Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  CHEESE

  Robert Pearson said “Shee-it” in a tone of profound skepticism.

  He was watching the TV hearings on the nomination of Rockwell Morgan Squeeze for Vice President. Squeeze was an oil millionaire famous for such monumental parsimonies as installing pay phones in his mansion so guests couldn’t run up his phone bill and bringing his lunch to the office in a paper bag for forty years. He was being quizzed about his generous contributions to seven out of ten of the senators on the committee investigating him.

  “Now, I resent that,” Rockwell was saying. “That’s a very nasty word, Senator. ‘Bribe,’ indeed!”

  “Well, just what would you call it?” asked the senator—one of the three who hadn’t received Rockwell’s largesse.

  “I regard it this way,” Mr. Squeeze said unctuously. “If I had a lot of cheese, and I looked around and saw a lot of mice without any cheese of their own, well, it would be the normal, generous thing …”

  “Now, wait a minute, I smell a rat,” the senator interrupted.

  “Shee-it,” Pearson said again. The door buzzer was humming.

  When Pearson opened the door he was greeted by a whiff of violets, even before he saw the man pointing the water pistol at him.

  And when he awoke (a day later, and with Rockwell Squeeze approved by the committee with a vote that stood—coincidentally, no doubt—at 7 to 3), he was in a basement surrounded by men with canvas bags over their heads. And his genitals were wired up to some electrical apparatus.

  “Shee-it,” he said again, and closed his eyes, concentrating furiously on the formulas Hassan i Sabbah X had told him.

  The men from Naval Intelligence began pouring electricity into Pearson’s penis and trying to extract information from his mouth (two procedures that usually worked well together). It was quite irritating when they were unable to learn anything about George Washington Bridge’s link with the Cult of the Black Mother, and perplexing when Pearson began to insist that he was Rockwell M. Squeeze, Vice President of the United States. It was revolting when they finally realized that he wasn’t playacting and really believed he was Rockwell M. Squeeze. By then his whang was charred to a gruesome extent and his obvious insanity was hopeless. They smothered him with a pillow and left.

  They were all very nice men when their duty did not call upon them to perform such regrettable tasks.

  A CARNIVAL OF LOONIES

  I am not what I am.

  —IAGO, IN BACON’S Othello

  The FBI finally found G.W.C. Bridge living in a flophouse in Miami’s ghetto. Having learned something from Naval Intelligence’s bungling in the cases of Hassan i Sabbah X and Robert Pearson, they moved in with great delicacy; a black agent was employed to form a friendship with him over a period of a month.

  “Weird cat,” the agent reported after a week. “Seems to be hiding something all the time….”

  “Can’t make him at all,” he reported the second week. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was a white reporter in blackface, trying to find out what it’s like to be black….”

  In fact, Bridge seemed more than a little bit psychotic in a methodical sort of way. He read no less than six newspapers a day and clipped numerous stories from them. The agent eventually had a chance to investigate these files while Bridge was visiting a patient in a nearby madhouse, and they were rather oblique. They all concerned Very Important Persons in government and industry, but that was about all they had in common. Bridge seemed to have a minute curiosity about the men who rule America; that was all that was evident. The agent could make nothing at all of the crazy notes scribbled on the margins of these news stories: “Possible,” “Probable,” “Still himself,” “Definitely occupied” …

  The mystery grew worse when the agent realized that Bridge spent a lot of time visiting madhouses and psychiatric wards. “Sure knows a lot of crazy people,” he reported the third week. “A hell of a lot of crazy people,” he amended at the end of the month.

  Another team of agents began revisiting the nuthouses, and it was soon realized that the patients Bridge visited had a few things in common, viz., none was white, but not all were black (some were Oriental, Indian, or Chicano); all, without exception, were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur; all were listed as chronic rather than acute psychotics; all claimed to be somebody else rather than who they actually were—one said he was Secretary of Commerce, one that he was Chairman of the Board of Morgan Guaranty Trust, one that he was Chief Engineer at Cape Kennedy, etc.

  The agents remembered their experience with Robert Pearson, former aide to Hassan i Sabbah X, and jumped to a conclusion. “That crazy church drove them all nuts and made them think they were white people.” Alas, a little checking refuted this easy assumption. Most of the loonies Bridge had visited had no previous connection with the Cult of the Black Mother at all….

  Things were coming to a head.

  THREE MINUTES, FORTY SECONDS

  That which exists is allowed.

  —JOHN LILLY, The Center of the Cyclone

  When Murphy came out the front door, Ed Goldfarb, in the bushes, shot him twice with Mendoza’s police special.

  Murphy, thrown back against the door, was reaching into his shoulder holster, his mouth open, still alive.

  The two shots hung in the empty mountain air, echoing.

  Thomas Esposito fired at Murphy and missed as Murphy’s hand slowly and steadily came up, firing at Goldfarb.

  Goldfarb fell back, hit.

  The echoes still rolled across the hills.

  “Mama, Mama,” Goldfarb said, rolling around, holding his stomach. He was weeping.

  The third man, Juan Ybarra, ran from the bushes to Murphy.

  Murphy was trying to raise the gun again. He was looking at Ybarra and trying to point the gun. His eyes were totally mad and would not focus anymore.

  Esposito was trying to shoot at Murphy again, with Ybarra in the way. He had an erection and his hands shook.

  Goldfarb continued to weep.

  The shots were still echoing.

  Birds were rising from the trees, flapping their wings noisily, twittering with anxiety. A crow cawed angrily.

  Murphy’s gun hand dropped. His mad eyes went empty.

  “Mama!” Goldfarb screamed. “I’m sorry!”

  Esposito and Ybarra ran lithely down the hill.

  “Mama,” Goldfarb wept. “Not me. Please. I’m sorry.”

  The birds swept down the hill, flapping.

  A black Mustang came up the hill. Esposito and Ybarra leapt out, and ran around to the back, and opened the trunk compartment.

  “Not me, please,” Goldfarb was protesting.

  Esposito and Ybarra lifted Detective Mendoza, gagged with adhesive tape, out of the trunk and carried him onto the lawn. He was dazed but his eyes were aware and frightened.

  Esposito ran over to Murphy and took his gun. Standing there, he fired twice into Mendoza’s head. He put the gun back in Murphy’s hand.

  Ybarra tore the adhesive tape off Mendoza’s mouth. It came away bloodstained.

  Goldfarb stopped crying and was still.

  Ybarra retched, almost puked, caught himself. He stood white-faced, breathing hard.

  Esposito picked up Murphy’s package, a brown paper bag. He opened it, found a box within, raised the lid. He inserted a finger and tasted.

  “The Jew,” he said.

  Ybarra looked at him, shaking.

  “Get on the stick,” Esposito said. “We can’t leave the Jew; he doesn’t fit.”

  Ybarra stood looking at him. “Come out of it,” Esposito said. “Help me with the Jew.”

  They carried Goldfarb into the back of the car.

  They drove off.

  Starhawk landed lightly on the lawn, running as he alighted. He ran into the house and to the bedroom. He found what he expected in the closet, another box, and tasted it. He ran softly, on the balls of his feet, back outside. He leapt, caught the roo
f, and pulled himself upward. He disappeared into the trees.

  The two dead men sprawled on the lawn.

  Birds began to return.

  Elapsed time since Murphy had come out the door was three minutes and forty seconds.

  THE SEA! THE SEA!

  Rolypolyboys tell lasses.

  —SIMON MOON,

  “HAWKFULLEST CONVENTIONS EVER”

  The loudroaring sea was calling. The moon was full, the Gentry were active, the howl of the wind was as mournful as a 1950s poem. Markoff Chaney, unable to sleep, sat up in his YMCA bed and hatched mischief.

  Through leaflets nailed on walls around Orange County, he had managed to create a Committee to Nuke the Whales, something that appealed to a lot of rich-wingers purely and simply on the grounds that it would make the eco-nuts and liberals scream. The Committee was an outstanding success; after only a year it had forty-two members. This was enough, together with such an outrageous cause, to get maximum media attention—Chaney was aware that anything, however small, can get the eye of the media if it’s repulsive enough—and the eco-nuts and liberals were screaming.

  Good; but now for something equally abominable on the other side.

  Chaney contemplated the Radical Lesbians wistfully. He felt like Voltaire contemplating God; if the Radical Lesbians hadn’t existed, he would have had to invent them. But what could he offer along those lines to balance the Committee to Nuke the Whales? The Child Molesters’ Liberation Front? That couldn’t begin to compete with “Figs” Newton’s Necrophile Liberation Front. The Council of Armed Cocaine Abusers? Nobody would believe it….

  The midget suddenly remembered the Council of Armed Rabbis he had used in his letter to Dr. Frank Dashwood of Orgasm Research. He had meant to follow up on that. Gaining access to heavily guarded nuclear plants to tamper with the coolant systems had kept him so busy lately that he had almost forgotten the damnable Dashwood and his shitheel statistics.

  Chaney was awake most of the night planning a campaign to bring quantum wobble into Dashwood’s charts and graphs.

  When he finally slept his tiny body curled into the orgonomic spiral and he looked as innocent as a schoolboy.

  He awoke in the morning full of piss and vinegar.

  The sea! The sea! Waving their long green hair, the sea hags were calling him. Finding a dark-lit bar, he ducked into the phone booth, attached his Blue Box equipment, and soon had a Washington operator convinced he was a White House official on important business.

  “This is a call from the White House,” the operator told the secretary at Orgasm Research. “The President is waiting on another line. He wishes to talk to Dr. Dashwood at once.”

  “I—I’ll put you through at once,” said Ms. Karrige, quite awed and flustered. The midget listened in glee as the phone rang.

  “F-F-Frank Dashwood,” came the doctors voice, rather breathlessly.

  “This is Ezra Pound of the Fair Play for Bad Ass Committee,” the midget said, shifting his story now that he had the victim on the line. “Your name has been given to us as a leader of the scientific community, and, quite frankly, we are looking for all the distinguished support we can get for our next full-page ad in the Sunday News-Times-Post. I assume you’re aware of the plight of Bad Ass,” he said significantly, bluffing, of course (but with some assurance, since every place in the world had some plight or other by 1984).

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Dr. Dashwood said evasively. “Why don’t you send me your literature and I’ll give it a careful reading.”

  “Doctor,” the midget said sternly, “if you were living in Bad Ass, wouldn’t you want action now?”

  “Well, undoubtedly, but if you’ll just send me your literature …”

  (“Oh, Ace, darling, darling,” a female voice near the phone said distinctly.)

  There was a startled pause; the midget deliberately let it drag out until the doctor spoke again.

  “Er, mark the envelope to my personal attention. You can be sure that the Bad Ass crisis has been very much on my mind. Terrible, simply terrible. But ah now I must be back to my business—”

  (“Fuck my cunt, Ace! Oh, fuck my cunt!”)

  “Doctor,” the midget said sternly, “are you fornicating while you’re talking to me? Is that your answer, sir, to the desperate people of Bad Ass?”

  (“Now, now!!!” the voice screeched. “Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus NOW!!!!!!!!”)

  Beautiful, the midget thought; I couldn’t have called at a better time. “Dr. Dashwood,” he said stiffly, “I don’t think you are really the sort who will add stature to the Fair Play for Bad Ass Committee.” He hung up jarringly.

  Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

  He set off for the post office and Stage Two of his campaign, smiling all the way—except once when he encountered one of the giant women, walking her enormous Saint Bernard, and he prudently crossed the street.

  THE DREADED NEUROLOGICAL ARMY

  Being keys themselves, their keylessness does not matter.

  —RICHARD ELLMAN, Ulysses on the Liffey

  On March 2, 1984, Simon Moon found a peculiarity while scanning the Beast’s memory banks for the Chicago police.

  There seemed to be two possible totals for the number of police officers in Chicago.

  Simon was intrigued. He began searching all the Chicago police records. What he found was so interesting that he mentioned it to Clem Cotex, whom he happened to be meeting for lunch that day.

  Cotex was not concerned with things as mundane as police records, so it took a while before he heard what Simon was saying.

  “Hold it,” Clem said when it finally registered. “Did you say 198?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Simon said. “There are pay vouchers for 198 officers less than there are uniforms for. In other words, there are 198 cops in Chicago who aren’t being paid. Weird, huh?”

  “One hundred ninety-eight,” Cotex repeated, eyes wide. “The exact number … Were they all over the department, these extras, or were they clustered?”

  “That’s even stranger,” Simon said. “They’re all in the Red Squad….”

  That same day Markoff Chaney was hiding in a coffee urn at Orgasm Research, hatching further mischief.

  The clock struck midnight; the cleaning women left; and out crept Chaney with an evil grin.

  Alas, he was not the only intruder that night, for as he padded lightly down the hall he suddenly heard a hoarse voice in one of the laboratories.

  “Better than human, are you, you @*)@’&¢ing #$%&’#er? Better than human, my %$#&! Take this, you $%#)*$#-eating #$%%$*er!”

  The voice was near inarticulate with rage, but it was clearly that of a jealous male, as any ethologist would easily recognize. Markoff slowly opened the door and peeked around the corner.

  There in the dim light, fully dressed and in his wrong mind, stood the idol of millions, the world’s leading rock guitarist, Knorton (“Grassy”) Knoll, feverishly working with a monkey wrench upon an object the likes of which Markoff Chaney had never seen—a Giacometti robot with a gigantic human phallus.

  “I’ll take you apart, you $%$#,” the demented rock musician was muttering. “I’ll tear your $%$@¢ out by its roots, I will.” And he continued his assault, gargling and panting like one obsessed—which he was. “Man against machine,” he gasped. “First they out-think us, now they out-fuck us. It’s time for all-out war, by $%*@$….”

  Markoff watched, silent as a cat, until the hebephrenic cuckold was finished with his foul work, and the machine stood, a heap of scrap metal, with the phallus removed. Then, after the musician slouched off into the night, the midget crept into the room and carefully wrote on the wall in stark purple crayon:

  THE PIGEONS IN B. F. SKINNER’S

  LABORATORIES ARE POLITICAL PRISONERS.

  RELEASE THEM OR FURTHER ACTIONS WILL

  FOLLOW.

  EZRA POUND, FOR

  THE DREADED NEUROLOGICAL ARMY (DNA)

  Spur-of-the-moment inspiration was h
is specialty.

  “In the typical Beethoven scherzo,” Justin Case explains with precise emphasis, “the elements are so mingled that, even though some may be the musical equivalent of cries of pain or grief, the total construction is both grotesque and gay.”

  Like most rock musicians, “Grassy” Knoll was a Second Circuit neurogenetic type, quite incapable of the Machiavellian mentations of Third Circuit schemers like Markoff Chaney. When “Grassy” carried Ulysses away from Orgasm Research, he planned only on throwing it in the first garbage can he passed. On the spur of the moment, he threw it in an alley instead.

  There it was found by a cat named Acapulco Gold—an ugly yellow Tom belonging to San Francisco’s best-known gossip columnist. The cat, with typical perversity, dragged it home.

  The columnist was at work on a book of reminiscences (The Roving I, he planned to call it) when his wife staggered in from the kitchen, white-faced but with a devilish grin. “Honey,” she said coaxingly, “come see what the cat dragged in….”

  Now, it so happened that the columnist was (like most writers in capitalist society) abominably underpaid, and, like Hassan i Sabbah X, he knew a one-of-a-kind item when he saw it. “This,” he pronounced, “will bring a pretty penny, when I find the right buyer.”

  He found the right buyer at police court only two nights later, when a tip informed him that the notorious Eva Gebloomencraft had been arrested again, this time for putting laughing gas in the air-conditioning system at a benefit concert for the Epileptic Liberation Front.

  The infamous Eva did not get called right away; the columnist had to sit through a dreary hearing on a black man who had caused a riot in a bar, throwing sixty fits and screaming that only a few minutes ago he had been a white atomic scientist at Los Alamos. When this obvious lunatic was finally removed from the court in a straitjacket (still shouting atomic secrets which he had evidently learned somewhere in the early stages of his delusion), Eva’s case was called.