Case began to think he was in a play, with everybody reading from a different script.
JUAN TOOTREEGO: But why did you give the new planets such strange names?
BERTHA VAN ATION: Well, I'm old-fashioned enough to be patriotic. I mean, why should everything in the sky have a Greek or Roman name?
BENNY BENEDICT: "Who shit?" "You shit!" "Bullshit!"
JUAN TOOTREEGO: I see. Like Mr. Benet, you have fallen in love with American names.
BERTHA VAN ATION: Well, yes, but I didn't call either of them Wounded Knee…
DRUNKEN WRITER: Yeah, I remember that from when I was a kid in Kentucky. "Frank shit!!" BULLSHIT!!!!" "Who shit…?"
WILLIAMS:… A Jam Sandwich using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.
NEWTON: My God, I just saw Bigfoot on the balcony.
WILDEBLOOD: Oh, that's Simon Moon. He's a mathematician and quite harmless, really.
MALIK: So in effect I became Middle America. Bouncing off the printed page into my retina, grok, decoded by nervous system circulating through Memory Storage the words formed a micro-Reader's Digest in my neurons. I honestly began to worry about the dangers of premarital sex.
BENEDICT: Nothing to compare with the hazards of marital sex. Do you have any idea how much alimony I'm paying every month?
At that point, unfortunately, Case dozed off in his chair (one joint of Colombian too many) and he never did find out about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache.
When he woke up most of the guests had left and Mary Margaret was telling Dr. Dashwood about the burglars who had ransacked her apartment last week. "The worst part of it," she was saying, "was that they even took Ulysses."
"Oh, were you very fond of him?" Dashwood asked. He obviously thought she was talking about a dog or cat.
Mary Margaret tittered, aware of the misunderstanding. "Ulysses was part of me," she said.
Case got to his feet and made his polite adieus. He couldn't stand any more ambiguity in one evening.
Ulysses was actually Mary Margaret Wildeblood's penis, which was now in Dash wood's laboratory-a fact which neither of them realized.
Mary Margaret was not a born woman (which was commonplace, since 51 percent of the Terran primates qualified for it), but a manufactured woman. This was something new and exotic. It had only been possible on that primitive planet for around forty years.
Epicene Wildeblood, Mary Margaret's former self, had been the bitchiest literary critic in Manhattan, the man that writers love to hate. His aphorisms were known and quoted everywhere in the world that was important by his own standards-i.e., from St. Mark's Place to 110th Street (East). Each Wildebloodism was a pearl of wit and a poison dart of malice: "Norman's mailer-than-thou-attitude," "Either McLuhan has had a divine vision or he is merely incoherent, and it is obvious that he has not had a divine vision," "llluminatus is just two nursery Nietzsches daydreaming about a psychedelic Superman," "Nixon's memoirs will never be placed beside Casanova's in the annals of amusing rascality, but they may well stand beside Mussolini's play about Napoleon in the archives of stentorian dullness."
Wildeblood had named his penis Ulysses way back in Gilgamesh Junior High School in Babylon, Long Island, where he grew up.
He named it Ulysses because it had Greek proclivities and a tendency to invade dark, forbidden places.
Wildeblood was by no means a simple or uncomplicated WoMan. The sex-change operation had been only stage one in a plan to totally transform himself. After that, she intended to become a nun.
By 1983 it was a sane and sensible decision for one living at the hot center of New York intellectual life. Like the Southerners who think "damn Yankee" is one word, Wildeblood's milieu had long ago forgotten that "male chauvinist" was two words. The slightest, kinkiest remnant of masculinity was a definite handicap, a suggestion of possible viciousness-like membership in the John Birch Society, owning a Mississippi accent, or a conviction for a major felony.
Besides, Wildeblood did urgently want to be a nun. A priest or even a monk had a certain arrogance in his very role qua priest or qua monk, however passionately he might cultivate Total Submission to the Will of God. Only a nun could experience the true endlessness of humility.
Wildeblood, simply, was tired of being the bitchiest male in Manhattan. He wanted to become the saintliest woman.
FOREVER
Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation magazine, published Justin Case's music criticism only because it confused (and, therefore, amused) him. Like most of his readers, Joe couldn't make head or tail out of whatever it was that Case was trying to say; but, unlike the readers- who were perpetually writing letters protesting Case's baroque inscrutability-Joe enjoyed puzzles. Joe was a chess puzzle and logical paradox addict; like William S. Burroughs, he was perpetually poring over the Mayan codices, trying to unscrew those inscrutable glyphs for which no Rosetta Stone has yet been found.
Three years earlier, in 1981, Joe had been a white-haired man who clearly showed his sixty-odd years. Now, in 1983, he had jet-black hair again, a face free of wrinkles, and could easily pass for a man in his early forties. This was because he had started using the rejuvenation-longevity drug FOREVER as soon as it appeared on the market. Fundamentalist Christians and the People's Ecology Party (PEP) denounced FOREVER as blasphemous and against God's will-"the ultimate insanity of the rational-technological mind," it had been called by Furbish Lousewart V, who almost defeated Hubbard in the 1980 election. Joe despised religionists and ecologists and went on using FOREVER. Dissident scientists began reporting disastrous side effects of FOREVER when they gave it in horse-doctor's doses to laboratory mice; Joe remembered the similar antimarijuana research of the sixties and seventies and went on using FOREVER, gambling that if there were anything wrong with it, it wouldn't kill him before a better rejuvenation drug was on the market.
Joe hoped to be around for several hundred years and take advantage of Time Travel when it arrived to make Eternity accessible to mankind. Above his desk at Confrontation was a motto from the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane which succinctly summarized Joe's view of the cosmos. It said:
THE UNIVERSE MAY BE NOT ONLY QUEERER THAN WE THINK
BUT QUEERER THAN WE CAN THINK.
ALIEN SIGNALS
Carol Christmas, an aspiring actress who had not yet achieved better than Off-Off-Broadway, was always a bit sensitive about her second source of income, so she heard Joe Malik saying "no wife, no whores, no mustache." Oddly enough, Blake Williams, who was picking up parts of several conversations during his own interstellar rap, also thought Malik was saying "no wife, no whores, no mustache." Williams and Carol Christmas both heard Malik's explanation through the semantic carousel around them something like this:
MALIK: Premarital sex, mind you. I was really terrified about the whole younger generation careening to hell in a handbasket with lUD's and condoms sprinkling on all sides. I began to see Commie threats everywhere. Everybody I knew, all my friends, the whole city of New York, seemed foreign subversive unwholesome. By God, I was Middle America.
"EGGS" BENEDICT: "Joe shit!" "Bullshit!" "Who shit?"…
"FIGS" NEWTON: Alien signals. He said alien signals.;?
WILLIAMS:… which is why we're all deviates. If,' Mother DNA had wanted us to be replicable units, She'd have made us insects instead of primates.