Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

JUST LIKE METHOD ACTING

In an apartment in the east village off St. Mark's Place, Tibetan posters and astrological charts gaze down on the couch where Joe Malik and Carol Christmas are engaged in erotometaphysical epistemology.

Getting a hand inside her panties was easy enough and Joe Malik thought he was home free, but then a snag appeared, an emotional problem that verged on full-blown lunacy; it had to do with Carol's third ex-husband, a Puerto Rican poet who claimed to be a Santaria initiate, whatever that was, and couldn't adjust to New York. He said that magic was impossible in New York because the intelligentsia were all Jewish atheists-"but I'm not a Jewish atheist," Joe protested, "I'm an Arab agnostic," wondering what the hell this had to do with a simple lay, but Carol's third husband, who might as well have been on the couch with them, also said that Carol could help him to write again if she believed in magic, and it wasn't much different from being an actress, anyway; Santaria, whatever it is, is just like method acting, Carol explained, but Joe was meanwhile from the context deciding it was more like Christian Science, but what it all came down to, the hand out of her panties by now, since to pressure her at this point would be coercive and chauvinistic, of course, the Puerto Rican bunofasitch had put a loa on her when they separated and she couldn't relax until they did an exorcism of the apartment… "Oh, bleeding Christ!" Joe gasped, both balls like boulders.

"It's just like method acting, honey," Carol repeated hopefully.

\cf0

"You mean," Natalie, dressed, asked, awed and full of hashish, "that this whatchamacculum, this state vector, collapses every which way?"

"No, no, no," Blake Williams hastens to correct. "That's only the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model, and it's obviously nonsense. It means that in the universe next door, Furbish Lousewart is President instead of Eve Hubbard. Pure science fiction and I, um, wonder what Everett, Wheeler, and Graham were smoking when they thought of it. What I'm trying to explain, my dear, is the most plausible alternative theory, which comes from taking Bell's Theorem literally."

"The ripple theory," Natalie prompted.

"But the ripples are all-over-the-universe-at-once," Williams explained again. "It's called the Quantum Inseparability Principle, or QUIP. Dr. Nick Herbert calls it the Cosmic Glue."

"Just like ripples in a pond, Jeez." Natalie Drest was bemused. "Parts of us are still interacting with Joe Malik and all the other people at the party. This is superheavy."

"Yes, but QUIP acts nonlocally in time as well as in space," Williams went on. "You've got to think of time ripples, as well as space ripples, to grok the quantum world…"