Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “Blake Williams had a mnemonic for my discovery,” Bertha Van Ation was excitedly telling Juan Tootreego as they passed the DEEP THROAT marquee. “Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue. See? Mercury Venus Earth …”

  But about those amoebas: Marvin Gardens, more relaxed now, is buttoning his coat and heading for the exit. Linda Lovelace continues to schlurp and suck on the screen behind him, but he is deciding that after the first split there are two amoebas, of course, but should you call them children of the first amoeba—him or her or it? And after the second split there are four. After the third split, eight. Nowhere does the phase change denoted by the symbol “death” appear to have occurred. Is one of the eight third-generation amoebas the original amoeba (him or her or it), or are all of them the original? And how does 8 = 4 = 2 = 1, anyhow?

  Markoff Chaney was about to have a dream come true.

  He was renting his old room at the YMCA on Chicago Avenue again, using it as a base for further anti-Dashwood activities. He had gone for a walk, and as he approached the intersection of Michigan and Lake Shore Drive, he was thinking about a new letterhead that would say FRATERNAL ORDER OF HATE GROUPS and have Robert Welch, Abby Hoffman, Anita Bryant, and George Wallace listed as officers. Perhaps he might add Natalie Drest and make her “Chairperson of the Board.”

  “Hsst!” a voice said. “You—yeah, you, shorty.”

  The midget stiffened and whirled around. “Hssst!” he said. “You—yeah, you, asshole.”

  “Hey, no offense,” the speaker said. “I got a business proposition for you.” The midget looked at him sharply; he didn’t look at all as shady and unsavory as a person should look who was offering a business proposition on the corner to a total stranger.

  “What are you selling?” he asked.

  “Not selling,” the friendly giant said. “Giving away. One hundred fifty dollars.”

  “And what do I have to do for it?” the midget asked warily, drawing a little closer.

  “I’m a butler,” the man said—and, in fact, he did not look like butlers the midget had seen in movies. His face was much longer from the nose down than most people’s; it gave him a permanent look of one who smells something but hasn’t found it yet. Most Chicagoans, Chaney had noticed, look like they’d just found it and it was worse than they’d imagined. “The lady I work for is very rich. And very eccentric.” He tried to leer suggestively; the effect was like a bishop winking. “She has a thing about m——… about you people of less than average stature.”

  Markoff Chaney felt his heart leap. Could it be true??

  “One hundred fifty dollars?”

  “That’s right. She gets these moods and sends me out looking every so often.”

  “I’m game,” the midget said, deciding. He could feel the pulse in his temple. Au revoir, ma chérie, he thought, firmly convinced that was French for “good-bye to virginity.”

  “There’s just one thing,” the butler said as they walked along. “You’ve got to do just what I tell you. Don’t be afraid; she’s not a real kink—no whips and chains or anything of that scene—but, well, her tastes are a little peculiar. I promise you won’t be hurt.”

  “Tell me,” the midget said.

  “It’s like a little drama or charade,” the butler said, lowering his voice. He explained certain things.

  “What?” the midget asked. “I don’t get to fuck her?”

  “But it will be enjoyable, nonetheless,” the butler said, “and you collect one hundred fifty smackers for it, remember.”

  “Oh, well,” Chaney said, quoting one of his basic axioms for Guerrilla Ontology, “insanity is another viable alternative.”

  JUST LIKE METHOD ACTING

  In an apartment in the east village off St. Mark’s Place, Tibetan posters and astrological charts gaze down on the couch where Joe Malik and Carol Christmas are engaged in erotometaphysical epistemology.

  Getting a hand inside her panties was easy enough and Joe Malik thought he was home free, but then a snag appeared, an emotional problem that verged on full-blown lunacy; it had to do with Carol’s third ex-husband, a Puerto Rican poet who claimed to be a Santaria initiate, whatever that was, and couldn’t adjust to New York. He said that magic was impossible in New York because the intelligentsia were all Jewish atheists—“but I’m not a Jewish atheist,” Joe protested, “I’m an Arab agnostic,” wondering what the hell this had to do with a simple lay, but Carol’s third husband, who might as well have been on the couch with them, also said that Carol could help him to write again if she believed in magic, and it wasn’t much different from being an actress, anyway; Santaria, whatever it is, is just like method acting, Carol explained, but Joe was meanwhile from the context deciding it was more like Christian Science, but what it all came down to, the hand out of her panties by now, since to pressure her at this point would be coercive and chauvinistic, of course, the Puerto Rican bunofasitch had put a loa on her when they separated and she couldn’t relax until they did an exorcism of the apartment….”Oh, bleeding Christ!” Joe gasped, both balls like boulders.

  “It’s just like method acting, honey,” Carol repeated hopefully.

  “You mean,” Natalie, dressed, asked, awed and full of hashish, “that this whatchamacculum, this state vector, collapses every which way?”

  “No, no, no,” Blake Williams hastens to correct. “That’s only the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model, and it’s obviously nonsense. It means that in the universe next door, Furbish Lousewart is President instead of Eve Hubbard. Pure science fiction and I, um, wonder what Everett, Wheeler, and Graham were smoking when they thought of it. What I’m trying to explain, my dear, is the most plausible alternative theory, which comes from taking Bell’s Theorem literally.”

  “The ripple theory,” Natalie prompted.

  “But the ripples are all-over-the-universe-at-once,” Williams explained again. “It’s called the Quantum Inseparability Principle, or QUIP. Dr. Nick Herbert calls it the Cosmic Glue.”

  “Just like ripples in a pond, Jeez.” Natalie Drest was bemused. “Parts of us are still interacting with Joe Malik and all the other people at the party. This is superheavy.”

  “Yes, but QUIP acts nonlocally in time as well as in space,” Williams went on. “You’ve got to think of time ripples, as well as space ripples, to grok the quantum world….”

  THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION

  There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

  —ERIC TEMPLE BELL. Debunking Science

  There was nothing really weird about Blake Williams, except that he was passionately in love with a dead man. This great, if somewhat bizarre, passion was entirely platonic, of course—nothing queer about good old Doc Williams, except his head. With his six-foot frame, his neatly trimmed gray beard, and his heavy black-rimmed spectacles, Williams was the very model of a modern major generalist. Due to the incident of the Gansevoort Street incinerator, he had learned to keep his mouth shut about his more outlandish ideas and obsessions.

  The man Blake Williams loved was Niels Bohr, the physicist who had chosen the Taoist yin-yang as his Coat of Arms when knighted by the Danish court—which was rather far out back in the 1930s (before Taoism became faddish with physicists). Bohr also added nearly as much to quantum theory as Planck, Einstein, or Schrödinger, and his model of the atom—the Bohr model, it’s called—had been believed literally by a generation of physicians before Hiroshima. Bohr himself, however, had never believed it; nor had he believed any of his other theories. Bohr invented what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which holds in effect that a physicist shouldn’t believe anything but his measurements in the laboratory. Everything else—the whole body of mathematics and theory relating one measurement to another—Bohr regarded as a model of how the human mind works, not of how the universe works. Blake Wil
liams loved Bohr for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which had made it possible for him to study physics seriously, even devoutly, without believing a word of it. That was convenient, since Williams’s own training as an anthropologist had schooled him to study all human symbol systems without believing any of them.

  On a deeper level—there is always a deeper level—Williams was a scientist who didn’t believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft.

  But Blake Williams didn’t believe in witchcraft, either. He didn’t believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology.

  “The study of human beliefs is an ethologist’s heaven and a logician’s hell,” he liked to say.

  Actually, Blake Williams hadn’t been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method.

  But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time—the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health—claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. They also said it didn’t work.

  Since the Sister Kenny method obviously had worked in his case, Blake grew up with the gnawing suspicion that the experts didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. He was also intensely curious about all forms of witchcraft, which eventually led him to become an anthropologist.

  Young Williams soon enough discovered—on his very first field trip, among the Hopi Indians—that witchcraft does by God and by golly work, after all. He began, tentatively and secretly, sharing his knowledge with carefully selected colleagues. Most of them were pretty evasive about the whole subject, but Marilyn Chambers, the author of the epoch-making Neuroanthropology, was star-tlingly blunt.

  “Everybody who’s been in the field knows that,” she said with a kind of weary patience.

  “But why doesn’t anyone say so?” Williams asked, still young, still naive.

  “Freud and Charcot once had virtually this same conversation,” Dr. Chambers said, “but the topic then was the sexual origin of the hysterical neuroses of Victorian women. Charcot invited Freud to be the goat and talk about it in public….”

  “I see,” Blake Williams said slowly. He did see.

  THE CAT AND THE DOG

  If we accept multiple universes, then we no longer need worry about what “really” happened in the past, because every possible past is equally real.

  —JOSEPH GERVER, “The Past as Backward

  Movies of the future,” Physics Today,

  April 1971

  “He who mast—— … who hesitates is lost,” Marvin Gardens said one day in the Confrontation office. Joe Malik considered it one of the most interesting Freudian slips he had ever heard and recorded it in his diary, where it was, of course, subsequently scanned by the Illuminati.

  Marvin and Joe never got along well, but that was because Marvin regarded Joe as an extraterrestrial invader and Joe regarded Marvin as a nut.

  “Marvin is emphatically not a loony,” Justin Case had been heard to say quite often. “He’s a genius. The greatest put-on artist since Hitchcock. Nobody recognizes what a great satirist he is.”

  “Justin Case,” Marvin said when that was repeated to him, “thinks he’s being liberal, but he’s just another victim of brainwashing by the Amazon Invasion.”

  Marvin Gardens had been traumatized by the 1970s and always referred to the Women’s Liberation Movement as the Amazon Invasion. He believed, or pretended to believe, that the ringleaders were all extraterrestrials who had arrived by flying saucer in 1968 and were boldly conspiring to seize supreme power everywhere through what he called semantic black magick. “They’ve atomized the language and created a semantic smog in which ordinary humanity is obliterated by abstractions like ‘chairperson’ or simple mammalian erotic signaling is politicized into a new sin called ‘sexism.’ Any male who dares to oppose them is stigmatized as a ‘male chauvinist,’ and any female who opposes them is labeled a victim of male brainwashing. Obviously, within a decade, they will command the key posts in all areas of industry (they’ve captured publishing already) and then government will fall. Probably, then, the males of their species will start landing and we’ll all be enslaved. (Some of the males may have landed already; look at the Manhattan literary scene.) It’s the sweetest infiltration job in the history of galactic espionage. For merely daring to reveal their plans, I am smeared by them as a ‘male chauvinist pig,’ which is ten times worse than an ordinary ‘male chauvinist’ and equivalent to an SP on the Scientologists’ hit list.”

  Some agreed with Justin Case that Marvin was kidding, that he had merely seen an opportunity—the chance to attain fame and fortune by espousing a bitterly controversial extreme position. Others, however, claimed he was dead serious, and was a classical case of cocaine paranoia. Marvin always pointed out, when either of these theories was mentioned in his presence, “there is a third possibility. I might be right. In that case, how convenient for Them that my sanity and sincerity are so often called into question. It almost looks as if They are conspiring to defame my character. Are they afraid that some might listen to me before it’s too late, before the takeover is complete?”

  Marvin’s principal enemy, among the male half of the population, was Frank Hemeroid, of course. Hemeroid, oddly enough, hardly even knew of Marvin’s existence and, hence, was incapable of being harmful to him by intention. That didn’t matter. He was still the enemy with a capital E. At times Marvin had even suspected him of being extraterrestrial, like the leaders of Women’s Lib.

  Hemeroid earned his animosity entirely by the books he wrote, which were full of treason, according to Marvin. Actually, Hemeroid’s novels merely reflected the 1970s literary society around him, in which most people were a little weird and all of them were losers. Hemeroid carefully depicted a world exactly like that: Most of his characters were weird and all of them were losers. The critics, who were all losers, called him a brutal realist. Marvin called him a traitor to planet Earth.

  Marvin wrote about all this in dialogues (he rather fancies himself as being of Platonic disposition) in which the speakers were Frank Hemeroid, representing 1970s values and reality-constructs, and Ernest Hemingway, Marvin’s childhood hero who had been consigned to the literary garbage heap when the extraterrestrials took over. Hemingway, in these dialogues, represented Man, individual Man, the universal maverick, as he was before the extraterrestrial invasion.

  The dialogues were full of things like this:

  FRANK: Did you ever really believe in your own myth, you old faker? Did you think you could come out of a neurotic suicide-prone family and by sheer Will transform yourself into a hero, a brave man, a great artist, a boxer, a big-game hunter, a cult figure, an image of courage and of grace under pressure? Didn’t you know you were a worm, that all men are worms and cowards, and that you’d be beaten at the end? Didn’t you know you’d be like all the rest of us and give in to self-pity and self-doubt and pull that final cosmic trigger?

  ERNEST: I never said my way was easy. I said that Man was not meant for defeat, however many individuals may be defeated. I said that the effort to be conscious enough and brave enough was admirable, whatever the consequences.

  FRANK: Consciousness? Bravery? Consciousness is only aware of its own suffering in this blind existence, and bravery is only a gesture against the inevitable end. A stupid gesture, since the cowards live longer, and if they’re cowardly enough, they make all the comfortable decisions and have all the security possible in a Death Universe like this.

  ERNEST: I deny none of that, and I have shown the cruelty more nakedly than any of your generation. I still say it is admirable to be brave and take big risks for the things you value. When everything mammalian and mechanical tells you to run, and you stand and don’t run, you learn what Man can be.

  And so on. Marvin was obsessed with something he called the Dignity of Man. He was not at all amused by ecol
ogical relativists who told him that an ant or a swine might equally believe in the Dignity of Ant or the Dignity of Swine. Men were not ants or swine, he would say coldly; and he would classify the heckler as probably brain-warped by the extraterrestrial Amazons.

  In truth, like most philosophers, Marvin never wrote explicitly about the one factor that really determined and explained everything in his philosophy. Just as Marx never mentioned his carbuncles in Das Kapital, and Freud didn’t publish anything about his own sexual hang-ups, Marvin Gardens never wrote a word anywhere about the source and motive of all his theorizing. This was his penis. It was four inches long at best, and it had given him a defeatist psychology about things in general, and women in particular, against which he had struggled mightily to build his philosophy of Transcendental Male Courage. The women he classified as extraterrestrials frightened him only a little bit more than the ordinary women he classified as terrestrials.

  Sometimes Marvin wrote dialogues between Pavlov’s Dog and Schrödinger’s Cat, instead of between Frank and Ernest. These were usually quite short and almost like Zen stories:

  DOG: I’ve got a million proofs that we’re not free.

  CAT: I’ve got one proof that we are.

  DOG: What’s that?

  CAT: Who asks what’s that?

  64 AMOEBAS

  The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form—in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality—has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science.