Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  Sit down when you want to pee

  Sit down when you want to pee

  Sit down when you want to pee

  SHe was writing it out a hundred times, to avoid making that mistake again. Ego is much more a body image than she had known. Psychologically, she was androgynous WoMan, the Baphomet idol; physically, she had to sit down to pee.

  Oh what fun it is to ride

  But Roy Ubu, back at FBI headquarters, was already briefing a five-man team on the brain drain mystery.

  “You mean,” Special Agent Tobias Knight asked, “we’re supposed to find 132 missing scientists without letting anybody know that there are 132 missing scientists we’re looking for? Is that it?”

  “The President Himself,” Ubu pronounced in Babbit’s frigid tones, “gives this project Top Priority.”

  “In other words, it’s impossible but you want us to do it, anyway,” Knight translated.

  “Now that’s enough defeatism, Toby, let’s get to work and believe in ourselves and by Christ a busted flush can win when the guys behind it have the balls for it…. Now, here’s the names in alphabetical order. One: Dr. George Washington Carver Bridge, sounds like a spade, graduate Miskatonic University; it says last worked for the government on Project Cyclops in the late seventies. Two: Dr. Charles Chance, nickname Fat, graduate Miskatonic, also last worked for the government on Cyclops. Three …”

  THE SECOND FURBISH LOUSEWART

  A man with one watch knows what time it is.

  A man with two watches is never sure.

  —SEGAL’S LAW

  Percy Lousewart was born in the Ohio River Valley in 1866 and by then Lousewart was no longer considered a euphonious name. His Christian name didn’t help, even though his mother had picked it due to her fervent, almost erotic, admiration for Shelley. She might as well have named the poor lad Cissy. Every time he introduced himself as Percy Lousewart, some bully or other felt compelled to make a witty remark, and a fight usually followed. Eventually poor Percy decided to change his name and went to see an educated man, a lawyer, about having the job done legally; he also wanted some advice on choosing a better, more popular title. The lawyer, alas, was more than erudite; he was a bibliomaniac, an alcoholic scholar, and the kind of crank who delights in writing letters to the Britannica correcting their errors. He told Percy all about the Furbish Lousewart plant and even showed him a picture of one. He was eloquent on the subject, and his passion was contagious. Percy Lousewart had his name changed only to Furbish Lousewart and took his lumps as they came. His first son was named Furbish Lousewart II and a tradition was begun.

  MALLOY DON’T SING

  The variables vary too much and the constants aren’t as constant as they seem.

  —FINAGLE’S FIFTH FUNDAMENTAL FINDING

  “The fuck,” Malloy said. “Where you get an idea like that? I don’t sing, I never sing. Who’s been handing you that shit?”

  It was a small furnished room on Taylor Street in the San Francisco tenderloin. A sign outside the window advertised an establishment on the ground floor, Les Nuits de Paris Massage.

  Starhawk said, “Marty, I know three guys up in Folsom because of you. They’re not sure. Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys. I’m sure. I make it a point of honor to be sure about things like that. You pick up $20 here from Mendoza, $15 there from Murphy, and you tell them what you think they want to hear, mostly crap. To keep them interested, you give them a live one now and then, somebody you don’t like. You and twenty other guys in this town. Don’t crap me, Marty. I’m here to make money for you, not to give you a hard time about it.”

  Malloy said, “You’re crazy. You should go see a psychiatrist. You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “Okay,” Starhawk said. “You’re smart, Marty. You’re so damned smart you don’t admit anything, even when the other guy knows more about it than you do. My ass. You’re so damned smart you’re stupid, is what you are.”

  Malloy started to get up.

  “Sit down,” Starhawk said. “I keep telling you, I’m not here to give you a hard time. Listen to me, Marty, just a minute. I’ve got a century that’s not doing anything, and it’s yours.” He opened his wallet and laid a $100 bill on the table. “Now, do we talk about its four brothers, and what you do to get them, or do you go on shitting me until I go out the door and find another guy that talks to cops?”

  The massage sign below the window flickered on-off, on-off.

  “Suppose I do it,” Malloy said. “I mean, I’m not admitting anything, but suppose just this once I go talk to The Murph. What I got to know is, whose ass is in the sling, who goes up? You understand, I don’t want somebody comes looking for me from the Syndicate.”

  “Nobody goes up, that’s the beauty of it,” Starhawk said. “You’re just going to tell Murph about a guy got in today from L.A. He’s here to do a job for Maldonado, see, and he got drunk and started shooting off his mouth about how funny it was, the guy he came to do the job on is a cop.”

  “Jesus,” Malloy said. The massage sign flickered off and on again. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Starhawk, the man of bronze, two balls of cast iron and no more brains than a hamster. You got it in your head it’s cop-hunting season and you’re going to shoot one of them. And they trust good old Marty Malloy so much they’ll spend all their time looking for an imaginary hit man from L.A., just because good old Marty tells them so. I take it all back. You don’t need a psychiatrist, you need a new brain.”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” Starhawk said. “It’s not that kind of job. It’s just a heist.”

  “What’s this cop got, somebody comes all the way from L.A. to heist it? The crown jewels?”

  Starhawk raised his fingers to his nose and made a sniffing motion.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Malloy said. “This cop, what he’s got is a bag of snow, so he won’t be talking to anybody else in the department when it turns up missing. I got to hand it to you, kid. Nobody could have set this up for you but another cop. The fuck, it would have to be his partner. Who’s pissed because he didn’t get his half, right?”

  “Don’t think about that, you might get so excited you’ll talk about it in your sleep. The thing is, you just got to tell Murph about this Syndicate gun from L.A. and how funny he thinks it is, that this crooked cop is trying to sell some hot snow to Maldonado’s boys and they just went and brought up this gorilla to take it from him, no down payment, no monthly installments, for free.”

  Malloy was grinning broadly. “Murph’ll shit,” he said. “He’ll absolutely shit a brick.”

  “Yeah,” Starhawk said. “I kind of think he will. You like it?”

  “Kiddo,” Malloy said, “if I wasn’t so broke this week, I’d do it free. Just to watch him trying not to look like the cop I’m telling him about. The fat prick.”

  “I sort of figured you’d like it,” Starhawk said. “Me, the only thing I regret is I can’t be there to see his face myself.”

  “Yeah,” Malloy said. “The fat prick.”

  IS VLAD A SYMBOL?

  A class made up solely of intellectuals will always have a guilty conscience.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  “Defection?” Ubu suggested at the second conference on the Brain Drain. “Russia or China …”

  “The CIA was the first agency into this,” Babbit said, “and they say it’s impossible. They know what color drawers every commissar wears these days with the latest surveillance techniques. One hundred thirty-two top American scientists are not working over there unknown to the CIA. Take that as axiomatic.” Babbit was firm.

  “Well there are only twelve people in HOME….”

  “They haven’t left the planet,” Babbit said briefly. “People of that caliber do not travel about without somebody noticing—Intelligence, newspapers, TV, other scientists, somebod
y. It is as if they have crawled into a hole and dragged the ground in after them.” His chair creaked screeee as he leaned forward for emphasis.

  “Hell, they’re not loose inside the country sir,” Ubu said firmly. “Americans can’t just disappear these days. Why to cash a check any kind of check you’ve got to write both your Social Security number and your GWB number and have them both scanned by the Beast. Sir there’s never been a people better watched and protected than the American people of November 1983. And we expect to do even better sir when the new circuits are put in the Beast next month.”

  He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice

  But the snow falls thicker, making a blanket of foam against the window of Babbit’s office and piles against the door of The Upstart Crow bookstore off Dupont Circle across town, where Marvin Gardens is autographing copies of Vlad Victorious.

  “I never got a real live autograph from a real live author Mr. Gardens tell me why did you write two books about a man like Vlad?”

  “To make money,” Marvin said in his Peter Lorre cokehead voice. He had prepared for the ordeal of the seventeenth autograph party in twenty-three days by snorting more than his usual morning quantity of the snow and was in no mood to conceal his divinity from the blind uncoked Earthlings. “I have always been possessed by a mad, passionate, almost erotic desire for a very large bank account. In fact, I love the feel of money the crisp crinkle of bills the metal solidity of coin the visual impact of a large check with seven figures.”

  “Is it true John Wayne will play Vlad again in the sequel?”

  “That’s just in the talking stage now and frankly I don’t care if they cast Raquel Welch the important thing is cash on the barrelhead my agent is asking a million for the screen rights and we won’t settle for a penny less … Yes?”

  “Is Vlad really a symbol?”

  O come let us adore Him

  O come let us adore Him

  The twelve people in HOME—High Orbital Mini-Earth—were construction engineers, six male and six female. They had originally been sent there to build, with materials shipped from Lunar Mining, HOME II, a space village for 10,000 occupants. This program had been canceled as “non-ec” by President Lousewart and the twelve colonists restricted to “ec” research, mostly astronomical, which President Lousewart turned over to his astrologers for a mystical interpretation.

  HOME was located in the area called Libration Point 5, where the gravitational fields of Luna and Terra were equally balanced. This null-gravity area had been mathematically discovered by the astronomer Lagrange and was therefore sometimes called the Lagrange Area. The name for the space town, HOME, had been coined by psychologist Timothy Leary in 1977.

  A friend of Leary’s named Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote overly complicated novels, had suggested a team song for the colonists, “HOME on Lagrange.” To popularize this idea, he had written letters about it to many space research groups and included it in a novel called The Trick Top Hat. Still, by 1984, the song hadn’t caught on with the twelve colonists. They were not at home on Lagrange because they feared that the whole project would soon be classified as “non-ec” and they would be dragged back to the womb-planet.

  ULYSSES AT HOME

  My dog understands perfectly everything I say to him.

  I am the one who does not understand.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood’s parties were the place to go that winter because of the penile adornment above the mantelpiece. Some even began to suspect that Wildeblood had undergone the transsex operation only to engage in the most flagrant excess of exhibitionism in world history.

  This was an uncharitable oversimplification. Wildeblood’s mind was vast, not simple, and had more kinks than a Pollack painting; She was not deep, but wide and complex. She actually intended to become a nun. When She quoted from the gospel of hir youth, “Humility is endless,” She really meant it. Submission was salvation; and who is more submissive than a nun? Above all, She longed to embrace the Lamb, all woolly and fleecy and pure, but very definitely horned and Ram-signed with Pentecostal fire. She had the hots for Divine intercourse. Where Natalie Drest was merely cock-mad, Mary Margaret Wildeblood was possessed by the god Priapus.

  The idea of mounting and, so to speak, enshrining Ulysses occurred to Mary Margaret at her very first reception after returning from Johns Hopkins.

  Benny “Eggs” Benedict started it by suggesting, “Norman Mailer might try to get revenge for some of your reviews by raping you.”

  “Let the male chauvinist pig try it,’ Mary Margaret said demurely. “I’ve been studying kung fu.”

  “Oh, are you planning to join Women’s Lib?” Justin Case inquired.

  “I have given it some thought,” Mary Margaret replied, practicing her new simpery-Marilyn-Monroe smile and positively reveling in the feel of the nylons on his, no dammit her, thighs.

  “JUST A GODDAM MINUTE,” a booming masculine voice cut in. This was Josephine Malik, chairperson of God’s Lightning—an outfit long suspected of terrorist fire-bombings against porny movie houses, adult bookstores, and other sexist enterprises. Jo was an ideological descendant of those who thought copulation was bad for the crops. “I don’t know about lib-lab wishy-washy groups like NOW,” she went on, “but God’s Lightning certainly isn’t accepting any members who weren’t born female.”

  “Oh, now,” a fluty feminine voice intervened—“Figs” Newton, spokesperson for the Necrophile Liberation Front, sporting a lapel button that said, OUT OF THE MAUSOLEUMS, INTO THE STREETS. “That’s hardly fair,” he pronounced—like most Terrestrials, he regarded himself as an expert on morality. “People are what they make themselves,” he said, good Existentialist that he was. “To hold the accidents of birth against them is practically racism, isn’t it?”

  This led to some lively debate, and it was finally decided that to hold the accident of genitalia-at-birth against somebody was definitely not racism, but might be sexism, or possibly genderism. Josephine Malik, meanwhile, smoldered.

  “Well,” she said finally, “God’s Lightning is not influenced by all this baroque civil rights and civil liberties horseshit out of the eighteenth century. According to semantics, people don’t have rights; they just make demands and call them their rights. It’s purely a pragmatic problem. If we let this—person—in, what’s to prevent other men from hacking off their prongs, infiltrating our ranks, and subverting our whole organization?”

  This was a poser, admittedly; and while the assembled company grappled with it, Josephine delivered her crusher: “Besides, there’s a lot of doubt about how complete these operations are. How do we know Ms. Wildeblood is in all respects a true woman and not just a truncated man?”

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood, who had a mind somewhat bizarre even for the twentieth century, had been waiting for such an opportunity. “I can certainly prove I’m not a man,” she smiled sweetly, and drew Ulysses out of her purse. Although two men fainted on the spot, the women merely blinked, at least at first. Then some of them began to titter.

  Thus began the great Wildeblood scandale of that winter. She had maliciously saved the relic of her previous masculinity with the thought that it might provoke some sort of spontaneous Group Encounter sessions, and now she knew she had the potential for some truly memorable Freak-outs. The relic was placed in the hands of a skilled taxidermist and soon emerged, in a natural-looking erect state, handsomely mounted on a redwood plaque. This hung over the mantelpiece of her posh Sutton Place apartment, and there she began to hold parties to which were invited (along with the usual New York VIPs) precisely those persons most likely to be neurologically galvanized by the sight of a penis without a man, which is considerably more memorable than mathematician Dodgson’s grin without a cat, although perhaps not as memorable as physicist Schrödinger’s cat, who was dead and alive at the same time.

  Blake Williams became a regular at these soirees, and often retired sneakily
to the kitchen to make notes, which later resulted in a scholarly article, “Priapism Recrudescent: Hellenic Religion in a Secular Context.” The “ithyphallic eidolon,” as he insisted on calling Ms. Wildeblood’s obscene joke, seemed to produce markedly different effects on various personality types. One football player, for instance, had to be removed in a straitjacket. Strangely enough, certain shy, timid, and stoop-shouldered men took it all in their stride, quite as if Wildeblood’s brutally explicit rejection of masculinity reinforced their own loose grip upon that (after all) somewhat mystical estate. The Gay set developed a superstition, almost a mystique, and the tradition of “kissing it for good luck” was even joked about, obscurely, in certain newspaper columns. (“A new religion, of which Linda Lovelace might almost be the prophet, is now sweeping the Way-Out People, all the way from Fifty-seventh Street to St. Mark’s Place.”)

  WHY?

  Why me, O Lord?

  —ANCIENT PRIMATE QUESTION

  “I said FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS,” the California writer was howling amid the group at the mantelpiece, below the ithyphallic eidolon.

  “Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no peanuts, mayonnaise, or glue,” Blake Williams was reciting patiently to Natalie Drest.

  “TV, publishing, movies, everywhere—the extraterrestrials have taken over,” Marvin Gardens was warning in his passionate Peter Lorre intonation.

  Benny Benedict suddenly had enough of the Wildeblood high-IQ set. He wandered out on the balcony, to look at the stars and wonder, half-drunkenly, why he was so depressed.