Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (7 page)

She no longer defined herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body, but as a human being trapped in male definitions of femininity.

It was a very satisfactory resolution of her problems. She no longer had to take responsibility for anything; everything was the fault of the men. There was no need to stifle resentments—the correct political stance was to express them, in a strident voice and with a maximum of emotional-territorial rage. She had finally learned the ABC’s of primate politics. She even learned to swell her muscles and howl.

It was all so much relief after years of self-doubt that Jo remained in 1968 while the rest of the world moved into 1970 and 1974 and 1980 and 1983. That was why she was wearing a BRING BACK THE SIXTIES button at Epicene Wildeblood’s party.

Jo still had one problem left over from pre-Women’s Lib days. Sometimes just before sleep, she heard a voice saying, “No wife, no horse, no mustache.”

Of course she knew that everybody occasionally heard such voices in the hypnagogic reverie before true sleep. You were wigging out only if you heard them all day long. Still, she wondered where it came from and why it had such a cryptic message.

Jo Malik hadn’t had a sexual relationship with a man since 1968, and looked it.

She was also sixty-four years old, and looked it.

Nevertheless, there was an Unidentified Man at the Wildeblood party, and Jo suspected him of having designs on her bod. That was because he kept trying to get into every conversation group that she intercepted. He was following her, she was convinced.

“Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no peanuts, mayonnaise, or glue,” Blake Williams said.

“Of course, Skull Island was Cooper’s Chinatown,” Justin Case said at the same moment.

“Wham! That arbral with his showers sooty? The fugs come in on tinny-cut foets,” Moon droned along.

Jo decided that she had taken perhaps a little too much of the Afghan hash that was going around. It seemed that everybody in the room—the
crème de la crème
of Manhattan intelligentsia—were all talking gibberish. She eased out onto the balcony for some fresh air and restful silence.

Eight stories below a marquee blinked up at her: DEEP THROAT, it said.

Male chauvinism.

She breathed deeply, mingling oxygen with the cannabis molecules in her blood.

And the Unidentified Man appeared.

“Hello,” he said casually. “I thought I’d find you out here.”

“Who the hell are you, buster?” Jo barked—the first warning.

“My
name
doesn’t matter,” he said. He was tall, and handsome, and very gentle in his eyes. The worst kind of Male Chauvinist Pig. The Seducer.

“You
don’t matter, either,” Jo said snappily. “I’d like to be alone, to enjoy the view,
if you don’t mind.”

She showed more teeth, emphasizing the second primate warning.

“I’m Hugh Crane,” the handsome stranger said quickly. “I have been sent by the Author of Our Being with an important message for you. Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all …
living in a novel”
.

“Take it and stick it,” Jo said, leaving the balcony.

Another male chauvinist squashed, or at least squelched.

Unfortunately, back in the Wildeblood
soiree
, the first voice she heard was Benny Benedict complaining. “Women’s Lib? Christ, what we need now is Men’s Lib. Do you know how much alimony I’m paying? …”

While “Eggs” Benedict was complaining about his alimony in New York, a telephone was ringing in Marlene Murphy’s apartment in San Francisco.

Starhawk, a bronze young man with an arrogant face, had picked Marlene up in a singles bar on Powell Street just three hours before and still didn’t know her last name. He came out of the bathroom stark naked to answer the phone. Very carefully, he said, “Yes?”

“Who is this?” the voice on the other end asked sharply.

Starhawk breathed deeply. “Who you trying to call?” he asked in return, calmly, starting to smile.

“Isn’t this 555-9470?”

Starhawk began to feel that he knew this voice from somewhere. “No,” he said. “This is 9479. Try again, Mac.” He hung up quickly.

Marlene Murphy came out of the bathroom, also naked, toweling her hair. Starhawk looked at her thoughtfully.

“You got a husband you sort of forgot to mention?” he asked.

“Me, a husband?” Marlene lit a cigarette. “Thanks for the laugh. I’d rather be in jail. A husband, Jesus, no, thanks.”

“Well, somebody didn’t like a man to be answering your phone,” Starhawk said. “Somebody with a voice like a cop. Or a bill collector.”

“My father,” she said. “Oh, crap. Here I am twenty-four years old and working for a Master’s in Social Psych and he thinks I shouldn’t have a man in my apartment when he calls. That’s the Irish for you.”

The phone rang again.

Marlene answered it this time. Starhawk started to cross the room but she grabbed his leg and as he turned she took his penis in her hand.

“Daddy?” Marlene sounded genuinely surprised. “A man? No, I’m alone, studying for the exams.” She was running her fingers around the crown of the penis and Starhawk was reacting with a notable swelling. “What? Look, I just told you. It was a wrong number. What am I, a suspect you got in the back room? You must have made a mistake, even if it was the first time in your whole life.”

Marlene leaned forward and kissed Starhawk’s cock quickly and shifted back to the phone at once. “No. I said no, Daddy, no, and I meant it. The Church says I’m supposed to go to Confession to a priest once a year. It doesn’t say I’m supposed to go to Confession to my own father every time he calls me on the phone.”

Her hand was moving rapidly now, trying to make Starhawk ejaculate. He smiled, recognizing her game, and pulled away, to kneel before her and began licking her inner thighs.

“No. I haven’t seen Aunt Irene in two years. She’s involved in
what?
Greenpeace? That’s just to protect the whales. There’s nothing communistic about it and half the people in Mendocino are in it. What? Sure, but they just
like
whales up there. What do you mean my voice is getting funny? It must be a cold coming on. Yes. Yes. Oh, God, it’s the door. Yes. I love you, too, Daddy. The door.” She hung up quickly, her pelvis heaving. “God, God,
God.
Oh, sweet fucking
Jesus
God.”

Starhawk stood up and said, “You like that kind of game? Why don’t you call the Archbishop and I’ll do it to you again while you talk to him.”

“You are a prize,” Marlene said. “You really are a prize. Have you spent your whole life learning how to please women?”

“It’s my life study,” Starhawk said. “Everything else is just a hobby.”

Starhawk, like most of the characters in this Romance, was a liar.

Most primates lied constantly, because they were afraid of
getting caught
and being pronounced no-good shits.

Starhawk was always afraid of getting caught, because his life study was really burglary.

Starhawk thought he had a right to steal anything and everything he could get away with from the white people.

The white people had stolen all the land in Unistat from his ancestors.

Starhawk, like the grim moralists in POE, was determined to
get even.

   Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as “expropriating the expropriators,” “an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty,” “they did it to me so I can do it to them,” and, in general, the emotional mathematics of “one plus one equals zero” (1 + 1 = 0).

The primates were so dumb they didn’t realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.

They did not understand
causality
at all.

The few primates who did understand causality slightly called it
karma.
They said all sorts of foolish things about it.

They didn’t even know enough mathematics to describe quantum probability waves. They said, in crude hominid metaphor, that bad karma led to
“bad vibes.”

Furbish Lousewart V was elected President of the United States in 1980 with the greatest landslide since Roosevelt II buried poor Alf Landon alive in 1936. The People’s Ecology Party also gained control of both the House and
the Senate and twenty-three governorships out of the fifty-one.

The PEP platform, a weird mixture of tangled religiosity and New Left antirationalism, became official policy.

The New Order began mildly—at least by comparison with what was to follow—and the major changes of the first administration consisted only of cutting the NASA budget to zilch; banning McDonald’s hamburger shops (which resulted in underground “Steakeasies,” where you gave the right password and got a Big Mac for $7); outlawing tobacco (a “lid” of Chesterfields was soon selling for $50 to $75 coast to coast); appointing three antitechnology fanatics to the first three vacancies in the Supreme Court; forbidding the teaching of Logical Positivism in colleges; throwing everybody off welfare (the streets were soon full of crippled and schizophrenic beggars, some of whom also slept there or even starved there on occasion, creating that Third World look which PEP regulars regarded as “spiritual”); cutting the use of electricity by 50 percent, gas by 70 percent, and atomic energy by 97 percent, thereby causing millions to freeze to death and millions more to join the army of unemployed beggars on the streets; beginning all Cabinet meetings with hatha yoga sessions and Krishna chanting; serializing the collected works of Ralph Nader in the official Party newspaper,
Doom;
encouraging Party members to beat up mathematicians, geologists, science-fiction fans, and other “non-ec” types (“non-ec” types were those either known to be disloyal to the Party or suspected of such disloyalty); encouraging the reemergence of cottage industry by rigidly repressing every more advanced kind of industry; introducing Zen meditation to grammar schools; and most important of all, blaming the host of new and tragic problems that resulted from government policies on an alleged conspiracy of “scientists” and instituting a nationwide witch
hunt to round up the members of this conspiracy for incarceration in reeducation centers.

The Revolution of Lowered Expectations had triumphed. By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.

Actually, the apotheosis of Furbish Lousewart V had been engineered by the same group of alpha males who had been promoting the Revolution of Lowered Expectations all along.

These were very cunning old primates in several of the most skillful predator bands on Terra. Because of the stealth and skill of these bands—made up of successful predator families that had been intermarrying for several generations—they collectively owned 99.4 percent of all the territory and resources of Unistat.

They only owned about 40 percent of the rest of Terra, and that seriously annoyed them.

The Revolution of Rising Expectations annoyed them even more, because it led many primates to argue that the reason poverty and starvation still continued in an advanced technological society was that
Somebody Was Getting More Than Their Share.
Whenever anybody asked who that
Somebody
might be, all eyes turned on these royal old primate males who owned so much. The eyes were not friendly. Sometimes, in far-off lands where these royal primates did not completely control the governments, some of their boodle was actually seized and redistributed to the people they had stolen it from. As Rising Expectations had mounted in the first half of the century, this regrettable pattern of expropriation also escalated.

The alpha males of these tough old predator families did not like this at all. They therefore invested a prudent sum in promoting the careers of everybody who preached Lowered Expectations, from Ralph Nader and the Club of
Rome to Oriental gurus and the neo-Stoics of the post-Marxist Left.

When Furbish Lousewart came along, they invested in him, too—enough to buy the election for him.

When Justin Case returned from the John the mad Simon Moon was still reading his nightmare version of the American Dream.

“Upper guns thou wilt, marxafactors,” Moon intoned, half-chanting. “A gnew gnu cries nixnix on your loin ardors [O my am I?] as the great Jehoover fouls his files [Seminole cowhand] with marching looter congs. What a loop in the evening, bloody-fouled loop! Lawn ordures for Crookbacked Dick, pig-bastchard of the world. See, it’s the stinking onion coop. Say, it’s the slimey deepsea doodler. By the wampum of caponey. O turnig on, Duke Daleyswine, lardmayor of burning-town! They’ll chip away yore homo hawks.”

“Hughes Rockefeller Exxon,” the drunken writer was muttering into his martini glass. “Thieving motherfucking …”

Justin decided the party was degenerating and left. In the foyer he had to pass Marvin Gardens and Josephine Malik and heard:

“Male chauvinist paranoid!” (Josephine to Marvin.)

“Extraterrestrial brainwasher!” (Marvin to Josephine.)

Justin decided morosely that the literary world had never been the same since the drug revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. “Pretty little boidies picking in the toidies,” he said gruffly to both of them and walked out.

Justin had no idea where he had gotten the words about the pretty little boidies from. He assumed it was the Afghan hash going around at the party.