Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  This primate was named Freud. He had taken his own nervous system apart and examined his component circuits by periodically altering its structure with neurochemicals.

  Among the anal insults exchanged by domesticated primates when fighting for their space were: “Up your ass,” “Go shit in your hat,” “You’re full of shit,” “Take it and stick it where the moon doesn’t shine,” and many others.

  One of the most admired alpha males in the Kingdom of the Franks was General Canbronne. General Canbronne won this adulation for the answer he once gave when asked to surrender at Waterloo.

  “Merde,” was the answer General Canbronne gave.

  When primates went to war or got violent in other ways, they always said they were about to knock the shit out of the enemy.

  They also spoke of dumping on each other.

  The primates who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombs intended to dump on the other primates real hard.

  Benny Benedict’s entire philosophy of life had been shaped by an obscene novel, a murder, and a Boston Cream Pie.

  The novel was called Odysseus and the most shocking thing about it, aside from the searing indecency of its language, was that it had been written by a famous theologian, Rev. Carl Gustav Jung of Zurich, Switzerland. Nobody had known what to make of the book when it was first published, except to fulminate against it. The story, in fourteen chapters, recounted fourteen hours in a very ordinary day as some staggeringly ordinary characters wandered about Zurich on extraordinarily ordinary business. When Jung revealed that the fourteen chapters corresponded to the fourteen Stations of the Cross, conservative critics added blasphemy to their charges against him. Later—much later—academic exegetes adopted Odysseus as the very model of a modern novel and wrote endless studies proving that it was an allegory on everything from the evolution of consciousness to the rise and fall of civilizations.

  Benny couldn’t understand much of what these academic critics wrote, but he knew that Odysseus was, to him, the only book that really succeeded in making the daily seem profound. That was enough of an achievement to convince him that Jung was a genius. It also encouraged him to look at everything that happened as being marvelous in one way or another. If Jung’s characters, or some of them, happened to defecate, urinate, masturbate, and fornicate during the fourteen hours, that was not because the theologian was trying to write pornography, but because the miracle of daily life could not be shown without all of its daily details. Benny didn’t give a flying Philadelphia fuck about the novel’s parallels with the Odyssey and the Stations of the Cross, which Jung admitted, or the other correspondences with body organs, colors, Tarot cards, I Ching hexagrams, and the romantic triangle in Krazy Kat, which his admirers claimed to have found. The important thing about Odysseus was that it demonstrated, almost scientifically, that no day was a dull day.

  Jung, who regarded himself as a better psychologist than the psychologists—this was a conceit typical of theologians—claimed to have found three more circuits in the nervous system beyond Freud’s oral biosurvival circuit and anal emotional-territorial circuit. Jung said that Odysseus demonstrated also a semantic-hominid circuit which created a veil of words between domesticated primates and their experience, thereby differentiating them from the wild primates. He also claimed a specific socio-sexual circuit created by the process of domestication. And he added a fifth, neurosomatic circuit typical of mysticism and music, which causes primates to feel High and spaced-out.

  But Benny didn’t care about all that. Odysseus, in his mind, was simply the book that described life the way it really is, without sentiment and emotions.

  The murder changed all that. It showed Benny that every day is also a terrible day, for somebody.

  On July 23, 1981, Benny’s mother, a white-haired old lady of eighty-four, left the Brooklyn Senior Citizen’s Home where she lived to walk one block to the supermarket. On the way she had her purse snatched and, according to witnesses, struggled with the thief. She was stabbed seventeen times with a Boy Scout knife. When Benny arrived at the hospital emergency room, she was already dead, but he got a look—a long look—at her crimson, mutilated body before the doctor on duty hustled him out into the hall and shot him full of tranquilizers.

  Benny was crippled psychologically in a way that he could not perfectly understand. After all, having reached the fifth decade of his life, he was well acquainted with grief: in the past ten years he had experienced the deaths of his father, his older brother, and three close friends. But murder is not just another form of grief: it is a metaphysical message like Fate knocking on the door at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth. Benny found that the whole world had turned to very fragile glass. Every police siren, every newscast, every angry voice on the street reminded him that he belonged to a dangerously violent species. Benny Benedict realized that each minute, somewhere in the world, somebody was being bashed, beaten, stabbed, shot, slashed, gassed, poisoned, robbed of life.

  He could not bear to be alone at night anymore.

  The Grinning Sadist began to haunt him.

  This horrifying image had been imprinted upon his neurons by various movies and TV melodramas of the sixties and seventies. The Grinning Sadist invaded your home, sometimes alone and sometimes with a horde of equally moronic and vicious cohorts. You were particularly susceptible if you were blind or a woman or all alone at night, but sometimes—as in The Dangerous Hours—he would come with his brutal crew in the bright daytime. His business was never simply burglary, although that was part of it; his real interest was in humiliation, terror, degradation, torture of the body and spirit. And he always grinned.

  Benny’s doctor prescribed Valium, 5 mg. before bedtime. It helped Benny sleep; but when he was awake, every noise still sounded like the Grinning Sadist furtively trying the door.

  Benny bought a police lock. Every noise now sounded like the Grinning Sadist trying to force a window.

  Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy given in 1970, two years after the murder of his daughter. “For the first year after the murder,” Senator Percy said, “my whole family lived in terror.”

  Benny felt a sudden sense of relief. This must be normal, he thought; it happens to everybody who’s had a murder close to them. And it lasts only a year….

  But as July 23, 1982, approached, Benny was not emerging from the terror; it was growing worse. Well, he had been reading up on grief and bereavement, and he knew the first anniversary is always a terrible time. He found the knowledge helpful; it gave him a small purchase on detachment. Also, without his doctor’s consultation, he had raised his Valium dosage at bedtime from 5 mg. to 15 mg. and sometimes 25.

  Then on July 23 itself—the anniversary of the murder—the Grinning Sadist appeared.

  Benny had been invited to give a talk at the Press Club on “Lousewart and Lowered Expectations.” The luncheon was excellent, but Benny ate little, knowing that a belch in the middle of the speech could destroy all communication for several minutes after. When Fred “Figs” Newton began to introduce him (…“New York’s most beloved daily columnist … an institution for over thirty years …”), Benny felt the usual twinges of stage fright, began rehearsing again his first three jokes, gave up on that and concentrated instead on his mantra (Om mani padme hum Om mani padme hum …) and was finally in the ideal state of mixed apprehension and urgency out of which the most relaxed-sounding public speeches always come.

  As the applause died down, he rose to speak.

  And he saw the Grinning Sadist coming right at him.

  He saw the deranged eyes, the cruel mouth, the deliberately ugly clothing (like a very poor cowboy or a 1960s college student), and the knife in the maniac’s hand.

  Om mani padme hum …

  And then he got the Boston Cream Pie right in the face.

  It hadn’t been a knife at all: he had imagined a knife when the pie plate was turned and raised as it
was thrown.

  Benny stood there, very conscious that he was overweight and past fifty, Boston Cream Pie dripping from his face, trying to remind himself that heart palpitations were not a symptom of heart attack, aware suddenly that the daily life of humankind was not only marvelous, as Jung had taught him, and terrible, as the murder had taught him, but totally absurd as well, as the Existentialists might have taught him.*

  *Galactic Archives: New York was an independent city-state in the northwest of Unistat. It was noted for its malodorous stockyards, its vast motion-picture industry, and a huge phallic monument dedicated to “Washington,” a fertility god who allegedly slept in nearly every part of the Unistat, usually with human women, bringing forth such semidivine progeny as the gigantic Paul Bunyan, the patriotic General Motors, the trickster-god Nixon, and the benign Mickey Mouse, who began as a totem of the city of Disneyland and eventually became the principal divinity of all Unistat.

  *Galactic Archives: Pie throwing was common in Unistat at the time of this Romance. It derived, of course, from the territorial feces-hurling rituals of other primates. See “Expressions of Violence in Wild and Domesticated Primates,” Encyclopedia of Primate Psychology, Sirius Press, 2775. Domesticated primates defend ideological territories (mental constructs) as well as the physical turf. Pie throwers were expressing mammalian territorial rage in a traditional primate manner by throwing guck in the faces of those who threatened their ideological “space.”

  AUFGEHOBEN

  2 NEW PLANETS DISCOVERED

  —NEWS HEADLINE, 1983

  The only one in New York who didn’t react emotionally to Benny Benedict’s “One Month to Go” column was Justin Case, an embittered, fortyish man who wrote beautifully meaningless film criticism. Case had not liked the film of 1984 and never read books, which he regarded as too old-fashioned to be worthy of serious attention.

  “Books were invented by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century and are, like all other inventions five centuries old, hopelessly archaic,” Case often said.

  He also liked to categorize books as “linear,” “Aristotelian,” and, when he was especially rhetorical, “paleolithic”; he justified this last adjective on the grounds that books consisted of words, an Old Stone Age invention.

  Case had a Ph.D. from Yale and a D.D. (Dishonorable Discharge) from the U.S. Army. He had earned the former for a thesis on “Metaphor and Myth in the Films of the Three Stooges” and the latter for trying to organize a mutiny during the Vietnam War. His film criticism appeared in a journal called Confrontation. His essays usually began with the same three words as his Ph.D. thesis—e.g., “Metaphor and Myth in Hitchcock’s 39 Steps,” “Metaphor and Myth in Beach Blanket Bingo”—that sort of thing.

  There was not much of an audience for such writing and Justin barely made a living. His dream was to become an editor at Pussycat magazine, where the big money was.

  The FBI had been tapping his phone ever since Vietnam and had reels and reels of his conversation, which concerned almost nothing but films. Nevertheless, they kept listening, hoping something incriminating would slip eventually. A man with both a Ph.D. and a D.D. was obviously worth attention, even if most of what he said was totally incomprehensible to them.

  Special Agent Tobias Knight, playing Case’s tapes one evening, actually heard a long rap about Curly being the id or first circuit, Larry the ego or second circuit, and Moe the superego or Jung’s fourth circuit. Things got even more confusing when Case went on to talk about the “cinematic continuity in the S-M dimension between Moe and Polanski.” It got even weirder when Case said, “Polanski himself went to Chinatown three times—when his parents were murdered by the Nazis, when his wife was murdered by the Manson Family, and when he got convicted of statutory rape. We all go to Chinatown, one way or another, sooner or later.” Still, the Bureau did not give up. Case was sure to say something incriminating, or at least intelligible to them, sooner or later.

  Tobias Knight had listened to 42,000 hours of “private” conversations since joining the FBI. Among other things, this had clearly shown him that all the standard primate sexual behaviors were prevalent throughout Unistat. Since Knight, like Benny Benedict and most other two-legged Terrans, did not know he belonged to a mammal species, this primate behavior was profoundly shocking to him. He felt much like a Methodist who runs a drugstore in Little Rock—anguished that the Sins of his fellows were exceeded only by their Hypocrisy. This made him Cynical.

  The same Cynicism was widespread in the Bureau. Older hands who had listened to 80,000 or even 100,000 hours of “private” conversations were beyond Cynicism. They had become paranoid about their fellow primates.

  Tobias Knight himself would be classified as a no-good shit by most of the primates if they knew what he was up to. He was the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage—that is, he had connections with four other Intelligence Agencies besides the FBI and was double-crossing all of them.

  He also had a walrus mustache and a jovial eye. He could have been an excellent character actor in movies or TV. Everybody liked him and trusted him on sight.

  That was why he was so successful in the cloak-and-dagger business.

  Justin Case suspected that the FBI was tapping his phone. However, 9,000,000 out of 20,000,000 primates in New York also suspected the FBI of tapping their phones. Case just happened to be one of the 8,000,000 who were correct in this suspicion.

  Case was certainly not a mutineer by temperament; his visual cortex—the most energized part of him—was neurogenetically imprinted with a dry, detached, analytical, almost passive, temperament. His world was made up of forms in space, edited into amusing montages by the passing of time; if he ever read books, he might have found that Einstein’s Relativity was the mathematical analog of his own mind.

  Even paintings barely won his tolerance; only film and TV, basically montage, turned him on. He was inclined to feel that anything which did not flicker, shimmer, and change rapidly was probably dead and should be decently and quickly buried.

  In short, he was an electronic Taoist.

  The Vietnam War had been punishing in various ways to all Unistaters, but Case, embroiled in the center of it, experienced it as very bad TV. It was like the film had stuck and Moe kept jabbing his finger in Curly’s eye, over and over, in an infinite regress, until the myth and metaphor had both turned meaningless through redundance. If the war wasn’t that, it was sloppy editing or just plain bad taste. The mutiny was the only equivalent he could find to the simple act of turning the dial to another channel.

  He had tried to explain this to the lieutenant appointed to defend him at the court-martial, a sly, cat-faced young man named Lionel Eacher. Lieutenant Eacher, before entering the service, had been an expert at Contract Law, the rules by which the primates determined and marked their territories. Remember: other mammals do this by leaving excretions which geometrically define the size and shape of the claimed turf, but domesticated primates do it by excreting ink on paper. Eacher was a lawyer, an expert at proving either that the ink excretions meant what they said (if he were being paid to prove that) or that the ink excretions didn’t exactly mean what they said (if he were being paid to prove that).

  Lionel Eacher listened to Case’s story with growing incredulity. At the end of the narrative he frowned very thoughtfully and said, “Would you just run that by me again?”

  So Case had explained, this time in more detail, the aesthetics of proper utilization of sadomasochist material in the total structure of Significant Form.

  “I see,” Eacher said thoughtfully. “I think we’ve got a winner.” He relaxed and lit a cigarette. “The usual defense is that you were reading the Bible and saw a white light and Jesus told you to give up war. But this, well, this is beautiful. You sound like a real fruitcake. I might even get you a medical discharge.”

  Case realized that he was talking to a barbarian, but that was normal in the military. He had an intuitive sense that twenty years in the joi
nt, which was what the Judge Adjutant General’s office was asking, would be even more redundant, in the S-M dimension, than the war itself. Very well: If a man of esthetic sensibility seemed like a fruitcake to these primitives, so be it. He wanted to go home.

  Case explained his position to the court-martial with great eloquence (part of what he said he even used later in a critique of The Rocky Horror Show) and they did, indeed, decide he was a fruitcake. They gave him a D.D., but two members of the board, he learned later, had argued vigorously for a medical.

  The Vietnam War, like most primate squabbles, was about territory. Chinese primates, Unistat primates, the primates of the Bear Totem from the steppes and various local Southeast Asian primates were trying to expand their collective-totem egos (territories) by taking over the turf in Southeast Asia. If they had been wild primates, they would have all excreted in the disputed area and maybe thrown excretions at each other; being domesticated primates, they made ink excretions on paper and threw metal and chemicals at each other. It was one of a series of rumbles over Southeast Asia which had at one time or another involved Dutch primates, French primates, primates of the Rising Sun totem, and various other predator bands.

  Since the Unistat primates, like other domesticated hominids, did not know they were primates, all this was explained by a ferocious amount of ink excretions invoking Morality and Ideology, the twin gods of domesticated primatedom. Basically, the primates who wanted to claim Southeast Asia said it was “good” to go in shooting and grab whatever was grabable; the primates who didn’t give a fuck about Southeast Asia said it was “evil.”