Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (6 page)

“Yeah???
Well,” the drunk decided majestically, “fuck
you
too. And the horse you rode in on, as they say in Texas.

But that lard-assed bore Blake Williams was droning, “The whole problem, of course, is that we haven’t been born yet. In fact, only now, at this point in history, is humanity about to be born.” Williams was full of rubbish like that.

“About to be born?” asked Carol Christmas, the most delicious piece of blond femininity in the galaxy. Case thought at once that it would be a splendidly wonderful idea to deposit at least some of his sperm within her—
any
orifice would do. He thought this was a brilliant decision on his part, and wondered how to begin implementing it. He had no idea that every male hominid, and many other male primates, immediately had that idea when looking at Carol.

“Elverun, past Nova’s atoms,” the hairy Moon read on to his small circle of admirers, “from mayan baldurs to monads of goo, brings us by a divinely karmic Tao-Jones leverage back past tactics and aztlantean tooltechs to Louses in the Skidrow Dimehaunts. This way the Humpytheatre.”

“I still say fuck ’em all.” The drunk was a solitary bassoon against Moon’s keening violin. “Capitalism is a rich man’s heaven and a poor man’s hell.”

“Ahm yes,” that windy old baritone sax, Blake Williams, bleated to the adorable Carol. “You see terrestrial life is embryonic in the evolutionary sense. In perspective to the cosmos.” Old chryselephantine pedant, Case thought.

The shrill fife of Josephine Malik, Case’s editor, was heard: “Moon. They say he works for the Beast.” She wore jeans, combat boots and a button saying in psychedelic colors, BRING BACK THE SIXTIES. Walking nostalgia.

“Floating you see,” the tuba of Williams oompah-oompah-ed onward, “in the amniotic atmosphere at the bottom of a 4,000-mile gravity well. And taking the Euclidean parameters of that gestation as the norm. Totally fetal, if you follow me, and in a very real sense blind because unborn, knowing um the dimensions of the wombplanet but not knowing what lies beyond the gravitational vagina—the whole universe
outside”
.

“A 4,000-mile
cunt?”
Carol was awed by the concept. Her blond head leaned forward in doubtful inquiry. “That’s a
very
funny metaphor, Professor.”

“The only difference between my publishers and the James gang,” the drunk went on, monotonous as a bass drum, “is that the James boys had horses.”

“… which explains the various rebirth experiences reported by astronauts like Aldrin and Mitchell and the others,” Williams trumpeted (gassy old windbag). “Earth is our womb. Leaving Earth is literally rebirth. There’s nothing metaphoric about it.”

“The James boys hell, my last publisher was more like Attila the Hun,” plonkty-plonked Frank Hemeroid in pianissimo.

Case began to feel that he had had perhaps too much hash.

“Right Wingers?” astronomer Bertha Van Ation was trilling. “We’ve got
real
Right Wingers out in Orange County. Let me tell you about the Committee to Nuke the Whales….”

But that impossible Williams person was murmuring privately now to Carol the Golden Goddess, and Case tried desperately to catch the words, dreading the thought that a sexual liaison was being formed.

“The mnemonic,” Williams was crooning, “is quite easy. Just say, ‘Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue.’ See?”

Mnemonic for what, in God’s name? But Moon was shrilling like a banshee now:

“Wet with garrison statements, oswilde shores, daily blazers, tochus culbook depositories, middlesexed villains and fumes. Fict! The most unkennedest carp of all. Fogt. Veiny? V.D.? Wacky? His bruttus gypper.”

“I was walking on Lexington Avenue one morning around three
A.M.
,”
the drunk maundered on, “and I heard this URRRRRP, this horrible
eldritch laughter
just like in an H. P. Lovecraft story, and do you want to know what I think it was? A publisher and his lawyer had just figured out a new way to screw one of their writers.”

“This the lewdest comedy nominator,” Moon keened high on the G-string. “This de visions of spirals fur de lewdest comedy nominator. Eerie cries from the scalped nations! This the oval orefice sends the plumbers fur de spills. Lust of the walkregans. Think! White harse devoted. Thank! Wit ars devoided. Dunk!”

“I wish Moon would stop reading that drivel,” Fred “Figs” Newton was clearly heard in solo. “I’d like to ask him how much the Beast really knows.”

“Oh,” the mournful oboe of Benny Benedict sang ominously, “the Beast knows
everything….”

“… by Loop Shore and Dellingersgangers,” Moon
keened over them, oblivious, “where yippies yip and doves duz nothing, to the hawkfullest convention ever.”

At this point Case had to beat a hasty retreat to the John (one martini too many) and he never did get all the conversations sorted out in his memory, but the louses in the skidrow dimehaunts were firmly lodged in the Ambiguous Imagery files of his Myth-and-Metaphor Detector, right next to the Three Stooges and Chinatown.

And Cagliostro the Great.

Blake Williams had the great good fortune to suffer a bout of polio in infancy. Of course he did not realize it was good fortune at the time—nor did his parents or his doctors. Nonetheless, he was among the lucky few who were treated by the Sister Kenny method at a time (the early 1930s) when the American Medical Association was denouncing that method as quackery and forbidding experiment thereon by its members. He was walking again, with only a slight limp, when he entered grade school in 1938. The real luck occurred twelve years later, in 1950, when he was eighteen; the limp and the dead muscles in his lower calves disqualified him for military service. The
next man drafted, in his place, had both testicles bloodily blown off in Korea.

Williams, of course, never knew about this patriotic gelding, but he was well aware that various boys his age were having various portions of their anatomy blown off in Korea; being somewhat philosophical, he often reflected on the paradox that the polio (which had been, when it occurred, a physical agony to him and a psychological agony to his parents) had preserved him from such mutilations. Considering that the only continuing effect of the polio was the slight limp, he had to admit that Nature or God or something-or-other had sneakily done him great good while appearing to do him great evil. This was a decided encouragement toward an optimistic attitude toward the seemingly evil and made him wonder if the universe were not benevolent after all. The guy who lost his balls in Williams’s place, on the other hand, became a pronounced pessimist and cynic.

Between Korea and Vietnam, while Blake was acquiring first an M.S. and then a Ph.D. in paleoanthropology, another great good fortune, in the form of another seeming evil, came before his eyes. He was walking in lower Manhattan; he had started from Washington Square, where he and his current girl friend—they were both NYU students—had just had a particularly nasty quarrel right after a biology class. He had wandered far to the west in a mood of suicidal gloom, such as young male primates often think they should experience after losing a sexual partner. Somehow, he wandered onto Vandivoort Street and found himself at the Vandivoort Street incinerator. There he saw a most peculiar sight: a rather stout man, looking like he was about to cry, was watching while two younger, thinner men were pouring books out of a truck into the incinerator.

“What the hell?” Blake Williams asked nobody in particular.
It was like an old movie of Nazi Germany. Nobody had told him that bookburning was now an American institution.

He approached the stout man, who was the only one of the three who seemed unhappy, and repeated his question. “What the hell?” he asked. “I mean, are you people burning
books
?”

“
They
are,” the stout man said. He went on to explain that he was an executive of something called the Orgone Institute Press and that a court had ordered all their books destroyed. Williams was curious and looked at some of the titles:
Character Analysis
and
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
and
The Cancer Biopathy
and
Contact with Space.

“I didn’t know that book burning was legal in this country,” he said.

“Neither did I,” the stout man said bitterly.

Blake Williams walked on, dazed. He couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d seen Storm Troopers rounding up Jews. He wondered if he’d fallen into a time warp.

Later, of course, he learned that the Orgone Institute, headed by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, had been investigating human sexuality and had come to some highly unorthodox conclusions. Dr. Reich himself died in prison, Dr. Silvert (Reich’s co-investigator) committed suicide, the books were burned, and the heresy was buried. But Williams had an entirely new attitude toward the country in which he lived, the scientific community which had looked on and made not a single gesture to support Dr. Reich and Dr. Silvert, and the omnipresent rhetoric which insisted that the Dark Ages had ended many centuries ago.

He remembered that Sister Kenny, at the time he and thousands of others were cured by her polio therapy, had been denounced as a quack by the same entrenched medical bureaucrats who imprisoned the Orgone researchers. How convenient, he thought, aghast, to assume that all
the injustices happen in other countries and other ages: that Dreyfus may have been innocent, but the Rosenbergs never; that Pasteur may have been right, but not the researcher ostracized from the American Association for the Advancement of Science—not the professor denied tenure at
our
university, not the man in
our
prison. Blake Williams came to the Great Doubt without bitterness but with increased awareness that society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence. On his own, and at some expense, he repeated all of Dr. Reich’s experiments and drew his own conclusions.

“There were only eighteen,” he used to say, deliberately cryptic, sucking his pipe, deadpan, whenever anybody enthused about scientific freedom in his presence. If the victim inquired, “Only eighteen what?” Blake would reply, with the same deadpan, “Only eighteen physicians who signed the petition against the burning of Reich’s books in 1957.” He was not disappointed in his expectation that nine out of every ten researchers would angrily reply, “But Reich really
was
a quack.” The tenth was the only one who would ever hear Williams’s real thoughts on any subject.

The turning point, however, didn’t come until 1977. It was then that Williams read a book entitled
Cosmic Trigger.
The author, a rather too clever fellow named Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote in a style as opulent as a Moslem palace, claimed to be in communication with a Higher Intelligence from the system of the dog star, Sirius. He also provided evidence, of a sort, that Aleister Crowley, G. I. Gurdjieff, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Timothy Leary, a Flying Saucer contactee named George Hunt Williamson, and the priesthood of ancient Egypt, among others, had also been contacted by ESP transmitters from Sirius. Williams found that he actually believed this preposterous yarn. The discovery thrilled him, since it didn’t really
matter whether the pretentious Wilson’s pompous claims were true or not. What mattered was that he, Blake Williams was free at last. (Remembering: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last,” the tombstone which had so moved him in 1968.) Despite B.S. and M.S. and Ph.D., Blake Williams was free. He did not have to think what other academics thought. He had somehow liberated himself from conditioned consciousness.

Project Pan, in a sense, began at that moment. Blake Williams knew that he was going to do something great and terrible with his newfound freedom, and he was resolved that, unlike Reich (and Leary and Semmelweiss and Galileo and the long, sad list of martyrs to scientific freedom), he would not be punished for it. “Screw the Earthlings,” he said bitterly and with
mucho cojones
, “I’m wise to their game. The trick is to be independent but not to let
them
know about it.”

That night he wrote in his diary,
“Challenge a remaining taboo”
It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo “Thou shalt not question Aristotle.” Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.

Blake Williams began looking around for a remaining taboo to violate.

This was by no means easy in Unistat at that time.

Jo Malik once thought she was a transsexual. She had even gone to Dr. John Money, the pioneer of transsexual therapy and surgery, at Johns Hopkins, back in the mid-sixties.

“I think I’m a man living in a woman’s body,” she said.

Dr. Money nodded; that was normal in his business. He began asking her questions—the standard ones—and in only a half hour she was convinced that she was not a transsexual; she was just a confused woman. Dr. Money kindly gave her the name of a good psychiatrist in New York, where she lived, for a more conventional form of therapy.

After three months the psychiatrist announced that Jo’s problem was not Penis Envy. That was hardly exciting; she had never thought her problem was quite that simple.

The therapy ground along. She learned a great deal about her Father Complex, her Mother Complex, her Sibling Rivalries, and her habit of hiding resentments. It was enlightening, in a painful way, but she was still confused.

Then the Women’s Liberation Movement began, and Jo dropped out of therapy to enter politics.