Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

The idea of mounting and, so to speak, enshrining Ulysses occurred to Mary Margaret at her very first reception after returning from Johns Hopkins.

Benny "Eggs" Benedict started it by suggesting, "Norman Mailer might try to get revenge for some of your reviews by raping you."

"Let the male chauvinist pig try it,' Mary Margaret said demurely. "I've been studying kung fu."

"Oh, are you planning to join Women's Lib?" Justin Case inquired.

"I have given it some thought," Mary Margaret replied, practicing her new simpery-Marilyn-Monroe smile and positively reveling in the feel of the nylons on his, no dammit her, thighs.

"JUST A GODDAM MINUTE," a booming masculine voice cut in. This was Josephine Malik, chairperson of God's Lightning-an outfit long suspected of terrorist fire-bombings against porny movie houses, adult bookstores, and other sexist enterprises. Jo was an ideological descendant of those who thought copulation was bad for the crops. "I don't know about lib-lab wishy-washy groups like NOW," she went on, "but God's Lightning certainly isn't accepting any members who weren't born female."

"Oh, now," a fluty feminine voice intervened-"Figs" Newton, spokesperson for the Necrophile Liberation Front, sporting a lapel button that said, OUT OF THE MAUSOLEUMS, INTO THE STREETS. "That's hardly fair," he pronounced-like most Terrestrials, he regarded himself as an expert on morality. "People are what they make themselves," he said, good Existentialist that he was. "To hold the accidents of birth against them is practically racism, isn't it?"

This led to some lively debate, and it was finally decided that to hold the accident of genitalia-at-birth against somebody was definitely not racism, but might be sexism, or possibly genderism. Josephine Malik, meanwhile, smoldered.

"Well," she said finally, "God's Lightning is not influenced by all this baroque civil rights and civil liberties horseshit out of the eighteenth century. According to semantics, people don't have rights; they just make demands and call them their rights. It's purely a pragmatic problem. If we let this- person- in, what's to prevent other men from hacking off their prongs, infiltrating our ranks, and subverting our whole organization?"

This was a poser, admittedly; and while the assembled company grappled with it, Josephine delivered her crusher: "Besides, there's a lot of doubt about how complete these operations are. How do we know Ms. Wildeblood is in all respects a true woman and not just a truncated man?"

Mary Margaret Wildeblood, who had a mind somewhat bizarre even for the twentieth century, had been waiting for such an opportunity. "I can certainly prove I'm not a man," she smiled sweetly, and drew Ulysses out of her purse. Although two men fainted on the spot, the women merely blinked, at least at first. Then some of them began to titter.

Thus began the great Wildeblood scandale of that winter. She had maliciously saved the relic of her previous masculinity with the thought that it might provoke some sort of spontaneous Group Encounter sessions, and now she knew she had the potential for some truly memorable Freak-outs. The relic was placed in the hands of a skilled taxidermist and soon emerged, in a natural-looking erect state, handsomely mounted on a redwood plaque. This hung over the mantelpiece of her posh Sutton Place apartment, and there she began to hold parties to which were invited (along with the usual New York VIPs) precisely those persons most likely to be neurologically galvanized by the sight of a penis without a man, which is considerably more memorable than mathematician Dodgson's grin without a cat, although perhaps not as memorable as physicist Schrodinger's cat, who was dead and alive at the same time.

Blake Williams became a regular at these soirees, and often retired sneakily to the kitchen to make notes, which later resulted in a scholarly article, "Priapism Recrudes-cent: Hellenic Religion in a Secular Context." The "ithy-phallic eidolon," as he insisted on calling Ms. Wildeblood's obscene joke, seemed to produce markedly different effects on various personality types. One football player, for instance, had to be removed in a straitjacket. Strangely enough, certain shy, timid, and stoop-shouldered men took it all in their stride, quite as if Wildeblood's brutally explicit rejection of masculinity reinforced their own loose grip upon that (after all) somewhat mystical estate. The Gay set developed a superstition, almost a mystique, and the tradition of "kissing it for good luck" was even joked about, obscurely, in certain newspaper columns. ("A new religion, of which Linda Lovelace might almost be the prophet, is now sweeping the Way-Out People, all the way from Fifty-seventh Street to St. Mark's Place.")

Why me, O Lord?

–ancient primate question

"I said FUCK THE BLOODY CAPITALISTS," the California writer was howling amid the group at the mantelpiece, below the ithyphallic eidolon.

"Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no peanuts, mayonnaise, or glue," Blake Williams was reciting patiently to Natalie Drest.

"TV, publishing, movies, everywhere-the extraterrestrials have taken over," Marvin Gardens was warning in his passionate Peter Lorre intonation.

Benny Benedict suddenly had enough of the Wildeblood high-IQ set. He wandered out on the balcony, to look at the stars and wonder, half-drunkenly, why he was so depressed.

After three years the question still came to him when he had too much booze aboard: Why me?

Which was selfish and maudlin. The real question should be: Why my mother?

Or, more to the point: Why anybody?

The world must be mad, that we go on living like this, and tolerate it. The primordial jungles were probably less dangerous than the streets of any city in Unistat. Was this the resultant of the long struggle upward from the caves-a world more frightening, more full of hatred and violence, more bloody than the days of the saber-tooth?

Every time I look at the TV news at seven, he thought miserably, I end up feeling this way before midnight. It's almost as if they're afraid somebody might have a flicker of hope or a good opinion of humanity (at least in potential) or a brief moment of delusory security. Every night, to prevent such unrealistic moods, they have to remind us that the violence and brutality is still continuing.

With a shock, Benny discovered that he was weeping again, silently, guiltily, privately. He had thought he was past that.

So much for booze as a tranquilizer.

He fought against it. It was self-indulgence, disguised self-pity actually. He dabbed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum…

"Nice night." An Unidentified Man had walked out onto the balcony.

"You don't feel the smog up here," Benny said, embarrassed, wondering if he had gotten rid of the last tear before this stranger had seen him.

The Unidentified Man looked up at the stars, smiling slightly. He was good-looking enough to be an actor, Benny thought, and at second glance he did look remotely familiar, as if his face had been in the newspapers sometime. "The stars," he said, "don't they get to you?"

Benny looked up. "I used to think I'd live to see people go there," he confessed, suddenly sure he had met this man somewhere before, a long time ago. "Not likely with Lousewart leading us back to the Stone Age."

"You're non-ec," the man said, in mock accusation.

"Guilty," Benny replied, realizing that this man was remarkably easy to talk to. "I think that if we used more of our brains, we'd be able to create a world where people would have a right to High Expectations."