Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  FRANK: But he was hanged anyway.

  ERNEST: But they knew they had hanged a man.

  FRANK: Like hell. They thought they’d just hanged a crazy gook.

  THE VALUE OF THE CONTENT

  When a people begin to cut down their trees without making any provision for reforestation, you may be sure it is a sign of the beginning of their cultural degeneration.

  —FURBISH LOUSEWART V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

  In the weeks following the car theft in 1968, Mounty Babbit’s luck at poker became so pronounced that he had to start losing by deliberation on occasion to avoid the suspicion of cheating. Halos were everywhere on earth; UFOs everywhere above.

  I am a genuine mad scientist, Mounty Babbit thought. Well, nobody is ever going to know about it.

  Then, a month later, it all passed. He didn’t know what cards the other poker players had, and he wasn’t seeing halos. He moved his family to Evanston, settled into his new job as Vice President at Weishaupt Chemicals, worked actively for the Nixon-Agnew campaign, and finally quit smoking.

  The pickets outside the walls of Weishaupt Chemicals (which was now the nation’s second-largest producer of napalm) were the only harassment in an otherwise perfectly satisfactory life.

  The Invasion (as he came to call it) began in early 1969. He was driving home from work, came off Lake Shore Drive onto Sheridan, crossed the Howard Street border into Evanston, and noted a large billboard with an eye atop a pyramid. A teaser campaign, he thought. The reverse side of the dollar bill. After a month or so of making people wonder, the advertisers would add their slogan. Probably another Friendly Loan Company.

  The next morning he awoke in total horror. He recalled the symptoms from some of the psychology books he had read back when he had feared for his sanity. The Activation Syndrome: thirst, rapid heartbeat, dizzy wobbles—the body preparing for emergency. What emergency? He couldn’t remember anything from the previous evening.

  Beside him, Mary Lou snuggled closer. “My, you were passionate last night,” she murmured affectionately.

  I drove home. I must have had dinner. And I made love—better than usual, it sounds like. And I cant remember any of it.

  Micro-amnesia.

  Babbit kept a very close watch on himself in the following days. Not close enough, evidently. At the end of the month he found among the canceled checks returned by his bank one in the sum of $100 to the Chicago Peace Action Committee. This was the sentimental old ladies who often appeared with the raggedy students picketing Weishaupt Chemicals. “EAT WHAT YOU KILL.” “NO MORE WAR.” “DRACULA LIVES ON BLOOD TOO.” “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS.” All those silly sentimental signs.

  He had not written this check. And yet the signature was his.

  Alone in his study with the bank book and checks, Mountbatten Babbit wept. He knew horror.

  Some alien entity had taken over his mind and written that check.

  My God, he thought, I am possessed.

  POLITICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

  The robot whose passport said “Frank Sullivan” landed at Kennedy International on December 26, 1983, and brought $500,000 worth of hashish through customs without any trouble, since the customs officials had orders from the CIA never to interfere with him.

  “Sullivan” affixed his gas mask and hailed a cab, which took him to the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street.

  In rapid succession, following a genetic script, he took a quick shower, shaved, changed into his best suit, went out for a slow stroll on Forty-second Street, and picked up a boy lounging outside the Fascination pinball arcade.

  They returned to “Sullivan’s” room and the boy there received a slurpingly hedonic blow job, for which he was paid $25.

  The lad was then covered with rapturous kisses and compelled (out of politeness) to listen to an interminable monologue on the world’s injustices to Ireland, the villainy of England, and the perfidy of the Masonic Jews. More kisses followed, the boy told a lugubrious story of poverty and legal problems, “Sullivan” coughed up $5 more, and the transaction was ended. “Sullivan” lounged on the bed for a while after the boy left, discovered that another $15 had disappeared from his wallet, cursed mildly, showered again, and set out on his night’s business.

  Another taxi delivered him to the Signifyin’ Monkey, a nightclub on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. He checked his Luger before getting out of the cab and darting across the sidewalk; he knew what was likely to happen to melanin-deficient persons on that street at that hour.

  The maitre d’ recognized “Sullivan” and made an almost imperceptible movement with his head. “Sullivan” ascended the stairs in the back, knocked quickly three times, then five times, then three times more, and was admitted to the private office of Hassan i Sabbah X.

  “Ah,” said Hassan, “the goodies from Afghanistan have arrived.”

  A sordid commercial transaction followed, distasteful to both parties—Hassan and “Sullivan” each regarded himself as fundamentally a philosopher unwillingly forced to grub and hustle in the jungle of commerce. Nonetheless, each bargained professionally and they were both quite happy by the time they came to the ritual of sharing one sample of the merchandise to seal their friendship anew.

  “You know,” Hassan said when they were both floating, “I don’t really believe you’re IRA.”

  “That’s funny,” said “Sullivan” with a hash giggle, “I don’t believe you’re really CIA, either.”

  They both chortled happily, having their keys.

  “Complicated world,” said Hassan.

  “Getting more complicated every day,” pseudo-Sullivan agreed benignly.

  “Could you place a Klee with a European collector?”

  “A Paul Klee?” Sullivan had heard “clay” originally and wondered if he were being asked to peddle pottery.

  “An honest-to-Jesus Klee original. From his mescaline period, I would say.”

  “Hold on to it a day or two,” Sullivan said grandly. “I’ll have to make a few phone calls first.” He was thinking that Hassan i Sabbah X wore the most brilliantly maroon ties he had ever seen. For that matter, the rug danced with hues worthy of a sultan’s harem. Definitely superior-grade hash, he decided.

  A door opened in the back of the office and another man stuck his head into the room. He was a black man, white-haired, gold spectacles, rather conservative blue suit and vest: “Sullivan” automatically memorized his features and sent them through his computer to recorders-and-identification.

  “Oh, pardon me,” the man said, backing out.

  But Sullivan—who was not IRA at all, as Hassan surmised, but was CIA, at least part-time—had already come up with a “make.” The man was George Washington Carver Bridge, one of the top scientists on Project Cyclops in the seventies. Now what was a man of that caliber doing skulking about the den of so large and carnivorous a mammal as Hassan i Sabbah X?

  “Who was that?” he asked idly.

  “One of the boys,” Hassan replied carelessly. “Just one of the boys.”

  But Sullivan went back to his hotel mulling over the perversities and paradoxes of the hashish state, and the ever-maddening question “What is Reality?” for his memory kept insisting that just before the door closed he had noted that the esteemed Dr. Bridge was carrying in his hand the amputated penis of a white man.

  WE MIGHT WAKE UP

  We mustn’t sleep a wink all night, or we might wake up—changed.

  —Invasion of the Body Snatchers

  After the day in 1968 when he found that he had written a check to the Chicago Peace Action Committee while in an altered state of consciousness, Mountbatten Babbit decided, once and for all, that he would see a psychiatrist.

  But not right away. He would fight for self-control first.

  He realized that his mental condition was highly illegal. ESP in 1941. Halos and ESP together, after that black kid stole his car. Now he was having blackouts in which he performed abominable acts that might threaten his se
curity clearance and even his bank account. That was absolutely terrifying. Anything that endangered the bank account must be a symptom of the most aggravated psychosis. Yes: He would definitely absolutely irrevocably commit himself to psychiatric counseling.

  But not right away. He would fight for self-control first.

  One night the Babbits had the Moons from across the street as guests for dinner. Molly Moon, as usual, got Mary Lou into a discussion of the occult. All the usual hocus-pocus and rubbish. She was especially keen on some Neon Bal Loon, a Tibetan monk who had allegedly transferred his consciousness into the mind of an Englishman and was now writing books through the Englishman’s mediumship.

  “It’s just the beginning,” Molly enthused. “Our materialism has become a threat to the whole world. Sure, more and more of the great Masters will be taking over Occidental bodies, to bring us their wisdom directly.”

  Mounty Babbit concentrated on discussing the financing of an antidrug pamphlet with Joe Moon, detective lieutenant on the Evanston police. Even that was disconcerting. “It probably won’t do any good,” Joe said once, rather bitterly. “The kids don’t believe anything we tell them.”

  The next step into psychosis was unexpected and oddly pleasurable. It occurred in the lunchroom at Weishaupt a few days later. Babbit was pouring sugar into his coffee when he suddenly looked at the sugar dispenser. The simplicity of the design, the one small flap that opened to let the sugar pour, abruptly delighted him. It was as if he had never seen it before.

  After that he was noticing more and more things in that heightened vision. One day in the Loop he saw a mother whirl suddenly and slap a whining child. His heart leapt with shock—and then he remembered that this was an everyday occurrence in America. It was as if he had seen it from the perspective of some culture where whining and hitting were not normal communication between parents and children.

  He wanted less and less meat in his diet; meat now appeared heavy and hard to digest.

  The strangest and most disturbing thing of all was the way Weishaupt Chemicals itself began to change. But everything was the same; he was just seeing with different eyes. The contrast between the executive offices and the workshops was an overwhelming experience. Architecture, coloring, decoration, upkeep—every kind of communication except words themselves said with total clarity “The Masters” and “The Serfs.” The typical primate pack hierarchy, unnoticed and taken for granted before.

  Strange visions came to him whenever his mind relaxed from financial or scientific problems. He would be in a burning jungle, running from helicopters that caused the burning. Or he would be in a temple with the eye-on-the-pyramid design practicing strange breathing exercises. Once he even had a name—Ped Xing—and he watched as one of his teachers burned himself to death in protest against the war. He was Ped Xing seeing through the eyes of Mountbatten Babbit.

  His monogamy, which he usually succeeded in maintaining fifty-one weeks of the year, was falling apart on him. He worried that Mary Lou would be growing suspicious. Women turned him on constantly, incessantly, tormentingly, as in early adolescence. Not all women—just white women. Ped Xing couldn’t get enough of them. He couldn’t even get enough of any one of them. Even after an orgasm, I would want to start again, rubbing and caressing their moist pussies until they came a second time. This excited me so much that I would often go down and suck them into a third orgasm. Then Ped Xing would ask them to suck him and drift off into aeons of tension and pleasure, glimpsing the temple of the eye-on-the-pyramid, occasionally even coming a second time himself, which hadn’t happened since he was in his early twenties.

  The homosexual phase almost drove me to suicide. But my ESP (I accepted it now, knowing it was all hallucination of course, but following it blindly, being dragged along by it) was both infallible and specific. Ped Xing picked only men of Babbit’s own status and importance; and he was never wrong. Evidently, there were more closet cases in the world than even Kinsey had estimated. I always took the male role, coming in their mouths, and would reciprocate by no more than masturbating them. Once, when the partner was not merely an executive but a Pentagon official, I started laughing at his moment of ejaculation, losing all control, laughing louder and louder, revealing the psychosis and not caring.

  That night I looked at the tree in his yard and knew it was an intelligent being. Not with human intellect, not with the mind of a dog or a rat or a fish even, but with its own life and indwelling consciousness. There was even a scientist in New York measuring the emotional reactions of plants with polygraph equipment. And there it stood, a blue spruce, stranger in structure and more alien in intelligence than any creature in science fiction.

  How can we live among so many wonders and not be overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of existence? Mounty Babbit, former atheist, asked himself. Our knowledge is so small, and our conceit is so great….

  Then he realized in horror that that was Ped Xing, the Buddhist, thinking.

  PARTNERS

  Man will never be contented until he conquers death.

  —DR. BERNARD STREHLER, 1977

  When Murphy got into the car Mendoza asked, “Bad news?”

  Murphy pulled out into the traffic, carefully. “It must be bad,” Mendoza said, looking at Murphy’s face.

  They drove. Murphy stared straight ahead.

  “Man’s your partner,” Mendoza said. “He shouldn’t hide things from you.”

  “Malloy,” Murphy said, “I got to go see Marty Malloy. Only he’s got a new bug up his ass; he only talks to one cop at a time.”

  “Shit on one at a time. You let him pull that, the next thing happens is he thinks he runs the police force. Marty, a cheap hood like Marty, you never give him an edge. On anything. You know that, Tom. Let them get out of line and all of a sudden you got another Jack Ruby. Guy like that gets an edge, he can’t keep his mouth shut, going around telling everybody about his friends the cops. Dropping in to see you at home, you know? When he takes his fall, half the force falls with him.”

  “Your principal problem,” Murphy said, “is that you’re a dumb spic with a loud mouth. Me, I don’t take shit from any of them, least of all from a Marty Malloy. But this is different.”

  “It sure is,” Mendoza said. “I didn’t know you so well, I’d think you got a guilty conscience about something. Some hood off the street, you can call him a spic anytime, but not me. Just who the fuck you think you are?”

  “All right, that just slipped out. You don’t have to eat my ass about it.”

  “All right, shit. First you’re keeping secrets, then I’m a spic, now I’m the one who’s being unreasonable. This is being partners? After ten years?”

  Murphy turned onto Van Ness. “Nobody’s keeping secrets,” he said. “It’s just one of those, what they call intangibles. Malloy doesn’t have as much balls as a cockroach anymore. I mean I know Malloy. Pushing fifty, getting shaky, scared shitless of me for years now. He doesn’t fancy-pants, not with me, he doesn’t. He says he won’t talk to anybody but me, that’s the way I play it this time around. I keep telling you, I know Malloy.”

  They turned down Geary. “Okay,” Mendoza said. “You know Malloy. He’s got the whole solution to the Kennedy assassination, or something. But, I don’t know what it is, something’s come over you this last week, Tom. Clam up all you want. A man can’t be partners ten years without knowing.”

  “Joe,” Murphy said, “it’s just I didn’t want to talk about it. Some things a man just keeps a tight mouth about. It’s my sister.”

  “Your sister?”

  “The doctor thinks she’s got cancer. You know a man like me, the wife dead, family means a lot. I been lighting candles for her at church.”

  “Tom,” Mendoza said. “Jesus, Tom. I’m sorry. Your sister. Christ, what can I say?”

  “It’s okay, Joe. Partners, it’s like being married in a way. I should have known you’d realize something was up. A man like me, something in the family, he don’t like to t
alk about it.”

  “Christ. Yeah. Which sister is that, the one in L.A. or the one up in Mendocino?”

  “Oh … the one in Mendocino. Irene.”

  “Look, she needs more money and you can’t raise it …”

  “Thanks, Joe. It’s not money, her husband is loaded, but thanks. I’m glad I talked about it.”

  “That’s what a partner is for.”

  Murphy parked near the corner of Taylor. “You go down to Gulliver’s, have a cup of coffee,” he said. “I’ll join you after I get whatever it is Malloy is selling.”

  “Partners,” Mendoza said.

  “Partners,” Murphy replied warmly. They shook hands.

  INSIDE OUT

  America is a white man’s heaven and a black man’s hell.

  —HASSAN I SABBAH X

  Hassan i Sabbah X gave up on hashish. He went to the safe and got out the LSD. Remembering …

  Using the transitional concept that the lock is a hole in the door through which one can exert an effort for a topological transformation, one could turn the room into another topological form other than a closed box. The room in effect was turned inside out through the hole.

  Remembering a lad of twelve having Ivanhoe rammed down his gullet by the Chicago public school system and walking out the door at 3:05 P.M. to mingle with the junkies, whores, pimps, thieves, and assorted varieties of revolutionaries (Black Panthers, Black P. Stone Rangers, acid-electrified Weatherpeople) who provided the real education in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the late 1960s. Remembering the assassinations of Malcolm and of Martin Luther King. Remembering the endless epic of Stackerlee and the famous couplet:

  I got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind.

  I’m a black motherfucker and I don’t mind dyin’.

  Call this the first metaprogram. It led Hassan (then called F.D.R. Stuart) far outside the ghetto into an entirely new and different world. It was easy. By acting out the imperatives of the Stackerlee “black motherfucker” script, the boy earned a term in the Audy Home, an institution for the further training of apprentice outlaws who slash tires on police cars, heave bricks through school windows, peddle merchandise from stores without first purchasing them, and answer policemen’s questions with “Fuck you, ya honky motherfuck’n cocksucker.” F.D.R. Stuart received the standard Audy Home training, which consists of sophisticated expert coaching in: (a) sodomy; (b) sadomasochism; and (c) assorted crimes more lucrative than selling shoplifted merchandise.