Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  EMPLOYEES MAY NOT EXCHANGE VACATION DAYS.—THE MGT.

  EMPLOYEES MAY NOT PUNCH OTHER EMPLOYEES’ TIME CARDS. ANY DEVIATION WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION.—THE MGT.

  FILL OUT IN TRIPLICATE. KEEP ONE COPY,MAIL ONE COPY TO THE OFFICE AND SEND THE THIRD TO THE TRANSYLVANIA CONSULATE.—THE MGT.

  (THIS WAS USED AT A BLOOD BANK, OF COURSE.)

  On January 18, 1984, the midget was in Chicago, hiding in a coffee urn in the tenth-floor editorial offices of Pussycat magazine. He had a Vacation Schedule Form with him, to be run off on Xerox and distributed to each editor’s desk. This form was his masterpiece; it was sure to provoke a nervous breakdown in anyone who tried to decipher and comply with all its directions, yet it was not much different, on the surface, from the hundreds of similar forms handed out in offices daily. Chaney was quite happy and quite impatient for the staff to leave so he could set about his cheerful task for the night.

  Two editors passed the coffee urn, talking.

  “Who’s the Pussycat interview for next month?” one asked.

  “Dr. Dashwood. You know, from Orgasm Research.”

  “Oh.”

  The midget had heard of Orgasm Research and it was, of course, on his shit list. More statistics and averages, more of the modern search for the norm that he could never be. And now the bastard who headed it, Dr. Dashwood, would be interviewed by Pussycat—and probably would get to fuck all the gorgeous Pussyettes at the local Pussycat Club. Chaney fumed. Orgasm Research moved from the middle of his shit list to the top, replacing his archenemy, Bell Telephone.

  The thought of Dr. Dashwood remained with him all night, as he ground out his surrealist vacation memo on the office Xerox. He was still fuming when he returned to his pantry-sized room at the YMCA and slipped the bolt (to keep out the wandering and prehensile deviates who infest YMCAs everywhere). Dr. Francis Dashwood, supervisor of orgasms, and now ready to dive headfirst into a barrel of Pussyettes: the midget suffered at the thought.

  But it was nearly 4 A.M. and he was tired. Tomorrow morning would be time to do something about Orgasm Research.

  Chaney dreamed of Dashwood measuring orgasms with an n-dimensional ruler in Frankenstein’s laboratory while men in trench coats went slinking about in the shadows asking unintelligible questions about 132 missing gorillas.

  In the morning he shuffled through his bogus letterhead file, looking for something appropriate for correspondence with Orgasm Research.

  THUGGEE SOCIETY, DIVISION OF HASH IMPORT AND AFROGENEALOGY, said the handsomest letterhead; this was illustrated with a three-headed Kali. But that one he reserved for correspondence with prominent white racists, informing them that the Afrogenealogy Division (Alex Haley, researcher-in-chief) had discovered that their great-great-grandmother was black. Chaney always invited the recipients to come to the next Thuggee meeting and bring their wives and sisters.

  FRIENDS OF THE VANISHING MALARIA MOSQUITO (COMMITTEE TO BAN D.D.T.) was a good one, but not good enough for Dr. Dashwood. Chaney reserved it for correspondence with President Lousewart.

  Finally, the midget selected CHRISTIANS AND ATHEISTS UNITED AGAINST CREEPING AGNOSTICISM, a Nonprophet Organization, Reverend Billy Graham, President; Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Chairperson of the Board.

  In a few moments Chaney produced a letter calculated to short a few circuits in Dr. Dashwood’s computeroid cortex:

  Dear Dr. Dashwood:

  When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.

  Cordially,

  Ezra Pound,

  Council of Armed Rabbis

  P.S. Entropy requires no maintenance.

  That should make the bastard wonder a bit, he thought with satisfaction, stuffing the enigmatic epistle in an envelope and addressing it.

  Markoff Chaney loathed math because it contained the concept of the average.

  Chaney not only loathed, but hated, despised, abominated, detested, and couldn’t stand the thought of Dr. Dashwood, not just because Dashwood’s work involved statistics and averages, but because is was concerned with orgasms.

  That was a tender subject to Chaney. He was a virgin.

  He was never attracted to women of his own stature—that was almost incestuous, and, besides, they simply did not turn him on. He adored the giantesses of the hateful oversized majority. He adored them, lusted after them, and was also terrified of them. He knew from sad experience, oft-repeated, that they regarded him as cute and even cuddly, and one of them had gone so far as to say adorable but absolutely ridiculous as a sex partner, damn and blast them all to hell.

  He had tried building his courage with booze. They thought he was disgusting and chauvinistic and not even cute anymore.

  He tried weed. They thought he was cute again, and even hilarious, but even more absurd as a possible lover.

  He tried est. The trainers spent the first day tearing him down—telling him he was a no-good shit and everybody knew he was a no-good shit and things like that, which he had always suspected. The second day they built him up and convinced him he could control his space as well as any other mammal. He was flying when he came out.

  He went at once to a singles bar and sidled up to the most attractive blonde in the place.

  “Hi,” he said boldly, swaggering a bit. “What would you say to a friendly little fuck?”

  She gazed down at him from what suddenly seemed an enormous height. “Hello, friendly little fuck,” she drawled with magnificent boredom.

  When Chaney slunk back to his YMCA room and his pornographic Tarot, he vowed more vehemently than ever that he would be the meanest fuck on the planet. Nobody would ever call him a friendly little fuck again.

  He still adored the giantesses and feared them, but now he hated them too; in short, he was really stuck on them.

  Their cunts—those hairy, moist, hot, adorable, inaccessible, rejecting, terrible, divine, frightening Schwartzchild Radiuses of the dimension of Manhood—were the Holy Grail to him.

  He knew their cunts were hairy and hot and moist, etc., despite his virginity, because he had read a lot of pornographic novels.*

  *Galactic Archives: Pornographic novels were novels about the things primates enjoy most, namely sexual acrobatics. They were taught to feel ashamed of these natural primate impulses so that they would be guilty-furtive-submissive types and easy for the alpha males to manipulate. Those caught reading such novels were called no-good shits, of course.

  PEP

  Muss es sein? Es muss sein.

  —LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

  PEP—the People’s Ecology Party—had been founded by Furbish Lousewart V following the success of his monumental best-seller, Unsafe Wherever You Go.

  Lousewart V was a man born into the right time; his book perfectly reflected all the foreboding of the late 1970s. Its thesis was simply that everything science does is wrong, that scientists are very nasty people, and that we need to go back to a simpler, more natural way of life. The message was perfect for the time; it was simply Hitler’s National Socialism redone, with only a few minor changes.

  Where Hitler wrote “Jew,” for instance, Lousewart wrote “scientist.” Nobody but the most backward denizens of Bad Ass, Texas, or Chicago, Illinois, was capable of really getting riled up by the anti-Semitic ploy anymore, and Lousewart had, with intuitive brilliance, picked the one scapegoat capable of mobilizing real fear, rage, and hatred among the general population.

  And Hitler’s Wagnerian primitivism was altogether too Teutonic for young America in the 1970s, so Lousewart replaced it with a chic blend of Taoist and Amerindian primitivism.

  It didn’t matter that scholars pointed out that all of Lousewart’s arguments were illogical and incoherent (his followers despised logic and coherence on principle), and it didn’t even matter that he had brazenly lifted most of his notions right out of Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends and Von Daniken’s Gold of the Gods. It was a package that had a built-in market. With th
e collapse of the Republican Party after Nixon and Ford, there was a void in national politics; somebody had to organize a force to challenge the Democrats, and the People’s Ecology Party moved quickly to capture the turf.

  Furbish Lousewart was an expert in Morality and Ideology; he understood that seeking out and denouncing no-good shits was the path by which one could become leader of a movement of the anxious and angry. In short, he had the instincts of a politician.

  The Lousewart philosophy of asceticism, medievalism, and despair was officially called the Revolution of Lowered Expectations.

  The Revolution of Lowered Expectations had not been invented by Furbish Lousewart. The whole neurosociology of the twentieth century could be understood as a function of two variables—the upward-rising curve of the Revolution of Rising Expectations and the downward-plunging trajectory of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations.

  The Revolution of Rising Expectations, which had drawn more and more people into its Up-thrust during the first half of the century, had led many to believe that poverty and starvation and disease were all gradually being phased out by advances in pure and applied science, growing stockpiles of surplus food in the advanced nations, accelerated medical progress, the spread of literacy and electronics, and the mounting sense that people had a right to demand a decent life for themselves and their children.

  The Revolution of Lowered Expectations was based on the idea that there wasn’t enough energy to provide for the rising expectations of the masses. Year after year the message was broadcast: There Isn’t Enough. The masses were taught that Terra was a closed system, that entropy was increasing, that life was a losing proposition all around, and that the majority were doomed to poverty, starvation, disease, misery, and stupidity.

  Most of the people who still had rising expectations were scientists. When Furbish Lousewart realized the political capital to be made from the Revolution of Lowered Expectations, he also realized—thus demonstrating his political savvy—that having an opposition meant having a scapegoat group.

  The scientists were an ideal scapegoat group because they all spoke in specialized languages and hardly anybody could understand them.

  The Jews had served this function in earlier ages because they spoke Yiddish.

  The scientists spoke Mathematics.

  LOUSES IN THE SKIDROW DIMEHAUNTS

  It is impossible now to suppose that organic life exists only on this planet.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  Justin Case heard about the louses in the skidrow dime-haunts at one of Epicene Wildeblood’s wild, wild parties, on December 23, 1983. Simon Moon, a creature with almost as much hair as Bigfoot, planted the louses in Case’s semantic preconscious. The whole evening was rather confusing—too many martinis, too much weed, too many people—and Moon was regarded as somewhat sinister by everybody because he worked for the Beast (or with the Beast, or on the Beast). To make matters even more surrealistic, that intolerable bore Blake Williams was lecturing on the Birth of Cosmic Humanity to anyone who would listen, and several other conversations were going on simultaneously. Nonetheless, Moon had a manuscript with him, and a few listeners, and Case couldn’t help absorbing part of what the mad Beastman was reading.

  “Thee gauls simper at his tyrant power,” Moon was chanting when Case first became conscious of him. What the hell was that? “He is ghoon with this seven-week booths and his mickeyed into mistory. His eyes did seem auld glowery.”

  “FUCK THEM ALL!” a drunken writer from California said, cymbal-like, in Case’s other ear.

  “I beg your pardon?” Epicene Wildeblood, gay as three chimps in a circus, seemed to think the drunk was addressing him.

  “I said, FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS!!!” the writer explained, weaving a bit to windward. “The goddamn motherfucking moneygrubbing Philistine lot of them …”

  “I see,” Wildeblood said dryly. He did not like people throwing scenes at his parties. “I think maybe you’ve had too much to drink….”

  “Yeah??? Well,” the drunk decided majestically, “fuck you too. And the horse you rode in on, as they say in Texas.

  But that lard-assed bore Blake Williams was droning, “The whole problem, of course, is that we haven’t been born yet. In fact, only now, at this point in history, is humanity about to be born.” Williams was full of rubbish like that.

  “About to be born?” asked Carol Christmas, the most delicious piece of blond femininity in the galaxy. Case thought at once that it would be a splendidly wonderful idea to deposit at least some of his sperm within her—any orifice would do. He thought this was a brilliant decision on his part, and wondered how to begin implementing it. He had no idea that every male hominid, and many other male primates, immediately had that idea when looking at Carol.

  “Elverun, past Nova’s atoms,” the hairy Moon read on to his small circle of admirers, “from mayan baldurs to monads of goo, brings us by a divinely karmic Tao-Jones leverage back past tactics and aztlantean tooltechs to Louses in the Skidrow Dimehaunts. This way the Humpytheatre.”

  “I still say fuck ’em all.” The drunk was a solitary bassoon against Moon’s keening violin. “Capitalism is a rich man’s heaven and a poor man’s hell.”

  “Ahm yes,” that windy old baritone sax, Blake Williams, bleated to the adorable Carol. “You see terrestrial life is embryonic in the evolutionary sense. In perspective to the cosmos.” Old chryselephantine pedant, Case thought.

  The shrill fife of Josephine Malik, Case’s editor, was heard: “Moon. They say he works for the Beast.” She wore jeans, combat boots and a button saying in psychedelic colors, BRING BACK THE SIXTIES. Walking nostalgia.

  “Floating you see,” the tuba of Williams oompah-oompah-ed onward, “in the amniotic atmosphere at the bottom of a 4,000-mile gravity well. And taking the Euclidean parameters of that gestation as the norm. Totally fetal, if you follow me, and in a very real sense blind because unborn, knowing um the dimensions of the wombplanet but not knowing what lies beyond the gravitational vagina—the whole universe outside”.

  “A 4,000-mile cunt?” Carol was awed by the concept. Her blond head leaned forward in doubtful inquiry. “That’s a very funny metaphor, Professor.”

  “The only difference between my publishers and the James gang,” the drunk went on, monotonous as a bass drum, “is that the James boys had horses.”

  “… which explains the various rebirth experiences reported by astronauts like Aldrin and Mitchell and the others,” Williams trumpeted (gassy old windbag). “Earth is our womb. Leaving Earth is literally rebirth. There’s nothing metaphoric about it.”

  “The James boys hell, my last publisher was more like Attila the Hun,” plonkty-plonked Frank Hemeroid in pianissimo.

  Case began to feel that he had had perhaps too much hash.

  “Right Wingers?” astronomer Bertha Van Ation was trilling. “We’ve got real Right Wingers out in Orange County. Let me tell you about the Committee to Nuke the Whales….”

  But that impossible Williams person was murmuring privately now to Carol the Golden Goddess, and Case tried desperately to catch the words, dreading the thought that a sexual liaison was being formed.

  “The mnemonic,” Williams was crooning, “is quite easy. Just say, ‘Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue.’ See?”

  Mnemonic for what, in God’s name? But Moon was shrilling like a banshee now:

  “Wet with garrison statements, oswilde shores, daily blazers, tochus culbook depositories, middlesexed villains and fumes. Fict! The most unkennedest carp of all. Fogt. Veiny? V.D.? Wacky? His bruttus gypper.”

  “I was walking on Lexington Avenue one morning around three A.M.,” the drunk maundered on, “and I heard this URRRRRP, this horrible eldritch laughter just like in an H. P. Lovecraft story, and do you want to know what I think it was? A publisher and his lawyer had just figured out a new way to screw one of their writers.”

  “This th
e lewdest comedy nominator,” Moon keened high on the G-string. “This de visions of spirals fur de lewdest comedy nominator. Eerie cries from the scalped nations! This the oval orefice sends the plumbers fur de spills. Lust of the walkregans. Think! White harse devoted. Thank! Wit ars devoided. Dunk!”

  “I wish Moon would stop reading that drivel,” Fred “Figs” Newton was clearly heard in solo. “I’d like to ask him how much the Beast really knows.”

  “Oh,” the mournful oboe of Benny Benedict sang ominously, “the Beast knows everything….”

  “… by Loop Shore and Dellingersgangers,” Moon keened over them, oblivious, “where yippies yip and doves duz nothing, to the hawkfullest convention ever.”

  At this point Case had to beat a hasty retreat to the John (one martini too many) and he never did get all the conversations sorted out in his memory, but the louses in the skidrow dimehaunts were firmly lodged in the Ambiguous Imagery files of his Myth-and-Metaphor Detector, right next to the Three Stooges and Chinatown.

  And Cagliostro the Great.

  TO HAVE LOCKS ON THESE DOORS

  One of the causes of cancer is the harmfulness of cooked foods.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  Blake Williams had the great good fortune to suffer a bout of polio in infancy. Of course he did not realize it was good fortune at the time—nor did his parents or his doctors. Nonetheless, he was among the lucky few who were treated by the Sister Kenny method at a time (the early 1930s) when the American Medical Association was denouncing that method as quackery and forbidding experiment thereon by its members. He was walking again, with only a slight limp, when he entered grade school in 1938. The real luck occurred twelve years later, in 1950, when he was eighteen; the limp and the dead muscles in his lower calves disqualified him for military service. The next man drafted, in his place, had both testicles bloodily blown off in Korea.