Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

ROSENFELT HAS DESTROYED ME

In 1941 the Carter Brothers Carnival played Xenia, Ohio, and some students from Antioch College tried to throw Cagliostro a whammy with a dragon-headed Japanese condom. His handling of that challenge aroused the admiration and awe of old carny hands; and they were even more amazed by his friendship with Rambo, the lion.

Sandoz, the lion tamer, in particular, was astonished at Cagliostro's ability to sit for hours in the cage, he and the lion staring into each other's eyes like lovers.

"Are you hypnotizing him?" Sandoz asked once.

"Not at all," Cagliostro said, laughing. "He's hypnotizing me. Or maybe we're just learning to get outside our own skins. That's what life is all about, you know-making windows, breaking out of every box…"

The failure of the students to shake up Cagliostro led a few professors to come over and try various scientific devices not likely to be included in any standard verbal code. He placidly identified rheostats, Wheatstone bridges, pH meters, Bunsen burners, and even a gyroscope. The next night they were back with a chemical formula never before synthesized.

"Are you presently able to see the particular object that I have been given at this time?" the girl asked.

And the blindfolded Cagliostro replied calmly, "A test tube. With some blue liquid in it. A copper sulphate compound."

"That's a damned good code," the professors agreed, more fervently this time, as they drove back to Antioch.

(There's no hope of salvaging anything-the suicide note had said-and you're going to have to make it on your own, just like I did. Rosenfelt has destroyed me and he'll destroy free enterprise.)

The carnival was in Biloxi, Mississippi, that winter, and Cagliostro was trying his new gig, combining Houdini-style escapes with his mentalism act. He had been locked in a trunk, and the local police cooperatively used their best padlocks to secure the chains. He settled down to slow, regular yoga breathing-the escape actually took only a few minutes, but he was following Houdini's formula that the audience was more impressed if they had to wait a half hour for the miracle. The yoga conserved the oxygen in the trunk against any possibility that panic, toward the end, might force him into rapid breathing. He timed the breaths against a slow AUMMMMMM, his mind drifted back to Park Avenue and a black maid whose framed picture of a Catholic-looking Jesus sometimes in certain lights seemed to have horns, and he relaxed his hands and feet (there can be no muscle tension in the torso if the extremities are totally limp), bringing her face back clearly, and he heard a voice shouting, "We're at war! The Japanese went and bombed some place called Pearl Harbor in Honolulu!"

Cagliostro was always carrying around a book called Homo Ludens in those days.

"Is that about faggots?" Sandoz asked him once.

Cagliostro laughed. "No," he said. "It's Latin. It means… uh, you know it's hard to translate… Man the Game Player, I suppose."

Sandoz grinned. "You can learn all about that just by watching the marks," he said. "I been a carny damn near twenty years now and I swear from the things I seen, you could sit down with a blackjack table and a sign saying THIS GAME IS CROOKED,' and half the marks would still sit down opposite you and try to beat you. A mark wants to lose," he concluded profoundly, almost with anger.

"No," Cagliostro said. "The mark wants to be hypnotized. He wants to enter the world of magic, with mirrors and blue smoke and shifting shapes, and he's willing to be swindled, just to have a glimpse of that world."

"Is that what that book says?" Sandoz asked.

"More or less," Cagliostro said. "In sociological jargon."