Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (43 page)

“Your friends sound like a bunch of damned Communists,” Dashwood said.

“Nay,” Gulliver protested. “They live in the State of Nature, without Bureaucrats or Commissars of any kind. And, I might add, Sir, their Opinion of our Doctors was based on my showing them an ordinary
Medical Bill
, at which they inquir’d of me the Average Income of the Doctors who present these Bills and the Average Income of the Unfortunate Patients who must pay them or be left without Treatment to Die in the Streets. Their comments on this were of such Disgust and Anger that I dared not show them a Psychiatrist’s Bill, lest their opinion of our Species, already Low, should sink Lower than
Whaleburger
, which is, as you may know, at the bottom of the Ocean.”

“Oh, Abzug off,” said Dashwood, really angry now.

He rushed into ORGRE and left Gulliver standing on the sidewalk.

   Back in New York, the phone was ringing again in the office of Abu Laylah at the Saudi Arabian Consulate. Still high on the new kef, Abu Laylah lifted the receiver leisurely.

“I say, is this the Saudi Arabian Consulate?” asked a very British voice.

“Oy vay
, have you got the wrong number!” Abu Laylah replied in a thick Yiddish accent.

“Oh,” the voice said, taken aback. “Veddy sorry.”

Abu Laylah went on packing happily. He had been fired that morning and was thoroughly enjoying himself screwing up all incoming calls before leaving.

Just a few minutes ago he had convinced some Infidel that the most sublime verse in the
Koran
was full of nonsense about horses and mustaches.

The Invisible Hand Society had its headquarters in Washington, just off Dupont Circle, in the same building which housed the Warren Belch Society.

Clem Cotex, the president of the Belchers, had noticed the name of the Invisible Hand on the building directory a long time ago. He liked it, because he liked mysteries. He enjoyed wondering about the Invisible Hand-ers and speculating on what esoteric business could justify such a name.

Were they the Nine Unknown Men who rule the world? The local branch of the Bavarian Illuminati? The traditionalist faction of the old Black Hand, out of which the Mafia and Cosa Nostra had grown?

Was Lamont Cranston their leader, perhaps?

Clem loved such speculations. Most of his life he had been a salesman in Arkansas and never thought of anything but commissions, net sales, tax writeoffs, and not telling the same Rastus and Mandy story to the same customer twice. Then one day in Chicago a tall, crew-cut humanoid—a human, Clem thought at the time—gave him some free tomato juice on the street. The man (the humanoid, actually) said he was from the Eris Tomato Juice Company and that they were handing out free samples to get people acquainted with their product.

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 computeroid 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.

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 Hollandaise 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 Hollandaise 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.