Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  But then, suddenly (hashish is full of surprises) Simon was weeping, remembering his father, Old Tim Moon, who had been a Wobbly organizer all his life, and Tim was singing “Joe Hill” again:

  The copper bosses killed you, Joe

  I never died, said he

  “Oh, Dad,” Simon said aloud. “Why did you have to die, before I ever knew how much I loved you?” And suddenly he was all alone in an empty living room, weeping like an old man whose family and friends were all dead, holding his Social Security check and wondering: Where is the Federal bureau in charge of distributing love?

  Which was absurd: Simon had lots of friends, and he was just being morbid.

  “Oh, Dad”—he sniffed one more time—“I miss you.”

  And then he stopped crying and went and put the Fugs’ record of “Rameses the Second Is Dead, My Love” on the stereo. And floated with the music and the hash into a Country-and-Western Egyptian paradise:

  He’s walking the fields where the Blessed live

  He’s gone from Memphis to Heeeeaav-en!

  * * *

  “Well?” Mary Margaret Wildeblood prompted, a bit impatiently. She was naked on Williams’s bed and had been Lourding herself, not vigorously, just gently, very gently, not getting too excited yet, merely trying to get him excited.

  “Just a minute just a minute,” Williams said, sitting in his drawers on the side of the bed, one sock in his hand. It wasn’t the transsex thing that was delaying him; he was still struggling with the New Idea she had given him back at the Three Lions. “It isn’t just poisoning,” he said absently. “Anything that shocks the whole neuroendocrine system might do it. Yes, of course. Artificially induced imprint vulnerability.”

  Mary Margaret seized his hand and placed it firmly between her thighs. “Imprint that,” she said coyly.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, caressing her absently. “But just listen a minute. Orgasm does it um I think. No, just the first orgasm. Right? You keep repeating the pattern of the first orgasm….”

  “I don’t,” Mary Margaret said. “Just up there a bit, on my Atkinson there, there, ah Christ.”

  “Yes yes you don’t and a lot of people I know don’t,” he said. “Yes. Um? But the people whose sexual patterns keep changing are a minority, certainly. They’ve changed their imprints somehow. Um. Yes, yes. Oh, my God!”

  “What is it?” Mary Margaret was becoming cross; his hand had stopped moving entirely.

  “Sorry,” he said, resuming the gentle stimulation on her Atkinson and the outer lips of her Feinstein. “I just realized some people keep changing their ideas too. They’ve loosened the semantic imprints. My God, that’s why conditioning theory is inadequate. Don’t you see the conditioned reflexes are built onto the imprints….”

  “God God God oh sweet Jesus God”

  “It’s a shock to the whole system. People who’ve had near-death or clinical death experiences. Shipwrecked sailors. And oh Jesus I call myself an anthropologist and I never got it before, rites of initiation of course that’s what they’re all about of course making new imprints….”

  “Oh God oh God darling darling”

  “Yes yes, I love you, new imprints of course, yes yes are you coming on my little darling”

  “God God GOD!!!”

  “Ah sweet little darling was it good? Ah yes you look so sweet now there’s nothing as lovely as that post-Millett expression but about those imprint circuits—”

  “Shut up and Briggs me please darling”

  And so, still reflecting on shock and imprint vulnerability and the changing of sexual-semantic imprints, Blake Williams began Briggsing a person who had been masculine for almost all the years they had known each other, wondering just how queer this was, really.

  “Incidentally,” Dr. Dashwood asked, “what do you think the Hammerklavier is all about?”

  Bertha Van Ation and he were sitting at the kitchen table now, sipping a little peach brandy he had found still remaining in the cabinet, and munching Ritz crackers.

  Dr. Van Ation brushed some auburn hairs back from her forehead. “The Black Hole,” she said promptly.

  “Ah you mean he was feeling dragged down into something he couldn’t escape?” Dr. Dashwood suddenly remembered he wanted to look up Jan (or was it Hans?) Zelenka.

  “No, not that aspect of it.” Bertha munched and frowned thoughtfully. “The suspension of all the cosmological laws. The end of space. The end of time. The end of causality.”

  Dashwood smiled. “Some people thought it was the end of music when it was first performed,” he said. “You might be on the right track.”

  “Why thank you sir said she.” Bertha grinned. “You really think I’m dragging my own astronomy into the music department.”

  “You have every right to,” he said. “We all see and hear through our own filters. To me, the Hammerklavier sounds like an unsuccessful attempt at Tantric sex. And the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies sound like monumentally successful attempts. That’s me dragging my own speciality into the music department.”

  “You are a doll.”

  “And you’re a living doll.”

  “Isn’t sex great?”

  “If God invented anything better,” Dashwood said, quoting an old proverb and adapting it to the Feminist age, “She kept it to Herself.”

  “And how did I score on your scale?”

  “Ten Spelvins of Sincerity, Sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness. No, make that eight Havens. You went off the scale.”

  In Hollywood, Carol Christmas, the Blond Goddess of everybody’s fantasies, was sleeping alone for once.

  She was still involved in 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.

  The quantum perturbations pulsed gently through her atoms, stimulating her molecules, rejuvenating her cells, providing a very satisfactory Trip for her whole neuroendocrine system, and enriching her dreams vastly.

  It was perfect Tantric sex, and she wasn’t even consciously aware of it.

  This was happening to her, and had been happening to her since the release of Deep Mongolian Steinem Job, because she was the Blond Goddess in so many fantasies.

  All over the world, as she slept and even while she was awake in the daytime, the quantum inseparability principle (QUIP) stimulated her gently, because all over the world, every hour, 250,000,000 lonely men were Lourding themselves while looking at photographs of her.

  Back in New York, Polly Esther Doubleknit was wandering around her apartment stark-naked.

  Her lover of the evening was sound asleep in the bedroom, but Polly Esther was wakeful and thinking of twenty dozen things at once, like the Second Oswald in Hong Kong and whether fish ever get seasick and how splendidly heavenly it had felt when her lover’s tongue was up inside her Feinstein and what was the name of the third Andrews Sister—Maxine and Laverne and who?—and Silent Tristero’s Empire and why so many things come in threes, not just Maxine and Laverne and what’s-her-name but Curly and Larry and Moe; and Tom, Dick, and Harry; and Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet; and Groucho, Chico, and Harpo; and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; and Past, Present, and Future; and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner; and the three witches in Macbeth; and the three brothers who start on the same quest in all the old fairy tales; and the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary; and of course the Big Three, Pops, J.C., and Smokey; and maybe she should cut down on those diet pills; it was absurd to be wandering around at three in the morning thinking in threes.

  And then there was up-down, back-forward, and right-left, the three dimensions in space; and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod; and the Three Wise Men, Whozit, and Whatzis-name and Melchior; and Peter, Jack, and Martin, the three brothers in Swift’s Tale of a Tub; and Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the Kingston Trio; and Friends, Romans, Countrymen, which was not only a triad, but a progressive triad, one beat, two beats, three beats, one, two, three, just like that, and she would definitely cut down on the diet pills.

  Polly Esther finall
y put a record on the stereo, turning the volume down to low so as not to waken her lover in the bedroom.

  She picked the Hammerklavier sonata, not out of coincidence or propinquity or even synchronicity, but just because it was her favorite of Beethoven’s piano pieces. It was her favorite because she couldn’t understand it, no matter now often she played it. It was the musical equivalent of a Zen koan to her, endlessly fascinating because endlessly enigmatic.

  The stark, discordant opening bars drove all wandering threesomes out of her mind, narrowing her attention to Ludwig’s urgent if incomprehensible universe of structured sound. She was swept into it again, as always, swept along by emotions so deep and yet so austere that nobody has ever been able to name them. Once she had invited the world’s three most admired concert pianists to a party, just so she could ask each of them, privately, what they thought the Hammerklavier meant. As she expected, she had gotten three wildly conflicting answers. Another time she had ordered every book in print about Beethoven from Doubleday’s on Fifty-third Street at Fifth Avenue and looked up Hammerklavier in the index of each. She got forty-four different opinions that way.

  The music hammered and surged along, carrying her through pain and frustration and loneliness to land, again and again, at things beyond such simple feelings, things that she sometimes felt were extraterrestrial or non-Euclidean or somehow beyond normal human perception. There are some kinds of knowledge, Ludwig had once claimed, that can only be expressed in music, not in any other art, not in science or philosophy. This was the most arcane of such knowledge, Ludwig’s most intimate secret, and maybe you weren’t entitled to understand it until you had been to the strange dark places of the psyche out of which he had created it.

  It was the childbirth process, of course—and Polly Esther did not consider it a miracle that Ludwig could understand that, he was so obviously bi, at least empathetically—the labor pains going on and on until the act of creation seemed impossible, you would never get there, and yet somehow even in the blocked hopeless feeling you were getting there; and it was all the terrors of his childhood, all those cruel beatings by his alcoholic father, remembered and not forgiven, never forgiven; but it was also that cold, analytical, almost scientific side of Ludwig, remorselessly following his experiment to its inexorable conclusion: he had discovered or rediscovered that the piano is, among other things, a percussion instrument and he was following the logic of that insight, as he followed every musical idea, to wherever it led him, to whatever abyss.

  And, after thinking all that, Polly Esther knew she still didn’t understand the Hammerklavier; but as it banged and howled to its defiant conclusion, she got a flash of one aspect she had never registered before. It was the last scene of Papillon, when after twelve years of horror, Steve McQueen finally escapes from Devil’s Island on his homemade raft of coconut shells and floats off into the Atlantic, as Ludwig floats off at the end of the Hammerklavier, shouting to the hostile sea and the indifferent sky:

  “I’M STILL HERE, you sons-of-bitches!”

  And, after that, Polly Esther was cleaned out, drained, purified; no more triangles haunted her. She turned off the stereo, yawned contentedly, and padded back to her bed.

  Her lover was still sleeping, twisted around in the covers so that her right leg stuck out, decorated with goose pimples from the cold air. Polly Esther rearranged the bedding to cover the girl, and climbed in beside her, hugging her tenderly once, but not enough to waken her.

  Then there were only a few remembered bars of the Hammerklavier and one more trio drifted up (Wyatt, Morgan, and Vergil, the Earp brothers), and then Polly Esther slept.

  PART ONE

  COMING TO A HEAD

  Art imitates nature.

  —ARISTOTLE

  Nature imitates art.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  WHAT—ME INFALLIBLE?

  The first entry of sin into the mind occurs when, out of cowardice or conformity or vanity, the Real is replaced by a comforting lie.

  —POPE STEPHEN,

  Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas

  Dr. Dashwood, as usual, began Friday by scanning the mail.

  The first letter said:

  THIS IS AN ENTIRELY NEW KIND OF CHAIN LETTER!!!

  We represent the Fertilizer Society of Unistat. It will not cost you a cent to join. Upon receipt of this letter, go to the address at the top of the list and Burger on their front lawn. You won’t be the only one there, so don’t be embarrassed.

  Then make five copies of this letter, leaving the top name off and adding your name and address at the bottom. Send them to five of your best friends and urge them to do the same. You won’t get any money, but within five weeks, if this chain is not broken, you will have 3,215 strangers Burgering on your lawn. (Here Comes Everybody!)

  Your reward next summer will be the greenest lawn on the block.

  DO NOT BREAK THIS CHAIN! Everybody who has broken it has within five days suffered acute, prolonged, and inexplicable constipation which responds to no known laxative and requires, in each case, intervention of the apple corer or its surgical equivalent.

  Dr. Dashwood made a mistake. He assumed this was another hoax by the enigmatic Ezra Pound.

  Polly Esther Doubleknit was a devout Roman Catholic and went to Confession that Saturday.

  “I did a naughty-naughty with a Secretary again,” she said.

  “How shocking,” said her Confessor in a profoundly bored tone. “Was she cute?”

  “She was an absolutely adorable little blond creature.”

  “I hope you both enjoyed yourselves,” said the priest. “But why are you telling me about this hedonic little escapade?”

  Polly Esther whispered, “I guess I feel guilty. I was raised Baptist, you know.”

  “But you’re a Catholic now,” the priest, Father Starhawk, said. “And as a convert, you probably know the theology better than people who were born into it. Now, tell me: What is a sin?”

  “A sin,” Polly Esther recited promptly, “is to knowingly hurt a sentient being.”

  “Except where it would be a greater sin, a greater hurt, to refrain.” Father Starhawk went on. “That’s why it’s no sin to kill a virus, remember. Now, did you hurt your cute little blond playmate?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Did you make her happy?”

  “I think so,” Polly Esther said wistfully. “She wants to see me again Monday night.”

  “Then I think you made her happy,” Father Starhawk said. “How many times did she reach Millett?”

  “Six or seven, I think.”

  “Then I’m sure you made her happy,” the priest said kindly. “As a mere male, I must say I envy the female capacity for multiple Millett. Now, obviously, your little party with this Secretary was not harmful, but joyful. So it was not a sin, but the opposite of a sin, a work of virtue. And you know the teachings of Moral Theology well enough to understand that, so why are you wasting my time?”

  “I guess it’s just my Baptist upbringing,” Polly Esther murmured.

  “You must clear your mind of all superstition,” the priest said, “because such nonsense muddies the intellect and keeps you from thinking clearly about Real moral issues. Now, do you have something Real to confess?”

  “Yes,” Polly Esther said nervously.

  “Well?” Father Starhawk’s jovial tone suddenly turned stern.

  “I think some of my money comes from slum properties.” Polly choked, then sighed deeply. It was a relief to say it, to have it out in the open.

  “You think?” the priest cried angrily. “You haven’t found out for sure? How long have you had this suspicion?”

  “Since about a week ago last Thursday.”

  “And what efforts have you made to find the facts about this grave matter, which may be, I remind you, a mortal sin?”

  Polly Esther trembled. “I tried,” she said, “but the way corporations are these days … I get twelve different stories every time I ask
the lawyers … but I really think we own some of the worst parts of Newark.”

  The priest was silent for a long time. “It’s my fault,” he said finally. “I was never strict enough with you. What is the first moral law about money?”

  “To ensure that no human being was being hurt in acquiring it, and if anyone was hurt, to return the money to them and make whatever other restitution is morally necessary.”

  “To ensure,” Father Starhawk repeated solemnly. “Saint Francis Xavier said that many centuries ago, a great and holy saint, and he specifically instructed priests to be certain that nobody received Absolution until they had given up all monies acquired from usury or other social injustices. That was long before Pope Stephen, my child, and it is the moral backbone of the Church. I cannot give you Absolution until you have examined your conscience on this matter and made whatever change is morally necessary.”

  “I’ll have a special Board meeting and get to the bottom of it,” Polly Esther said. “Thank you, Father, for restoring my vision of Reality.”

  “That is the function of the Church,” Father Starhawk said.

  And then he added, softly:

  “Pray for me, please. I am a sinner, also.”

  Father Starhawk was a Cherokee Indian and a Stephenite.