Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

NO WIFE, NO HORSE, NO MUSTACHE

What is certain is that in countries like Bulgaria, where people live on- polenta, yogurt, and other such foods, men live to a greater age than in our parts of the world.

–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

Justin Case heard about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache at one of Mary Margaret Wildeblood's wild, wild parties. Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation, told the story. It was rather hard for Case to follow because the party was huge and noisy-a typical Wildeblood soiree. Everybody was there-Blake Williams, bearded, beamish, bland, the inventor of interstellar pharmaco-anthropology, Gestalt neurobiology, and a dozen other sciences that nobody understood; Juan Tootreego, the Olympic runner who had broken the three-and-a-half-minute mile; Carol Christmas, blond, bubbly, and possessed of the greatest bod in Manhattan; Natalie Drest, chairperson of the Index Expurgatorius in God's Lightning; Marvin Gardens, who had two best-selling novels and seemingly owned 90 percent of the cocaine in the Western world; Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer from Griffith Observatory who had discovered the two new planets beyond Pluto. Hordes of other Names-maxi-, midi-, and mini-celebrities-swarmed through Mary Margaret's posh Sut-ton Place pad as the evening wore on. There was a lot of booze, a lot of weed, and-due to Marvin Gardens- altogether too much coke.

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 Reader's Digest," Malik explained, trying to clarify matters but not sure how much Case had already missed.

"The Reader's 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 Reader's Digest all the way through and become one with it."

"Become one with the Reader's Digest?" Case was in beyond his depth and sinking fast in ontological quicksand. "… which makes the Van Alien 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 Reader's 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 syner-getically…"

"You mean," Carol Christmas breathed huskily, "you were deliberately brainwashing yourself to believe in this Reader's 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. Benet, 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 Dash wood'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," "llluminatus 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.