“That’s absurd,” Dr. Axon said. “If I were to claim that everybody should be a neurologist, you would all quite properly regard that as an eccentricity. Yet when an artist says we should all be artists, we are apt to agree, a bit sheepishly. And if a religious person says we should all be religious, we not only agree, but feel a bit guilty about our shortcomings in that department. Well, I’ve never had an artistic or religious impulse in my life, and I’m not ashamed of the fact.”
“Research is your art and your religion,” said the Japanese monk, speaking for the first time. “What a person truly is, in any universe, is the Buddha Nature,” he added blandly. He knew that he existed in this continuum only to make that one Dharma revelation, so he immediately resumed his impassive silence.
The others decided that the monk’s remarks made no sense.
“What do you think, Dr. Axon,” Loup-Garou asked rhetorically, “if only a few people had sex in their lives, and the majority were, not merely ascetics, but simply unaware of sex—deaf, dumb, and blind to the erotic side of life? Would you not think that was at least a little bit odd, a symptom, perhaps, of some pathology? Arrrrrrrrrgh!!!”
He had discovered the Rehnquist in his Lobster Newburg.
And the chef arrived from the kitchen, exasperated as only a French chef can be exasperated. “The goats!” he cried. “Once again it is that they march!”
But Loup-Garou was still going “arrrgh,” like a man with the death rattle.
“What is it?” Ms. Gebloomenkraft asked him, her eyes full of motherly concern.
“It’s nothing—nothing,” Loup-Garou gasped. “Just a touch of heartburn.” He was still in shock, thinking the Rehnquist might be a hallucination. But if you were naïve enough to talk about hallucinations, the results might be rubber sheets, electroshock, windows with bars on them.
“The goats,” the chef repeated, with emphasis. “They will not be governed. They march again, I tell you!”
Loup-Garou took another peek. The Rehnquist was still there. It was a great big one—ithyphallique, as the anthropologists would say. This was Madness, or else something unspeakable was afoot.
Billy began to sing, off key:
Four goats and ME,
They came to TEA,
They came to STAY,
They stayed all DAY,
Oh, my! Oh, me!
Four goats and ME!
At this point he fell face down in his Lobster Newburg.
“Bill-uh isn’t accustomed to fine French wines,” Dr. Carter said, his genial smile beginning to look just a bit forced.
WHALEBURGER
While Loup-Garou was struggling with the enigma of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg, in Paris, Justin Case was speaking to a man from the Saudi Arabian delegation to the U.N., in New York.
“This is actually ah rather trivial,” Case said awkwardly into the phone. “You see, many years ago an Arab resigned from this job and left behind a note in Arabic, and well um after staring at it for twenty-six years, I’m a bit bored with the mystery and I’d like to have the answer….”
“Certainly, certainly,” said the voice in the receiver. “I’d be glad to help. Can you sound it out?”
“Well, he wrote it in the European alphabet,” Case said. “So I guess its more or less phonetic. I’ll read it to you. Um:
Qol: Hua Allahu achad: Allahu Assamad; lam yalid walam yulad; walam yakun lahu kufwan achad
Did you get that?”
“Most certainly,” said the electronic voice. “It’s one of the most famous verses in Al Koran. In English it would be—of course, it loses most of its beauty in translation—but, roughly, it means God is He who has no beginning and no end, no size and no shape, no definition, and no wife, no horse, no mustache.”
“Ah, yes,” Case said. “Well, thank you very much, and I’m sorry for having taken your time with such a trivial matter.”
He hung up, staring into space in a bemused manner.
“No wife, no horse, no mustache,” he repeated aloud.
Something certainly had gotten lost in the translation.
When Dr. Dashwood returned from lunch he was accosted in the ORGRE parking lot by another sailor, who said his name was Lemuel Gulliver.
“In the course of my Travels in Diverse Lands,” Gulliver said, “I came once upon a Race of perfectly Enlightened Beings who looked like Horses and talked like G. I. Gurdjieff. When they inquired of me regarding the Laws and Customs and Manners of my people, concerning which I was at some pains to Inform them correctly and fully, they expressed great Astonishment and keen Horror, saying that they never heard of such a Tribe of Conscienceless Rascals and Filthy Scoundrels in all of creation. This estimate of the Human Race, as you can well imagine, dismayed me no little bit, and I endeavour’d to defend our species—”
“Yes, yes,” Dashwood said, “but I’m in a hurry, you understand….”
“These equine Philosophers,” Gulliver went on as if he had not heard, “were not impressed by any of my Words and said plainly to me that if our Theologians were not the worst Lunatics in creation, then certainly our Lawyers were the worst Thieves. They averred further that if what I told them of our Doctors were true, we were wiser to resort to Plumbers or Blacksmiths, who are no more Ignorant and a great deal less Greedy, Avaricious, and Rapacious.”
Dashwood was stung by these words. “It takes a long time and a lot of money invested to get through medical school,” he said angrily.
“I explained that to my equine Philosophers,” Gulliver replied, “but they did not accept it as a Valid Argument; for they asserted, any Thief or Scoundrel when apprehended will give you Justifications in Plenty for his Misdeeds, but the Judicious are not Fool’d by such Rationalizations, and—they said further—those who prey not upon any chance Passerby, but upon the Sick and the Disabled and the Dying are, without doubt, the most Rapacious and Rascally of the Yahoo Tribe (for such was their Name for our Species).”
“Your friends sound like a bunch of damned Communists,” Dashwood said.
“Nay,” Gulliver protested. “They live in the State of Nature, without Bureaucrats or Commissars of any kind. And, I might add, Sir, their Opinion of our Doctors was based on my showing them an ordinary Medical Bill, at which they inquir’d of me the Average Income of the Doctors who present these Bills and the Average Income of the Unfortunate Patients who must pay them or be left without Treatment to Die in the Streets. Their comments on this were of such Disgust and Anger that I dared not show them a Psychiatrist’s Bill, lest their opinion of our Species, already Low, should sink Lower than Whaleburger, which is, as you may know, at the bottom of the Ocean.”
“Oh, Abzug off,” said Dashwood, really angry now.
He rushed into ORGRE and left Gulliver standing on the sidewalk.
Back in New York, the phone was ringing again in the office of Abu Laylah at the Saudi Arabian Consulate. Still high on the new kef, Abu Laylah lifted the receiver leisurely.
“I say, is this the Saudi Arabian Consulate?” asked a very British voice.
“Oy vay, have you got the wrong number!” Abu Laylah replied in a thick Yiddish accent.
“Oh,” the voice said, taken aback. “Veddy sorry.”
Abu Laylah went on packing happily. He had been fired that morning and was thoroughly enjoying himself screwing up all incoming calls before leaving.
Just a few minutes ago he had convinced some Infidel that the most sublime verse in the Koran was full of nonsense about horses and mustaches.
THE INVISIBLE HAND SOCIETY
The Invisible Hand Society had its headquarters in Washington, just off Dupont Circle, in the same building which housed the Warren Belch Society.
Clem Cotex, the president of the Belchers, had noticed the name of the Invisible Hand on the building directory a long time ago. He liked it, because he liked mysteries. He enjoyed wondering about the Invisible Hand-ers and speculating on what esoteric business could justify such a name.
Was Lamont Cranston their leader, perhaps?
Clem loved such speculations. Most of his life he had been a salesman in Arkansas and never thought of anything but commissions, net sales, tax writeoffs, and not telling the same Rastus and Mandy story to the same customer twice. Then one day in Chicago a tall, crew-cut humanoid—a human, Clem thought at the time—gave him some free tomato juice on the street. The man (the humanoid, actually) said he was from the Eris Tomato Juice Company and that they were handing out free samples to get people acquainted with their product.
Within three days Clem had joined the Trekkies and was writing letters to CBS demanding the return of Star Trek to TV. He had also gotten heavily involved in classical music, started relearning all the math he had in high school, discovered that he often knew who was calling him on the phone before he picked up the receiver, and invented a new cosmology of his very own, which was based on the idea that the universe was not spherical, as Heisenberg’s General Relativity claimed, but five-cornered like the Pentagon building.
Within a week Clem had checked that there was no Eris Tomato Juice Company, noticed that UFOs seemed to be following his car wherever he went, and was beginning to think he was attracted to the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk.
By the end of the second week Clem was less elated and agitated, and had gone through a battery of tests at a company that did psychological testing for top management positions. The psychologists told him that he had an “unusually rich fantasy life,” but was too well adjusted to be schizophrenic; that his IQ was the highest they had ever measured (and he knew damned well that it had never been that high before): and that he definitely was not Management Material. They suggested that he take up whatever art was most attractive to him.
Clem, becoming less agitated, less elated, and more conscious of detail all the time, as the stuff in the tomato juice continued to mutate his nervous system, decided that he was one among possibly many thousands of subjects in a consciousness-expansion project being carried on by extraterrestrials.
Within a year he had written a symphony, which he decided was not very good, and had changed his religion ten times, without learning much in the process. He had also read his way through every volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, looking for clues as to what the hell was really going on.
Whoever was behind this experiment (and he was no longer quite sure they were necessarily extraterrestrials) seemed to have left a stream of grossly obvious Hints throughout every field of human knowledge. The stuff in the tomato juice was what theologians would call a gratuitous grace, but that was the only gratuitous part of it. You had to figure out, on your own, who They were, what They were up to, and what you should do about it.
The last thing you should do about it, Clem knew, was to talk about it, to the ordinary people who hadn’t been given the stuff in the tomato juice. They would just think you were weird.
Clem had a list of people from history who (he figured) had probably been given the stuff in the tomato juice. The list started out with Jesus Christ, of course, and included a lot of the usual Suspects (Buddha, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Leonardo Da Vinci), but it had quite a few that ordinary people would never have included, like Lewis Carroll and H. P. Lovecraft and General E. A. Crowley, the discoverer of the North Pole, and Joshua Abraham Norton, who in San Francisco in 1857 declared himself Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico, and King of the Jews.
For years Clem had tried to find others on the same neurological wavelength as himself. He had joined, and eventually been kicked out of, the Fortean Society, Mensa, the Rosicrucians, the Center for UFO Studies, and the ultrasecret SSFTASS (Secret Society for the Abolition of Secret Societies). He was too far-out for all of them.
Eventually he organized his own society for the investigation and elucidation of “what the hell is really going on around here.” He called it the Warren Belch Society, after the famous Old West lawman who won every gun-fight because on each occasion when he confronted a shoot-out, his opponents’ guns had mysteriously jammed.
The people Clem recruited were not the sort who would attribute Marshal Belch’s phenomenal good luck to “coincidence”; nor would they be satisfied by metaphysical labels like “synchronicity” or “psychokinesis.”
They assumed the extraterrestrials had some obscure cosmic reason for protecting Warren Belch.
On the day when Justin Case got tired wondering about Joe Malik’s mysterious Last Communication and tried (unsuccessfully) to find out what it meant, Clem Cotex got tired wondering about the Invisible Hand Society. He marched down the hall, opened their door, and walked into a tiny but tastefully decorated reception room.
The wall to the right was adorned with a large gold dollar sign: $, emblazoned with the initials T.A.N.S.T.A.G.I. The wall to the left had a giant reproduction of the famous Steinberg cartoon of a little fish about to be eaten by a slightly bigger fish, which in turn, was about to be eaten by a still bigger fish, which also was about to be eaten by an even bigger fish, and so on, to the border of the cartoon and evidently, beyond that, to infinity.
There was nobody in the room.
Clem looked around, a bit uncertainly.
SDATE YOUR BIZNIZ PLEEZ, said a computeroid voice, evidently out of the ceiling.
“Uh I’d like to see the head man or ah the head woman as the case may be,” Clem stammered.
THAD WOULD BE DOKTOR RAUSS ELYSIUM, the computer said. HE IZ NOT IN THE OFFIZ TODAY.
“Oh ah tell him Clem Cotex called,” Clem said, edging toward the door.
He suddenly didn’t want to investigate the Invisible Hand any further, while he was alone. Some other time, he thought, when I have some friends with me.
YOUR MEZZAGE HAS BEEN RECORDED, the voice droned behind him as he fled the scene.
FALLING GIRDERS
The apprehension of the Real can only be compared to a radiance or illlumination because it is a revelation of part of the coherence of the Divine Act of Creation.
—POPE STEPHEN, Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas
Mary Margaret Wildeblood, Manhattan’s bitchiest literary critic, was getting just a tiny bit spiflicated. She was working on her fifth martini, in fact.
“Mailer can’t write,” she said argumentatively. “None of them can write. We haven’t seen a real writer since Raymond Chandler.”
“Um,” said her companion noncommittally. He was Blake Williams.
“What do you mean, ’um?” Mary Margaret demanded truculently. “I was talking nonsense just to see if you were listening.”
They were in the Three Lions bar on U.N. Plaza.
“Well, in fact, I was listening,” Dr. Williams said urbanely. “You were comparing Mailer to Chandler, to the disadvantage of Mailer. However, I admit my attention was also wandering a bit. I was thinking about the Hollandaise Sauce enigma.” He was on his fifth martini too.
“What’s that?” Mary Margaret asked. Yet the martinis must have been getting to her, because she did not wait for his answer and announced, in the voice of Discovery, “The best short story ever written is by John O’Hara.”
“It was a case of food poisoning,” Dr. Williams said. “A bunch of people got poisoned by some contaminated Hollandaise Sauce.” Yet he looped back courteously and asked, “What short story?”
The robot who used the name “Frank Sullivan” came in and took a table near them. He was accompanied by Peter Jackson, the Black associate editor of Confrontation magazine.
“I forget the title,” Mary Margaret said. “It was about a car salesman who has a very good day, makes some really top-notch sales, and stops at a bar to celebrate before going home. He has one drink after another and doesn’t get home until after midnight, and then get this and then he goes and gets his rifle from the den and �
��”
“Oh I read that,” Dr. Williams said. “It isn’t a short story, it’s a novel. Called um ah er Appointment in Samara. And he doesn’t use a rifle. He gasses himself in his car.”
“Damnedest case I ever heard of,” pseudo-Sullivan said. “The Ambassador has been on morphine ever since.”
“No,” Mary Margaret said impatiently. “That was what the character in Appointment in Samara did, yes, everybody knows that one, but I’m talking about a short story O’Hara wrote much later, maybe thirty years later. In the short story, dammit what is the title, in the short story …”
“Wigged?” pseudo-Sullivan cried. “We thought we’d have to put him in a straitjacket.”
“In the short story,” Mary Margaret plowed on, noting that Williams was listening to the robot, “the salesman takes the rifle and goes to his bedroom and puts the rifle to his head …” She paused.
It worked. “And?” Williams asked, still wondering a bit about the Hollandaise Sauce mystery and why the Ambassador wigged.
“And his wife wakes up,” Mary Margaret concluded, “and she says, ‘Don’t.’ And he doesn’t.”
“He was hopping all around the room like a chicken on acid and making gargling and choking noises,” the “man” called “Frank Sullivan” went on.
“He doesn’t?” Williams cried.
“That’s the point,” Mary Margaret said. “You see, like the character in the Samara novel, this man goes right to the edge, he looks over the abyss, and then he pulls back at the last moment. Because his wife speaks to him.”
“So it’s a love story,” Williams said. “Very sneaky and indirect, typical of O’Hara, but still a love story. He decides to continue carrying his burden, whatever it is, for the sake of the woman he loves.”
“Well, how much will Confrontation pay for this?” pseudo-Sullivan demanded.
Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy Page 33
