Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (47 page)

“Certainly, certainly,” Dashwood said, struggling to remove Joseph K.’s fingers from his sleeve. “But if you were to see a good counselor—not a psychiatrist, necessarily … I don’t mean to imply—”

“We are all guilty,” Joseph K. said flatly. “They have established so many rules, and recorded them in archives that the ordinary citizen cannot consult, that we must all, the most loyal and decent of us, stumble on a mere technicality occasionally. Not that I mean to assert that technicalities are not necessary, you understand, since it is important to spell out in detail the
exact
meaning intended in a statute, don’t you agree, George?”

“Frank,” Dashwood said automatically.

Joseph K. suddenly looked sly. “Oh,” he said slowly, “you claim that you are not George Dorn? How clever of them, although I can’t imagine how they persuaded you, but of course a man of your moral principles would not be
bribed
, certainly. They must have convinced you it was for my own good in some absolute metaphysical sense, right?
Certainly. You would not work for them out of
malice
, would you?” He released Dashwood with a poignant, despairing gesture. “You mean well, he said. “They all mean well, I know.
But I am innocent
, I tell you!”

He backed away. “And you
are
George Dorn, and I am not deceived,” he added bitterly.

Then he turned and ran.

The big news of the 1985 season in the art world was that François Loup-Garou had abandoned Neo-Surrealism and founded a new school of art called
Pararealisme.

This was only partly the result of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg; it was also a matter of economics.

For nearly a century, it had been very important for an artist to belong to a “school,” and it was even better to be the founder of a “school.” This was not just a case of “In Union There Is Strength”; it was also a shrewd marketing strategy. It might take an individual painter ten or twenty years to be “discovered”—if he were original, it might take much longer, and he might not be alive to enjoy it—but when a School of Art was formed, that was News, and all members of the school were discovered simultaneously.

There had been an Impressionist school, a Post-Impressionist school, an Expressionist school, an Abstract Expressionist school, a Cubist school, a Futurist school, a
Pop school and an Op school, and so on. François Loup-Garou had noticed that the commercial life of each school was getting shorter all the time, due to the accelerated intensity of competition: Neo-Surrealism was already being eclipsed, as an object of news and debate, by the Neo-Cubism of the American, Burroughs.

He decided it was time to launch a new school.

After the experience of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg,
Pararealisme
seemed appropriate to him.

According to Standard Operating Procedure, he got a few friends together and they began issuing Proclamations denouncing all other schools (especially Neo-Cubism) as obsolete and reactionary. This got them into the Art Journals and into some newspapers.

Then they held their own first show, and that got them into the international news magazines.

They were news; it didn’t really matter if their paintings were any good at all.

In fact, their paintings were rather good, in a fey sort of way.

They had revived traditional “representational” art (everything they did was as naturalistic as a news photograph), but with a difference that made a difference.

The largest canvas at the first Pararealiste show was Loup-Garou’s own
What Do You Make of This, Professor?
An enormous work it was, covering two walls, bent in the middle on a special hinged frame. It showed a cerulean-blue sky, with hailstones: thousands and thousands of hailstones, six months’ painstaking labor, and each hailstone had a tiny image of the Virgin Mary on it.

Puzzled viewers might have found some enlightenment in the First Pararealiste Manifesto:

Some said that the Pararealistes were even better at writing manifestos than at painting pictures; but they meant what they said. The hailstones in
What Do You Make of This, Professor?
were no image of dream or delirium—“We spit on surrealism! Fantasy is every bit as dreary as Logic! It is the REAL that we seek!” the First Manifesto had also declared. What Loup-Garou had so painstakingly depicted was an occurrence that actually happened at Lyons in 1920. Xeroxes of the old newspaper stories about the event (“PEASANTS SEE VIRGIN ON HAILSTONES”) were distributed to the press, emphasizing again that Pararealistes only painted the real, or as they always wrote, the REAL.

Little Pierre de la Nuit—Pierrot le Fou, he styled himself—was Loup-Garou’s best friend and had contributed seventeen canvases to the first show. Magnificent, monstrous things they were, of course—flying saucers, all of them: blue and gold and silver and green and bright orange, shaped like doughnuts or boomerangs or ellipsoids or cones. Every one of them had been reported in the sky by somebody or other in the past forty years.
Loup-Garou circulated news stories about each sighting, you can be sure, to demonstrate again pararealisme’s devotion to the REAL.

Then there was Jean Cul’s
The Sheep-Cow;
some claimed it was the greatest of all Pararealiste paintings. It portrayed an animal half-sheep and half-cow, a veritable insult to the laws of genetics. Such an animal had been born in Simcoe, Ontario, in 1888. They circulated news stories about it.

All of this created so much international discussion that the Pararealistes immediately released the second Manifesto. (They had learned something about P.R. from the early surrealists.)

They denounced those who did not like their paintings as fools. They then denounced those who
did
like their paintings as damned fools, for liking them for the wrong reasons. They went on to fulminate against everybody in general:

It reads better in the original French. But it would have been a top news story if it hadn’t been eclipsed by the singularly obscene “miracle” at Canterbury Cathedral that week.

The details of the alleged “miracle” had been censored and covered up by high Church officials from the very beginning. Newspapers, at first, printed only short items saying that something strange caused the Archbishop of Canterbury to turn a ghastly white during Mass and stumble so badly that he fell off the altar.

Of course some cynics immediately assumed that His Eminence was as drunk as a skunk. There are always types like that, believing the worst of everybody.

Then the rumors started to circulate. Those who had been in the Cathedral said that the Most Reverend Archbishop had not so much stumbled as
jumped
, and that his expression was one of such fear and loathing that all present felt at once that something distinctly
eldritch
and
unholy
had invaded the church. Others, imaginative types and religious hysterics, claimed to have felt something cold and
clammy
moving in the air, or to have seen “auras.”

By the time the rumors had gone three times around the United Kingdom and twice around Europe, there were details that came out of the
Necronomicon
or the grim fictions of Stoker, Machen, Walpole. Horned men, Things with tentacles, and Linda Lovelace were prominently featured in these embroidered versions of the Canterbury Horror, as it was beginning to be called.

The press, of course, got more interested at this point, and the Reverend Archbishop was constantly besieged to conform or deny the most outlandish and distasteful reports about what had occurred. At first His Eminence refused to speak to the press at all, but finally, by the time some scandal sheets were claiming that Nyarlathotep, the
mad faceless god of Khem, had appeared on the altar bellowing
Cthulhu fthagn!
, the Archbishop issued a terse statement through his Press Secretary.

“Nothing untoward happened. His Eminence merely tripped on the altar rug, and any further discussion would be futile.”

This merely fanned the flames of Rumor, of course.

One legend circulated even more than the others, perhaps because it appealed to prurient interest, or maybe just because it was the version given by a few people who had actually been in the Cathedral during Mass.

According to this yarn, a miraculous flying Rehnquist—just like the ones in the murals at Pompeii, except that it didn’t have wings—had soared across the front of the church, barely missing His Eminence’s high episcopal nose.

The judicious, of course, did not credit this wild rumor. They were all coming around, as the judicious usually do, to the view of the cynics. The Archbishop, they said, had been stewed to the gills.

His Eminence was no fool, however. After the first shock, he had begun his own investigation, aided by a few trusted deacons.

They found the slingshot, abandoned, on the floor of the first pew, to the right. That was the direction the Rehnquist had come from, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

The Archbishop told them, then, the rumors
he
had heard about the incident of the Unistat Ambassador who had to be put on morphine after finding It, wrapped in pink ribbon, on a staircase.

“We are dealing with a deranged mind,” His Eminence said, “but not with anything ‘supernatural,’ thank God.”

They never found the Rehnquist, but as the Archbishop pointed out, “the perpetrator may have confederates.”

Everybody tried to remember who had been sitting in the extreme right of the first pew. They carefully made up a list, including everybody’s separate memories, half-memories, or pseudo-memories. The list looked like this:

“One name seems to stand out, doesn’t it?” asked His Eminence.

“Eva Gebloomenkraft,” said a deacon. “Isn’t she that Jet Set millionairess who got into so much trouble in Unistat two years ago for putting laughing gas in the air conditioning system at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”

   The sudden death of Bonny Benedict created waves of confusion and apprehension far beyond what ordinarily would have resulted from such a tragic accident.

The first one affected was Polly Esther Doubleknit, who called down from her executive office to the City Desk at once.

“What the hell happened to Bonny?” she demanded.

The City Editor spoke in a hoarse croak. “It seems to be what the TV news said, a heart attack.” He was beginning to feel that he’d be the next victim, since his blood pressure seemed to be rising every minute.

“A heart attack?” Polly Esther was dumbfounded. “But what about the man?”

“He’s being held, of course,” the City Editor said. “But God knows what they’ll charge him with—manslaughter,
negligent homicide, who knows? There’s never been a case like this before.”

“They had better charge him with something,” Polly Esther said crisply. “Or this paper will land on the D.A.’s office with all four feet. Do I make myself clear?”

   Admiral Babbit nearly jumped out of his skin when the news reached Washington.

“It’s those Briggsing Bryanting faggots from Alexandria!” he screamed. “And they’re gonna try to pin it on us!”

This was a defensive over-reaction caused by the fact that Old Iron Balls had been contemplating various ways of bringing about the demise of Ms. Benedict. But he distrusted Einstein and neuroanalysis—“Jewish egghead stuff”—and never realized that most of his mentations consisted of defensive over-reactions.

“I’ll fix those Rehnquist-suckers,” he said to an aide. “Get old de la Plume, and tell him I’ve got a big job for him.”

This referred to Mr. Shemus de la Plume, Naval Intelligence’s ace handwriting forger.

And so, within thirty-six hours, the
Washington Post
had come into possession of a diary, allegedly written by John Disk, the man who had killed Bonny Benedict. The diary only
looked
cryptic at first glance. With a little study, anybody with at least two inches of forehead could figure out, from the abbreviations and clumsy codes used, that Disk had been an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.

This was quite a shock to both Disk and the CIA, who had never had any connection with each other.

Actually, Disk had been raised in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church, a bizarre fascistoid splinter group which
had broken with the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen of Dublin.