Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (3 page)

As the applause died down, he rose to speak.

And he saw the Grinning Sadist coming right at him.

He saw the deranged eyes, the cruel mouth, the deliberately ugly clothing (like a very poor cowboy or a 1960s college student), and the
knife
in the maniac’s hand.

Om mani padme hum …

And then he got the Boston Cream Pie right in the face.

It hadn’t been a knife at all: he had imagined a knife when the pie plate was turned and raised as it was thrown.

Benny stood there, very conscious that he was overweight and past fifty, Boston Cream Pie dripping from his face, trying to remind himself that heart palpitations were not a symptom of heart attack, aware suddenly that the daily life of humankind was not only marvelous, as Jung had taught him, and terrible, as the murder had taught him, but totally absurd as well, as the Existentialists might have taught him.
*

The only one in New York who didn’t react emotionally to Benny Benedict’s “One Month to Go” column was Justin Case, an embittered, fortyish man who wrote beautifully meaningless film criticism. Case had not liked the film of
1984
and never read books, which he regarded as too old-fashioned to be worthy of serious attention.

“Books were invented by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century and are, like all other inventions five centuries old, hopelessly archaic,” Case often said.

He also liked to categorize books as “linear,” “Aristotelian,” and, when he was especially rhetorical, “paleolithic”; he justified this last adjective on the grounds that books consisted of
words
, an Old Stone Age invention.

Case had a Ph.D. from Yale and a D.D. (Dishonorable Discharge) from the U.S. Army. He had earned the former for a thesis on “Metaphor and Myth in the Films of the Three Stooges” and the latter for trying to organize a mutiny during the Vietnam War. His film criticism appeared in a journal called
Confrontation.
His essays usually began with the same three words as his Ph.D. thesis—
e.g.
, “Metaphor and Myth in Hitchcock’s
39 Steps,”
“Metaphor and Myth in
Beach Blanket Bingo”
—that sort of thing.

There was not much of an audience for such writing and Justin barely made a living. His dream was to become an editor at
Pussycat
magazine, where the big money was.

The FBI had been tapping his phone ever since Vietnam and had reels and reels of his conversation, which concerned almost nothing but films. Nevertheless, they kept listening, hoping something incriminating would slip eventually. A man with both a Ph.D. and a D.D. was obviously worth attention, even if most of what he said was totally incomprehensible to them.

Special Agent Tobias Knight, playing Case’s tapes one evening, actually heard a long rap about Curly being the id or first circuit, Larry the ego or second circuit, and Moe the superego or Jung’s fourth circuit. Things got even more confusing when Case went on to talk about the “cinematic continuity in the S-M dimension between Moe and Polanski.” It got even weirder when Case said, “Polanski himself went to Chinatown three times—when his parents were murdered by the Nazis, when his wife was murdered by the Manson Family, and when he got convicted of statutory rape. We all go to Chinatown, one way or another, sooner or later.” Still, the Bureau did not give up. Case was sure to say something incriminating, or at least intelligible to them, sooner or later.

Tobias Knight had listened to 42,000 hours of “private” conversations since joining the FBI. Among other things, this had clearly shown him that all the standard primate sexual behaviors were prevalent throughout Unistat. Since Knight, like Benny Benedict and most other two-legged Terrans, did not know he belonged to a mammal species, this primate behavior was profoundly shocking to him. He felt much like a Methodist who runs a drugstore in Little Rock—anguished that the Sins of his fellows were exceeded only by their Hypocrisy. This made him Cynical.

The same Cynicism was widespread in the Bureau.
Older hands who had listened to 80,000 or even 100,000 hours of “private” conversations were beyond Cynicism. They had become paranoid about their fellow primates.

Tobias Knight himself would be classified as a no-good shit by most of the primates if they knew what he was up to. He was the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage—that is, he had connections with four other Intelligence Agencies besides the FBI and was double-crossing all of them.

He also had a walrus mustache and a jovial eye. He could have been an excellent character actor in movies or TV. Everybody liked him and trusted him on sight.

That was why he was so successful in the cloak-and-dagger business.

Justin Case suspected that the FBI was tapping his phone. However, 9,000,000 out of 20,000,000 primates in New York also suspected the FBI of tapping their phones. Case just happened to be one of the 8,000,000 who were correct in this suspicion.

Case was certainly not a mutineer by temperament; his visual cortex—the most energized part of him—was neurogenetically imprinted with a dry, detached, analytical, almost passive, temperament. His world was made up of forms in space, edited into amusing montages by the passing of time; if he ever read books, he might have found that Einstein’s Relativity was the mathematical analog of his own mind.

Even paintings barely won his tolerance; only film and TV, basically montage, turned him on. He was inclined to feel that anything which did not flicker, shimmer, and change rapidly was probably dead and should be decently and quickly buried.

In short, he was an electronic Taoist.

The Vietnam War had been punishing in various ways to all Unistaters, but Case, embroiled in the center of it,
experienced it as very bad TV. It was like the film had stuck and Moe kept jabbing his finger in Curly’s eye, over and over, in an infinite regress, until the myth and metaphor had both turned meaningless through redundance. If the war wasn’t that, it was sloppy editing or just plain
bad taste
. The mutiny was the only equivalent he could find to the simple act of turning the dial to another channel.

He had tried to explain this to the lieutenant appointed to defend him at the court-martial, a sly, cat-faced young man named Lionel Eacher. Lieutenant Eacher, before entering the service, had been an expert at Contract Law, the rules by which the primates determined and marked their territories. Remember: other mammals do this by leaving excretions which geometrically define the size and shape of the claimed turf, but domesticated primates do it by excreting ink on paper. Eacher was a lawyer, an expert at proving either that the ink excretions meant what they said (if he were being paid to prove that) or that the ink excretions didn’t
exactly
mean what they said (if he were being paid to prove that).

Lionel Eacher listened to Case’s story with growing incredulity. At the end of the narrative he frowned very thoughtfully and said, “Would you just run that by me again?”

So Case had explained, this time in more detail, the aesthetics of proper utilization of sadomasochist material in the total structure of Significant Form.

“I see,” Eacher said thoughtfully. “I think we’ve got a winner.” He relaxed and lit a cigarette. “The usual defense is that you were reading the Bible and saw a white light and Jesus told you to give up war. But this, well, this is beautiful. You sound like a real fruitcake. I might even get you a medical discharge.”

Case realized that he was talking to a barbarian, but that was normal in the military. He had an intuitive sense
that twenty years in the joint, which was what the Judge Adjutant General’s office was asking, would be even more redundant, in the S-M dimension, than the war itself. Very well: If a man of esthetic sensibility seemed like a fruitcake to these primitives, so be it. He wanted to go home.

Case explained his position to the court-martial with great eloquence (part of what he said he even used later in a critique of
The Rocky Horror Show)
and they did, indeed, decide he was a fruitcake. They gave him a D.D., but two members of the board, he learned later, had argued vigorously for a medical.

   The Vietnam War, like most primate squabbles, was about territory. Chinese primates, Unistat primates, the primates of the Bear Totem from the steppes and various local Southeast Asian primates were trying to expand their collective-totem egos (territories) by taking over the turf in Southeast Asia. If they had been wild primates, they would have all excreted in the disputed area and maybe thrown excretions at each other; being domesticated primates, they made ink excretions on paper and threw metal and chemicals at each other. It was one of a series of rumbles over Southeast Asia which had at one time or another involved Dutch primates, French primates, primates of the Rising Sun totem, and various other predator bands.

Since the Unistat primates, like other domesticated hominids, did not know they were primates, all this was explained by a ferocious amount of ink excretions invoking Morality and Ideology, the twin gods of domesticated primatedom. Basically, the primates who wanted to claim Southeast Asia said it was “good” to go in shooting and grab whatever was grabable; the primates who didn’t give a fuck about Southeast Asia said it was “evil.”

Justin Case was not verbally oriented; he thought in pictures, as a good film critic should. He never asked whether the war was “good” or “evil.” It was unaesthetic.

The people who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombs had not regarded the Vietnam War as unaesthetic. They thought it was downright evil.

They thought just about everything the Unistat alpha males—in corporations and governments—did was evil.

They thought most of their fellow primates were
no-good shits.

Justin Case had been born blissfully by a joyous mother schooled in the Grantly Dick-Read method of natural childbirth.

By the time Justin was thirty-six years old, in 1983, the Dick-Read method was as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Things were moving fast on Terra in that age.

Nonetheless, the Dick-Read natural childbirth yoga was good for its time, and Case had a permanent security imprint on the oral biosurvival circuitry of his brain. That was one reason he never worried about ethical issues.

When Justin began to crawl about the house and then rose up to walk up and down in it, his father, a former alpha male with a large corporation now on the skids due to booze, found him a pest and a nuisance. Father disappeared rapidly, pursued by lawsuits and child maintenance liens, which harassed him so much that he drank even more, earned less, and was first chronically and then permanently incapable of paying a blessed penny to Justin and Justin’s Mommy.

Justin was not genetically programmed to be an alpha male, but under the circumstances he learned to do a good imitation of one.

“Mommy’s Great Big Man,” Mommy called him.

The anal-territorial (old primate) section of Justin’s brain took an imprint of Pretend-Authority.

Then Justin discovered the
semantic
environment. He learned to read and watch TV. The books seemed clumsy and sententious compared to the immediacy of the tube. He took a visual-electronic imprint on the semantic circuit, like most of his generation.

Case’s sociosexual circuit was imprinted by
Playboy
, Sexual Revolution, weed, Rock, yippies, protest, the Generation Gap, Women’s Lib, and General Confusion. He was a bachelor who had heterosexual couplings as often as he felt the need, with the minimum possible human involvement.

If you’re interested in superficialities, he looked like a gay intellectual or a college professor or a little bit of both. He already had a bald spot. He dressed in conservative good taste. And every four years he went to a polling booth and carefully printed with a heavy felt-tip pen, “NONE OF THE ABOVE.”

This was his one flicker of Social Consciousness.

Case had one Weird Experience in his whole life. It happened in 1973 when he went to see the famous mentalist, psychic, escape artist, and comedian Cagliostro the Great, at a nightclub called Von Neumann’s Catastrophe.

Cagliostro began his act with a few traditional tricks—being locked in one box and then reappearing out of another at the opposite side of the room, that kind of routine. This was followed by one of his bitingly sarcastic monologues about the tricksters in other professions, such as the clergy and the government. This was all as Case had expected from the Most Controversial Magician in Show Biz history. Then came the psychic stunts, which were sometimes frighteningly impressive.

“B.W.,” Cagliostro called out. “Will you please stand up?” Case saw the unbearable bore, Blake Williams, standing at a ringside table.