SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

by Robert Anton Wilson

  Within three days Clem had joined the Trekkies and was writing letters to CBS demanding the return of Star Trek to TV. He had also gotten heavily involved in classical music, started relearning all the math he had in high school, discovered that he often knew who was calling him on the phone before he picked up the receiver, and invented a new cosmology of his very own, which was based on the idea that the universe was not spherical, as Heisenberg's General Relativity claimed, but five-cornered like the Pentagon building.

  Within a week Clem had checked that there was no Eris Tomato Juice Company, noticed that UFOs seemed to be following his car wherever he went, and was beginning to think he was attracted to the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk.

  By the end of the second week Clem was less elated and agitated, and had gone through a battery of tests at a company that did psychological testing for top management positions. The psychologists told him that he had an "unusually rich fantasy life," but was too well adjusted to be schizophrenic; that his IQ was the highest they had ever measured (and he knew damned well that it had never been that high before): and that he definitely was not Management Material. They suggested that he take up whatever art was most attractive to him.

  Clem, becoming less agitated, less elated, and more conscious of detail all the time, as the stuff in the tomato juice continued to mutate his nervous system, decided that he was one among possibly many thousands of subjects in a consciousness-expansion project being carried on by extraterrestrials.

  Within a year he had written a symphony, which he decided was not very good, and had changed his religion ten times, without learning much in the process. He had also read his way through every volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, looking for clues as to what the hell was really going on.

  Whoever was behind this experiment (and he was no longer quite sure they were necessarily extraterrestrials) seemed to have left a stream of grossly obvious Hints throughout every field of human knowledge. The stuff in the tomato juice was what theologians would call a gratuitous grace, but that was the only gratuitous part, of it. You had to figure out, on your own, who They were, what They were up to, and what you should do about it.

  The last thing you should do about it, Clem knew, was to talk about it, to the ordinary people who hadn't been given the stuff in the tomato juice. They would just think you were weird.

  Clem had a list of people from history who (he figured) had probably been given the stuff in the tomato juice. The list started out with Jesus Christ, of course, and included a lot of the usual Suspects (Buddha, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Leonardo Da Vinci), but it had quite a few that ordinary people would never have included, like Lewis Carroll and H. P. Lovecraft and General E. A. Crowley, the discoverer of the North Pole, and Joshua Abraham Norton, who in San Francisco in 1857 declared himself Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico, and King of the Jews.

  For years Clem had tried to find others on the same neurological wavelength as himself. He had joined, and eventually been kicked out of, the Fortean Society, Mensa, the Rosicrucians, the Center for UFO Studies, and the ultrasecret SSFTASS (Secret Society for the Abolition of Secret Societies). He was too far-out for all of them.

  Eventually he organized his own society for the investigation and elucidation of "what the hell is really going on around here." He called it the Warren Belch Society, after the famous Old West lawman who won every gun-fight because on each occasion when he confronted a shoot-out, his opponents' guns had mysteriously jammed.

  The people Clem recruited were not the sort who would attribute Marshal Belch's phenomenal good luck to "coincidence"; nor would they be satisfied by metaphysical labels like "synchronicity" or "psychokinesis."

  They assumed the extraterrestrials had some obscure cosmic reason for protecting Warren Belch.

  On the day when Justin Case got tired wondering about Joe Malik's mysterious Last Communication and tried (unsuccessfully) to find out what it meant, Clem Cotex got tired wondering about the Invisible Hand Society. He marched down the hall, opened their door, and walked into a tiny but tastefully decorated reception room.

  The wall to the right was adorned with a large gold dollar sign: $, emblazoned with the initials T.A.N.S.T.A.G.I. The wall to the left had a giant reproduction of the famous Steinberg cartoon of a little fish about to be eaten by a slightly bigger fish, which in turn, was about to be eaten by a still bigger fish, which also was about to be eaten by an even bigger fish, and so on, to the border of the cartoon and evidently, beyond that, to infinity.

  There was nobody in the room.

  Clem looked around, a bit uncertainly.

  SDATE YOUR BIZNIZ PLEEZ, said a compiiteroid voice, evidently out of the ceiling.

  "Uh I'd like to see the head man or ah the head woman as the case may be," Clem stammered.

  THAD WOULD BE DOKTOR RAUSS ELYSIUM, the computer said. HE IZ NOT IN THE OFFIZ TODAY.

  "Oh ah tell him Clem Cotex called," Clem said, edging toward the door.

  He suddenly didn't want to investigate the Invisible Hand any further, while he was alone. Some other time, he thought, when I have some friends with me.

  YOUR MEZZAGE HAS BEEN RECORDED, the voice droned behind him as he fled the scene.

  FALLING GIRDERS

  The apprehension of the Real can only be compared to a radiance or illumination because it is a revelation of part of the coherence of the Divine Act of Creation.

  –pope stephen, Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood, Manhattan's bitchiest literary critic, was getting just a tiny bit spiflicated. She was working on her fifth martini, in fact.

  "Mailer can't write," she said argumentatively. "None of them can write. We haven't seen a real writer since Raymond Chandler."

  "Um," said her companion noncommittally. He was Blake Williams.

  "What do you mean, 'um'?" Mary Margaret demanded truculently. "I was talking nonsense just to see if you were listening."

  They were in the Three Lions bar on U.N. Plaza.

  "Well, in fact, I was listening," Dr. Williams said urbanely. "You were comparing Mailer to Chandler, to the disadvantage of Mailer. However, I admit my attention was also wandering a bit. I was thinking about the Hollan-daise Sauce enigma." He was on his fifth martini too.

  "What's that?" Mary Margaret asked. Yet the martinis must have been getting to her, because she did not wait for his answer and announced, in the voice of Discovery, "The best short story ever written is by John O'Hara."

  "It was a case of food poisoning," Dr. Williams said. "A bunch of people got poisoned by some contaminated Hol-landaise Sauce." Yet he looped back courteously and asked, "What short story?"

  The robot who used the name "Frank Sullivan" came in and took a table near them. He was accompanied by Peter Jackson, the Black associate editor of Confrontation magazine.

  "I forget the title," Mary Margaret said. "It was about a car salesman who has a very good day, makes some really top-notch sales, and stops at a bar to celebrate before going home. He has one drink after another and doesn't get home until after midnight, and then get this and then he goes and gets his rifle from the den and…"

  "Oh I read that," Dr. Williams said. "It isn't a short story, it's a novel. Called um ah er Appointment in Samara. And he doesn't use a rifle. He gasses himself in his car."

  "Damnedest case I ever heard of," pseudo-Sullivan said. "The Ambassador has been on morphine ever since."

  "No," Mary Margaret said impatiently. "That was what the character in Appointment in Samara did, yes, everybody knows that one, but I'm talking about a short story O'Hara wrote much later, maybe thirty years later. In the short story, dammit what is the title, in the short story…"

  "Wigged?" pseudo-Sullivan cried. "We thought we'd have to put him in a straitjacket."

  "In the short story," Mary Margaret plowed on, noting that Williams was listening to the robot, "the salesman takes the rifle and goes to his bedroom and puts the rifle to his head…"
She paused.

  It worked. "And?" Williams asked, still wondering a bit about the Hollandaise Sauce mystery and why the Ambassador wigged.

  "And his wife wakes up," Mary Margaret concluded, "and she says, 'Don't.' And he doesn't."

  "He was hopping all around the room like a chicken on acid and making gargling and choking noises," the "man" called "Frank Sullivan" went on.

  "He doesn't?" Williams cried.

  "That's the point," Mary Margaret said. "You see, like the character in the Samara novel, this man goes right to the edge, he looks over the abyss, and then he pulls back at the last moment. Because his wife speaks to him."

  "So it's a love story," Williams said. "Very sneaky and indirect, typical of O'Hara, but still a love story. He decides to continue carrying his burden, whatever it is, for the sake of the woman he loves."

  "Well, how much will Confrontation pay for this?" pseudo-Sullivan demanded.

  "No, it's more complicated than that," Mary Margaret argued. "The motive for the attempted suicide is never explained. Just like the motive for the real suicide in the Samara novel is never explained."

  "Does it need to be explained?" Williams drawled, waving at the waiter for another martini. "If I were trapped into selling cars for a living, I'd think about blowing my head off occasionally."

  "Yes, but," Mary Margaret said. "Most people never see the emptiness of their lives the way these two characters of O'Hara's do. That's the Turn of the Screw. It's like the parable Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. How he was hired to find a real estate salesman who'd disappeared…"

  "A salesman again," Williams noted. "We are toying with synchronicity. When does Arthur Miller come on the scene?"

  "Wait," Mary Margaret said. "It gets weirder. This salesman, in Spade's story, just went out to lunch one day and never returned. No evidence of foul play, no suicide note, nada. Years pass, and his wife wants to marry again, so she hires Spade to prove the salesman is really dead. Spade digs around and finds the salesman alive in another town, with a new name and a new family. He explains to Spade what happened when he went out to lunch that day and simply disappeared. A girder fell from a building under construction-you want to talk about synchronicity? -and almost killed him. It missed him only a few feet. It was like a Satori experience."

  "A WHAT???" Peter Jackson, the Black editor, cried in astonishment at the next table.

  Mary Margaret and Blake were both hooked; they looked deep, deep into their martini glasses as they strained not to miss pseudo-Sullivan's answer. "A Rehnquist," the humanoid said. "Jumpin' Jesus on a rubber crutch," Peter Jackson said. "You're not putting me on? You mean right in the middle of the staircase…"

  "Where the Ambassador had to see it when he came down to the reception," pseudo-Sullivan said. "A great big one, like Harry Reems's, or what's-his-name's in the porn movies. With a pink ribbon around it. The Company," he stressed the word slightly, avoiding the initials, "thinks the KGB did it. Believe me, the Ambassador hasn't been the same man since."

  "Good Lord," Blake Williams said. "It's like your falling-girder story. Except in this case it's a falling Rehnquist… from the Fourth Dimension, maybe." He was thinking that this was too wild to be a KGB project and might involve the paranormal.

  "Eva Gebloomenkraft was there," pseudo-Sullivan went on, "and kept trying to calm the Ambassador down, but he was just making those gargling noises and turning a funny kinda purple color…"

  "Eva Gebloomenkraft," Jackson said. "Isn't she that rich dame with the big Brownmillers who keeps getting eighty-sixed from nightclubs all over Europe?"

  "Yeah," pseudo-Sullivan said. "A Jet Setter, you know? But she tried awfully hard to cheer up the Ambassador. Kept making little jokes about Freud's theories-Castration Anxiety and Rehnquist Envy and so on… By then it had disappeared, by the way. But we know damned well the Ambassador didn't hallucinate it. Two of our men saw it, but they got distracted, trying to calm the Ambassador down when he first started jumping up and down and howling, 'In a pink ribbon, a pink ribbon!' and, 'What diseased mind could conceive it?'And stuff like that…" "It was as if this man's life was a watch," Mary Margaret said, picking up her own narrative. "And a jeweler had taken the back off and let him see how the gears worked. Nothing had meaning anymore in a universe where there's no good reason why a girder hits you or misses you."

  "And Dashiell Hammett wrote this, you say?" Williams prompted. "It sounds very Existentialist."

  Mary Margaret finished her sixth martini. "Hammett not only wrote it," she said, "he lived it. He spent ten years working for the Pinkertons when Class War was really War in this country. He knew that the girders fall on the just and the unjust."

  "You mean he was a real detective who wrote about fictitious detectives?" Williams was off on his own tangent at once. "That's like Godel's Proof. Or Escher painting himself painting himself…"

  "Don't get too intellectual about it," Mary Margaret said. "You might miss the obvious."

  SINCERITY IN SPELVINS

  I'd rather have my mail delivered by Lockheed than ride in a plane built by the post office department.

  –bartholomew gimble

  Dr. Dashwood went out to dinner that night with Dr. Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer from Griffith Observatory who had discovered the two planets beyond Pluto.

  Dashwood ordered a Manhattan with Southern Comfort-a combination that had never occurred to him before. He wondered how the idea got into his head-and Dr. Van Ation decided to try the same.

  "Goethe said, 'Man muss entweder der Hammer oder der Amboss sein-you must be the hammer or the anvil," said a voice in the next booth.

  "Mmm," Bertha Van Ation said. "This is good." She was sampling her Manhattan with Southern Comfort.

  "Of course, he was just being melodramatic," the voice in the next booth said. "As an artist he must have known there are states in which you are both the hammer and the anvil-there's no either/or about it. That's the creative fire."

  "So what's new in astronomy?" Dr. Dashwood asked.

  "Uh?" Bertha said. "Oh, sorry, I was eavesdropping on the next booth."

  "The hammer and the anvil," Dashwood said. "I heard him too. Must be a poet. They tell me we have more poets 'of anthology rank,' whatever that is, than any other city in America."

  "Like the Hammerklavier sonata," said a new voice, a feminine one, in the adjoining booth. "Beethoven was both the hammer and the anvil there. Maybe he even intended the pun. He read Goethe, didn't he?"

  "Read him?" asked the first voice. "They knew each other. Would have been friends, if two egomaniacs could become friends."

  "This is my favorite vice," Bertha whispered. "Listening in on the conversation at the next table."

  "It sure sounds as if he had that idea in mind," the feminine voice said. "Is there any other piano piece where the pianist literally has to hammer away at the keys like that?"

  "This is weird," Dashwood whispered. "I got a crank letter today-we get them by the ton at Orgasm Research, as you can imagine-and it was all about the Hammerklavier."

  "My, what erudite cranks you attract," Bertha whispered. "The cranks who write to us, at Griffith, are mostly illiterate farmers who have seen UFOs."

  "They went walking on the street once," the man in the next booth boomed. "And everybody kept bowing to them. Goethe finally said, 'I find all this ostentatious honor a bit embarrassing.' And you know what Ludwig said? He said, 'Don't let it bother you. It is me they are honoring.

  The woman's silvery laugh had golden highlights of hashish in it. "That's Beethoven for you," she said.

  Suddenly the two arose; they had evidently paid their check already and had been lingering over their coffee. Dr. Dashwood and Dr. Van Ation, without being conspicuous about it, looked them over as they left. They were both Chinese.

  "That's San Francisco for you," Dashwood said.

  "I bought a Vivaldi record the other day," Bertha said. "It was made by a classical group in Japan, and
they played his Four Seasons music on Japanese instruments. It sounded remarkably like the harpischord he wrote it for."

  "M," Dashwood nodded. "And we've got all these kids playing sitars and trying to sound like Ravi Shankar."

  "The arts and sciences have always been international," Bertha said. "It's only our damned politics that remain nationalistic. To our sorrow."

  "Mn," Dashwood nodded again. "But, as I was asking you a while ago, what's new in astronomy?"

  "Well," Bertha said intensely, leaning forward, "the universe is turning out to be a hell of a lot bigger than we thought even three or four years ago…"

  At the other end of the room, seated at a table that gave a good view of Dashwood, the Continental Op was enjoying swordfish steak. He enjoyed it even more when he reminded himself that it could go on the expense account.

  He owed this good fortune to the fact that Dashwood did not know his face yet.

  Outside and across the street, Tobias Knight was dining on doughnuts and coffee from a deli, and bemoaning the fact that this typically warm San Francisco day had turned into a typically cold San Francisco night.

  He owed this exile in the cold to the fact that Dashwood did know his face.

  In Washington, Simon Moon had gone cruising at a bar called the Easter Basket. He had there picked up a young boy named Marion Murphy, who had long blond hair and girlish mannerisms, both of which were qualities Simon appreciated.

  They had gone back to Simon's pad and smoked some hash. Then they rapped for a while, and Simon learned that Marion was working on a Master's in social psych, had a father who was a cop in San Francisco, and was a member of Purity of Ecology.

  Simon decided not to hold the last fact against the boy.