Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “Where the hell is that?” Ubu asked.

  “New England, somewhere in Massachusetts … ah, here it is, Arkham, Massachusetts.”

  “And how many of the 132 were students there?” Ubu was hot on the scent.

  “Sixty-seven of them,” Knight said triumphantly. “All in the classes of ’66 through ’69….”

  “By God, it’s a live one,” Ubu cried. “Two or three might be happenstance, even ten might be coincidence, but Jumpin’ Jesus sixtyfuckinseven means something. Let’s look into this Miskatonic U. and find out what was going on back there in ’66 to ’69, besides dope.”

  ’cause Santa Claus is coming

  to tooooooown!

  GORILLA THEATER

  Mounty Babbit took a walk in Lincoln Park one day in 1969, trying to relax and calm his mind. Every tree spoke to him; the lions looked at him as a brother; the nervous armadillo pacing its cage stopped to stare at him, and he received clearly the message, “How did we get trapped in these ridiculous bodies?”

  “We need bodies,” Ped Xing replied, “just as we need minds, to function in this three-dimensional continuum. Surely you remember that we are actually n-dimensional?”

  “Oh, yes,” the armadillo signaled, “how could I have forgotten?”

  Socrates had his daemon, Mounty thought in despair; Jesus had the Father in Heaven; Elwood P. Dowd had his giant white rabbit, Harvey; but why do I have to have a crazy Vietnamese Buddhist?

  “You make the napalm,” Ped Xing told him.

  Thoroughly agitated, Babbit wandered into the primate house, not noticing the sign which said “CLOSED TODAY.” There he saw two grim-faced men, in green uniforms, and a gorilla, in a blue uniform, going through a most remarkable pantomime. One of the men would raise a sign saying “WE DEMAND JUSTICE” and the gorilla would then spray him with a can of shaving cream; the other man would then feed the gorilla.

  Operant conditioning. But what the hell …

  Even Ped Xing was confused by that one.

  WHERE THE FUCK?

  The night watchman at Bhavani Imports, a Puerto Rican poet and Santaria initiate named Hugo de Naranja, was reading a novel called Illuminatus! when the mysterious incident occurred. Hugo was so absorbed in the book, which he considered the greatest novel since Don Quixote, that he didn’t notice the strange sound at first. Gradually the sound’s persistence invaded his consciousness, dragged him out of the most aesthetically exquisite blow job in all modern fiction, jerked him into an alert awareness that out there in the darkness there was something odd going on.

  Rats, he thought.

  No, the quick trot of rat paws was different.

  A thief with soft slippers, or in his stockings …

  Not that, either.

  Hugo put down his book and picked up flashlight in left hand groping right-handedly and then finding pistol in holster. Something was going on in the vast darkness of the warehouse and he had to go and look for it and do something about it. He wished he hadn’t read so many Women’s Lib diatribes against machismo and Papa Hemingway. He wished he could still believe in the macho values. He wished he had more cojones or another job.

  Then he walked out of his cubbyhole office, flashing the light ahead of him, and quoted to himself from his favorite philosopher. “The ordinary man has problems. The warrior only has challenges.” Then he saw the intruder.

  A cat. It was only a cat, held for one moment in his lightbeam, then skittering away into deeper darkness as the light raced after it. Then it was caught again, higher up, standing for Christ’s sake on the ghastly amputated penis plaque, its golden eyes glittering half-whitely in the flashed lightray. A cat standing on a penis, something right out of Surrealism or Dada.

  “Scat!” Hugo shouted, really amused now. “Rrrow! Scat! Beat it!”

  Then the cat leapt and Hugo’s flash leapt after it jumping to the floor, where it would, should, must, didn’t land. The light moved back quickly, swept several arcs, while Hugo was beginning to think: Christ, it didn’t make any sound when it landed, not even a muffled cat thud. And his beam swept back and forth again in searching arcs, as the words formed “it disappeared in midair,” were rejected (it couldn’t) and the beam rested for a minute on the challengingly erect Penis Without a Man (what hijo de puta would do a thing like that?) and the question burst from his lips, aloud, the nightwatchman’s vice of talking to himself, which he had always resisted before:

  “Where did it the fuck jump to? Where the fuck?”

  THE DISPOSSESSED

  Mounty Babbit never did learn to live with Ped Xing. In fact, he eventually had a full-scale psychotic breakdown. Of course, because of his wealth, the doctors always referred to it as a catathymic crisis.

  The breakdown occurred at a dinner party, worse luck.

  The Moons were guests again, and this time they had their nephew, Simon—a bearded young mathematician whose father had been the black sheep of the Moon family, a Wobbly agitator. Simon himself had been arrested during the Democratic Convention riots the previous year but got off on probation.

  Everything went pleasantly enough until Molly Moon got on her obsession about Oriental Masters invading Western bodies to pass on their transcendental mysticism.

  Joe Moon must have noticed the look on Mounty’s face because he said, “Molly, remember our host is a scientist.”

  “And a Taurus,” Molly said quickly. “I know how hard it is for him to accept spiritual truths.”

  “He doesn’t bore you with the latest chemical shop-talk,” Joe said gently. “I’m sure you don’t have to bore him with all this astrology or whatever it is.”

  “It’s not astrology. It’s astral projection.”

  “It sounds half-astral to me,” Joe said, laughing as loud as he could, trying to get them all laughing and turn the topic into a joke.

  Young Simon, however, had ideas of his own. “Aunt Molly might be right,” he said thoughtfully. “The Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox does lead to some freaky possibilities. But why assume only the high adepts are coming? Every primitive group in the world has some kind of magical tradition. And they’ve tried everything else to get out from under white domination.”

  “Now don’t start with your radicalism …” Joe warned.

  “I’m not talking politics,” Simon said innocently. “Everywhere in the world there are people who’d like to change places with us. Live in our rich homes. Eat our extravagant diet. Drive our cars. We know a lot about the space-time-matter continuum, but we’re more ignorant than Asia or Africa about space-time-mind continuum. How about the Native Americans, for that matter? Wouldn’t their magicians love to take over some white bodies for a while? Is that why so many young people are wearing Indian headbands, taking Indian drugs like peyote, moving out of the cities into the woods …? Ever have your car stolen by a black kid from Chicago’s ghetto? Wouldn’t they like to steal your body too?”

  “That’s nonsense,” Molly Moon said angrily. “All those backward people you’re talking about couldn’t learn the higher spiritual arts….”

  “Mounty, you’re a scientist,” Joe Moon said imploringly. “Tell Simon what’s wrong with his theory.”

  “Anybody can spin theories,” Babbit said carefully. “Science is a matter of proof. You can make up a million and one theories, Simon, but if you go to work for a corporation you’ll have to produce theories that engineers can use. The one theory out of a million that can be proven. Everything else is just idle speculation.”

  “Exactly.” Joe Moon beamed, delighted. “Let the coons earn the right to live in Evanston, I say.”

  “Well, this theory could be checked out,” Simon went on guilelessly; but Babbit knew he was baiting everybody. “If such an uh invasion were occurring, it would be aimed at people with important positions. Business executives. Government officials. The people who control the media. Check them out and see if they’re all growing a little bit weird lately….”

  The helicopter descended an
d the earth turned to flame. My daughter ran toward me, burning, screaming. Why was it an American flag on the helicopter instead of a swastika? Was it Calley or Eichmann who was looking at me with imploring eyes begging my understanding and forgiveness?

  Day after day the napalm fell from the skies. Day after day children died screaming at 1,000° Centigrade. Month after month, year after year, the fire continued to consume the world, Ped Xing’s world. He sat in the lotus, his shakti mounted on his penis, their eyes locked, until the neurological synergy occurred: They were One. And then the Others were there, too, all the minds of space-time who turned on the neuroatomic circuit, the beetle intellects of Betelgeuse, Nicholas and Perenella Flamel, Bruno and Elizabeth, Cagliostro, and, as the time warp opened, galaxy after galaxy joined in, the Starmaker appeared dimly, and the first jump was possible.

  He was a flower on a rose bush in England and a poet was staring at him as he stared back at the poet: “The roses have the look of flowers that are looked at” emerged from that moment.

  SHe was a microbe flailing tentatively in a soupy ocean.

  He was a Terran archivist looking back at the decline and fall of the American Empire.

  She was Mountbatten Babbit in Evanston, Illinois—a good one, grab quick, this was one of the murderers, hold on—

  Mountbatten Babbit, Ph.D., became aware that every body at the table was staring at him. Then he realized that he was sobbing. “Oh, God,” he said, a mind at the end of its tether. “Oh, God, God, God …”

  It was explained as a breakdown due to overwork. There was no psychiatrist; ambition forbade the risk, so a clinical psychologist of Behaviorist orientation was found, on the faculty of Northwestern University, and the visits were listed as consultation in social psychology for business management.

  Mounty and the psychologist defined Ped Xing as a hallucination caused by the negative conditioning of the pacifist pickets surrounding Weishaupt Chemicals. A method of deconditioning was worked out, using hypnosis and aversion therapy against all manifestations of the Ped Xing persona. The aversive stimulus was apomorphine, a non-addicting morphine derivative that provokes vomiting and sensations of death. At first Ped Xing would speak directly at these moments, begging and pleading, “Don’t send me back to the flames….” Later he became defiant. “We’ll be back, millions of us, from all over the Third World. Living in your fat white bodies. Running your corporations and bureaucracies. All through the seventies and eighties. We’ll be back.” As the theory of aversion therapy predicts, Ped Xing was finally extinguished.

  Safely established beyond freedom and dignity, Mounty Babbit became the ideal conditioned subject. In 1982 he resigned his position as President of Weishaupt Chemicals to become Special Scientific Advisor to the White House.

  ANOTHER EIGENSTATE

  That which is forbidden is not allowed.

  —JOHN LILLY, The Center of the Cyclone

  O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum

  Benny Benedict was working on his mantra, and didn’t realize that he had wandered quite a bit from the Sanskrit original.

  O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum the purpose of suffering is to make us ask the important questions what a guy a stage magician he said O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum

  He had reached the corner of Lexington and Twenty-third Street.

  Pablo Gomez stepped out of a doorway and hit Benny from behind, hard, with a lead pipe.

  Oh mommie take me home Oh mommie take me home … Benny exploded into the white light.

  Fortunately the last remaining citizen of Manhattan with a sense of civic duty, one James Mortimer, came around the corner at just that moment. James Mortimer carried a police whistle at all times, since he knew he was living in a still-violent society. He blew several blasts, loud and shrill. Pablo Gomez fled without getting any money, and an ambulance arrived in time to rush Benny to the hospital and save his life.

  THE ROOMS WERE TURNED INSIDE OUT

  The “nervous breakdown” (as it was called) of Hassan i Sabbah X did not attract much attention; the Cult of the Black Mother had never been as well publicized as the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers. The New York News-Times-Post actually referred to Hassan as a “well-known nightclub owner in Harlem,” in their very brief story, and their reporter hadn’t even investigated far enough to learn that Hassan was also the head of a cult with more members than the Missouri Synod Lutherans. But, then, the Cult of the Black Mother had never been publicity-minded; even The Amsterdam News, unaware of its membership, described it as “a small church.”

  Hassan had been delivered to Bellevue in a state of raving mania, under physical restraint by two of his former aides. The psychiatrists quickly pronounced him “paranoid schizophrenic” and prescribed the heaviest tranquilizer then available, which in fact kept him fairly drowsy even when he wasn’t comatose. Nonetheless, when able to summon the energy to rise out of his lethargy and talk again, he would monotonously repeat to any other inmate or orderly who came near, “Look, I don’t belong here. Something terrible has happened. I’m really the President of this fucking country …” and so on, with endless elaborations and details.

  “A deeply defended psychosis,” the psychiatrists decided, and began a course of electroshock treatments.

  Whenever the flipped-out black came out of his daze, however, he would begin the same schizzy ranting all over: “Hey, listen, I’m the President of this fucking country….”

  The electroshock was stepped up. Hassan retreated into a permanent daze and ceased to annoy anybody. By this time his brain had been fried to the consistency of a White Tower scrambled egg and his impressions of the external world were mostly olfactory and aural, like those of a subnormal toy poodle; he no longer argued about anything, since he no longer understood such abstract concepts as ego persistence or identity. The psychiatrists were satisfied: “If you can’t cure a nut,” their tacit motto was, “at least you can keep him from running around the ward annoying people.”

  Two FBI agents later discussed the matter privately.

  “You think CIA did it?” asked the first, Tobias Knight.

  “You figure he’d been working for them?” the other, Roy Ubu, asked in return. “I always had that notion myself. But why would they fuck his head like that, when God only knows what he might spill to somebody who’d get released from the nuthouse and repeat it to a reporter? Nah, CIA doesn’t work that way. They’d just—” He drew a finger across his throat.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Knight said stubbornly. “Somebody got to him.”

  “Something,” Ubu corrected with a sinister intonation. “You know as well as I do what he was. A witch.”

  “Voodooist,” Knight corrected.

  “Whatever. Everybody we ever sent in died of a heart attack, right?” Ubu looked over his shoulder. “Officially, the Bureau doesn’t believe in witches. But I’ll tell you what happened to Mr. Hassan i Sabbah X in my opinion. He called up something that he couldn’t put down.”

  THE LOCK IS A HOLE

  Dr. Francis Dashwood—neat, clean, rich, and not yet forty—drove into the grounds of the Orgasm Research Foundation on Van Ness in San Francisco at precisely 8:57 in the morning. He checked his wristwatch again after he parked his sleek M.G. in the executive parking lot. It was 8:58. Excellent. A quick trot and he was at his desk before the office clock reached nine. Once again he had demonstrated the punctuality (anal-retentive personality, silly prescientific Freudians called it) which had contributed so much to raising him to his present high position in the medical research bureaucracy of the United States.

  Frank Dashwood, M.D., L.L.D., Ph.D., at the age of only thirty-eight, headed the most heavily funded and hotly debated institution in the world: Orgasm Research, a multimillion-dollar project dedicated to filling in the psychological intangibles left out of the pioneering research of Masters and Johnson two decades e
arlier. Since these psychological intangibles were—as Dr. Dashwood sometimes wittily remarked—“both psychological and intangible,” there was no end to the research. Meanwhile, the funding money came rolling in.

  Frank was, according to a survey by a management analyst, one of the seventeen men in the United States who was totally happy with his job.

  Other researchers sometimes expressed envy of this fact. “What red-blooded man,” one of them had once asked with some warmth, “wouldn’t be happy supervising other people’s orgasms and pulling down a swift sixty grand a year for it?”

  This was somewhat unfair to a dedicated scientist. Dr. Dashwood was truly fascinated by orgasms—as Edison was by electricity—and had an inexhaustible curiosity about every possible factor involved in every possible twitch, itch, moan, gibber, gasp, sob, shudder, or howl connected with that dramatic biological tremor. Even more, however, he was mesmerized by lines, curves, averages, graphs, and every aspect of mathematics that could be clearly visualized. The world, for him, was not made up of “things,” crude Disneyland animations projected by our lower nervous circuits, but of energy meshes. With no knowledge of Zen Buddhism, he intuitively shared Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng’s vision that “from the beginning there has never been a thing.” Dr. Dashwood lived in a universe of transactions that could be written as equations and traced on graph paper.

  Above his desk was a motto suggested ironically by a skeptical friend. Dr. Dashwood saw nothing funny about it and adopted it as his own banner:

  SCIENCE, PURE SCIENCE, AND DAMNED BE HE

  WHO FIRST CRIES “HOLD, TOO MUCH!”

  As he settled himself at his desk he observed that Ms. Karrige, his secretary, had already poured his coffee for him. Fine: The girl (femperson, he corrected) was really getting broken to the harness. He whipped out his thermometer and measured the black liquid in the cup: 98.4 degrees. Excellent: She was learning to meet his exacting demands.