Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (39 page)

“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’ll 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 balding, 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:

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 Benedicts contribution to the mythology of the assassination, Case calmly clipped that item and added it to his file.

Three-quarters of the other material in Case’s file was also fictitious. One-third of this disinformation had been generated by Intelligence Agencies—domestic, foreign, and extraterrestrial—as covers or screens for their own activities in and around Dallas in 1963. Another third had been produced by sincere, dedicated, sometimes avid
conspiracy buffs
, weaving their own webs of confusion as they searched for the elusive truth. The last third had
been created, like the Bonny Benedict item, by journalists following Hearst’s advice about what to do when there was no news.

Anybody trying to find out “what
really
happened” from this collection of mythology would be so confused that the significant fact of the extraterrestrial intervention would never be apparent.

Case did not suspect any of this. He loved his J.F.K. file. He was convinced that someday the crucial piece would come to him, he would insert it into the file, and the whole jigsaw would make sense.

He never realized that the one detail which gave everything away was that while Oswald was firing from the sixth-floor window he was also having a Coke on the second floor and mingling with the crowd in the street.

Like most liberals, Justin Case lacked imagination and never took seriously all the evidence of extraterrestrial activity on earth during the past forty years.

Case was currently having an affair with the Hollywood actress Carol Christmas.

Carol was renowned among the heterosexual male population for having the biggest Brownmillers since Jayne Mansfield; so far only women and a few Gay men had noticed that she could also act.

Carol had been married four times. She had had three abortions. Like other famous Beauties, she was
always
dieting, and hence, a little bit high-strung. She was also a disciple of General E. A. Crowley, the eccentric English explorer who had discovered the North Pole and claimed there was a hole there leading down to the center of the Earth. Carol devoutly believed Crowley’s yarn that there was a whole civilization down there, inside the Earth, run by green-skinned women.

Carol believed this because she had a great artistic faith in the principle of balance. In her probability
continuum—in the series of quantum eigenstates that had crystalized into her universe—the whole outside of the planet seemed to be run by white-skinned males. It was only fair that the inside should be run by green-skinned females.

Carol was having three other affairs at the same time as her
amour
with Justin Case. There was a hairdresser in Hollywood (bi, not Gay) who was very talented at Bryanting and Briggsing—two arts at which totally straight men, in Carol’s opinion, were usually a bit clumsy. There was also François Loup-Garou, the painter, in Paris, who adored her madly, as only a painter can adore a woman. And there was a bitter but brilliant Black novelist in Chicago named Franklin Stuart.

Justin Case knew all about these other
amours;
after all, he read Bonny Benedict’s column every day. Bonny kept the world informed about which celebrities were Potter Stewarting each other. She did this in a way that was perfectly clear to every reader but totally without any clear meaning in a court of law, in case somebody got irritated and tried to sue her. What she did was to write something like “Hollywood sexpot Carol Christmas and Black novelist Frank Stuart are an item these days.”

Everybody knew what “an item” meant.

When Bonny wrote that a couple were “a hot item” many of her readers were mildly puzzled, but assumed she was insinuating some fantastic sexual acrobatics. Actually, it only meant that Bonny was trying to avoid stylistic monotony; occasionally, she even switched it to “a torrid item,” which led to even more lascivious fantasies for some of her readers.

Justin Case didn’t object to Carol Christmas’s other affairs because he accepted it as a fact of life that actors are hypersexed, just as coal miners are prone to black lung disease and novelists to booze and weird drugs. Besides,
jealousy was a sign of possessiveness, and possessiveness was illiberal. And, anyway—as he usually concluded his ruminations on this subject, during the infrequent moments when he thought of it at all—Carol’s career kept them apart most of the time, and he was not so naive as to expect somebody of her youth and beauty to resist all temptations.

And it was the 1980s, wasn’t it?

Actually, Case was a bit of an unconscious psychic—that is, he was aware of quantum probability waves, although not consciously. He
sensed
that there were approximately 1050 universes in which he had lusted after Carol and never got into her Frankel even once. That unconscious psychic knowledge kept him content with this universe, where he was her part-time lover.

Carol Christmas had starred in the first hard-core porn movie to win the Academy Award,
Deep Mongolian Steinem Job.
The film had been directed by Stanley Kubrick, after he read a satirical novel in which the author had imagined what would happen if Kubrick set out to make a serious and even
artistic
porn film.

Despite the success of
Deep Mongolian Steinem Job
, most humans still did not realize that all fantasies tend to become realities, in one universe or another.

Carol did realize it, however. She was currently involved in approximately 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.

The sensuous California sun hung low and sultry over San Francisco, turning everybody’s mood in a low and sultry direction. It was a day when anything could happen. Cops helped old ladies across the street. Bankers gave loans to people who really needed them. A high school girl was heard to speak a sentence in English, without “ya know” before the predicate object.

And a mysterious hand scrawled “The enormous tragedy of the dream nor dashed a thousand kim” on the wall of the Van Ness Street entrance of Orgasm Research.

Dr. Frank Dashwood (dum dum de! Who’s Zelenka?) arrived from another novel.

He turned into the Van Ness parking lot of ORGRE, executed a smart translation of his sleek MG into the RESERVED area, and saw the incomprehensible scrawl.

That damned Ezra Pound again. Why do I have to be haunted by a schizo with an obsession about Fernando Poo?

At nine-oh-one Dr. Dashwood passed through the solid oak door saying in gold letters:

FRANCIS DASHWOOD, M.D.
PRESIDENT

There was nothing urgent on the memo pad, so Dashwood began opening the incoming mail leisurely.

Dr. Dashwood was intrigued. He began thinking of topological transformations, non-Euclidean geometrics, Wheeler’s wormholes in superspace … But then he realized he was Romanticizing, just because the puzzle had sparked his imagination. In ordinary four-dimensional Heisenberg space-time, there was no way out of the paradox: If the writer crossed the river, he and his lady were committing sodomy in Iowa, and if the lady crossed the river, they were violating the Mann Act in Illinois.

Logicians dream up such Strange Loops, Dashwood reflected, just to make games for other logicians; but lawyers create them to make more jobs for lawyers.

Dashwood scrawled, “Tell him his lady better damned well
find
a job in Illinois.”

Next.