Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

Benny Benedict was working on his mantra, and didn't realize that he had wandered quite a bit from the Sanskrit original.

O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum the purpose of suffering is to make us ask the important questions what a guy a stage magician he said O how money makes me hum O how money makes me hum

He had reached the corner of Lexington and Twenty-third Street.

Pablo Gomez stepped out of a doorway and hit Benny from behind, hard, with a lead pipe.

Oh mommie take me home Oh mommie take me home… Benny exploded into the white light.

Fortunately the last remaining citizen of Manhattan with a sense of civic duty, one James Mortimer, came around the corner at just that moment. James Mortimer carried a police whistle at all times, since he knew he was living in a still-violent society. He blew several blasts, loud and shrill. Pablo Gomez fled without getting any money, and an ambulance arrived in time to rush Benny to the hospital and save his life.

The "nervous breakdown" (as it was called) of Hassan i Sabbah X did not attract much attention; the Cult of the Black Mother had never been as well publicized as the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers. The New York News-Times-Post actually referred to Hassan as a "well-known nightclub owner in Harlem," in their very brief story, and their reporter hadn't even investigated far enough to learn that Hassan was also the head of a cult with more members than the Missouri Synod Lutherans. But, then, the Cult of the Black Mother had never been publicity-minded; even The Amsterdam News, unaware of its membership, described it as "a small church."

Hassan had been delivered to Bellevue in a state of raving mania, under physical restraint by two of his former aides. The psychiatrists quickly pronounced him "paranoid schizophrenic" and prescribed the heaviest tranquilizer then available, which in fact kept him fairly drowsy even when he wasn't comatose. Nonetheless, when able to summon the energy to rise out of his lethargy and talk again, he would monotonously repeat to any other inmate or orderly who came near, "Look, I don't belong here. Something terrible has happened. I'm really the President of this fucking country…" and so on, with endless elaborations and details.

"A deeply defended psychosis," the psychiatrists decided, and began a course of electroshock treatments.

Whenever the flipped-out black came out of his daze, however, he would begin the same schizzy ranting all over: "Hey, listen, I'm the President of this fucking country…"

The electroshock was stepped up. Hassan retreated into a permanent daze and ceased to annoy anybody. By this time his brain had been fried to the consistency of a White Tower scrambled egg and his impressions of the external world were mostly olfactory and aural, like those of a subnormal toy poodle; he no longer argued about anything, since he no longer understood such abstract concepts as ego persistence or identity. The psychiatrists were satisfied: "If you can't cure a nut," their tacit motto was, "at least you can keep him from running around the ward annoying people."

Two FBI agents later discussed the matter privately.

"You think CIA did it?" asked the first, Tobias Knight.

"You figure he'd been working for them?" the other, Roy Ubu, asked in return. "I always had that notion myself. But why would they fuck his head like that, when God only knows what he might spill to somebody who'd get released from the nuthouse and repeat it to a reporter? Nah, CIA doesn't work that way. They'd just-" He drew a finger across his throat.

"I don't believe in coincidences," Knight said stubbornly. "Somebody got to him."

"Something," Ubu corrected with a sinister intonation. "You know as well as I do what he was. A witch."

"Voodooist," Knight corrected.

"Whatever. Everybody we ever sent in died of a heart attack, right?" Ubu looked over his shoulder. "Officially, the Bureau doesn't believe in witches. But I'll tell you what happened to Mr. Hassan i Sabbah X in my opinion. He called up something that he couldn't put down."

Dr. Francis Dashwood-neat, clean, rich, and not yet forty-drove into the grounds of the Orgasm Research Foundation on Van Ness in San Francisco at precisely 8:57 in the morning. He checked his wristwatch again after he parked his sleek M.G. in the executive parking lot. It was 8:58. Excellent. A quick trot and he was at his desk before the office clock reached nine. Once again he had demonstrated the punctuality (anal-retentive personality, silly prescientific Freudians called it) which had contributed so much to raising him to his present high position in the medical research bureaucracy of the United States.

Frank Dashwood, M.D., L.L.D., Ph.D., at the age of only thirty-eight, headed the most heavily funded and hotly debated institution in the world: Orgasm Research, a multimillion-dollar project dedicated to filling in the psychological intangibles left out of the pioneering research of Masters and Johnson two decades earlier. Since these psychological intangibles were-as Dr. Dashwood sometimes wittily remarked-"both psychological and intangible," there was no end to the research. Meanwhile, the funding money came rolling in.

Frank was, according to a survey by a management analyst, one of the seventeen men in the United States who was totally happy with his job.

Other researchers sometimes expressed envy of this fact. "What red-blooded man," one of them had once asked with some warmth, "wouldn't be happy supervising other people's orgasms and pulling down a swift sixty grand a year for it?"

This was somewhat unfair to a dedicated scientist. Dr. Dashwood was truly fascinated by orgasms-as Edison was by electricity-and had an inexhaustible curiosity about every possible factor involved in every possible twitch, itch, moan, gibber, gasp, sob, shudder, or howl connected with that dramatic biological tremor. Even more, however, he was mesmerized by lines, curves, averages, graphs, and every aspect of mathematics that could be clearly visualized. The world, for him, was not made up of "things," crude Disneyland animations projected by our lower nervous circuits, but of energy meshes. With no knowledge of Zen Buddhism, he intuitively shared Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng's vision that "from the beginning there has never been a thing." Dr. Dashwood lived in a universe of transactions that could be written as equations and traced on graph paper.

Above his desk was a motto suggested ironically 'by a skeptical friend. Dr. Dashwood saw nothing funny about it and adopted it as his own banner:

SCIENCE, PURE SCIENCE, AND DAMNED BE HE

WHO FIRST CRIES "HOLD, TOO MUCH!"

As he settled himself at his desk he observed that Ms. Karrige, his secretary, had already poured his coffee for him. Fine: The girl (femperson, he corrected) was really getting broken to the harness. He whipped out his thermometer and measured the black liquid in the cup: 98.4 degrees. Excellent: She was learning to meet his exacting demands.

Dr. Dashwood could not abide inexactitude or slovenliness in any human activity. "A thing worth doing," he would explain to his subordinates, "is worth doing right." He said this often, and malicious members of the staff said it even more often, when he was out of earshot, with a tone and a facial expression that were caricatures of his own.

With a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye, Frank Dashwood buzzed Ms. Karrige. "What's first for today?" he asked cheerfully.

The Jabberwock was growing: The key was no key…

Megalithic monuments were certainly not places of worship but places of refuge for people fleeing the advance of mud.