Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (28 page)

Vlad the Barbarian
was a blatant incitement to violence, garbed in the most reactionary moralistic prejudices imaginable. It was bought by the first New York publisher to whom it was submitted, for a higher advance than Albert Speer’s memoirs or any of the confessionals of the Watergate felons. A movie sale was negotiated even before the book was released, and John Wayne starred as Vlad, looking really sincere every time he explained why murder and rape were the highest human virtues.

Marvin was immediately commissioned to write a sequel,
Vlad Victorious.

Actually, because Marvin really was, in his own odd way, a philosopher of sorts,
Vlad the Barbarian
was not totally bad. In researching it Marvin had stumbled upon the enigma that makes Vlad Teppis somewhat interesting to students of the human mind in general and the ruling-class mind in particular. The mystery was this: Two early,
approximately contemporary and seemingly authentic accounts tell one particular story about Vlad, but each tells it differently. There is thus no scientific way of saying which account is true.

The disputed story is that two monks on a journey stopped at Vlad’s castle one night and begged shelter from the elements. Vlad set out for them a magnificent banquet and then afterward asked them what the people of Hungary really thought about him. The first monk answered diplomatically and falsely that everybody said Vlad was a stern but just ruler. The second monk boldly told the truth: that everybody said Vlad was a homicidal maniac. Vlad thereupon had
one
of the monks impaled. The problem is that the first seemingly authentic account says he executed the flattering liar, and the other seemingly authentic account claims he executed the honest monk.

Marvin left this mystery unsolved in his book, and it was, perhaps, one reason that the novel became fashionable even with intellectuals.

Everybody, it appeared, had some intuitive, prelogical feeling about which monk a man of the caliber of Vlad Teppis would impale. Some were quite sure that a dingaling of that sort would kill the one who dared to tell him the truth. Others, however, were just as sure that Vlad would find a special sadistic relish, and a moral justification to boot, in surprising both monks by executing the flatterer.

Arguing about Vlad’s choice, as it was soon called, spread from coast to coast.

“What would you do if you were one of the monks?” was a favorite question in these arguments.

“I’d do what the first monk did,” Simon Moon said, in an argument with other programmers who worked with the Beast. “I’d tell Vlad he was the very model of a Christian statesman—which, in fact, he was.”

“I’d tell the truth,” said Markoff Chaney, on a Greyhound bus, “just to prove that little men have big balls.”

“I’d lie,” Dr. Frank Dashwood admitted at a posh Nob Hill party in San Francisco. “The most dangerous thing in the world is to tell the truth to a government official who is a primitive barbarian, in fourteenth-century Transylvania or twentieth-century America.”

Professor Fred (“Fidgets”) Digits, who always kept his connection with the Warren Belch Society a secret and, hence, retained academic respectability, finally published a paper in
Technology Review
analyzing the problem from the perspective of the von Neumann-Morgenstern game theory. The monks, in this context, basically confront a problem in
prediction.
Each must decide, before speaking, what Vlad’s reaction will be: Will he be grateful for an accurate report or angered by it? Every person in an authoritarian situation faces this dilemma daily, and it haunts corporations, armies, and government bureacracies. “It is the classic disinformation situation,” Digits concluded, satisfied that he had identified the problem, even if he couldn’t solve it.

Others pointed out the similar logic of the notorious “Snafu Principle” proposed by the eccentric businessman Hagbard Celine in his witty, perverse little booklet
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing.
According to the Snafu Principle, accurate, honest communication is possible only between equals, and
every
power matrix is a disinformation situation.

Since this seems to challenge the very principle of power and leads directly to anarchy, many were sorry that Mad Marvin had ever posed the Vlad Enigma.

As a scientist, Washy Bridge, of course, regarded Von Junzt as a mental case and the
Necronomicon
as the ravings of a deranged cannabis abuser. Nonetheless, that one gaunt German sentence found in 1971 stuck with him, taunted him, provoked him, eventually goaded him. He began studying the origins of the Frankenstein idea within the Promethean ambience of the Shelley-Byron circle. He researched the early Resuscitation Society. He traveled to Michigan to talk to H. C. E. Coppinger, the far-out physicist who had started the cryonics movement with his astonishing book
The Aspects of Immortality.
The idea just wouldn’t let go of him. In 1974 he even, somewhat shamefacedly, looked into the writings of a strange Providence, Rhode Island, mystic who had written much on the metaphysics of the
Necronomicon.
Washy found in this man’s weird writings a better translation than that of Von Junzt:

Justin Case, feeling on top of the world and full to the brim with human kindness, gave a lavish tip to the young lady who had assisted him during his Christian Science copulation with Carol Christmas. He went home musing happily on how simple life was really and how easy it was to transcend one’s own little problems with a water bed, a cooperative warm-mouthed lady, Christian Science, and a few good snorts of Marvin Gardens’s incredible coke.

On Fourteenth Street near Union Square, Justin was stopped by a zombie. The zombie had pale skin, large eyes that never moved, a mouth that didn’t smile, and the unmistakable expression of death. “Do you love your neighbor?” the zombie asked.

“Pardon me,” Justin said, dodging, “but I …”

“It is easy to love your neighbor,” the zombie said, dodging with him. “The scientific principles of Christian Love are now known and can be applied by anyone. For one dollar, just one single dollar, you can have a copy of
What Religiosophy Means
, the book that answers all the questions of philosophy definitely and scientifically.”

“Please”—Justin shifted again—“I must …”

“For fifty cents,” the zombie went on, still with no expression and with eyes unmoving, “you can have
The Scientific Cure for Depressions, Economic and Psychological.”

“Oh, go shit in your hat,” Justin growled in Circuit Two
territorial language. “Disappear. Get out of my way, you creep.”

“This is free,” the zombie said, passing him a four-page pamphlet titled
“Usura Contra Naturam Est.”
“There is no need for competition, brother.”

Justin looked at the pamphlet when he got home. It was made up of quotations from Thomas Aquinas, Ezra Pound, B. F. Skinner, and Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of the First Bank of Religiosophy. The quotes from Aquinas and Pound condemned the lending of money at interest. The quotes from Skinner said that people could be conditioned to abandon any habitual behavior and substitute a new behavior. The quotes from Dr. Naismith urged everybody to join the First Bank of Religiosophy, or at least to buy one of his books or pamphlets: “What Religiosophy Means,”
The Scientific Cure for Depressions, Economic and Psychological
, “Jesus Christ’s Secret Teachings About Money,” and
Operant Reinforcement, the Bible Alternative to Satan’s International Bankers
*

   The streets were full of zombies at that time. The Religiosophists were the most robotic; not for nothing had Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of Religiosophy, spent five years studying with B. F. Skinner at Harvard. The
Religiosophists had all been operant-conditioned to be tireless proselytizers, and Blake Williams had even invented a mathematical puzzle based on calculating the probability of crossing any American city without being accosted by one of them, which turned out to be harder than the old problem of crossing Dublin without passing a pub.

The Ganesha Freaks were almost as android. Led by Swami Mammonananda, they had also been conditioned to be superpersistent hustlers and to believe that the world would reach
samadhi
on May 1, 1984, if 100,000,000 people were paying funds directly into Mammonananda’s bank account by that date in return for bronze emblems of Ganesha, the Hindu
Papa Legba
, or Opener Between the Worlds.

The worst pests of all were the Loonies, disciples of Neon Bal Loon, an English eccentric originally born Albert Pike in Gaotu, Wobblysex, Buggering-on-the-Thames, Lousewartshire, England. Pike claimed to be a reincarnated Tibetan and insisted that Neon Bal Loom was a real Tibetan name, his in his former incarnation. He averred further that the earth was hollow and a gang of naked women, witches, lived inside and were responsible for all the evils on the surface. His followers prayed in pig Latin, while standing on one leg like storks. Pike claimed that was the language of Lemuria.

   Mary Margaret Wildeblood snuggles all comfy and cozy in her bed, swallows a female hormone tablet with water poured neat from a silver-sheened pitcher beside the clock and opens a well-thumbed edition of
The 120 Days of Sodom
remembering the foot beneath the chin the ropes the nude figure of Cagliostro tied to the bedposts and begins to read, Jesus watching with those reproachful hurting eyes as her hand sneaks back to the table gropes over the pitcher and clock down to the drawer to remove
stealthily (Perfect Sin, with Jesus watching) the vibrator Here’s the part tortures especially for pregnant women

Marvin Gardens is sniffing just a
little
bit more coke, only a
tiny
bit, really, turning the FM dial in search of some music as accelerated as his own nervous system, thinking: At the fifth generation you’ve got ah um 64 amoebas a full-blown ecosystem now what I want to know is would they all be permutations and combinations like the 64 hexagrams in the
I Ching
or would they all be the same like the Creative
repeated 64 times? Jesus maybe just one more snort one little
tiny
teensy-weensy
itty-bitty
snort yes with cloning now in laboratories there may be 64 of
me
someday outbreed the extraterrestrials that way maybe Jesus yes but Linda Lovelace oh Christ if I ever did meet her I’d be too shy to say, to say, I mean like with Picasso you could just walk right up and say “I’m an admirer of your work and I’d like to commission a small sketch” perfectly normal an artist and a fan but to say “I admire your work could you give me a personalized blow job”

“I think the record is stuck,” Natalie said, finally getting a word in edgewise.

“Um yes my dear just a sec but Ignatz I was saying is very simple-minded he thinks he just hates cats

“Whereas Krazy on the other hand knows that each brick is actually a phallic gift [Herriman must have been aware of the Freudian associations of that marvelous monosyllable,
brick].
Krazy remembers, or things she remembers, a previous incarnation in which she and Ignatz were lovers….”

   But in the split second of orgasm in the orgonomic plasma, ego dilated to crash wave after wave floating in the astral as taught by Hagbard via Miss Portinari in
potentia
faster than the speed of light full-blown on each side of the boundary, Joe Malik in terror sees the glaring red Eye and the golden triangular frame 3 × 3 × 3 the sign of Choronzon, 333, whose name and number signified the Great Lie.