Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (30 page)

John Wayne, nearly one hundred years old, but looking and feeling around thirty due to FOREVER, and totally cured of all cancers by the Org pills, also went to Hell. He was rumored to be one of the richest slave traders and War Chiefs in the Western sector.

“HELL IS HEAVEN” was the proud slogan of the region.

Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family’s black maid, Sophie Hagé. She had observed his precocity and wasn’t surprised at the timing; and the deed itself, she had learned, was par for the sons and the female servants of the best families on Park Avenue. What was not normal was the passion that endured over several months, and the extent to which she herself was picked up and carried by it. Soon they were sharing secrets, just as if they were true lovers and equals, not master and servant.

“Nails and glass in your shoes?” she asked him on the day that Nazi tanks crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.

“I read about it in a book about saints that I got from the library on Forty-second Street,” he said.

“But that’s crazy, mon.” She was from Haiti.

“But it worked,” he said. “I saw Jesus.”

“You saw
Jesus?”

“Well,” he said bashfully. “That wasn’t just from the nails
in my shoes. It was after I whipped my back with wet rope for six hours.”

Sophie gazed at him thoughtfully for a long time. “What you trying to do, boy?”

“I’m learning how to live without fear,” he said simply. “You know my dad. He’s afraid of everything and everybody. Jews, Catholics, bad omens, the government, a broken mirror … you
know.
I just don’t want to live my life that way.”

Sophie thought about it for three days. Then she told him there was a man he ought to meet.

“What sort of man?” he asked.

“A high priest of
Voudon.”

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

The Eye, diamond-bright and glowing with a red inflammation, floated in the air at the head of the couch as Joe Malik returned to the Euclidean flatland at the bottom of the gravity well.

Bloodshot eyes I’ve got to be haunted by
, he thought
bitterly, still dealing with the dimensions of the triangle. 3 × 3 × 3. No doubt about it. 333. The number of the Mighty Devil Choronzon, who had afflicted Dr. Dee and Sir Edward Kelley in the seventeenth century and raised hell for Aleister Crowley earlier in this century. Choronzon, the Lurker at the Threshold, who drove back any occultist who tried to push open the final door, cross the boundary of the unmarked state. Choronzon, avatar of the Great Lie, spirit of Constriction, protector of the Illuminati.

Choronzon with a hangover, to judge by the redness of the eye.

“Jeez that was great oh honey ah you doll you lovely Arab sheikh you,” Carol was bubbling happily.

   But Blake Williams plows on:

“The Freudian, of course, sees much more in Krazy’s love for Ignatz. Sadomasochism, in fact. ‘Li’l dollink, always fetful,’ Krazy mutters contentedly as each brick bounces off her head. And worse: Krazy is female only in some sequences. In others this remarkable feline is indisputably male. Herriman, the psychoanalyst would suggest, had some AC-DC hang-ups when he conceived this fantasy.”

“Sometimes, Professor, you remind me of Burroughs,” Natalie said.

“Well, I do admire much of his work, especially
The Job
…” Williams was pleased by the comparison.

“No, the other one, the guy who wrote
Tarzan
, Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“I? Remind you? Of Edgar Rice Burroughs?”

“Of something he said once. He said that he had a lot of fun with his imagination and that he knew in a small way what a grand time God had in creating the universe.”

   Joe Malik didn’t even believe in Choronzon. The Skeptic within him had decided that the most operational
model for those events which naïve occultists attribute to “Choronzon” was to classify them as synchronicities activated by the presence of the Trickster God archetype, in the Jungian collective unconscious, or Leary’s neurogenetic archives, or somewhere back down there in the thalamus or brainstem. To assume, even for a minute, that Choronzon had an objective existence beyond the archetype in the unconscious circuitry of the central nervous system was to collapse into prescientific
theology
and
demonology.

But, alas, the Skeptic was only one program inside the Malik biocomputer, and not at his best at moments like this. The Shaman tape began running in its own programs as the Skeptic faded out, and Joe noticed again for the thousandth time how the ego circuit melded with the new program as easily as it had with the old, so now he “was” Joe Malik the Shaman, son of a thousand years of Sufis, and if Choronzon was really messing around he betta watcha his ass.

“It’s that motherfuckin’
loa,”
Carol said angrily. “We didn’t do the exorcism right….”

“Choronzon”
was a mind-construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered “Both.”

This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his
Laws of Form.

A
loa
was a mind-construct of those primates who specialized in
Santaria
, also called
Magicko de Chango
or
Voudon.
A
loa
, just like the Gentry, might on occasion be kindly
disposed; but a guardian
loa
who was set on a woman to prevent her from copulating (except with the primate who had through
Santaria
created/projected/contacted said
loa)
was well known to be extremely malign, devious, fiendish, impish, devilish, and a Royal pain in the ass. The
loas
, like the Gentry and the various Cabalistic angels and demons, operated beneath the space-time continuum in “dream time,” where the true Free Masons create reality friezes.

An
archetype
was a mind-construct of a primate named Carl Jung, who specialized in preneurological psychology. An archetype existed at the
“psychoid”
level, which was below that of individual or collective unconsciousness, where the organic and the inorganic meld and merge into psychoid matrices which, if nudged by the right archetype, would produce a reality-construct so astonishing that it would appear like magick or a very strange “coincidence.” Jung called these psychoid archetypal effects
synchronicities.

   And Marvin Gardens, coked to the nines, is reading on and on with absolute absorption:

Cycles that’s it, he thinks excitedly, we’re all permutations and combinations of that first amoeba every ejaculation another birthdeath or node in the everybranching whatchamacallit. Oh man this is heavy and I’m really grooving with it cycles in time great wheels turning like the Mayan calendar the genetic clock like music but oh shit maybe it’s just the coke I still haven’t figured out if the damn amoeba is immortal

But Malik is maintaining his cool, albeit with some effort. “So all right,” he said aloud, facing the Eye unblinking, “are you just trying to scare me to death, or do you have a message for me?”
Treat all of Them in a lofty way, lest They have cause to think thee weak
, said Dr. Dee.

“We better do the exorcism again,” whispered Carol Christmas—nude, golden, and delicious—also maintaining her cool.

Carol had a great deal of experience at maintaining her cool. Her career had been typical of self-directed Unistat females who matured in the early 1970s: one rape at age fifteen while hitchhiking (she never hitchhiked again); two abortions; husband #1, who turned out to be so free of Macho and the Male Stereotype that even God’s Lightning couldn’t accuse him of Chauvinism (he wept most piteouasly when Carol got tired of supporting him and threw him out); husband #2, who was brilliant, kind, generous, sensitive, and a junky; a succession of mediocre lovers, with one or two she still treasured in memory but wouldn’t want to live with again for all the tea in Acapulco; producers who believed that an actress as gorgeous as she should only be cast in roles that justified getting all her clothes off sometime during the third act and several times in their private offices; husband #3, who had put the goddamned
loa
on her when they separated; and Ronnie

“Ronnie is doing very well for a special child,” the doctor had told her the last time she visited the home. That was a hell of an elaborate euphemism for Mongolian idiot, she thought angrily; but the doctor was trying to be kind, and she forgave him.

But two nights later she opened in another Off-Off-Off Broadway,
Hiroshima Werewolf
, and one critic described her as having “a special childlike quality reminiscent of Monroe.” She felt a wave of vertigo on reading that: If
the doctor and the critic were not in cahoots to drive her over the edge, then those words were the most sinister kind of synchronicity. But she maintained her cool.

Now she had a goddamned
loa
on top of everything else.

She maintained.

   And Justin Case, deeper asleep, dapper as loop, was just waltzing along Owld Broadway with Judge Wishingdone, past Punker Hall, and there was a patchy fog and a zoo city zoo, one nixson and a vegetable. And he was blowin to adams and tilling the tyler, Don Judge Lincoln, mercurial and zany and hoppy, that high on the thigh-angle of him, cruising the dollarwars and until he was caught with Topsy! in the barn!! on the farce of youlie!!! No martha! that’s jokeson’s guile for you, toomsayer.

But they were in the cherrytreeattric warld, an honest ape, he couldna tell a phone. One nukied individual, with Ma in her gurdjef and Pop in the easel, to the republic for witch’s hands, by the Donzerly Light. And who comes up but Indrarambam and Rashowsunnier and Shivabull, loads and toads of them, forty of them, with their fords and hords and their gauchos and cheekos and jumbos and harpoons inem (corpus whalem!) asking about the launches and donors and the thousand and ninety things they ask, irking and rooking and snooping, prying and preying, forty of them, all buyers cotter, infernal reamin you sodage, doubt’s eternal fact, by all Chinatown howdials.

Justin moans in his sleep as the Iranian Rastuys Shiites close in on him.

   
“Papa Legba, Papa Legba, Papa Legba,”
Joe Malik chants along with Carol Christmas, while the astral/ electrical/prajna/orgone/psionic/bioplasmic/odyle energy, or
the Power of Imagination, in the room continues to escalate toward quantum wobble.

Papa Legba was the Opener of the window, according to the
Santaria
metaphor. Like Maxwell’s Demon, he could increase or decrease entropy at whim, and take you into alternative eigenstates. He was the Boss Honcho on the astral
potentia
level, the alpha male of the pack. He’d kick the ass of any
loa
intruding on his good friends, and Carol had learned to be one of his very good friends since living with Hugo de Naranja.

Joe Malik didn’t know from Papa Legba, but he understood the exorcism in his own terms. Papa Legba was the guise in which Thoth, that master Quick Change Artist, appeared in the
Santaria
or
Voudon
game. Joe knew about Thoth from Hagbard Celine, who always employed the Cabalistic/Golden Dawn metaprograms when attempting quantum alterations in the fabric of reality. Thoth commandered seventy-eight servitors, each one encoded in his Book of Signals to mankind, ordinarily known as the Tarot deck. Each Tarot card was synchronistic with a different quantum
eigenvalue
and the arrangement of the cards, when shuffled at random, revealed the Hidden Variable causing the “acausal” quantum jump to the next reality-mesh.

Malik the Skeptic tended to regard that explanation as pseudoscientific balderdash, but Malik the Shaman found it useful as a working hypothesis when critters like Chronozon went bump in the night.

   “Zeno of Elias on the other hand my dear reminds us that before the brick can ever hit Krazy it must first travel half of the distance from Ignatz’s paw to Krazy’s head, but before it can do that it must cover half of
that
distance that is to say a quarter of the original distance …”

John Disk had originally become involved in morality and ideology due to the Fetus People, as
Pussycat
genially labeled the antiabortion movement of the 1970s. The Fetus People did not like this description; they called themselves the Right to Life Committee.

Disk was in his teens then and had the usual hormones flowing through his adolescent primate body. He thought he was continually tormented by sinful desires, not understanding the role of testosterone in pubescent primates.

He was a member of the True Roman Catholic Church, a splinter group formed after Vatican II had taken the main body of the Romish religion off into heresy and modernism. The members were survivors of the Irish-American fascism that had once rallied behind Father Coughlin, Father Feeney, and Senator Joe McCarthy. They regarded the English Mass as being almost as sacrilegious as abortion and Social Security as only one step from Stalinism.

The Fetus People or the Right to Life Committee was an amalgamation of True Roman Catholics with the kind of Fundamentalists Protestants seldom seen north of Bad Ass, Texas. They were, like all primate ideologists and moralists, chiefly concerned with finding
no-good shits
and
dumping
on them.