Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (31 page)

They believed the abortionists were in league with all the other no-good shits, including the Rockefellers, the
international Communist sex educators, life-extension researchers, cattle mutilators, NASA, and the intergalactic Black Magicians of the Illuminati, under the leadership of the infamous Cagliostro the Great.

They also believed that the Unistat government had never waged an unjust war, that the hair of the seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, and most of what they read in
Readers Digest.

By 1982 the legal struggles over abortion were over and the whole issue seemed as remote as the War of the Roses. This was because a 100 percent effective
morning-after
contraceptive had been on the market since 1980 and had proven so effective that requests for abortions had dwindled to virtually zero.

By 1983 the economic demand for abortions was about as microscopic as the demand for buggy whips in 1923, after every town in Unistat had switched from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. Another quantum jump in sociology had occurred.

Actually, the morning-after pill was a chemical abortifacient, as any biochemist knew. The biochemists never talked about this in public, since they were all agnostic liberals and it was against their principles to either lie by denying the facts or to help the Fetus People by telling the truth.

As a result of this policy by the biochemists only a handful of the Fetus People turned their attack against the pill when abortion was no longer a live issue. Since the resultant of the morning-after pill was, to the human eye, no different from ordinary menstruation, opposing this seemed exceedingly eccentric even for Fetus People.

The majority of the Fetus People, deprived of their
raison d’être
, began splitting amoebalike into factions and subfactions.

Some few of them, who had really been concerned with the
rights of the unborn, became concerned at last with the rights of the born and launched new groups to oppose the surviving vestiges of war, capital punishment, or poverty in backward parts of the planet.

The majority, who had been mainly preoccupied with finding no-good shits and dumping on them, joined organizations like NOODLE (National Organization Organized for Decent Literature and Entertainment) or the First Bank of Religiosophy.

John Disk drifted into White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, a group mostly concerned with combating parapsychology, psychics, UFO demons, sex educators, cattle mutilators, and, of course, the loathsome Cagliostro the Great.

In 1941 the Carter Brothers Carnival played Xenia, Ohio, and some students from Antioch College tried to throw Cagliostro a whammy with a dragon-headed Japanese condom. His handling of that challenge aroused the admiration and awe of old carny hands; and they were even more amazed by his friendship with Rambo, the lion.

Sandoz, the lion tamer, in particular, was astonished at Cagliostro’s ability to sit for hours in the cage, he and the lion staring into each other’s eyes like lovers.

“Are you hypnotizing him?” Sandoz asked once.

“Not at all,” Cagliostro said, laughing. “He’s hypnotizing
me.
Or maybe we’re just learning to get outside our own skins. That’s what life is all about, you know—making windows, breaking out of every box …”

The failure of the students to shake up Cagliostro led a few professors to come over and try various scientific devices not likely to be included in any standard verbal code. He placidly identified rheostats, Wheatstone bridges, pH meters, Bunsen burners, and even a gyroscope. The next night they were back with a chemical formula never before synthesized.

“Are you presently able to see the particular object that I have been given at this time?” the girl asked.

And the blindfolded Cagliostro replied calmly, “A test tube. With some blue liquid in it. A copper sulphate compound.”

“That’s a
damned
good code,” the professors agreed, more fervently this time, as they drove back to Antioch.

The carnival was in Biloxi, Mississippi, that winter, and Cagliostro was trying his new gig, combining Houdini-style escapes with his mentalism act. He had been locked in a trunk, and the local police cooperatively used their best padlocks to secure the chains. He settled down to slow, regular yoga breathing—the escape actually took only a few minutes, but he was following Houdini’s formula that the audience was more impressed if they had to wait a half hour for the miracle. The yoga conserved the oxygen in the trunk against any possibility that panic, toward the end, might force him into rapid breathing. He timed the breaths against a slow AUMMMMMM, his
mind drifted back to Park Avenue and a black maid whose framed picture of a Catholic-looking Jesus sometimes in certain lights seemed to have horns, and he relaxed his hands and feet (there can be no muscle tension in the torso if the extremities are totally limp), bringing her face back clearly, and he heard a voice shouting, “We’re at war! The Japanese went and bombed some place called Pearl Harbor in Honolulu!”

   Cagliostro was always carrying around a book called
Homo Ludens
in those days.

“Is that about faggots?” Sandoz asked him once.

Cagliostro laughed. “No,” he said. “It’s Latin. It means … uh, you know it’s hard to translate …
Man the Game Player
, I suppose.”

Sandoz grinned. “You can learn all about that just by watching the marks,” he said. “I been a carny damn near twenty years now and I swear from the things I seen, you could sit down with a blackjack table and a sign saying ‘THIS GAME IS CROOKED,’ and half the marks would still sit down opposite you and try to beat you. A mark
wants to lose,”
he concluded profoundly, almost with anger.

“No,” Cagliostro said. “The mark wants to be hypnotized. He wants to enter the world of magic, with mirrors and blue smoke and shifting shapes, and he’s willing to be swindled, just to have a glimpse of that world.”

“Is that what that book says?” Sandoz asked.

“More or less,” Cagliostro said. “In sociological jargon.”

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

Mary Margaret Wildeblood still couldn’t get to sleep, and
The Search for the Historical Vlad
was pishposh. She got out of bed and padded over to the desk to glance at the latest volumes that had arrived for review.

   FROM CALIGARI TO VLAD

Another pretentious volume of neo-Freudian film criticism by George Dorn, obviously cashing in on the current fad. Rot.

   THE RADICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF SMOKEY STOVER

   Hmm? Marshall McLuhan again. Try a page:

Fiddlefaddle. What else have we got?

   
IN THE CASTLE OF VLAD

   Somebody else ripping off Marvin Gardens.

   CONTEMPORARIES OF VLAD

   I smell a fad in the making.

   PATTERNS OF FASCIST ART

Who’s being dissected? Wagner, Pound, Celine, Riefenstahl, Vonnegut …
Vonnegut?
Oh: It’s by Kate Millett.

   JACKIE DID IT!

   The latest Kennedy assassination expose. Bosh.

   I AWAIT HIS RETURN

   By who? Rebecca Goodman. Didn’t she write that anthropology book a few years back,
Golden Apples of
something? What this time? Hm. Had her husband cryonically frozen at death. Hm.

   Well, let’s see. Millett, I guess.

Mary Margaret realized that she was getting horny again; any reference to subjugation and humiliation was likely to trigger that response in her. She stealthily removed the
vibrator from the bureau drawer again, climbed back into bed with
Patterns of Fascist Art
, and then remembered a little bit of hashish left in the living room.

“Perhaps a diagram would help,” Blake Williams said, getting a sketchpad and drawing rapidly:

“This is ordinary causality, as we usually experience it,” he said, as Natalie stifled a yawn. “A causes B, which causes C, and so on. I go to Wildeblood’s party at A, and meet you, and we come here to B, and we discuss Krazy Kat at C, which leads to Schrödinger’s Cat at D. Got it?”

“Yeah, the Gutenberg fix; the linear mode, as McLuhan calls it….”

“Right you are. Now quantum causality, before the appearance of the epiphenomena of space and time, functions entirely differently if we trust Bell’s Theorem. It looks more like this.” And Williams sketches rapidly:

“A ‘causes’ B, C, D, and E, but B also ‘causes’ A, C, D, and E, and C ‘causes’ A, B, D, and E … and so on. Got it …? All before the appearance of the space-time manifold.”

“You mean it works everywhichway in time …”

“No, it happens before time itself appears along with space as a by-product of the quantum mesh….”

   Brrrzzzzzzmmmmbrz the vibrator purrs along as Mary Margaret surrenders again to Him (to Him!) starting to compose a poem almost “Crush me in your Dionysian biceps, Jesus Lord” but that was perhaps a bit too Hopkins and the reality of it was beyond poetry (heresy: she could never admit that in literary circles) but the thrust and the purr and the agony and the ecstasy of it Lord Lord lord

because she was remembering an old Sufi proverb about the three stages of the Path which were “Lord, use me” and then “Lord, use me but don’t break me” and then “Lord, I don’t care if you break me”

and He was breaking her smashing her annihilating her the Great Magician of the Tarot naked on the bed as She rammed hir cock up his ass

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

“So that the brick never moves, logically,” Williams says.

“Yeah I had that in a class at the New School, ‘Paradox and Personality,’ it’s based on you know Relativistic Ego
Therapy, we’re all Empedoclean concepts in social topology.” Natalie actually had received an A for the course.

“In
territorial
topology my dear I um invented Relativ
ists
Ego Therapy,” Williams says, meaning:
7
created the course.

“You’re
that
Professor Williams my God you’re famous at the new School.” Natalie was impressed.

“And at Esalen um yes my dear but to the world at large—” Williams demurs.

   “Thank God I’m an atheist,” Joe Malik said fervently. “If I considered for even a moment for even a microsecond that the
pretense
of a demon might be functionally equivalent to the
presence
of a demon … Just change the
t
to an
s …”

   But Marvin abandons the
Britannica
(never find what you really want in there) and undressing for bed fumbles at the radio for something bearable, only to hear

He quickly turns the dial (after a moment of pride at new-won fame and wincing at the cacophony of The Civic Monster), finding a classical station the end of the
Ninth
all those heavenly choirs singringinging at the Omega Point over a century before science discovered it (always read Nietzsche and listen to Ludwig, was one of his adages, for the long-range evolutionary perspective), pops a downer to take the edge off the coke jitters before they come, and slips under the covers remembering Linda’s mouth two inches four inches six inches nine goddamned inches gorgeous splat splat splat always splitting but always one, is it really? as Ludwig answers yes I will yes