Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  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.

  LIVING IN A NOVEL

  Let there be a form distinct from the form.

  —G. SPENCER BROWN, Laws of Form

  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.

  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. T
here 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? …”

  STARHAWK’S LIFE STUDY

  In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it’s exactly the opposite.

  —BEN TUCKER, FAMOUS VAUDEVILLE COMEDIAN

  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.�
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  LANDSLIDE

  Bryce S. DeWitt states: “The Copenhagen view promotes the impression that the collapse of the state vector, and even the state vector itself, is all in the mind.” … One fact which seems to emerge from the present discussions of the nature of consciousness is that it is nonlocal (i.e., not confined to a certain region of space-time)….

  —LAWRENCE BEYNAM, Future Science

  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.