How can you keep the facts clear and sharp-edged when this happens? "You really want me to Potter Stewart you right now on a public beach in broad daylight?" he asked, feeling like a fool.
The woodpecker went to work above them just then, banging away like a Rock drummer. Dashwood remembered from Nutley High School:
The woodpecker pecked on the outhouse door;
He pecked and he pecked till his pecker was sore.
"George, you're too serious. Don't you know how to play? Did you ever think that life is maybe a game? The world is a toy, George. I'm a toy. You conjured me out of your fantasies while you were Lourding-off in that jail cell last night. I'm a magic voodoo doll. You can do anything you want with me."
Dashwood shook his head. "I can't believe you. The way you're talking-it's not real."
"I always talk this way when I'm horny. It so happens that at such tender moments I'm more open to the vibrations from outer space. George, is the Tooth Fairy real? Is the thought of the Tooth Fairy a real thought? How is it different from the mental picture of my Brownmillers that you get when you imagine you can look right through my sweater? Does the fact that you can think of Potter Stewarting me and I can think of Potter Stewarting you mean that we are going to Potter Stewart? Or is the universe going to surprise us?"
"The universe is going to surprise you," Dashwood said. "I don't trust women with tommy guns who rave about Tooth Fairies and vibrations from outer space. I'm getting the hell out of here." He started to walk away.
"Listen, George," Mavis said earnestly. "You are about to walk into a completely different universe, one you might not like at all. Every quantum decision creates a whole new space-time manifold…"
"Oh, bullburger," he said, before she could go any further with that gibberish.
"You damned fool! You're walking out on the greatest adventure of our century!" She was almost shouting now. "Atlantis! Illumination! Leviathan! Hagbard Celine!"
Dashwood kept going.
"You asshole!" she screamed. "You're about to miss the best Steinem Job of your life."
He almost turned then, but this was all too bizarre for him. He continued down the asphalt road grimly, ignoring the yellow submarine that was beginning to surface offshore.
Blake Williams galloped past him suddenly, riding a horse with no wife and no mustache. He was Lassie (who was really a male dog in drag), but he was also Dashwood's father. Like the Gutmanhammett.
Then Furbish Lousewart came out of the lavatory wearing a laboratory smock. "The masses are female," he sneered, drawing a rotary saw out of his toolbox depository. He methodically began sawing off Dashwood's head.
"Give me head!" he screamed. "The whiteness of the wall! Gothin haven, annette colp us! Give me head!"
And then Linda Lovelace was there, with Dracula's old red-lined cape, starting to suck him, starting to suck the purity of essence from him, biting down hard hard hard, a blood-smeared mouth with canine fangs.
And he woke up.
He looked at the alarm clock blearily, still haunted by fangs and blood. Six-fifty-eight; the alarm would go off in two minutes.
I am Frank Dashwood. All that other was just a dream.
He depressed the alarm switch and put his naked feet on the cold floor, so he would not roll over and dream he was going to work.
Fangs and blood. Why do people see such films? Weird species, we are.
Dr. Dashwood staggered to the shower. White tile, white on white: the whiteness of the wall. Vibrations from outer space, she said. Not too hot, now: careful. Ah, that's good. Watch that it doesn't heat up too fast, though. Fangs and blood: average person has seen one hundred, maybe two hundred, of those films. Hundreds of hours of horror grooves in the brain: neurological masochism. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
He turned the hot-water spigot down quickly. Always does that: starts tepid and then boils you.
He leapt from the shower and began toweling. Oral sadism: she looked good enough to eat, we say. Little Red Riding Hood. Eatupus complex.
Dashwood surveyed his features in the mirror, combing his hair. As the world sees me: this not unhandsome, definitely nervous, middle-aged face.
Radio will bring me all the way back. Try KKHI, maybe catch some Vivaldi. Dashwood's Law: whenever you turn on KKHI, they're either playing Vivaldi or will play Vivaldi within fifteen minutes.
De de dum de dum de dee
De de dum de dum de dum dum dum
Sounds more like Bach. Wait: listen:
De de drum de drum de DRUM
Drum drum de droom de de
Wheeeee dumb de!
And that was the Concerto for Harp by Jan Zelenka. And now the news. In Bad Ass, Texas, School Superintendent B. S. Curve was murdered last night by a bombattached to the starter of his automobile. Superintendent Curve had been under attack by local clergy and the John Birch Society for proposing the teaching of the metric system in schools. In Washington, President K-
Dashwood snapped the radio off irritably. Whenever you want to hear some pleasant music, they break for the nws. Ah, well: time to head for the office, anyway.
De de dum de dum de dee… Where the hell did I put the key? Oh yes; alarm clock, next to. Dum de de:
sure sounded like Bach at first. Dum drum de dee! Really bounced along, music of that period. Baroque.
He started his car.
Crrrumph rumph rumph.
Oh, damn. Try again.
Crrrrrrrrrrrumph rumph a zoom.
Dashwood pulled out into the traffic. Always fails to ignite first time. Dum dum de. Zelenka, he said. Who the hell was Zelenka? Same period as Bach, I'm sure.
Dr. Dashwood turned onto Van Ness and headed for Orgasm Research: da dum da dum da dreee!
And drove straight into an entirely different kind of novel.
THE MAD ARAB
Qol: Hua Allahu achad; Allahu Assamad; lam yalid walam yulad; walam yakun lahu kufwan achad.
–al qoran
One day earlier and three thousand miles due east, Bonita ("Bonny") Benedict, a popular columnist for the New York News-Times-Post-Herald-Dispatch-Express-Mirror-Eagle, sat down to write her daily stream-of-consciousness. According to her usual procedure, Bonny began by flipping through her notebook. This usually served to fructify her imagination, but that day proved rather sterile. Items which had already been used were crossed out with large X's and what was left was weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. There was literally nothing timely or exciting enough for a lead.
Bonny was only stumped for a minute; then she remembered the ancient maxim of the great pioneer of modern journalism, Charles Foster Hearst: "If there isn't any news, invent some."
Ms. Benedict, whose hair would have been gray if she hadn't decided it was more chic to bleach it pure platinum-white, had lasted in the news game for forty years. She did not lack the faculty of imagination.
Bonny inserted a fresh sheet in the typewriter and began at once, trusting her years of experience to guide her. What emerged was:
Who is the man in Hong Kong who looks exactly like Lee Harvey Oswald? Believe it or not, darlings, that question is causing a lot of excitement among the members of the new Senate Committee on Congressional Committees on Assassinations. In case you forgot, they're the ones who are trying to find out why the various Congressional Committees on Assassinations couldn't find out anything. What they're asking each other is: Could the man in Hong Kong really be Oswald? And, if so, who was the double that got shot in Dallas? Doesn't it make your heads swim???
That was what was known as a fail-safe item. If (as was likely) the Senate Committee simply ignored it rather than fan the flames of rumor, many readers would believe it on the grounds that it had been printed and not denied. If, on the other hand, the Committee did deny it, even more people would believe it. A 1981 psychological survey had shown that 67 percent of the population experienced uncertainty, indecision, suspicion, or downright paranoia whenever they saw the words "government denial" in print.
<
br /> Bonny went on to use up the not-totally dreary items in her notebook, jazzing each one enough to give it a coat of sparkle, or at least of tinsel. But she still needed a zinger for the closing. She followed the sage advice of the prophet Hearst one more time and wrote:
Wasn't that Furbish Lousewart of the Purity of Ecology Party eating steak and drinking Manhattans (made with Southern Comfort, my dears!) at Sardi's last night? What would the Party regulars think of this flagrant disregard of POE principles?
Bonny, in her youth, had been a disciple of the famous feminist and psychologist Alberta Einstein. It was Ms. Einstein, in her epoch-making Neuropsychology, who introduced the concept that every brain constructs a different "island-reality" from the billions of signals it receives every minute. This concept had revolutionized the social sciences and even led Heisenberg to propose a similar relativity principle in physics. Bonny knew that the POE people lived in an island-reality where eating meat and drinking fermented spirits were atrocities comparable to ax murder or Burgering in the well. This item would make them hopping mad.
A columnist's career depends on amusing most of her readers most of the time and making some of them hopping mad some of the time.
The owner-publisher of the New York News-Times-irc was Polly Esther Doubleknit, relict of the late Dacron Doubleknit, the leisurewear king. When the leisurewear fad had peaked in the 1970s, Dacron had shrewdly used the cash flow to "diversify," as his accountant called it. Engulf and Devour, his competitors called it. When he died Dacron owned over a thousand retail stores coast to coast, a tapioca mine in Nutley, N.J. (a bad investment, that one, suggested by a plausible but Machiavellian midget), a large hunk of Canadian forestland, three South American governments (his leisurewear was thereafter made with very cheap labor), sixteen Congresspersons, three senators, a shipyard in Yellow Springs, Ohio (suggested by Eva Gebloomenkraft), seven state legislatures together with four other whorehouses in Nevada, and the New York News-Times-u.s.w.
Dacron died of a heart attack at fifty-two, brought on by anxiety about the amount of political corruption he was involved in. Dacron did not like to bribe public officials and hated the size of the bribes they all wanted, because he had been raised a Presbyterian. Unfortunately for him, he lived in an age of Terminal Bureaucracy and there was absolutely no way, no matter how many lawyers he hired, to find out if his corporations were, in any given instance, in violation of the law. There were too many laws, and they were written in language that guaranteed maximum ambiguity all around, so that lawyers (who wrote the laws) could always get jobs proving that the laws meant Yes, if they were being paid to prove that, or that the laws meant No, if they were being paid to prove that. Dacron never found out, for sure, whether he was one of the businessmen in the country operating 100 percent legally all the time or if he was in violation of so many statutes that he was subject to over a thousand years in prison; no two lawyers ever would agree about that. So Dacron bribed as many officials as possible to protect himself, and then gradually worried himself to death about the bribes being discovered someday.
Polly Esther, finding herself the heir of Dacron's farraginous empire, quickly appointed professional executives to manage most of it; but she took over the newspaper personally. She was a fan of a TV show called Low Grant and rather fancied herself as becoming another Mrs. Pynchon.
Mrs. Pynchon was the publisher of the paper on the Low Grant show. She was tough enough to eat barbed wire and spit tacks, but she was also cool and elegant. Polly Esther wanted to be like that.
She also had a secret desire to be the other Mrs. Pynchon, the wife of the novelist. She had read one of Pynchon's novels once while dieting, and maybe she had used just a little bit too many of those diet pills, because she believed every word of it. She was still convinced that the baskets on the street saying WASTE meant We Await Silent Tristero's Empire.
Naturally, Polly Esther believed both of Bonny Benedict's fictions of the day. She had long suspected that both Oswald and Lousewart were agents of Silent Tristero's Empire.
Polly Esther was about forty-two but she could easily pass for thirty-two. This was because she was very rich.
Once a year Polly Esther went to a ranch in Nevada which looked like a luxury motel and treated its guests like the inmates of a concentration camp. They fed Polly Esther on a diet what would barely sustain life and tasted horrible. They made her exercise several hours a day. A brutal staff insulted her, mocked her, bullied her, and got her back on her feet again, running, every time she thought she'd drop from exhaustion. They also shot her full of Gerovitol, methamphetamines, and vitamins three times a day. They charged her fifty-five hundred dollars.
Some of this actually had a slight effect on her body, but most of it was directed at her mind. She came out of this two-week ordeal, each year, convinced that she had suffered enough to deserve to be beautiful for another fifty weeks.
She was indeed beautiful, and had been a flaming redhead for so long that only a few people in Xenia, Ohio, remembered her as a dark-haired girl who had to leave town because of a scandal in the local Baptist church choir.
The robot who traveled under the name "Frank Sullivan" was in New York the next morning and saw Bonny Benedict's column. "Oh, Burger, Lourde, and corruption," he muttered, the newspaper trembling in his hands.
He immediately canceled his business in New York and hopped an orbital to Washington, where he leapt into a cab, sped to Naval Intelligence, and galloped into the office of Admiral Mounty ("Iron Balls") Babbit.
Babbit was in charge of "Dungeon and Dragon" operations, including the "Sullivan" matter; these were machinations so murky that they were not even known to those normally cleared for covert operations.
"How the holy Potter Stewart did she get hold of this?" pseudo-Sullivan demanded, waving Bonny Benedict's column.
Babbit stopped breathing for a minute as he read the Second Oswald item.
"Jesus and Mary Christ," he said finally, in a hollow tone. 'The Briggsing Bryanting Frankel, she must have a source in the CIA. Those mother-Stewarting sons-of-bitches, they 11 do anything to blow one of our operations."
This was typical of Old Iron Balls, as his men called him. He was convinced that everything malign emanated from Central Intelligence over in Alexandria. They spent all their time, he believed, plotting to discredit Naval Intelligence, and all because a high CIA official had once caught him, Mounty Babbit, in an intimate moment with the CIA man's mistress.
"Those bastards," he repeated in a tone as cold as official charity. "I'd like to blow that Burger-house in Alexandria off the face of the earth and every limp-wristed Briggsing Bryanting Harvard egghead in it."
But that was only one level of Old Iron Balls's mind- the public level. Much deeper, he was already plotting various scenarios that resulted from the sudden deaths of Bonny Benedict or "Frank Sullivan."
Of course, Babbit did not for a moment contemplate assassination in the vulgar sense; there had been more than enough of that sort of thing back in the sixties and it had made all sorts of trouble for everyone in the Intelligence game. Babbit was guided by a maxim now universally accepted in the cloak-and-dagger business although originally formulated by Beria of the NKVD: "Any damned fool can commit murder. Any halfway trained operative can arrange convincing suicide. It takes an artist to manage an authentic natural death."
Pseudo-Sullivan had a larger than average share of ESP, as did many persons in the Intelligence game. "You know," he said casually, "I've left Certain Papers in a Certain Place to be opened in case of sudden death…"
"Oh, you needn't worry about anything like that," Babbit said hastily. "Why, you're one of our most valuable um men. We wouldn't dream of…" Blah-blah-blah. It was a set speech, for occasions like this.
He was thinking of Bonny Benedict and of her publisher, that hoity-toity rich Frankel-Briggser, Polly Esther Doubleknit.
The next fuse ignited by the Oswald-in-Hong-Kong story was in the frontal cortex of a baldin
g, nervous man named Justin Case, who was living in a sociological treatise. That is, people made him so anxious that he shielded himself from them with a cocoon of words and concepts which had gradually become more real to him than the people were. He was a heavyweight Intellectual.
Justin Case had more Moral Concern than was good for a man. He worried about racism and sexism and imperialism and injustice and the general cussedness of his species; he agonized over each and every person on the planet who might be getting a raw deal; if you put enough martinis in him, he would start singing "Joe Hill" and "We Shall Overcome" and "Which Side Are You On?" and other old Labor and Civil Rights songs.
Naturally, Case was the editor of a Liberal Magazine.
The magazine was called Confrontation and had been started by a mad Arab named Joe Malik, who abandoned it in 1968 to enter a Trappist monastery. Malik had been traumatized by the Democratic Convention that year and told everybody he intended to spend the rest of his life in vehement and continuous prayer.
Malik left behind a note which still hung on the bulletin board at Confrontation. It said:
Qol: Hua Allahu achad; Allahu Assamad; lam yalid walam yulad; walam yahun lahu kufwan achad.
Nobody at Confrontation could read Arabic, but they all liked to stop and look at the note occasionally, wondering what it meant.
The stockholders had appointed Case to the editorship, after Malik retreated to the cloister, because Justin had as much righteous indignation as the mad Arab but was not so flaky.
By spring 1984, Case had 120 bound volumes of books, articles, and press clippings about the J.F.K. assassination, since he was still Righteously Indignant about the palpably obvious cover-up involved in the Warren Report.
The day that pseudo-Sullivan wigged out over Bonny Benedict's contribution to the mythology of the assassination, Case calmly clipped that item and added it to his file.
SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY Page 29