Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (45 page)

“That’s all very well and good, I’m sure,” Blake Williams said, “but ah scientifically the behavior in question was certainly not mediated through the rational circuits of the cortex and does require ah some sort of explanation. I mean, if it wasn’t conditioning, what the Potter Stewart was it?”

“Mmm,” said Mary Margaret. “Mmm? How about imprinting?”

“What?”
Dr. Williams looked, for a moment, like the Ambassador finding the Rehnquist on the stairs.

“Imprinting,” Mary Margaret said. “When an animal learns something all-at-once-in-a-flash. Isn’t that called imprinting?”

Williams stared.

“I think you’ve got it,” he said finally. “How would you ah like to go up to my apartment and discuss this further?”

He was suddenly madly in love with her. She had given him a New Idea.

   In San Francisco, Dr. Van Ation had been Briggsing Dr. Dashwood for twenty minutes.

He sounded like a man at prayer. “Oh, God,” he kept repeating. “Oh, God, God, God …”

Dr. Van Ation was thoroughly enjoying herself. Dashwood had Briggsed her for forty minutes, during which she reached Millet six times, and she was still purring with gratitude.

“Oh, God, God,
God,”
Dashwood croaked, as her tongue continued to excite his Rehnquist.

   “And so,” Simon Moon concluded, “government is just a glitch. A semantic hallucination.”

“Mrn—mn,” said Marlon Murphy.

Simon turned around and looked at the boy; and it was as he feared; Marlon was about 80 percent asleep. Simon had been lecturing virtually to himself for several minutes.

“Non Illegitimati carborundum
,” he muttered. It was his
mantra
against resentment, wrath, and other diseases of the ego.

He leaned over and kissed Marlon lightly on the ear.

“Mrn,” Marlon mumbled.

Simon got up from the bed and padded into the living room, where he smoked a little more hash and remembered classrooms back in Chicago, beatings he had received for being intellectual and queer, the first boy he had ever Briggsed (wasn’t his name Donald something?), the beauty of Russell’s definition of number when he finally grasped it (the class of all classes that are similar), the first time he was Bryanted (he was afraid it would hurt), the strange out-of-book experience in New York on hash when he saw that the laws that govern us are partly
grammatical and partly pure whimsy, and this was very good hash, indeed, because he could almost remember that experience: there was a universe where he was hetero and Furbish Lousewart was President; yes, this was very high-grade hash, indeed, and he almost believed it, and why not? The math certainly did imply such universes, and each universe could be like a book, each book a variation on the same theme, and the Author (if one dared to try imagine such a Being) might even be in a meta-universe which had its own Author, and so on, to infinity….

But then, suddenly (hashish is full of surprises) Simon was weeping, remembering his father, Old Tim Moon, who had been a Wobbly organizer all his life, and Tim was singing “Joe Hill” again:

“Oh, Dad,” Simon said aloud. “Why did you have to die, before I ever knew how much I loved you?” And suddenly he was all alone in an empty living room, weeping like an old man whose family and friends were all dead, holding his Social Security check and wondering: Where is the Federal bureau in charge of distributing love?

Which was absurd: Simon had lots of friends, and he was just being morbid.

“Oh, Dad”—he sniffed one more time—“I
miss
you.”

And then he stopped crying and went and put the Fugs’ record of “Rameses the Second Is Dead, My Love” on the stereo. And floated with the music and the hash into a Country-and-Western Egyptian paradise:

*   *   *

“Well?” Mary Margaret Wildeblood prompted, a bit impatiently. She was naked on Williams’s bed and had been Lourding herself, not vigorously, just gently, very gently, not getting too excited yet, merely trying to get him excited.

“Just a minute just a minute,” Williams said, sitting in his drawers on the side of the bed, one sock in his hand. It wasn’t the transsex thing that was delaying him; he was still struggling with the New Idea she had given him back at the Three Lions. “It isn’t just poisoning,” he said absently.
“Anything
that shocks the whole neuroendocrine system might do it. Yes, of course. Artificially induced imprint vulnerability.”

Mary Margaret seized his hand and placed it firmly between her thighs. “Imprint that,” she said coyly.

“Yes, yes,” he said, caressing her absently. “But just listen a minute. Orgasm does it um I think. No, just the first orgasm. Right? You keep repeating the pattern of the first orgasm….”

“I don’t,” Mary Margaret said. “Just up there a bit, on my Atkinson there,
there
, ah Christ.”

“Yes yes you don’t and a lot of people I know don’t,” he said. “Yes. Um? But the people whose sexual patterns keep changing are a minority, certainly. They’ve changed their imprints somehow. Um. Yes, yes. Oh, my God!”

“What
is
it?” Mary Margaret was becoming cross; his hand had stopped moving entirely.

“Sorry,” he said, resuming the gentle stimulation on her Atkinson and the outer lips of her Feinstein. “I just realized some people keep changing their ideas too. They’ve loosened the semantic imprints. My God, that’s why conditioning theory is inadequate. Don’t you see the conditioned reflexes are built onto the imprints….”

“God God God oh sweet Jesus God”

“It’s a shock to the whole system. People who’ve had
near-death or clinical death experiences. Shipwrecked sailors. And oh Jesus I call myself an anthropologist and I never got it before, rites of initiation of course that’s what they’re all about of course making new imprints….”

“Oh God oh God darling darling”

“Yes yes, I love you, new imprints of course, yes yes are you coming on my little darling”

“God God GOD!!!”

“Ah sweet little darling was it good? Ah yes you look so sweet now there’s nothing as lovely as that post-Millett expression but about those imprint circuits—”

“Shut up and Briggs me
please
darling”

And so, still reflecting on shock and imprint vulnerability and the changing of sexual-semantic imprints, Blake Williams began Briggsing a person who had been masculine for almost all the years they had known each other, wondering just how queer this was, really.

   “Incidentally,” Dr. Dashwood asked, “what do
you
think the
Hammerklavier
is all about?”

Bertha Van Ation and he were sitting at the kitchen table now, sipping a little peach brandy he had found still remaining in the cabinet, and munching Ritz crackers.

Dr. Van Ation brushed some auburn hairs back from her forehead. “The Black Hole,” she said promptly.

“Ah you mean he was feeling dragged down into something he couldn’t escape?” Dr. Dashwood suddenly remembered he wanted to look up Jan (or was it Hans?) Zelenka.

“No, not that aspect of it.” Bertha munched and frowned thoughtfully. “The suspension of all the cosmological laws. The end of space. The end of time. The end of causality.”

Dashwood smiled. “Some people thought it was the end of music when it was first performed,” he said. “You might be on the right track.”

“Why thank you sir said she.” Bertha grinned. “You really think I’m dragging my own astronomy into the music department.”

“You have every right to,” he said. “We all see and hear through our own filters. To me, the
Hammerklavier
sounds like an unsuccessful attempt at Tantric sex. And the
Seventh
and
Eighth Symphonies
sound like monumentally successful attempts. That’s me dragging my own speciality into the music department.”

“You are a doll.”

“And you’re a
living
doll.”

“Isn’t sex great?”

“If God invented anything better,” Dashwood said, quoting an old proverb and adapting it to the Feminist age, “She kept it to Herself.”

“And how did I score on your scale?”

“Ten Spelvins of Sincerity, Sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness. No, make that eight Havens. You went off the scale.”

   In Hollywood, Carol Christmas, the Blond Goddess of everybody’s fantasies, was sleeping alone for once.

She was still involved in 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.

The quantum perturbations pulsed gently through her atoms, stimulating her molecules, rejuvenating her cells, providing a very satisfactory Trip for her whole neuroendocrine system, and enriching her dreams vastly.

It was perfect Tantric sex, and she wasn’t even consciously aware of it.

This was happening to her, and had been happening to her since the release of
Deep Mongolian Steinem Job
, because she
was
the Blond Goddess in so many fantasies.

All over the world, as she slept and even while she was awake in the daytime, the quantum inseparability principle
(QUIP) stimulated her gently, because all over the world, every hour, 250,000,000 lonely men were Lourding themselves while looking at photographs of her.

   Back in New York, Polly Esther Doubleknit was wandering around her apartment stark-naked.

Her lover of the evening was sound asleep in the bedroom, but Polly Esther was wakeful and thinking of twenty dozen things at once, like the Second Oswald in Hong Kong and whether fish ever get seasick and how splendidly heavenly it had felt when her lover’s tongue was up inside her Feinstein and what was the name of the third Andrews Sister—Maxine and Laverne and
who?
—and Silent Tristero’s Empire and why so many things come in threes, not just Maxine and Laverne and what’s-her-name but Curly and Larry and Moe; and Tom, Dick, and Harry; and Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet; and Groucho, Chico, and Harpo; and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; and Past, Present, and Future; and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner; and the three witches in
Macbeth;
and the three brothers who start on the same quest in all the old fairy tales; and the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary; and of course the Big Three, Pops, J.C., and Smokey; and maybe she should cut down on those diet pills; it was absurd to be wandering around at three in the morning thinking in threes.

And then there was up-down, back-forward, and right-left, the three dimensions in space; and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod; and the Three Wise Men, Whozit, and Whatzis-name and Melchior; and Peter, Jack, and Martin, the three brothers in Swift’s
Tale of a Tub;
and Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the Kingston Trio; and Friends, Romans, Countrymen, which was not only a triad, but a progressive triad, one beat, two beats, three beats, one, two,
three, just like that, and she would definitely cut down on the diet pills.

Polly Esther finally put a record on the stereo, turning the volume down to low so as not to waken her lover in the bedroom.

She picked the
Hammerklavier
sonata, not out of coincidence or propinquity or even synchronicity, but just because it was her favorite of Beethoven’s piano pieces. It was her favorite because she couldn’t understand it, no matter now often she played it. It was the musical equivalent of a Zen koan to her, endlessly fascinating because endlessly enigmatic.

The stark, discordant opening bars drove all wandering threesomes out of her mind, narrowing her attention to Ludwig’s urgent if incomprehensible universe of structured sound. She was swept into it again, as always, swept along by emotions so deep and yet so austere that nobody has ever been able to name them. Once she had invited the world’s three most admired concert pianists to a party, just so she could ask each of them, privately, what they thought the
Hammerklavier
meant. As she expected, she had gotten three wildly conflicting answers. Another time she had ordered every book in print about Beethoven from Doubleday’s on Fifty-third Street at Fifth Avenue and looked up
Hammerklavier
in the index of each. She got forty-four different opinions that way.

The music hammered and surged along, carrying her through pain and frustration and loneliness to land, again and again, at things beyond such simple feelings, things that she sometimes felt were extraterrestrial or non-Euclidean or somehow beyond normal human perception. There are some kinds of knowledge, Ludwig had once claimed, that can only be expressed in music, not in any other art, not in science or philosophy. This was the most arcane of such knowledge, Ludwig’s most intimate secret,
and maybe you weren’t entitled to understand it until you had been to the strange dark places of the psyche out of which he had created it.

It was the childbirth process, of course—and Polly Esther did not consider it a miracle that Ludwig could understand that, he was so obviously bi, at least empathetically—the labor pains going on and on until the act of creation seemed impossible, you would never get there, and yet somehow even in the blocked hopeless feeling you
were
getting there; and it was all the terrors of his childhood, all those cruel beatings by his alcoholic father, remembered and not forgiven, never forgiven; but it was also that cold, analytical, almost scientific side of Ludwig, remorselessly following his experiment to its inexorable conclusion: he had discovered or rediscovered that the piano is, among other things, a percussion instrument and he was following the logic of that insight, as he followed every musical idea, to wherever it led him, to whatever abyss.

And, after thinking all that, Polly Esther knew she still didn’t understand the
Hammerklavier;
but as it banged and howled to its defiant conclusion, she got a flash of one aspect she had never registered before. It was the last scene of
Papillon
, when after twelve years of horror, Steve McQueen finally escapes from Devil’s Island on his homemade raft of coconut shells and floats off into the Atlantic, as Ludwig floats off at the end of the
Hammerklavier
, shouting to the hostile sea and the indifferent sky: