Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

"No, the other one, the guy who wrote Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs."

"I? Remind you? Of Edgar Rice Burroughs?"

"Of something he said once. He said that he had a lot of fun with his imagination and that he knew in a small way what a grand time God had in creating the universe."

Joe Malik didn't even believe in Choronzon. The Skeptic within him had decided that the most operational model for those events which naive occultists attribute to "Choronzon" was to classify them as synchronicities activated by the presence of the Trickster God archetype, in the Jungian collective unconscious, or Leary's neurogenetic archives, or somewhere back down there in the thalamus or brainstem. To assume, even for a minute, that Choronzon had an objective existence beyond the archetype in the unconscious circuitry of the central nervous system was to collapse into prescientific theology and demonology.

But, alas, the Skeptic was only one program inside the Malik biocomputer, and not at his best at moments like this. The Shaman tape began running in its own programs as the Skeptic faded out, and Joe noticed again for the thousandth time how the ego circuit melded with the new program as easily as it had with the old, so now he "was" Joe Malik the Shaman, son of a thousand years of Sufis, and if Choronzon was really messing around he betta watcha his ass.

"It's that motherfuckin' loa," Carol said angrily. "We didn't do the exorcism right…"

"Choronzon" was a mind-construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered "Both." This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his Laws of Form.

A loa was a mind-construct of those primates who specialized in Santaria, also called Magicko de Chango or Voudon. A loa, just like the Gentry, might on occasion be kindly disposed; but a guardian loa who was set on a woman to prevent her from copulating (except with the primate who had through Santaria created/projected/contacted said loa) was well known to be extremely malign, devious, fiendish, impish, devilish, and a Royal pain in the ass. The has, like the Gentry and the various Cabalistic angels and demons, operated beneath the space-time continuum in "dream time," where the true Free Masons create reality friezes.

An archetype was a mind-construct of a primate named Carl Jung, who specialized in preneurological psychology. An archetype existed at the "psychoid" level, which was below that of individual or collective unconsciousness, where the organic and the inorganic meld and merge into psychoid matrices which, if nudged by the right archetype, would produce a reality-construct so astonishing that it would appear like magick or a very strange "coincidence." Jung called these psychoid archetypal effects synch ronicities.

And Marvin Gardens, coked to the nines, is reading on and on with absolute absorption:

Syngamy forms a zygote, which develops into a new diploid form, and the cycle begins anew

Cycles that's it, he thinks excitedly, we're all permutations and combinations of that first amoeba every ejaculation another birthdeath or node in the everybranching whatchamacallit. Oh man this is heavy and I'm really grooving with it cycles in time great wheels turning like the Mayan calendar the genetic clock like music but oh shit maybe it's just the coke I still haven't figured out if the damn amoeba is immortal.

But Malik is maintaining his cool, albeit with some effort. "So all right," he said aloud, facing the Eye unblinking, "are you just trying to scare me to death, or do you have a message for me?" Treat all of Them in a lofty way, lest They have cause to think thee weak, said Dr. Dee.

"We better do the exorcism again," whispered Carol Christmas-nude, golden, and delicious-also maintaining her cool.

Carol had a great deal of experience at maintaining her cool. Her career had been typical of self-directed Unistat females who matured in the early 1970s: one rape at age fifteen while hitchhiking (she never hitchhiked again); two abortions; husband #1, who turned out to be so free of Macho and the Male Stereotype that even God's Lightning couldn't accuse him of Chauvinism (he wept most pite-ously when Carol got tired of supporting him and threw him out); husband #2, who was brilliant, kind, generous, sensitive, and a junky; a succession of mediocre lovers, with one or two she still treasured in memory but wouldn't want to live with again for all the tea in Acapulco; producers who believed that an actress as gorgeous as she should only be cast in roles that justified getting all her clothes off sometime during the third act and several times in their private offices; husband #3, who had put the goddamned loa on her when they separated; and Ronnie

"Ronnie is doing very well for a special child," the doctor had told her the last time she visited the home. That was a hell of an elaborate euphemism for Mongolian idiot, she thought angrily; but the doctor was trying to be kind, and she forgave him.

But two nights later she opened in another Off-Off-Off Broadway, Hiroshima Werewolf, and one critic described her as having "a special childlike quality reminiscent of Monroe." She felt a wave of vertigo on reading that: If the doctor and the critic were not in cahoots to drive her over the edge, then those words were the most sinister kind of synchronicity. But she maintained her cool.

Now she had a goddamned loa on top of everything else.

She maintained.

And Justin Case, deeper asleep, dapper as loop, was just waltzing along Owld Broadway with Judge Wish-ingdone, past Punker Hall, and there was a patchy fog and a zoo city zoo, one nixson and a vegetable. And he was blowin to adams and tilling the tyler, Don Judge Lincoln, mercurial and zany and hoppy, that high on the thigh-angle of him, cruising the dollarwars and emanstirpating his sklavs until he was caught with Topsy! in the barn!! on the farce of youlie!!! No martha! that's jokeson's guile for you, toomsayer.

But they were in the cherrytreeattric warld, an honest ape, he couldna tell a phone. One nukied individual, with Ma in her gurdjef and Pop in the easel, to the republic for witch's hands, by the Donzerly Light. And who comes up but Indrarambam and Rashowsunnier and Shivabull, loads and toads of them, forty of them, with their fords and hords and their gauchos and cheekos and jumbos and harpoons inem (corpus whalem!) asking about the launches and donors and the thousand and ninety things they ask, irking and rooking and snooping, prying and preying, forty of them, all buyers cotter, infernal reamin you sodage, doubt's eternal fact, by all Chinatown howdials.

Justin moans in his sleep as the Iranian Rastuys Shiites close in on him.

"Papa Legba, Papa Legba, Papa Legba," Joe Malik chants along with Carol Christmas, while the astral/ electrical/prajna/orgone/psionic/bioplasmic/odyle energy, or the Power of Imagination, in the room continues to escalate toward quantum wobble.

Papa Legba was the Opener of the window, according to the Santaria metaphor. Like Maxwell's Demon, he could increase or decrease entropy at whim, and take you into alternative etgenstates. He was the Boss Honcho on the astral potentia level, the alpha male of the pack. He'd kick the ass of any loa intruding on his good friends, and Carol had learned to be one of his very good friends since living with Hugo de Naranja.