Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

GORILLA THEATER

Mounty Babbit took a walk in Lincoln Park one day in 1969, trying to relax and calm his mind. Every tree spoke to him; the lions looked at him as a brother; the nervous armadillo pacing its cage stopped to stare at him, and he received clearly the message, "How did we get trapped in these ridiculous bodies?"

"We need bodies," Fed Xing replied, "just as we need minds, to function in this three-dimensional continuum. Surely you remember that we are actually n-dimensional?"

"Oh, yes," the armadillo signaled, "how could I have forgotten?"

Socrates had his daemon, Mounty thought in despair; Jesus had the Father in Heaven; Elwood P. Dowd had his giant white rabbit, Harvey; but why do I have to have a crazy Vietnamese Buddhist?

"You make the napalm," Fed Xing told him.

Thoroughly agitated, Babbit wandered into the primate house, not noticing the sign which said "CLOSED TODAY." There he saw two grim-faced men, in green uniforms, and a gorilla, in a blue uniform, going through a most remarkable pantomime. One of the men would raise a sign saying "WE DEMAND JUSTICE" and the gorilla would then spray him with a can of shaving cream; the other man would then feed the gorilla.

Operant conditioning. But what the hell…

Even Fed Xing was confused by that one.