Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

By spring 1984, Case had 120 bound volumes of books, articles, and press clippings about the J.F.K. assassination, since he was still Righteously Indignant about the palpably obvious cover-up involved in the Warren Report.

The day that pseudo-Sullivan wigged out over Bonny Benedict's contribution to the mythology of the assassination, Case calmly clipped that item and added it to his file.

Three-quarters of the other material in Case's file was also fictitious. One-third of this disinformation had been generated by Intelligence Agencies-domestic, foreign, and extraterrestrial-as covers or screens for their own activities in and around Dallas in 1963. Another third had been produced by sincere, dedicated, sometimes avid conspiracy buffs, weaving their own webs of confusion as they searched for the elusive truth. The last third had been created, like the Bonny Benedict item, by journalists following Hearst's advice about what to do when there was no news.

Anybody trying to find out "what really happened" from this collection of mythology would be so confused that the significant fact of the extraterrestrial intervention would never be apparent.

Case did not suspect any of this. He loved his J.F.K. file. He was convinced that someday the crucial piece would come to him, he would insert it into the file, and the whole jigsaw would make sense.

He never realized that the one detail which gave everything away was that while Oswald was firing from the sixth-floor window he was also having a Coke on the second floor and mingling with the crowd in the street.

Like most liberals, Justin Case lacked imagination and never took seriously all the evidence of extraterrestrial activity on earth during the past forty years.

Case was currently having an affair with the Hollywood actress Carol Christmas.

Carol was renowned among the heterosexual male population for having the biggest Brownmillers since Jayne Mansfield; so far only women and a few Gay men had noticed that she could also act.

Carol had been married four times. She had had three abortions. Like other famous Beauties, she was always dieting, and hence, a little bit high-strung. She was also a disciple of General E. A. Crowley, the eccentric English explorer who had discovered the North Pole and claimed there was a hole there leading down to the center of the Earth. Carol devoutly believed Crowley's yarn that there was a whole civilization down there, inside the Earth, run by green-skinned women.

Carol believed this because she had a great artistic faith in the principle of balance. In her probability continuum-in the series of quantum eigenstates that had crystalized into her universe-the whole outside of the planet seemed to be run by white-skinned males. It was only fair that the inside should be run by green-skinned females.

Carol was having three other affairs at the same time as her amour with Justin Case. There was a hairdresser in Hollywood (bi, not Gay) who was very talented at Bryanting and Briggsing-two arts at which totally straight men, in Carol's opinion, were usually a bit clumsy. There was also Fran9ois Loup-Garou, the painter, in Paris, who adored her madly, as only a painter can adore a woman. And there was a bitter but brilliant Black novelist in Chicago named Franklin Stuart.

Justin Case knew all about these other amours; after all, he read Bonny Benedict's column every day. Bonny kept the world informed about which celebrities were Potter Stewarting each other. She did this in a way that was perfectly clear to every reader but totally without any clear meaning in a court of law, in case somebody got irritated and tried to sue her. What she did was to write something like "Hollywood sexpot Carol Christmas and Black novelist Frank Stuart are an item these days."

Everybody knew what "an item" meant.

When Bonny wrote that a couple were "a hot item" many of her readers were mildly puzzled, but assumed she was insinuating some fantastic sexual acrobatics. Actually, it only meant that Bonny was trying to avoid stylistic monotony; occasionally, she even switched it to "a torrid item," which led to even more lascivious fantasies for some of her readers.

Justin Case didn't object to Carol Christmas's other affairs because he accepted it as a fact of life that actors are hypersexed, just as coal miners are prone to black lung disease and novelists to booze and weird drugs. Besides, jealousy was a sign of possessiveness, and possessiveness was illiberal. And, anyway-as he usually concluded his ruminations on this subject, during the infrequent moments when he thought of it at all-Carol's career kept them apart most of the time, and he was not so naive as to expect somebody of her youth and beauty to resist all temptations.

And it was the 1980s, wasn't it?

Actually, Case was a bit of an unconscious psychic-that is, he was aware of quantum probability waves, although not consciously. He sensed that there were approximately 1050 universes in which he had lusted after Carol and never got into her Frankel even once. That unconscious psychic knowledge kept him content with this universe, where he was her part-time lover.

Carol Christmas had starred in the first hard-core porn movie to win the Academy Award, Deep Mongolian Steinem Job. The film had been directed by Stanley Kubrick, after he read a satirical novel in which the author had imagined what would happen if Kubrick set out to make a serious and even artistic porn film.

Despite the success of Deep Mongolian Steinem Job, most humans still did not realize that all fantasies tend to become realities, in one universe or another.

Carol did realize it, however. She was currently involved in approximately 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.

The sensuous California sun hung low and sultry over San Francisco, turning everybody's mood in a low and sultry direction. It was a day when anything could happen. Cops helped old ladies across the street. Bankers gave loans to people who really needed them. A high school girl was heard to speak a sentence in English, without "ya know" before the predicate object.

And a mysterious hand scrawled "The enormous tragedy of the dream nor dashed a thousand kim" on the wall of the Van Ness Street entrance of Orgasm Research.

Dr. Frank Dashwood (dum dum de! Who's Zelenka?) arrived from another novel.

He turned into the Van Ness parking lot of ORGRE, executed a smart translation of his sleek MG into the RESERVED area, and saw the incomprehensible scrawl.

That damned Ezra Pound again. Why do I have to be haunted by a schizo with an obsession about Fernando Poo?

At nine-oh-one Dr. Dashwood passed through the solid oak door saying in gold letters:

There was nothing urgent on the memo pad, so Dashwood began opening the incoming mail leisurely.

Dear Dr. Dashwood,

I am writing to you as a Sex Expert because I don't know where else to turn. I already wrote to Ann Lan-ders, but she just told me to take cold showers. My problem is that I am madly, hopelessly, passionately in love with Linda Lovelace. I've actually seen Deep Throat ninety-three times now and nothing can get her out of my mind. Other women leave me cold; I only want Linda, Linda, Linda. She has so much beauty and charm and sweetness and, my God, can she eat Rehnquist! I know this is hopeless because even though I've written a novel about Vlad the Impaler and made lots of money, I'm still very shy with women. (Some of them are extraterrestrials, I have discovered.) Why did God make such an unjust universe? Can you help me?

Dr. Dashwood frowned thoughtfully, then scrawled, 'Send this nut the see-a-psychiatrist letter." Dum de dum de dum de. Next!