Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

TRANSFORMATION

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

Marvin Gardens was awake again; the downers hadn't fully taken the edge off the coke excitation.

He had turned the radio on, but the only thing worth listening to was Handel's Messiah-the fourth time he had caught parts of it this week-and they were in the middle of "He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Not quite what he needed at this hour, with the early morning Manhattan permeation of suicides and accidental overdoses skulking in the shadows. He wished they would get on to the Hallelujah Chorus.

Marvin found a book he'd never finished-The Autobiography of Cagliostro the Great. He opened at random and started reading:

"Get a a job," my father said. Turning back, I saw the beggar falling to the ground, obviously fainting from starvation, but when he landed I knew, from his limpness, that it was more than a faint: that he was dead.

It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a parallel here to the famous experience of the Buddha, who, like myself, had the misfortune to be born rich and only discovered what life is like for most people when he encountered a beggar and a corpse. Is this parallel an accident? I am not sure: I cannot say when I was elected, or drafted, to receive the Aquarian message, the great affirmation that "All is joy," in contrast to the Buddha's equally true, equally false, but now obsolete "All is sorrow."

We never see what is in front of our eyes. My father did not see what happened inside me when that beggar died; I have brought men and women to the edge of the Vision, by various tactics, and they, afraid to see it, ran off to psychiatrists.

"It's really very simple to remember the order of the ten planets," Blake Williams explained to Natalie."Just memorize the sentence 'Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.' Got it?"

"Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue," Natalie repeated dubiously.

"That's all," Williams said proudly. "You just use the initial letter of each word as a mnemonic, and you've got all ten planets. Mercury Venus Earth Mars the asteroids Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Mickey and Goofy."

"Wow!" said Natalie. "Disneyland in the skies."

"Who the hell was that?" Carol Christmas asked breathlessly, as the triangle finally faded. "Sure didn't look like a loa to me," she added, frowning thoughtfully.

"It was Simon Moon," Joe Malik said, also somewhat breathless. "I knew him in another universe… or another novel… or something…"

Carol stared at him. "You wigging?" she asked bluntly.

"No," Joe said. "I think I'm beginning to understand the trap we're all caught in, and how to get out of it."