you store the volume on a high shelf in your private library. After your death, the executor of your will—a cousin, let's say—decides to browse among your bookshelves. She spies
The Book of Susan,
stretches for it, dislodges it. Suddenly the volume falls heavily on her head, rendering her unconscious. Five hours later, the executor awakens—as a total amnesiac. She notices the open book in front of her and immediately starts to read it. Her empty mind is like a sponge, absorbing every one of your recorded experiences. Now, dear Susan. Here's the question. At the precise moment when your cousin finishes reading the book and rises from the library floor, have you been reborn?”

“Reborn?”

“Take all the time you want,” he said.

“Of
course
I haven't been reborn,” I said.

“Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“And so you refused to let Dr. Croom carry out his experiment?”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

Bruno scratched Leni behind the ears. “I told him he could proceed—proceed with my blessing… provided he acceded to one extreme condition. He must also make a duplicate of me, someone to look after the original Mina, nourishing her, cleaning her, caressing her, while my real self again joined the circuit.”

“And Croom agreed?”

Bruno nodded. “The man was a romantic.”

Like most other Bruno and Mina enthusiasts, I had often wondered about the one-year hiatus in their career. Had they become ill? Grown weary of the circuit? Now the riddle was solved. Throughout his absence Bruno had occupied a motel on the outskirts of Philadelphia—the first time he had ever settled in one place for more than a week—caring for his frightened, aphasic, and largely paralyzed wife.

He fed her three meals a day, changed her diapers faithfully, and spent many hours reading poetry and fiction aloud in her presence. Despite the lost neurons, Mina retained a modicum of control over her dominant hand, and she managed to compose, at least twice a week, a letter filled with ardor and appreciation. The effort depleted her, and her script bordered on the illegible, but it was obvious from these exchanges that the primal Mina was no zombie. She knew what had happened to her. She understood that her doppelgänger was growing in a Chestnut Hill basement. She realized that a duplicate Bruno would soon replace the loving husband who attended her, so that he might go forth and again practice his art.

“Did Mina approve?” I asked.

“She said she did,” Bruno replied. “I was skeptical, naturally, but her letters evinced no feelings of betrayal. Whenever I suggested that she was telling me what I wanted to hear, she became angry and hurt.”

Nine months after the bullet ruined Mina's brain, Dr. Croom summoned Bruno to his ramshackle laboratory and presented him not only with a facsimile of the artist's wife but also with his own artificial twin.

“I can't tell you which phenomenon amazed me more”—Bruno finished his second mug of tea—“seeing and speaking with Mina's replica, or interviewing my second self.”

“Credible copies?” I asked.

“Perfect copies. And yet I kept wondering: if this was Mina, then who was that person back in my hotel room? I wholly admired the duplicate. You might even say I cherished her. Did I love her? Perhaps. I don't know. My mind was not on love that day.”

And so Bruno hit the road once more, coupling with the forged Mina in forty-two parks—famous and obscure, metropolitan and suburban, Old World and New—over the course of a full year. It was one of their most successful tours ever, drawing unqualified accolades from the critics even as audiences presented the artists with vast quantities of applause, adulation, and cash.