Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (15 page)

The homosexual phase almost drove me to suicide. But my ESP (I accepted it now, knowing it was all hallucination of course, but following it blindly, being dragged along by it) was both infallible and specific. Ped Xing picked only men of Babbit’s own status and importance; and he was never wrong. Evidently, there were more closet cases in the world than even Kinsey had estimated.
I always took the male role, coming in their mouths, and would reciprocate by no more than masturbating them. Once, when the partner was not merely an executive but a Pentagon official, I started laughing at his moment of ejaculation, losing all control, laughing louder and louder, revealing the psychosis and not caring.

That night I looked at the tree in his yard and knew it was an intelligent being. Not with human intellect, not with the mind of a dog or a rat or a fish even, but with its own life and indwelling consciousness. There was even a scientist in New York measuring the emotional reactions of plants with polygraph equipment. And there it stood, a blue spruce, stranger in structure and more alien in intelligence than any creature in science fiction.

How can we live among so many wonders and not be overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of existence? Mounty Babbit, former atheist, asked himself. Our knowledge is so small, and our conceit is so great….

Then he realized in horror that that was Ped Xing, the Buddhist, thinking.

When Murphy got into the car Mendoza asked, “Bad news?”

Murphy pulled out into the traffic, carefully. “It must be bad,” Mendoza said, looking at Murphy’s face.

They drove. Murphy stared straight ahead.

“Man’s your partner,” Mendoza said. “He shouldn’t hide things from you.”

“Malloy,” Murphy said, “I got to go see Marty Malloy. Only he’s got a new bug up his ass; he only talks to one cop at a time.”

“Shit on one at a time. You let him pull that, the next thing happens is he thinks he runs the police force. Marty, a cheap hood like Marty, you never give him an edge. On anything. You know that, Tom. Let them get out of line and all of a sudden you got another Jack Ruby. Guy like that gets an edge, he can’t keep his mouth shut, going around telling everybody about his friends the cops. Dropping in to see you at home, you know? When he takes his fall, half the force falls with him.”

“Your principal problem,” Murphy said, “is that you’re a dumb spic with a loud mouth. Me, I don’t take shit from
any of them, least of all from a Marty Malloy. But this is different.”

“It sure is,” Mendoza said. “I didn’t know you so well, I’d think you got a guilty conscience about something. Some hood off the street, you can call him a spic anytime, but not me. Just who the fuck you think you are?”

“All right, that just slipped out. You don’t have to eat my ass about it.”

“All right,
shit
. First you’re keeping secrets, then I’m a spic, now I’m the one who’s being unreasonable. This is being partners? After ten years?”

Murphy turned onto Van Ness. “Nobody’s keeping secrets,” he said. “It’s just one of those, what they call intangibles. Malloy doesn’t have as much balls as a cockroach anymore. I mean I
know
Malloy. Pushing fifty, getting shaky, scared shitless of me for years now. He doesn’t fancy-pants, not with me, he doesn’t. He says he won’t talk to anybody but me, that’s the way I play it this time around. I keep telling you, I know Malloy.”

They turned down Geary. “Okay,” Mendoza said. “You know Malloy. He’s got the whole solution to the Kennedy assassination, or something. But, I don’t know what it is, something’s come over you this last week, Tom. Clam up all you want. A man can’t be partners ten years without knowing.”

“Joe,” Murphy said, “it’s just I didn’t want to talk about it. Some things a man just keeps a tight mouth about. It’s my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“The doctor thinks she’s got cancer. You know a man like me, the wife dead, family means a lot. I been lighting candles for her at church.”

“Tom,” Mendoza said. “Jesus, Tom. I’m sorry. Your sister. Christ, what can I say?”

“It’s okay, Joe. Partners, it’s like being married in a
way. I should have known you’d realize something was up. A man like me, something in the family, he don’t like to talk about it.”

“Christ. Yeah. Which sister is that, the one in L.A. or the one up in Mendocino?”

“Oh … the one in Mendocino. Irene.”

“Look, she needs more money and you can’t raise it …”

“Thanks, Joe. It’s not money, her husband is loaded, but thanks. I’m glad I talked about it.”

“That’s what a partner is for.”

Murphy parked near the corner of Taylor. “You go down to Gulliver’s, have a cup of coffee,” he said. “I’ll join you after I get whatever it is Malloy is selling.”

“Partners,” Mendoza said.

“Partners,” Murphy replied warmly. They shook hands.

Hassan i Sabbah X gave up on hashish. He went to the safe and got out the LSD. Remembering …

Remembering a lad of twelve having
Ivanhoe
rammed down his gullet by the Chicago public school system and walking out the door at 3:05
P.M.
to mingle with the junkies, whores, pimps, thieves, and assorted varieties of revolutionaries (Black Panthers, Black P. Stone Rangers, acid-electrified Weatherpeople) who provided the real education in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the late 1960s. Remembering the assassinations of Malcolm and of Martin Luther King. Remembering the endless epic of Stackerlee and the famous couplet:

Call this the first metaprogram. It led Hassan (then called F.D.R. Stuart) far outside the ghetto into an entirely new and different world. It was easy. By acting out the imperatives of the Stackerlee “black motherfucker” script, the boy earned a term in the Audy Home, an institution for the further training of apprentice outlaws who slash tires on police cars, heave bricks through school windows, peddle merchandise from stores without first purchasing them, and answer policemen’s questions with “Fuck you, ya honky motherfuck’n cocksucker.” F.D.R. Stuart received the standard Audy Home training, which consists of sophisticated expert coaching in: (a) sodomy; (b) sadomasochism; and (c) assorted crimes more lucrative than selling shoplifted merchandise.

He was, after graduation, ready for postgraduate work at Springfield, once he passed the admissions test, which consists of being captured by the police while in the
possession of something hot. He was in possession of a Ford Mustang registered to a Mountbatten Babbit of Evanston. Postgraduate work at Springfield included a refresher course in sodomy and S-M, together with advanced study in grand larceny; but by this time F.D.R. Stuart had begun to doubt that the Stackerlee metaprogram contained the whole answer to life’s problems. A former Black Muslim, now a Sufi, was his cell mate, and taught him various things about the less-publicized qualities of the human nervous system.

F.D.R. Stuart spent many hours staring at one wall of his cell, gradually creating a hole through which he could pass into another world. There was a different kind of time over there, and eventually he discovered that angels and fairies and elves and witches and Bodhisattvas and conjurs and all sorts of superhuman folk could be contacted and persuaded to become allies.

The Sufi cell mate, a heavy cat in more ways than F.D.R. Stuart ever understood, pretended to be unimpressed with this achievement and laid down some stern raps about the perils of “Opening the Gate” without first “clarifying the soul.” The upshot of it was that young Stuart spent an hour a day memorizing a page in the dictionary until he had a vocabulary that would grace a Harvard graduate. Alas, the Sufi was paroled around then and Stuart continued his explorations unguided.

In 1983, in Harlem, New York, Hassan i Sabbah X was the Horsethief of a group known as the Cult of the Black Mother. This was ostensibly devoted to the worship of Kali, goddess of destruction (and rebirth); the police suspected, but couldn’t prove, that it was also a kingpin in international hashish smuggling. The FBI, meanwhile, had their own suspicions; they believed it was a Black Revolutionary Army disguised as a church. An Army Intelligence agent of appropriate Negritude and duplicity
managed to gain admission to one of the lower ranks but learned only that: (a) Horse thief was a term for head honcho or boss man borrowed from the gypsies; (b) the rituals were fairly close to those of orthodox Hindu Kali worship, except for certain Masonic elements; and (c) every time a black FBI agent managed to infiltrate the Cult of the Black Mother, he died very soon of a heart attack.

The last fact was well known, and often discussed, at the Bureau. The word
witchcraft
popped up at least once in each of these conversations, and was quickly laughed down, but each agent went away harboring his own very private opinions. Some of them even began attending the church of their choice even more often than was expected by the rather Puritan standards of the Bureau.

The CIA which actually employed Hassan i Sabbah X as a spy on ghetto affairs, was well aware that he planned to double-cross them at the first opportunity, but that didn’t worry them. They had their own plans for him, which were expressed in their usual jolly euphemism, “termination with maximum prejudice,” a remark illustrated by a finger drawn across the throat to make the meaning clear to neophytes. But that was only for the future, when he began to show signs of shifting allegiance.

Now (it is the night of December 23, 1983, again) while a miniature sled with eight tiny reindeer was allegedly dodging past commercial airliners, communications satellites, flying saucers, and other technocraft in the skyways, two human beings of reprehensible character drove up to the Sutton Place digs of Mary Margaret (Epicene) Wildeblood in a truck hired from U-Haul only a few hours earlier. These were Edward J. Smith and Samuel R. Hall, and they had been purged from the Black Panther Party a few months earlier because of their fondness for the null-circuit neurological program induced by injecting diacetylmorphine
(C21H23NO5)
directly into their veins. This compound was known as
heroin
to white people and
caballo
to Ed and Sam’s Puerto Rican neighbors. Ed and Sam called it
horse
and mainlined it as often as they possibly could—“riding the horse over the rainbow” was their expression for the null program, and it meant as much to them as Samadhi to a Hindu or the Eucharist to a Catholic. In fact, it allowed them to forget for a while that, to 90 percent of their fellow citizens, they were unmistakably identifiable as
niggers
, a species generally regarded as twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas. It didn’t matter, to Sam and Ed, that the people who believed this also believed in the existence of a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft named God, in the Virgin Birth of U.S. Senators, in the accuracy of TV news, and in premarital chastity for women.

Sam and Ed also believed in the existence of the gaseous vertebrate, the immaculate generation of senators, the pictures on the tube, and premarital chastity for at least
some
women (their own sisters, wives, and daughters). They also believed that they
were
twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas, but that they had a right to be that way. They called it Black Pride.

Once inside the Wildeblood apartment, Ed and Sam were as efficient as a pair of vacuum cleaners. To say they took everything that wasn’t nailed down is to underestimate their rapacity. If something that looked valuable
was
nailed down, they employed pliers and other tools. When they finally drove away the U-Haul truck was as stuffed with goodies as the miniature sled allegedly circling the skies at that moment. When Mary Margaret Wildeblood returned from her month in Vermont, she was heard to compare her condition to that of the Chinese farmer in
The Good Earth
after the locusts had passed.

Ed and Sam drove directly to the Sugar Hill apartment
of Hassan i Sabbah X, which is not listed on the mailboxes and can only be reached through another apartment with the name LESTER MADDOX on it. Ed, who knew this scene better than Sam, knocked.

“White,” said a muffled voice from inside.

“Man,” Ed replied.

“Native,” came the voice again.

“Born,” Ed completed the formula.

The door opened, and they were ushered into the home of a very respectable Afro-Methodist clergyman who had never been publicly connected in any way with Hassan i Sabbah X.

“What was that jive?” Sam demanded.

“Password,” Ed explained briefly.

“Borrowed from the Ku Klux Klan,” the clergyman added with some glee. “He got himself one weird sense of humor, Brother Hassan.” He ushered them into the kitchen, slid the refrigerator around easily on specially built ball rollers, and they passed through to an apartment that did not exist in anybody’s records anywhere.

The air was heavy with the smell of Indian hemp; an enormous statue of Kali, the Black Mother, dominated the room. A group of black men sat in a circle and Sam recognized two small cigarettes circulating in opposite directions, which he called clockwise and counterclockwise, not knowing the technical magical terms deosil and widdershins.

“You will now ascend to the sixth plane, without my guidance,” said Hassan i Sabbah X to the circle. “I am returning to the earth plane briefly. Aummmm …”