Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (26 page)

“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….”

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 Williams 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.

“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 ecological 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?

DECEMBER 23, 1983:

Natalie Drest was amazed as the conversation swung in a new quantum direction. “You,” she gasped, “you dig Krazy Cat too?”

“Indeed, my dear,” Blake Williams beamed. “I may be the most devout student of Herriman’s work anywhere in the civilized world.”

He didn’t tell her (yet) that he regarded Krazy as a symbol of Schrödinger’s Cat in the great wave-mechanics puzzle.

Even Blake Williams occasionally worried that he was talking over his audience’s head.

   But Joe Malik seeks purchase for an elbow on the back of the couch, noticing the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner alcove, her foot pressed down on the head of the Serpent. He was wondering what the hell
Santaria
was, amazed as always by the blind skill of female fingers, Carol guiding him into her without looking down actually lying with her eyes closed as she reveled no doubt in strictly private fantasy (Am I Paul Newman? Woody Allen? That damned third ex-husband? First or second ex-husband? Some damned high school football hero ten years ago?), slipping in smoothly, interlocking, beginning to merge; to meld; to float on the great ocean of sensation, to find the window.