Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (25 page)

“Yes, yes—but how can I be sure who I’m speaking to?”

“Well,” Stuart said, “if you have your doubts, call me back. Go through information, to check the number, and then have the
Pussycat
switchboard put you on my line. That should convince you.”

“I’ll do just that,” the doctor said. “A lot of damned peculiar things are happening today. I want to be sure you’re not some cohort of that Ezra Pound character.” He hung up abruptly.

Ezra Pound, Stuart thought, bemused. The doctor thinks a dead poet and folk singer is plotting against him.

An absolute nut of the first water. A real signifyin’ mad scientist.

Obviously, this would require great care. Dashwood couldn’t just be discarded as an interview subject for
being batty; he was too big a name. The interview would go ahead, but Dashwood would be handled with kid gloves.

The phone buzzed, and he picked it up.

“Dr. Dashwood is back on the line,” his secretary said.

“Put him through.” He waited, then said, “Dr. Dashwood?”

“Well, I guess it really is you,” the voice said. “Please excuse me. A man in my sensitive field—cranks and schizophrenics wondering around loose …”

“Yes, yes, I quite understand,” Stuart said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “Poets always have harbored nasty grudges.” He had no doubt that the doctor was as goofy as a waltzing mouse.

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

President Hubbard had abolished poverty through a plan which she called the RICH economy.

RICH meaning Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis.

This was a diabolically clever scheme to abolish all forms of human labor except the most creative—
i.e.
, those frontal-lobe metaprogramming circuits which have evolved last in evolution and surpass the mechanical old four-circuit primate brain functions.

Of course it had been theoretically possible to abolish most mechanical labor since about 1948, when a very
cunning primate mathematician, Norbert Weiner, noted that self-correcting (cybernetic) machines would soon be able to monitor whole factories.

Even earlier a metaprogramming-circuit Greek primate, Aristotle, had observed that it would be possible to abolish slavery “when the loom and other machines become self-managing.”

Terran primates had continued slavery over the generations, despite the increasing distress this caused their hominid third and fourth (semantic and moral) circuits, simply because machines could not yet manage themselves. As many a primate Utopian had rediscovered in chagrin, under primitive planetary conditions, “somebody has to do the shit-work.” The most appealing solution to electing that somebody was to invade a weaker neighboring tribe and bring back a group of biots who could be domesticated.

This had been done so often that there was no hominid pack on Terra that did not show the effects of
domestication
and
slave mentality
, a fact first noted by a dour German primate named Nietzsche.

In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of individualistic third-and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery had grown so repugnant that it was formally “abolished” within a century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through inertia in the form of “wage slavery,” which required that all primates not born into the sixty families that
“owned”
almost everything would have to
“work”
for those families or their corporations in order to get the tickets (called
“money”)
which were necessary for survival.

This slave mentality was so entrenched in the domesticated primates that cybernation advanced very slowly in the first thirty years after Weiner discovered it would be possible to abolish primate toil. All the important primate
bands—the alpha male corporations, the primate trade unions, the primate council or “government,” the primate totem cults or “churches”—believed that the traditional domesticated caste system was the only possible system under which primates could live. Even the Red primates shared this delusion, differing only in their ideas about distribution of resources.

President Hubbard boldly challenged this domesticated primate thought-form by announcing that everybody who
could
be replaced by a machine
would
be replaced by a machine.

It seemed like the end of the world to the primates, at first.

It turned out to be only the end of poverty.

“Any false or partially false premise extended with accurate logic will generate an approximate simulation of insanity.” Crossing Broadway at Seventy-second Street, still lecturing, it was Blake Williams.

“Yes, yes, of course, Professor, but if you’ll listen a moment to what I’m trying to say,” Natalie Drest protested.

“But you see, young lady, most of the premises of our current religious, scientific, and philosophical thinking must be false, or partially false, as judged by a more advanced civilization. What would a Higher Intelligence make of
our doctrines of
transubstantiation
or
charmed quarks
or the
categorical imperative?”

“Well, yeah, but, professor …”

“Then, dammit, will you listen? Most of our beliefs and behavior will appear clinically insane to a Higher Intelligence viewing this planet.”

“Sure, its all relative, I know that, but, Professor …”

“Look,” Dr. Williams said with crushing finality, “do you want to fuck, or don’t you?”

Her answer was drowned out by a siren racing up Riverside Drive.

“What?”

“I said, I been tryna tell you for ten blocks, Professor, I’m still getting over a case of the clap …”

“That’s quite all right, my dear,” Blake Williams pronounced suavely. “I’m a broad-minded man. I understand the exuberance of youth, the powerful hormones coursing through your vibrant young bloodstream, the noble refusal of your generation to regard the taboos of old as binding upon the free spirits of the 1980s, and besides, I’ve reached the age at which I’m not horny
every
night of the year. You are still invited to come along to my humble digs and listen to my old Joan Baez records.”

“Gee, Professor, you know what you are? You’re cool. You’re not sexist at all.”

“Um, yes, thank you, my dear. I’m just getting old, actually. Now, about the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky
gedan-kenexperiment …”

Linda Lovelace, a projection of light traveling 186,000 miles per second through film of events that actually transpired in Miami years before, is taking first one inch of Harry Reems’s penis, then two, three, five, the whole incredible nine inches, and paranoid little Marvin Gardens, hunched in his seat, overcoat in lap, snorts the last of his coke.

It was the forty-fourth time Marvin had seen
Deep Throat
and the twenty-third time on coke, and under the overcoat his hand was magically transforming into Linda’s mouth again, that separate reality where the dancing photons on the screen and the synergizing synapses in his brain joined to produce more than 3-D better than Technicolor realer than real God yes higher than a kite oh Lord.

Marvin was having a rare happy moment in which the extraterrestrial invasion wasn’t worrying him.

He, Harry Reems, is about to come, and Marvin Gardens, too, wondering in one corner of his mind about the eternity of protoplasm, because when he comes she’ll take it out of her mouth and—
splat!
—he’ll shoot all over her
face. Marvin is waiting, but take an amoeba now does it die when it splits? Are there two new amoebas or is it two selves where there was one self before? God, she’s got all of it now, faster, call them Krazy and Ignatz say, now is Krazy the first amoeba and Ignatz a twin or are both of them still Krazy, two Krazies instead of one? Jeez, right down her throat now, and when they split again we have four, she’s licking the head now ah that’s good and about to swallow it all again, call them say Groucho Chico Harpo and Zeppo, which is the original amoeba or are they all, are amoebas really immortal then? Now now here it comes now one amoeba dividing forever now going on and on for all eternity now a single explosion of DNA seed now now ah Christ Christ yes now now now yes Eternal God oh good.

   “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.”

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.