Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  “Zeno of Elias on the other hand my dear reminds us that before the brick can ever hit Krazy it must first travel half of the distance from Ignatz’s paw to Krazy’s head, but before it can do that it must cover half of that distance that is to say a quarter of the original distance …”

  THE FETUS PEOPLE

  John Disk had originally become involved in morality and ideology due to the Fetus People, as Pussycat genially labeled the antiabortion movement of the 1970s. The Fetus People did not like this description; they called themselves the Right to Life Committee.

  Disk was in his teens then and had the usual hormones flowing through his adolescent primate body. He thought he was continually tormented by sinful desires, not understanding the role of testosterone in pubescent primates.

  He was a member of the True Roman Catholic Church, a splinter group formed after Vatican II had taken the main body of the Romish religion off into heresy and modernism. The members were survivors of the Irish-American fascism that had once rallied behind Father Coughlin, Father Feeney, and Senator Joe McCarthy. They regarded the English Mass as being almost as sacrilegious as abortion and Social Security as only one step from Stalinism.

  The Fetus People or the Right to Life Committee was an amalgamation of True Roman Catholics with the kind of Fundamentalists Protestants seldom seen north of Bad Ass, Texas. They were, like all primate ideologists and moralists, chiefly concerned with finding no-good shits and dumping on them.

  They believed the abortionists were in league with all the other no-good shits, including the Rockefellers, the international Communist sex educators, life-extension researchers, cattle mutilators, NASA, and the intergalactic Black Magicians of the Illuminati, under the leadership of the infamous Cagliostro the Great.

  They also believed that the Unistat government had never waged an unjust war, that the hair of the seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, and most of what they read in Readers Digest.

  By 1982 the legal struggles over abortion were over and the whole issue seemed as remote as the War of the Roses. This was because a 100 percent effective morning-after contraceptive had been on the market since 1980 and had proven so effective that requests for abortions had dwindled to virtually zero.

  By 1983 the economic demand for abortions was about as microscopic as the demand for buggy whips in 1923, after every town in Unistat had switched from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. Another quantum jump in sociology had occurred.

  Actually, the morning-after pill was a chemical abortifacient, as any biochemist knew. The biochemists never talked about this in public, since they were all agnostic liberals and it was against their principles to either lie by denying the facts or to help the Fetus People by telling the truth.

  As a result of this policy by the biochemists only a handful of the Fetus People turned their attack against the pill when abortion was no longer a live issue. Since the resultant of the morning-after pill was, to the human eye, no different from ordinary menstruation, opposing this seemed exceedingly eccentric even for Fetus People.

  The majority of the Fetus People, deprived of their raison d’être, began splitting amoebalike into factions and subfactions.

  Some few of them, who had really been concerned with the rights of the unborn, became concerned at last with the rights of the born and launched new groups to oppose the surviving vestiges of war, capital punishment, or poverty in backward parts of the planet.

  The majority, who had been mainly preoccupied with finding no-good shits and dumping on them, joined organizations like NOODLE (National Organization Organized for Decent Literature and Entertainment) or the First Bank of Religiosophy.

  John Disk drifted into White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, a group mostly concerned with combating parapsychology, psychics, UFO demons, sex educators, cattle mutilators, and, of course, the loathsome Cagliostro the Great.

  ROSENFELT HAS DESTROYED ME

  In 1941 the Carter Brothers Carnival played Xenia, Ohio, and some students from Antioch College tried to throw Cagliostro a whammy with a dragon-headed Japanese condom. His handling of that challenge aroused the admiration and awe of old carny hands; and they were even more amazed by his friendship with Rambo, the lion.

  Sandoz, the lion tamer, in particular, was astonished at Cagliostro’s ability to sit for hours in the cage, he and the lion staring into each other’s eyes like lovers.

  “Are you hypnotizing him?” Sandoz asked once.

  “Not at all,” Cagliostro said, laughing. “He’s hypnotizing me. Or maybe we’re just learning to get outside our own skins. That’s what life is all about, you know—making windows, breaking out of every box …”

  The failure of the students to shake up Cagliostro led a few professors to come over and try various scientific devices not likely to be included in any standard verbal code. He placidly identified rheostats, Wheatstone bridges, pH meters, Bunsen burners, and even a gyroscope. The next night they were back with a chemical formula never before synthesized.

  “Are you presently able to see the particular object that I have been given at this time?” the girl asked.

  And the blindfolded Cagliostro replied calmly, “A test tube. With some blue liquid in it. A copper sulphate compound.”

  “That’s a damned good code,” the professors agreed, more fervently this time, as they drove back to Antioch.

  (There’s no hope of salvaging anything—the suicide note had said—and you’re going to have to make it on your own, just like I did. Rosenfelt has destroyed me and he’ll destroy free enterprise.)

  The carnival was in Biloxi, Mississippi, that winter, and Cagliostro was trying his new gig, combining Houdini-style escapes with his mentalism act. He had been locked in a trunk, and the local police cooperatively used their best padlocks to secure the chains. He settled down to slow, regular yoga breathing—the escape actually took only a few minutes, but he was following Houdini’s formula that the audience was more impressed if they had to wait a half hour for the miracle. The yoga conserved the oxygen in the trunk against any possibility that panic, toward the end, might force him into rapid breathing. He timed the breaths against a slow AUMMMMMM, his mind drifted back to Park Avenue and a black maid whose framed picture of a Catholic-looking Jesus sometimes in certain lights seemed to have horns, and he relaxed his hands and feet (there can be no muscle tension in the torso if the extremities are totally limp), bringing her face back clearly, and he heard a voice shouting, “We’re at war! The Japanese went and bombed some place called Pearl Harbor in Honolulu!”

  Cagliostro was always carrying around a book called Homo Ludens in those days.

  “Is that about faggots?” Sandoz asked him once.

  Cagliostro laughed. “No,” he said. “It’s Latin. It means … uh, you know it’s hard to translate … Man the Game Player, I suppose.”

  Sandoz grinned. “You can learn all about that just by watching the marks,” he said. “I been a carny damn near twenty years now and I swear from the things I seen, you could sit down with a blackjack table and a sign saying ‘THIS GAME IS CROOKED,’ and half the marks would still sit down opposite you and try to beat you. A mark wants to lose,” he concluded profoundly, almost with anger.

  “No,” Cagliostro said. “The mark wants to be hypnotized. He wants to enter the world of magic, with mirrors and blue smoke and shifting shapes, and he’s willing to be swindled, just to have a glimpse of that world.”

  “Is that what that book says?” Sandoz asked.

  “More or less,” Cagliostro said. “In sociological jargon.”

  JUMPED BY JESUS

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood still couldn’t get to sleep, and The Search for the Historical Vlad was pishposh. She got out of bed and padded over to the desk to glance at the latest volumes that had arrived for review.

  FROM CALIGARI TO VLAD

  Another pretentious volume of neo-Freudian film criticism by George Dorn, obviously cashing in on the
current fad. Rot.

  THE RADICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF SMOKEY STOVER

  Hmm? Marshall McLuhan again. Try a page:

  and the Notary Sojac sign, communicating much by its very inscrutability, is not alphabetical but ideogrammic, bringing tribal mystery to the electronic continuum, just as Chief Cash U. Nutt, true shaman that he is

  Fiddlefaddle. What else have we got?

  IN THE CASTLE OF VLAD

  Somebody else ripping off Marvin Gardens.

  CONTEMPORARIES OF VLAD

  I smell a fad in the making.

  PATTERNS OF FASCIST ART

  Who’s being dissected? Wagner, Pound, Celine, Riefenstahl, Vonnegut … Vonnegut? Oh: It’s by Kate Millett.

  JACKIE DID IT!

  The latest Kennedy assassination expose. Bosh.

  I AWAIT HIS RETURN

  By who? Rebecca Goodman. Didn’t she write that anthropology book a few years back, Golden Apples of something? What this time? Hm. Had her husband cryonically frozen at death. Hm.

  Well, let’s see. Millett, I guess.

  Beneath the veneer of chic liberalism, Vonnegut’s sexist prejudice reveals hm skip a bit refusal to recognize dialectic of capitalist blah blah blah a really sinister note enters with the chauvinist caricature of Montana Wildstack blah blah beneath the sentimentality a ruthless determination to subjugate and humiliate women

  Mary Margaret realized that she was getting horny again; any reference to subjugation and humiliation was likely to trigger that response in her. She stealthily removed the vibrator from the bureau drawer again, climbed back into bed with Patterns of Fascist Art, and then remembered a little bit of hashish left in the living room.

  “Perhaps a diagram would help,” Blake Williams said, getting a sketchpad and drawing rapidly:

  “This is ordinary causality, as we usually experience it,” he said, as Natalie stifled a yawn. “A causes B, which causes C, and so on. I go to Wildeblood’s party at A, and meet you, and we come here to B, and we discuss Krazy Kat at C, which leads to Schrödinger’s Cat at D. Got it?”

  “Yeah, the Gutenberg fix; the linear mode, as McLuhan calls it….”

  “Right you are. Now quantum causality, before the appearance of the epiphenomena of space and time, functions entirely differently if we trust Bell’s Theorem. It looks more like this.” And Williams sketches rapidly:

  “A ‘causes’ B, C, D, and E, but B also ‘causes’ A, C, D, and E, and C ‘causes’ A, B, D, and E … and so on. Got it …? All before the appearance of the space-time manifold.”

  “You mean it works everywhichway in time …”

  “No, it happens before time itself appears along with space as a by-product of the quantum mesh….”

  Brrrzzzzzzmmmmbrz the vibrator purrs along as Mary Margaret surrenders again to Him (to Him!) starting to compose a poem almost “Crush me in your Dionysian biceps, Jesus Lord” but that was perhaps a bit too Hopkins and the reality of it was beyond poetry (heresy: she could never admit that in literary circles) but the thrust and the purr and the agony and the ecstasy of it Lord Lord lord

  because she was remembering an old Sufi proverb about the three stages of the Path which were “Lord, use me” and then “Lord, use me but don’t break me” and then “Lord, I don’t care if you break me”

  and He was breaking her smashing her annihilating her the Great Magician of the Tarot naked on the bed as She rammed hir cock up his ass

  I AM CONFUSED

  To be is to be related.

  —CASSIUS KEYSER, Thinking About Thinking

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

  “So that the brick never moves, logically,” Williams says.

  “Yeah I had that in a class at the New School, ‘Paradox and Personality,’ it’s based on you know Relativistic Ego Therapy, we’re all Empedoclean concepts in social topology.” Natalie actually had received an A for the course.

  “In territorial topology my dear I um invented Relativists Ego Therapy,” Williams says, meaning: 7 created the course.

  “You’re that Professor Williams my God you’re famous at the new School.” Natalie was impressed.

  “And at Esalen um yes my dear but to the world at large—” Williams demurs.

  “Thank God I’m an atheist,” Joe Malik said fervently. “If I considered for even a moment for even a microsecond that the pretense of a demon might be functionally equivalent to the presence of a demon … Just change the t to an s …”

  But Marvin abandons the Britannica (never find what you really want in there) and undressing for bed fumbles at the radio for something bearable, only to hear

  I’m in love with Vlad the Impaler

  With Hitler and Nixon and Ahab the Whaler

  He quickly turns the dial (after a moment of pride at new-won fame and wincing at the cacophony of The Civic Monster), finding a classical station the end of the Ninth all those heavenly choirs singringinging at the Omega Point over a century before science discovered it (always read Nietzsche and listen to Ludwig, was one of his adages, for the long-range evolutionary perspective), pops a downer to take the edge off the coke jitters before they come, and slips under the covers remembering Linda’s mouth two inches four inches six inches nine goddamned inches gorgeous splat splat splat always splitting but always one, is it really? as Ludwig answers yes I will yes

  I never died said he

  “But the crowning insult to our simple-minded realism comes, of course, from our friends the physicists,” Williams explains. “If Krazy is Schrödinger’s Cat in the famous demonstration then my dear then we are really up the ontological creek without a paddle because when the brick is hurled she may be in any of several eigenstates, several mathematical probability matrices, in some of which the brick will certainly hit her and in some of which it will not.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  “Wow, indeed. To paraphrase Descartes: ‘I think; therefore, I am confused.’”

  ESCAPISM

  The first fame of Cagliostro began while he was touring with the U.S.O. during the war. He had entirely abandoned mentalism by then and his act depended entirely on escaping from everything the M.P.’s could devise to restrain him.

  Variety called him “the new Houdini” in 1945, just a few months before Hiroshima.

  His first arrest occurred in the fall of that year, possession of marijuana, the charges dismissed without a trial. (His agent’s connections, the Crane family lawyer, the fact that the Crane fortune had not been wiped out entirely when ORGASMOR dropped to the bottom of the Big Board, and judicious oiling of what Show Biz and underworld people call “tin mittens”—officials on the take—contributed to this happy consummation.) He was one of the first guests on The Ed Sullivan Show, but was never asked to return due to a 1948 “morals” arrest: the girl was quite young and an “act against nature” was alleged. Once again, money changed hands and there was no trial.

  His career was mostly “in the clubs” after that; Hollywood and TV were both in one of their chronic contractions of cowardice at the end of the decade.

  A second morals arrest, followed rapidly by a second pot bust, made him a little too hot for most club owners. Still—the crowds turned out wherever he appeared. The mob decided to set immediate money against caution, and he was allowed to go on working. Until his disastrous appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950.

  “You’re not a Communist, you hardly know any Communists, you could have sung like a bird without hurting yourself,” his agent said afterward. “Why did you have to do it, baby?”

  “Listen,” Crane said angrily. “Do you think I can get out of a fucking set of Junior G-Man handcuffs if I let one single jot of fear get into my head? You don’t understand. I can’t let anything scare me—especially not shit-heads like them.”

  “It’s your own funeral,” the agent replied glumly. “I’ll tell you the plain and varnished facts. You’re gonna end up like Chaplin. Two sex scandals, two drug scandals, and now this. You’re gonna e
nd up worse than Chaplin. You’re box-office poison, baby. From this day forward.”

  THE HEAD REVOLUTION

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  Although the HEAD Revolution transformed the Terran primates at the time of this ancient Romance, nobody knows when it actually began. Some trace it to certain Alchemical cults of the early Dark Ages; some say it did not properly start as an organized movement until neuropharmacology began to replace old-fashioned “psychology” in the late Dark Ages (i.e., just before the time of this epic novel); some try to find its origins in primitive shamanism and yoga.

  What is clear is that some primates on Terra began to transcend genetic four-circuit limitations many centuries, or even millennia, before true neuroscience appeared among them. Whether this was due to mutation, empirical hit-or-miss experimentation with alkaloid herbs, or other factors is unknown. In Egypt and China and other places, a few primates reported fifth-circuit raptures—the dawning of neurosomatic consciousness—two thousand or even three thousand years before the Space Age began.

  The picture is the same on all planets. A few biots suddenly rise above the eat-it-or-flee-it imprints of the amphibian biosurvival circuit, above the dominate-or-submit imprints of the mammalian territorial-emotional circuit, above the either/or logic of the hominid semantic circuit, above the “good” and “bad” values of the tribal sociosexual circuit. They have transcended infantile feeding programs, childish emotional programs, adolescent philosophizing, and adult “responsibility” (pack role) all at once.

  What has happened, of course, is that these biots have formed a fifth circuit in their brains. This is called the neurosomatic circuit because it allows conscious feedback between the nervous system (“mind,” in prescientific primate language) and the soma (“body”). In the larval stages of this Hedonic Revolution, every planet exhibits the same monotonous pattern: