Justin Case's god was a dead Irishman named James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, who had been the greatest tenor of the twentieth century. Case owned every record of every Joyce concert preserved on wax, and regarded the man as having the most subtle musical sensibility since the great Ludwig himself. If only he had been a composer instead of a singer, Case sometimes thought, with that ear…
Actually, Joyce had considered the priesthood, writing, and even medicine before settling on a musical career. His voice thrilled audiences in Europe and America for nearly a decade before the famous Joyce Scandal, which destroyed him. Case always fumed with anger when he read of the great singer's last days-how concerts were disrupted and ruined by moralistic hecklers howling "Garters garters garters!" till the shamed man left the stage, humiliated. It was known that he died of drink, often comparing himself to Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell, and cursing the Christian churches bitterly.
Case once had an affair with the anthropologist and sexologist Marilyn Chambers, just because she shared his passion for Joyce's music. Due to the receptivity of the postcoital male, he had even allowed her to explain the parallel universe theory to him once-something he always dismissed as rubbish when Blake Williams talked about it.
"You mean," he asked, "that in another universe Joyce's thing about girls' undergarments might never have been discovered and his career wouldn't have been ruined?"
"Even more," Dr. Chambers said. "If Wheeler's interpretation of the state vector is true, there must be such a universe. Also, a universe where Joyce did become a priest instead of a singer."
"Far fucking out," Case said. "I wonder what you'd be in the universe next door…"
NO WIFE, NO HORSE, NO MUSTACHE
What is certain is that in countries like Bulgaria, where people live on- polenta, yogurt, and other such foods, men live to a greater age than in our parts of the world.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
Justin Case heard about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache at one of Mary Margaret Wildeblood's wild, wild parties. Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation, told the story. It was rather hard for Case to follow because the party was huge and noisy-a typical Wildeblood soiree. Everybody was there-Blake Williams, bearded, beamish, bland, the inventor of interstellar pharmaco-anthropology, Gestalt neurobiology, and a dozen other sciences that nobody understood; Juan Tootreego, the Olympic runner who had broken the three-and-a-half-minute mile; Carol Christmas, blond, bubbly, and possessed of the greatest bod in Manhattan; Natalie Drest, chairperson of the Index Expurgatorius in God's Lightning; Marvin Gardens, who had two best-selling novels and seemingly owned 90 percent of the cocaine in the Western world; Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer from Griffith Observatory who had discovered the two new planets beyond Pluto. Hordes of other Names-maxi-, midi-, and mini-celebrities-swarmed through Mary Margaret's posh Sut-ton Place pad as the evening wore on. There was a lot of booze, a lot of weed, and-due to Marvin Gardens- altogether too much coke.
Basically, Joe Malik said, his encounter with the man who had no wife, no horse, and no mustache had been part of an experiment in neurometaprogramming. Case had no idea what the holy waltzing fuck neurometaprogramming might be in English, and the story came through in a kind of polyphonic counterpoint with the other conversations swirling around them.
Joe Malik, known as the last of the Red Hot Liberals, was half Arab, of course, but-as he himself liked to point out-he had been raised Roman Catholic and became an atheist in engineering school (Brooklyn Polytechnic) and nobody could detect anything Islamic about him. Yet he did talk rather oddly at times-especially after his melodramatic adventures with the Discordian philosopher and millionaire Hagbard Celine.
"No wife, no horse, no mustache," Malik was saying. "Oh, I think President Hubbard is doing a great job," Blake Williams was telling Carol Christmas. "The solar energy we're getting from the L5 space cities is going to triple and quadruple the Gross National Product, and the way she abolished poverty was brilliant."
"But Hubbard is so damn technological," Fred "Figs" Newton protested piously. "There's no spirit no sense of tragedy no gnosis anywhere in the administration…"
"I can't get used to Mary Margaret being a woman," an Unidentified Man said.
"No wife, no horse, no mustache," Malik repeated. "That's all it said."
"I beg your pardon?" Case asked, intrigued by something nonmusical for the first time in his life.
"I still say fuck 'em all," a drunken writer howled somewhere. "Bastardly thieving…"
"It was in the Reader's Digest," Malik explained, trying to clarify matters but not sure how much Case had already missed.
"The Reader's Digest?" Case prompted. "That was the whole point," Malik went on earnestly. "I was stoned on Alamout Black hashish, the best in the world, and I sat down to read a whole issue of Reader's Digest all the way through and become one with it."
"Become one with the Reader's Digest?" Case was in beyond his depth and sinking fast in ontological quicksand. "… which makes the Van Alien Belt a gigantic placenta"-Captain Cosmic was still on his own trip- "and every organism a cell in the megafetus struggling up the slippery 4,000-mile walls of the gravity well…"
"I wanted to experience a totally alien, science-fiction reality," Malik pursued his theme. "Reader's Digest comes from another universe, grok, from a world occupied by millions of Americans who are not New York intellectuals. These people sincerely believe that our government has never waged an unjust war, that the hair of a seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, that millionaires get rich through honesty and hard work, that a Jewish girl once got pregnant by a dove, and all sorts of things like that, which are regarded as medieval superstitions in my normal environment. Entering Reader's Digest through the empathy of hash is a quantum jump to another reality."
There was a momentary silence in which Case distinctly heard Juan Tootreego whispering, "… nose candy from Marvin…"
"The trick," Malik went on, "is to concentrate on the reality projected through the printed page. Every sentence is a signal from another world, a nervous system different from yours with which you can interface syner-getically…"
"You mean," Carol Christmas breathed huskily, "you were deliberately brainwashing yourself to believe in this Reader's Digest world?"
"Of course," Malik said, with an isn't-it-obvious shrug. "A single ego is a very narrow view of the world."
"Escape velocity," Williams plunged onward to the stars, "that is, 18,000 em-pee-aitch, is the bursting of the waters, the endocrine message that the planetary birth process is beginning…"
"Everybody," Mary Margaret Wildeblood announced, "this is Dr. Dashwood from San Francisco he studies orgasms."
Dashwood, a pipe-smoking ectomorph, fidgeted in their gaze.
"Yes, I know," came the paranoid pipe of Marvin Gardens, always sounding a little like Peter Lorre, "they all say I'm exaggerating, but I tell you it's real they are extraterrestrials and they control TV and the newspapers and all the media …"