Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

OVERALL THERE IS A SMELL OF FRIED ONIONS

When next recorded the itinerant Rehnquist was in the possession of Lady Sybiline Greystoke, who had either purchased it directly from Ms. Gebloomenkraft or had acquired it from some go-between.

Lady Sybiline was an eccentric, even for the British nobility. She was so far to the right, politically, that she regarded the Magna Carta as dangerously radical. She was so High Church that she referred to Charles I as "Saint Charles the Martyr." She hunted lions, in Africa, and was a crack shot. She was also, secretly, president of the Sappho Society, the group of aristocratic Lesbians who had secretly governed England, behind the scenes, since their founder, Elizabeth I.

Lady Sybiline and her good and intimate friend, Lady Rose Potting-Shedde, evidently found great amusement, between them, with the Rehnquist, for they even took it with them when Lady Sybiline embarked, that summer, for her annual lion hunt in Kenya.

Their White Hunter on that expedition was a red-faced man named Robert Wilson, who, like Clem Cotex, knew he was living in a book.

Robert Wilson had discovered this when somebody showed him the book in question. It was called Great Short Stories and was by some Yank named Hemingway. And there he was, Robert Wilson, playing a featured role in the very first story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

It was a shock, at first, to see himself in a book, and it was a bit thick to find his drinking and his red face described so dispassionately. It was like seeing yourself on the telly, suddenly observing the-man-who-was-you from outside.

Then Wilson discovered that he was in another book, but changed in totally arbitrary ways that verged on surrealism. This book was a bit of tommyrot and damned filth called The Universe Next Door, and he was, in fact, both inside it and outside it, being both the author of it and a character in it.

Robert Wilson began to experience cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, and a growing sense of unreality.

Then came Lady Sybiline and Lady Rose and that mysterious object they kept in a small box and kept joking about, obscurely, between themselves.

They called it Marion Brando.

The river had pebbles at the bottom. They were shiny and small and the water rushed over them constantly and you could see clear to the other side of it if you had your glasses on and weren't too drunk. Robert Wilson stared at the pebbles, thinking they were like pearls, trying not to remember what had happened that morning.

"After all, it was a clean kill," Lady Sybiline said beside him. He wished she wouldn't talk. He wished she would go away and take Marion Brando with her.

"The hills, in the distance," she said. "They look like white rhinoceri."

"They look like white rhinoceri," he said. "Jesus Christ."

"Don't talk that way."

"The bloody hills don't look at all like rhinoceri," he said. "They have no horns, for one thing. No exoskeleton on the head. I never heard such a damned silly thing. They look like elephants, actually."

"Stop it," she said. "It wasn't that bad."

"It was bloody bad," he said. "Bloody awful bad."

"If it hadn't happened, would it be cute, then, for me to say the hills look like white rhinoceri?"

"It wouldn't be cute no matter what happened."

"Oh," she said. "It's like that."

"Yes," he said. "It's like that."

"Will you please please stop repeating everything I say?"

The water kept running, always running, over the pebbles that were like pearls.

"It was bad," he said again. "Bloody awful bad."

"Are you always this rude to your clients?"

"Oh, it comes down to that," he said. "The hired help have to keep a polite tongue in their heads. You bloody English."

"You're English yourself," she said.

"I'm part Irish. I wish I were all Irish now."

"Really. You don't have to go on like this. Everybody is a little bit… eccentric."

That was the kind of whining excuse he despised. He knew then that he was going to be brutal. Somebody had to teach them.

"English literature," he said. "There is none in this century."

She cringed. He knew he had reached her.

"Stop it," she said.

"Everything worth reading is by Irishmen," he said. "Padraic Colum. Beckett. O'Casey."

"Stop it. Stop it."

"Behan. Bernard Shaw. O'Flaherty."

"Stop it. Stop it. Stop it."

"I'm stopping," he said. "I feel that I ve said all this before somewhere, already. But how could you do it?"

"It excites me," she said. "To have… Marion… there… while I'm firing at a lion."

He shook his head. "You are a five-letter woman," he said wearily.

But then the Rehnquist mysteriously disappeared again, back in Nairobi, while Lady Sybiline and Lady Rose were staying at the glamorous new Mau Mau Hilton.

Lady Sybiline was furious, but frustrated. There was no way of asking the hotel to question its employees about the theft without describing the object that had been stolen, and that was, of course, potentially embarrassing.

But she and Lady Rose had lots of other exciting little games, and they soon forgot all about "Marion Brando."

Especially after they bought a beautiful plastic-and-rubber imitation which they christened "David Bowie."

It wasn't really theft, of course; Indole Ringh was a pious and holy man who would never steal anything. It was his religious duty, as he conceived it, to remove the holy relic from the heathens and return it to its rightful homeland.

Indole Ringh was a brown, gnarled, perpetually smiling little man, the offspring often generations of very conservative Hindus who had never accepted English ideas or ideals.

He had, in fact, three personalities. One was just an ordinary Hindu nobleman who was always smiling. The second, when he was in Samadhi, was an awe-inspiring guru, no more human than a statue of Brahma. The third, when he was in Dhyana, was just the brightest, quickest, most curious monkey in the jungle.

He didn't believe in any of those personalities; he just watched them come and go, blandly indifferent.

Because he practiced hatha yoga, bhakti yoga, rajah yoga, and gnana yoga, and because he smoked a great deal of bhang, he was as conscious of detail as Clem Cotex or the late Pope Stephen. Because he believed the oldest Vedas were the important ones, he had no truck with modernistic notions of aceticism, British prudery, or heathen Missionary nonsense of any sort.

He was a devout worshiper of Shiva, god of sex, intoxication, death, and transformation. He believed that you couldn't come to your senses until you went out of your mind. He kept alive, within his own province, the ancient cult of Shiva-Kali, the divine couple whose embrace generated the whole play of existence.

And now, in Nairobi of all places, he had found, somehow in the possession of a heathen Englishwoman, the most sacred of all lost relics-the Shivalingam itself, the engine of the creative lightning.

So it was not theft at all; he was merely restoring the relic to the place where it belonged, in India.

In fact, he placed it on the altar in his own temple, and invited the whole province to come see it and marvel and know the power of the Divine Shiva, who possessed such a tool of creativity.

He was going to restore the old-time religion.

He made a speech to the assembled multitude on the first day the Shivalingam was displayed in the temple. He told them that the polarity of Shiva and Kali was the basic pulse of creation. He said the Chinese dimly discerned this in their yin and yang symbolism, and the heathen West in their concept of positively and negatively charged particles. He explained that the male-female polarity was the engine of creation, not just in the human and animal kingdoms, but in every aspect of nature. He said that Samadhi and Dhyana and normal consciousness were equally real, equally unreal, and equally pointless, but that if you contemplated this Shivalingam long enough it wouldn't matter whether you understood any of this or not.

He was so bombed on bhang that he kept going into Samadhi every few minutes during this, and the crowd, both his old disciples and newcomers, decided he was the wisest and holiest man in all India.

Old Ringh kept smiling and going into Samadhi and explaining that we are all bisexual immortals who inhabit many universes and mind-states, and the crowd kept cheering and getting higher on his vibes, and finally they all went into the temple and contemplated the Shivalingam, where Indole Ringh had placed it on the altar, facing the enormous carving of the sacred yoni of the Black Goddess, Kali, and under the faded photograph of the Wise Man from the West, General Crowley, who, even though an English heathen, had understood the Mysteries and had spent many hours, while smoking bhang, discussing with Ringh's father how, even in mathematics, the sacred yoni appeared in both the shape and the substance of 0, the void, while the lingam appeared in the shape and substance of 1, the creative lightning, and how, out of the union of the 0 and 1, all of the numbers of creation could be generated in binary notation.

And as everybody meditated on the miraculous return of the Shivalingam, old Ringh remembered how General Crowley promised, when he had to return to the West, that he would use what he had learned in India to teach the whole world how the phallic spark of Imagination, represented by the 1 or lingam, generated everything out of absolute 0, the dark yoni, nothingness.