Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (22 page)

Basically, Joe Malik said, his encounter with the man who had no wife, no horse, and no mustache had been part of an experiment in neurometaprogramming. Case had no idea what the holy waltzing fuck neurometaprogramming might be in English, and the story came through in a kind of polyphonic counterpoint with the other conversations swirling around them.

Joe Malik, known as the last of the Red Hot Liberals, was half Arab, of course, but—as he himself liked to point out—he had been raised Roman Catholic and became an atheist in engineering school (Brooklyn Polytechnic) and nobody could detect anything Islamic about him. Yet he did talk rather oddly at times—especially after his melodramatic adventures with the Discordian philosopher and millionaire Hagbard Celine.

“No wife, no horse, no mustache,” Malik was saying.

“Oh, I think President Hubbard is doing a great job,” Blake Williams was telling Carol Christmas. “The solar energy we’re getting from the L5 space cities is going to triple and quadruple the Gross National Product, and the way she abolished poverty was brilliant.”

“But Hubbard is so damn technological,” Fred “Figs” Newton protested piously. “There’s no spirit no sense of tragedy no gnosis anywhere in the administration….”

“I can’t get used to Mary Margaret being a woman,” an Unidentified Man said.

“No wife, no horse, no mustache,” Malik repeated. “That’s all it said.”

“I beg your pardon?” Case asked, intrigued by something nonmusical for the first time in his life.

“I still say fuck em
all,”
a drunken writer howled somewhere. “Bastardly thieving …”

“It was in the
Readers Digest,”
Malik explained, trying to clarify matters but not sure how much Case had already missed.

“The
Readers Digest?”
Case prompted.

“That was the whole point,” Malik went on earnestly. “I was stoned on Alamout Black hashish, the best in the world, and I sat down to read a whole issue of
Readers Digest
all the way through and
become one with it.”

“Become one with the
Readers Digest?”
Case was in beyond his depth and sinking fast in ontological quicksand.

“… which makes the Van Allen Belt a gigantic placenta”—Captain Cosmic was still on his own trip—“and every organism a cell in the megafetus struggling up the slippery 4,000-mile walls of the gravity well …”

“I wanted to experience a totally alien, science-fiction reality,” Malik pursued his theme.
“Reader’s Digest
comes from another universe, grok, from a world occupied by millions of Americans who are not New York intellectuals.
These people sincerely believe that our government has never waged an unjust war, that the hair of a seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, that millionaires get rich through honesty and hard work, that a Jewish girl once got pregnant by a dove, and all sorts of things like that, which are regarded as medieval superstitions in my normal environment. Entering
Readers Digest
through the empathy of hash is a quantum jump to another reality.”

There was a momentary silence in which Case distinctly heard Juan Tootreego whispering, “…
nose candy
from Marvin …”

“The trick,” Malik went on, “is to concentrate on
the reality projected through the printed page.
Every sentence is a signal from another world, a nervous system different from yours with which you can interface synergetically …”

“You mean,” Carol Christmas breathed huskily, “you were deliberately brainwashing yourself to believe in this
Readers Digest
world?”

“Of course,” Malik said, with an isn’t-it-obvious shrug. “A single ego is a very narrow view of the world.”

“Escape velocity,” Williams plunged onward to the stars, “that is, 18,000 em-pee-aitch, is the bursting of the waters, the endocrine message that the planetary birth process is beginning …”

“Everybody,” Mary Margaret Wildeblood announced, “this is Dr. Dashwood from San Francisco he studies orgasms.”

Dashwood, a pipe-smoking ectomorph, fidgeted in their gaze.

“Yes, I
know,”
came the paranoid pipe of Marvin Gardens, always sounding a little like Peter Lorre, “they all say I’m exaggerating, but I tell you it’s
real
they are extraterrestrials and they control
TV
and the
newspapers
and
all the media …”

Case began to think he was in a play, with everybody reading from a different script.

JUAN TOOTREEGO: But why did you give the new planets such strange names?

BERTHA VAN ATION: Well, I’m old-fashioned enough to be patriotic. I mean, why should
everything
in the sky have a Greek or Roman name?

BENNY BENEDICT: “Who shit?” “You shit!” “Bullshit!”

JUAN TOOTREEGO: I see. Like Mr. Benét, you have fallen in love with American names.

BERTHA VAN ATION: Well, yes, but I didn’t call either of them Wounded Knee….

DRUNKEN WRITER: Yeah, I remember that from when I was a kid in Kentucky. “Frank shit!!” BULLSHIT!!!!” “Who shit …?”

WILLIAMS: … A Jam Sandwich using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.

NEWTON: My God, I just saw Bigfoot on the balcony.

WILDEBLOOD: Oh, that’s Simon Moon. He’s a mathematician and quite harmless, really.

MALIK: So in effect I
became
Middle America. Bouncing off the printed page into my retina, grok, decoded by nervous system circulating through Memory Storage the words formed a
micro-Reader’s Digest
in my neurons. I honestly began to worry about
the dangers of premarital sex.

BENEDICT: Nothing to compare with the hazards of marital sex. Do you have any idea how much alimony I’m paying every month?

At that point, unfortunately, Case dozed off in his chair (one joint of Colombian too many) and he never did find out about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache.

When he woke up most of the guests had left and Mary Margaret was telling Dr. Dashwood about the burglars who had ransacked her apartment last week. “The worst
part of it,” she was saying, “was that they even took Ulysses.”

“Oh, were you very fond of him?” Dashwood asked. He obviously thought she was talking about a dog or cat.

Mary Margaret tittered, aware of the misunderstanding. “Ulysses was part of me,” she said.

Case got to his feet and made his polite adieus. He couldn’t stand any more ambiguity in one evening.

   Ulysses was actually Mary Margaret Wildeblood’s penis, which was now in Dashwood’s laboratory—a fact which neither of them realized.

Mary Margaret was not a
born
woman (which was commonplace, since 51 percent of the Terran primates qualified for it), but a
manufactured
woman. This was something new and exotic. It had only been possible on that primitive planet for around forty years.

Epicene Wildeblood, Mary Margaret’s former self, had been the bitchiest literary critic in Manhattan, the man that writers love to hate. His aphorisms were known and quoted everywhere in the world that was important by his own standards—
i.e.
, from St. Mark’s Place to 110th Street (East). Each Wildebloodism was a pearl of wit and a poison dart of malice: “Norman’s mailer-than-thou-attitude,” “Either McLuhan has had a divine vision or he is merely incoherent, and it is obvious that he has not had a divine vision,”
“Illuminatus
is just two nursery Nietzsches daydreaming about a psychedelic Superman,” “Nixon’s memoirs will never be placed beside Casanova’s in the annals of amusing rascality, but they may well stand beside Mussolini’s play about Napoleon in the archives of stentorian dullness.”

Wildeblood had named his penis Ulysses way back in
Gilgamesh Junior High School in Babylon, Long Island, where he grew up.

He named it Ulysses because it had Greek proclivities and a tendency to invade dark, forbidden places.

Wildeblood was by no means a simple or uncomplicated WoMan. The sex-change operation had been only stage one in a plan to totally transform himself. After that, she intended to become a nun.

By 1983 it was a sane and sensible decision for one living at the hot center of New York intellectual life. Like the Southerners who think “damn Yankee” is one word, Wildeblood’s
milieu
had long ago forgotten that “male chauvinist” was two words. The slightest, kinkiest remnant of masculinity was a definite handicap, a suggestion of possible viciousness—like membership in the John Birch Society, owning a Mississippi accent, or a conviction for a major felony.

Besides, Wildeblood
did
urgently want to be a nun. A priest or even a monk had a certain arrogance in his very role
qua
priest or
qua
monk, however passionately he might cultivate Total Submission to the Will of God. Only a nun could experience the true endlessness of humility.

Wildeblood, simply, was tired of being the bitchiest male in Manhattan. He wanted to become the saintliest woman.

Joe Malik, the editor of
Confrontation
magazine, published Justin Case’s music criticism only because it confused (and, therefore, amused) him. Like most of his readers, Joe couldn’t make head or tail out of whatever it was that Case was trying to say; but, unlike the readers—who were perpetually writing letters protesting Case’s baroque inscrutability—Joe enjoyed puzzles. Joe was a chess puzzle and logical paradox addict; like William S. Burroughs, he was perpetually poring over the Mayan codices, trying to unscrew those inscrutable glyphs for which no Rosetta Stone has yet been found.

Three years earlier, in 1981, Joe had been a white-haired man who clearly showed his sixty-odd years. Now, in 1983, he had jet-black hair again, a face free of wrinkles, and could easily pass for a man in his early forties. This was because he had started using the rejuvenation-longevity drug FOREVER as soon as it appeared on the market. Fundamentalist Christians and the People’s Ecology Party (PEP) denounced FOREVER as blasphemous and against God’s will—“the ultimate insanity of the rational-technological mind,” it had been called by Furbish Lousewart V, who almost defeated Hubbard in the 1980 election. Joe despised religionists and ecologists and went on using FOREVER. Dissident scientists began reporting disastrous side effects of FOREVER when they gave it in
horse-doctor’s doses to laboratory mice; Joe remembered the similar antimarijuana research of the sixties and seventies and went on using FOREVER, gambling that if there were anything wrong with it, it wouldn’t kill him before a better rejuvenation drug was on the market.

Joe hoped to be around for several hundred years and take advantage of Time Travel when it arrived to make Eternity accessible to mankind. Above his desk at
Confrontation
was a motto from the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane which succinctly summarized Joe’s view of the cosmos. It said:

THE UNIVERSE MAY BE NOT ONLY QUEERER THAN WE THINK BUT QUEERER THAN WE CAN THINK
.

Carol Christmas, an aspiring actress who had not yet achieved better than Off-Off-Broadway, was always a bit sensitive about her second source of income, so she heard Joe Malik saying “no wife, no whores, no mustache.” Oddly enough, Blake Williams, who was picking up parts of several conversations during his own interstellar rap, also thought Malik was saying “no wife, no whores, no mustache.” Williams and Carol Christmas both heard Malik’s explanation through the semantic carousel around them something like this:

MALIK:
Premarital sex
, mind you. I was really terrified
about the whole younger generation careening to hell in a handbasket with IUD’s and condoms sprinkling on all sides. I began to see
Commie threats
everywhere. Everybody I knew, all my friends, the whole city of New York, seemed foreign subversive unwholesome. By God, I
was
Middle America.

“EGGS” BENEDICT: “Joe shit!” “Bullshit!” “Who shit?” …

“FIGS” NEWTON: Alien signals. He said alien signals.

WILLIAMS: … which is why we’re all deviates. If Mother DNA had wanted us to be replicable units, She’d have made us insects instead of primates.

DASHWOOD: Well, actually science has been studying orgasms for quite some time now, but what’s new about our work is certain psychological intangibles….

CAROL CHRISTMAS: Marvin, has anyone seen Marvin …

BENEDICT: Well if I were Vlad I know who I’d impale….

CAROL CHRISTMAS: Are you sure he isn’t in the kitchen? Marvin, are you out here in the kitchen?

MALIK: That was when I stopped the experiment. There I was, totally at one with Middle America, totally inside the
Readers Digest
, and then I came to that title: “No Wife, No Whores, No Mustache.”

DASHWOOD:
Shattering into atoms
is male and
undulating
is female, but
balloons bursting
is common to both.

MALIK: I closed the magazine and threw it in the fire. The title was too good to be ruined by an explanation.

NATALIE DREST: Ooh I get that
undulating
a lot especially when some er guy is you know giving me you … know … head….

DASHWOOD: Yes sixty-eight percent of the females report an
undulating
experience during cunnilingus….

But at this point Williams realized that he would never recapture the audience previously listening to his outer-space theories, and he also wanted some air. He edged crabwise to the balcony and stood breathing deeply, raising his eyes to study the southern sky and then pick out the bright red glare of Sirius.

“Is Marvin out here on the balcony?” asked a contralto. It was Carol Christmas.

“I’m afraid not,” Williams said. “I think he left the party already.”

“Oh, did he take all the coke with him?”

“I guess so.”

Alone again, Blake Williams communed briefly with the Big Dipper and asked himself what the hell Malik had been talking about: No wife? No whores? No mustache?

“WHO SHIT???” Benny Benedict was yelling inside.

   The actual title of the
Readers Digest
article had been “No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache,” not “No Wife, No Whores, No Mustache.” Joe Malik, as he had been trying to explain amid the din of the Wildeblood
soirée
, had been engaged in neuroprogramming research, trying to become one with the
Readers Digest
, when he found that wonderful title, which led him to immediately abort the experiment. He knew, intuitively, that the mystery of a title like that was much better than the solution, the explanation of the title, could ever be.