Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (12 page)

“What’s this cop got, somebody comes all the way from L.A. to heist it? The crown jewels?”

Starhawk raised his fingers to his nose and made a sniffing motion.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Malloy said. “This cop, what he’s got is a bag of snow, so he won’t be talking to anybody else in the department when it turns up missing. I got to hand it to you, kid. Nobody could have set this up for you but another cop. The fuck, it would have to be his partner. Who’s pissed because he didn’t get his half, right?”

“Don’t think about that, you might get so excited you’ll talk about it in your sleep. The thing is, you just got to tell Murph about this Syndicate gun from L.A. and how funny he thinks it is, that this crooked cop is trying to sell some hot snow to Maldonado’s boys and they just went and brought up this gorilla to take it from him, no down payment, no monthly installments, for free.”

Malloy was grinning broadly. “Murph’ll shit,” he said. “He’ll absolutely shit a brick.”

“Yeah,” Starhawk said. “I kind of think he will. You like it?”

“Kiddo,” Malloy said, “if I wasn’t so broke this week, I’d do it free. Just to watch him trying not to look like the cop I’m telling him about. The fat prick.”

“I sort of figured you’d like it,” Starhawk said. “Me, the only thing I regret is I can’t be there to see his face myself.”

“Yeah,” Malloy said. “The fat prick.”

“Defection?” Ubu suggested at the second conference on the Brain Drain. “Russia or China …”

“The CIA was the first agency into this,” Babbit said, “and they say it’s impossible. They know what color drawers every commissar wears these days with the latest surveillance techniques. One hundred thirty-two top American scientists are not working over there unknown to the CIA. Take that as axiomatic.” Babbit was firm.

“Well there are only twelve people in HOME….”

“They haven’t left the planet,” Babbit said briefly. “People of that caliber do not travel about without somebody noticing—Intelligence, newspapers, TV, other scientists,
somebody.
It is as if they have crawled into a hole and dragged the ground in after them.” His chair creaked screeee as he leaned forward for emphasis.

“Hell, they’re not loose
inside
the country sir,” Ubu said firmly. “Americans can’t just disappear these days. Why to cash a check any kind of check you’ve got to write
both
your Social Security number and your GWB number and have them both scanned by the Beast. Sir there’s never been a people better watched and protected than the
American people of November 1983. And we expect to do even better sir when the new circuits are put in the Beast next month.”

But the snow falls thicker, making a blanket of foam against the window of Babbit’s office and piles against the door of The Upstart Crow bookstore off Dupont Circle across town, where Marvin Gardens is autographing copies of
Vlad Victorious.

“I never got a real live autograph from a real live author Mr. Gardens tell me why did you write two books about a man like Vlad?”

“To make money,” Marvin said in his Peter Lorre cokehead voice. He had prepared for the ordeal of the seventeenth autograph party in twenty-three days by snorting more than his usual morning quantity of the snow and was in no mood to conceal his divinity from the blind uncoked Earthlings. “I have always been possessed by a
mad, passionate
, almost
erotic
desire for a very large bank account. In fact, I love the
feel
of money the crisp
crinkle
of bills the metal
solidity
of coin the visual impact of a large check with
seven figures.”

“Is it true John Wayne will play Vlad again in the sequel?”

“That’s just in the talking stage now and frankly I don’t care if they cast Raquel Welch the important thing is
cash on the barrelhead
my agent is asking a million for the screen rights and we won’t settle for a penny less … Yes?”

“Is Vlad really a symbol?”

The twelve people in HOME—High Orbital Mini-Earth—were construction engineers, six male and six female. They had originally been sent there to build, with materials shipped from Lunar Mining, HOME II, a space village for 10,000 occupants. This program had been canceled as “non-ec” by President Lousewart and the twelve colonists restricted to “ec” research, mostly astronomical, which President Lousewart turned over to his astrologers for a mystical interpretation.

HOME was located in the area called Libration Point 5, where the gravitational fields of Luna and Terra were equally balanced. This null-gravity area had been mathematically discovered by the astronomer Lagrange and was therefore sometimes called the Lagrange Area. The name for the space town, HOME, had been coined by psychologist Timothy Leary in 1977.

A friend of Leary’s named Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote overly complicated novels, had suggested a team song for the colonists, “HOME on Lagrange.” To popularize this idea, he had written letters about it to many space research groups and included it in a novel called
The Trick Top Hat.
Still, by 1984, the song hadn’t caught on with the twelve colonists. They were not at home on Lagrange because they feared that the whole project would soon be classified as “non-ec” and they would be dragged back to the womb-planet.

Mary Margaret Wildeblood’s parties were the place to go that winter because of the penile adornment above the mantelpiece. Some even began to suspect that Wildeblood had undergone the transsex operation only to engage in the most flagrant excess of exhibitionism in world history.

This was an uncharitable oversimplification. Wildeblood’s mind was vast, not simple, and had more kinks than a Pollack painting; She was not deep, but wide and complex. She actually intended to become a nun. When She quoted from the gospel of hir youth, “Humility is endless,” She really meant it. Submission was salvation; and who is more submissive than a nun? Above all, She longed to embrace the Lamb, all woolly and fleecy and pure, but very definitely horned and Ram-signed with Pentecostal fire. She had the hots for Divine intercourse. Where Natalie Drest was merely cock-mad, Mary Margaret Wildeblood was possessed by the god Priapus.

The idea of mounting and, so to speak, enshrining Ulysses occurred to Mary Margaret at her very first reception after returning from Johns Hopkins.

Benny “Eggs” Benedict started it by suggesting, “Norman Mailer might try to get revenge for some of your reviews by raping you.”

“Let the male chauvinist pig try it,’ Mary Margaret said demurely. “I’ve been studying kung fu.”

“Oh, are you planning to join Women’s Lib?” Justin Case inquired.

“I have given it some thought,” Mary Margaret replied, practicing her new simpery-Marilyn-Monroe smile and positively reveling in the feel of the nylons on his, no dammit her, thighs.

“JUST A GODDAM MINUTE,” a booming masculine voice cut in. This was Josephine Malik, chairperson of God’s Lightning—an outfit long suspected of terrorist fire-bombings against porny movie houses, adult bookstores, and other sexist enterprises. Jo was an ideological descendant of those who thought copulation was bad for the crops. “I don’t know about lib-lab wishy-washy groups like NOW,” she went on, “but God’s Lightning certainly isn’t accepting any members who weren’t
born
female.”

“Oh, now,” a fluty feminine voice intervened—“Figs” Newton, spokesperson for the Necrophile Liberation Front, sporting a lapel button that said, OUT OF THE MAUSOLEUMS, INTO THE STREETS. “That’s hardly fair,” he pronounced—like most Terrestrials, he regarded himself as an expert on morality. “People are what they make themselves,” he said, good Existentialist that he was. “To hold the accidents of birth against them is practically
racism
, isn’t it?”

This led to some lively debate, and it was finally decided that to hold the accident of genitalia-at-birth against somebody was definitely not
racism
, but might be
sexism
, or possibly
genderism.
Josephine Malik, meanwhile, smoldered.

“Well,” she said finally, “God’s Lightning is not influenced
by all this
baroque
civil rights and civil liberties horseshit out of the eighteenth century. According to semantics, people don’t
have
rights; they just make demands and call them their rights. It’s purely a pragmatic problem. If we let this—
person
—in, what’s to prevent other men from hacking off their prongs, infiltrating our ranks, and subverting our whole organization?”

This was a poser, admittedly; and while the assembled company grappled with it, Josephine delivered her crusher: “Besides, there’s a lot of doubt about how complete these operations are. How do we know Ms. Wildeblood is in all respects a true woman and not just a truncated man?”

Mary Margaret Wildeblood, who had a mind somewhat bizarre even for the twentieth century, had been waiting for such an opportunity. “I can certainly prove I’m not a man,” she smiled sweetly, and drew Ulysses out of her purse. Although two men fainted on the spot, the women merely blinked, at least at first. Then some of them began to titter.

Thus began the great Wildeblood
scandale
of that winter. She had maliciously saved the relic of her previous masculinity with the thought that it might provoke some sort of spontaneous Group Encounter sessions, and now she knew she had the potential for some truly memorable Freak-outs. The relic was placed in the hands of a skilled taxidermist and soon emerged, in a natural-looking erect state, handsomely mounted on a redwood plaque. This hung over the mantelpiece of her posh Sutton Place apartment, and there she began to hold parties to which were invited (along with the usual New York VIPs) precisely those persons most likely to be neurologically galvanized by the sight of a penis without a man, which is considerably more memorable than mathematician Dodgson’s grin without a cat, although perhaps not as memorable as physicist Schrödinger’s cat, who was dead and alive at the same time.

Blake Williams became a regular at these
soirees
, and often retired sneakily to the kitchen to make notes, which later resulted in a scholarly article, “Priapism Recrudescent: Hellenic Religion in a Secular Context.” The “ithyphallic eidolon,” as he insisted on calling Ms. Wildeblood’s obscene joke, seemed to produce markedly different effects on various personality types. One football player, for instance, had to be removed in a straitjacket. Strangely enough, certain shy, timid, and stoop-shouldered men took it all in their stride, quite as if Wildeblood’s brutally explicit rejection of masculinity reinforced their own loose grip upon that (after all) somewhat mystical estate. The Gay set developed a superstition, almost a
mystique
, and the tradition of “kissing it for good luck” was even joked about, obscurely, in certain newspaper columns. (“A new religion, of which Linda Lovelace might almost be the prophet, is now sweeping the Way-Out People, all the way from Fifty-seventh Street to St. Mark’s Place.”)

“I said FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS,” the California writer was howling amid the group at the mantelpiece, below the ithyphallic eidolon.

“Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no
peanuts, mayonnaise, or glue,” Blake Williams was reciting patiently to Natalie Drest.

“TV, publishing, movies, everywhere—the extraterrestrials have
taken over,”
Marvin Gardens was warning in his passionate Peter Lorre intonation.

Benny Benedict suddenly had enough of the Wildeblood high-IQ set. He wandered out on the balcony, to look at the stars and wonder, half-drunkenly, why he was so depressed.

After three years the question still came to him when he had too much booze aboard:
Why me?

Which was selfish and maudlin. The real question should be:
Why my mother?

Or, more to the point:
Why anybody?

The world must be mad, that we go on living like this, and tolerate it. The primordial jungles were probably less dangerous than the streets of any city in Unistat. Was this the resultant of the long struggle upward from the caves—a world more frightening, more full of hatred and violence, more bloody than the days of the saber-tooth?

Every time I look at the TV news at seven, he thought miserably, I end up feeling this way before midnight. It’s almost as if they’re afraid somebody might have a flicker of hope or a good opinion of humanity (at least in potential) or a brief moment of delusory security. Every night, to prevent such unrealistic moods, they have to remind us that the violence and brutality is still continuing.

With a shock, Benny discovered that he was weeping again, silently, guiltily, privately. He had thought he was past that.

So much for booze as a tranquilizer.

He fought against it. It was self-indulgence, disguised self-pity actually. He dabbed his eyes and tried to think of something else.
Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum …

“Nice night.” An Unidentified Man had walked out onto the balcony.

“You don’t feel the smog up here,” Benny said, embarrassed, wondering if he had gotten rid of the last tear before this stranger had seen him.

The Unidentified Man looked up at the stars, smiling slightly. He was good-looking enough to be an actor, Benny thought, and at second glance he did look remotely familiar, as if his face had been in the newspapers sometime. “The stars,” he said, “don’t they get to you?”