Sandoz, the lion tamer, in particular, was astonished at Cagliostro's ability to sit for hours in the cage, he and the lion staring into each other's eyes like lovers.
"Are you hypnotizing him?" Sandoz asked once.
"Not at all," Cagliostro said, laughing. "He's hypnotizing me. Or maybe we're just learning to get outside our own skins. That's what life is all about, you know-making windows, breaking out of every box…"
The failure of the students to shake up Cagliostro led a few professors to come over and try various scientific devices not likely to be included in any standard verbal code. He placidly identified rheostats, Wheatstone bridges, pH meters, Bunsen burners, and even a gyroscope. The next night they were back with a chemical formula never before synthesized.
"Are you presently able to see the particular object that I have been given at this time?" the girl asked.
And the blindfolded Cagliostro replied calmly, "A test tube. With some blue liquid in it. A copper sulphate compound."
"That's a damned good code," the professors agreed, more fervently this time, as they drove back to Antioch.
(There's no hope of salvaging anything-the suicide note had said-and you're going to have to make it on your own, just like I did. Rosenfelt has destroyed me and he'll destroy free enterprise.)
The carnival was in Biloxi, Mississippi, that winter, and Cagliostro was trying his new gig, combining Houdini-style escapes with his mentalism act. He had been locked in a trunk, and the local police cooperatively used their best padlocks to secure the chains. He settled down to slow, regular yoga breathing-the escape actually took only a few minutes, but he was following Houdini's formula that the audience was more impressed if they had to wait a half hour for the miracle. The yoga conserved the oxygen in the trunk against any possibility that panic, toward the end, might force him into rapid breathing. He timed the breaths against a slow AUMMMMMM, his mind drifted back to Park Avenue and a black maid whose framed picture of a Catholic-looking Jesus sometimes in certain lights seemed to have horns, and he relaxed his hands and feet (there can be no muscle tension in the torso if the extremities are totally limp), bringing her face back clearly, and he heard a voice shouting, "We're at war! The Japanese went and bombed some place called Pearl Harbor in Honolulu!"
Cagliostro was always carrying around a book called Homo Ludens in those days.
"Is that about faggots?" Sandoz asked him once.
Cagliostro laughed. "No," he said. "It's Latin. It means… uh, you know it's hard to translate… Man the Game Player, I suppose."
Sandoz grinned. "You can learn all about that just by watching the marks," he said. "I been a carny damn near twenty years now and I swear from the things I seen, you could sit down with a blackjack table and a sign saying THIS GAME IS CROOKED,' and half the marks would still sit down opposite you and try to beat you. A mark wants to lose," he concluded profoundly, almost with anger.
"No," Cagliostro said. "The mark wants to be hypnotized. He wants to enter the world of magic, with mirrors and blue smoke and shifting shapes, and he's willing to be swindled, just to have a glimpse of that world."
"Is that what that book says?" Sandoz asked.
"More or less," Cagliostro said. "In sociological jargon."
JUMPED BY JESUS
DECEMBER 24, 1983:
Mary Margaret Wildeblood still couldn't get to sleep, and The Search for the Historical Vlad was pishposh. She got out of bed and padded over to the desk to glance at the latest volumes that had arrived for review.
FROM CALIGARI TO VLAD
Another pretentious volume of neo-Freudian film criticism by George Dorn, obviously cashing in on the current fad. Rot.
THE RADICAL EPISTEMOLOGY
OF SMOKEY STOVER
Hmm? Marshall McLuhan again. Try a page:
and the Notary Sojac sign, communicating much by its very inscrutability, is not alphabetical but ideogram-mic, bringing tribal mystery to the electronic continuum, just as Chief Cash U. Nutt, true shaman that he is
Fiddlefaddle. What else have we got?
IN THE CASTLE OF VLAD
Somebody else ripping off Marvin Gardens.
CONTEMPORARIES OF VLAD
I smell a fad in the making.
PATTERNS OF FASCIST ART
Who's being dissected? Wagner, Pound, Celine, Riefen-stahl, Vonnegut… Vonnegut? Oh: It's by Kate Millett.
JACKIE DID IT!
The latest Kennedy assassination expose. Bosh.
I AWAIT HIS RETURN
By who? Rebecca Goodman. Didn't she write that anthropology book a few years back, Golden Apples of something? What this time? Hm. Had her husband cryonically frozen at death. Hm.
Well, let's see. Millett, I guess.
Beneath the veneer of chic liberalism, Vonnegut's sexist prejudice reveals hm skip a bit refusal to recognize dialectic of capitalist blah blah blah a really sinister note enters with the chauvinist caricature of Montana Wildstack blah blah beneath the sentimentality a ruthless determination to subjugate and humiliate women
Mary Margaret realized that she was getting horny again; any reference to subjugation and humiliation was likely to trigger that response in her. She stealthily removed the vibrator from the bureau drawer again, climbed back into bed with Patterns of Fascist Art, and then remembered a little bit of hashish left in the living room.
"Perhaps a diagram would help," Blake Williams said, getting a sketchpad and drawing rapidly:
"This is ordinary causality, as we usually experience it," he said, as Natalie stifled a yawn. "A causes B, which causes C, and so on. I go to Wildeblood's party at A, and meet you, and we come here to B, and we discuss Krazy Kat at C, which leads to Schrodinger's Cat at D. Got it?"
"Yeah, the Gutenberg fix; the linear mode, as McLuhan calls it…"
"Right you are. Now quantum causality, before the appearance of the epiphenomena of space and time, functions entirely differently if we trust Bell's Theorem. It looks more like this." And Williams sketches rapidly:
"A 'causes' B, C, D, and E, but B also 'causes' A, C, D, and E, and C 'causes' A, B, D, and E… and so on. Got it…? All before the appearance of the space-time manifold."
"You mean it works everywhichway in time…"
"No, it happens before time itself appears along with space as a by-product of the quantum mesh…"
Brrrzzzzzzmmmmbrz the vibrator purrs along as Mary Margaret surrenders again to Him (to Him!) starting to compose a poem almost "Crush me in your Dionysian biceps, Jesus Lord" but that was perhaps a bit too Hopkins and the reality of it was beyond poetry (heresy: she could never admit that in literary circles) but the thrust and the purr and the agony and the ecstasy of it Lord Lord lord
because she was remembering an old Sufi proverb about the three stages of the Path which were "Lord, use me" and then "Lord, use me but don't break me" and then "Lord, I don't care if you break me"
and He was breaking her smashing her annihilating her the Great Magician of the Tarot naked on the bed as SHe rammed hir cock up his ass
I AM CONFUSED
To be is to be related.
–cassius keyser, Thinking About Thinking