Quantum Voices Read online

  Yes. I’ve been there, so let it go.

  This is outrageous.

  Please, she implored, just work with me.

  Work with you?

  Yeah. Work with me and let it go cause I’ve been there.

  I don’t need concepts, affirmed Marcel. I need to train my mind. I need to gaze at a candle flame or stare at an orange without distraction.

  He then heard the therapist say: In that case let me give you some drugs. They’ll make you feel better. And if you ever have children, you can give them the same drugs. Then you can all live like zombies for the rest of your lives.

  Fantastic! said Marcel.

  The internationally famous polygraph expert cleared her throat: I do not appreciate your sarcasm. We are here for you.

  Here for me? Are you insane?

  Okay, what I’m hearing you say is that . . .

  As Marcel ran from the therapist, he heard her say: Go three blocks in that direction, take your first left then an immediate right and you will find Imported ExtraVergine Olive Oil.

  He followed her directions but did not find what he was looking for, so he turned his attention to the deeper questions like: Why adults laugh or feel uncomfortable when a baby farts.

  Having lost all sense of direction, Marcel stumbled upon at a chain restaurant specializing in food that tastes like painted cardboard. He quickly encountered Kelly, the hostess, who was made completely of bubbles. Kelly was one big bubble, bouncing around, blowing bubbles with her bubble mind and leaving trails of bubbles as she seated unsuspecting customers.

  Bubbles popped as Kelly bounced over to Marcel.

  One?

  Marcel was speechless. He ran as fast as he could, away from Kelly the human bubble and the chain restaurant. And what did he find to add insult to injury? He found a group of tweens skipping in a circle, chanting in childlike voices: Marcel has no communication skills. Marcel has no communication skills.

  The tiny voyeur’s data bank continued to fill as he observed more examples of the human condition. I could hear Madame Sosostris muse on her love for the desert as I continued to understand the story of Marcel. Outside her home, many voices sound like gibberish and white noise. You can only listen to one at a time, but inside I could listen to multiple voices with total clarity. The desert, she said, its solitude touches the soul like a cactus thorn; it washes over the heart like sweet rain and blossoms in the core.

  It was to such a place that Marcel fled. He felt he needed space after the bubble debacle and reasoned that the desert was the logical choice. There, he let out his most hidden desires: sleeping with stars, slithering with snakes and doing a peyote ritual with envoys of the Kogi tribe.

  Continuing through the desert, he came upon a community of cenobites. They detested all that was not holy and worshipped a deity known as The Lowered. They lived in a fortress whose walls they spray painted with words like: degeneracy, indecency and filth.

  Marcel was offended at the décor of this place too. The followers of The Lowered immediately detected his presence in their citadel and condemned him as a heretic in a public, ritualistic display: The Guardian of the fortress entered the square with his retinue. A small child clutched at his leg. All wore strait jackets and had permanent fake smiles plastered to their faces, black paint covering their eyes. One of them lost control and screamed incessantly: Demon Processed! Demon Processed!

  The Lowered’s henchmen quickly dispatched the hysterical zealot then the Guardian banished Marcel from the desert. He called Marcel a degenerate bastard and other terrible things.

  Before Marcel fled and sought refugee status, he sang a song to The Lowered’s disciples: Perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties or sentiments which give direction to the character of Man. You, cenobites, are your own demise and the most pathetic spectacle I have ever spied on. Quothe the raven. Amen.

  An orgy of glory?

  Yes, replied the good Madame. An orgy of glory.

  My mind flashed and I realized there was no clock in the home of Madame Sosostris. Perhaps she thought I had become bored, for she said: Enough with idle chatter.

  But Madame? Were you not expounding on the glories of eternal life?

  Indeed I was. And now I will expound on the glory of your lives. I have seen you practicing Tai Chi with Lao Tzu, prophesying with Ezekiel, composing with Sappho.

  Okay? I intended no sarcasm. But after all, what I did was walk along the Thames mostly.

  Marcel had now been outraged beyond the point of recovery. He had reached the bottom of existence, the pit of reality, the underarm of an Orangutan. In that stringy, course-orange hair, he witnessed a flea circus. The orange ape was oblivious to the exhibition happening right under his arm. These hopping dots of lower life pranced in the vilest display of indecency ever witnessed on that ape’s body.

  The barker’s voice filled with exuberance: Welcome to the suicide show! Before we begin, let me explain to you newcomers the socially redeeming value of our show. Some fleas in our community thought we had become degenerates. They said flea on flea crime had reached epidemic proportions, that nobody cared about anybody and that fleas were numb to the pain of others.

  So we set up the Suicide Show to determine if their self-criticism was right. We knew fleas would come to see the first couple shows, curiosity being what it is. However, the test was designed to determine if: they would continue to attend the shows, indicating that they were insensitive brutes, remain indifferent to the whole pageant of flea self-termination or become outraged, thus proving their innate sensitivity.

  Believe me, barked the barker: We have no trouble finding interested and, I must say, creative performers.

  Unable to restrain himself, the incensed Marcel shouted: And I’m sure you have no trouble finding zeros in front of single digit exponents in your bank account either. The tiny observer began to scratch and the ape began to scratch and the pageant of self-termination turned into a giant Flea Massacre, Marcel barely escaping with his life, the orange beast impervious to the carnage for which he was responsible.

  I began to realize the sapience of my gracious hostess as I sat and listened with Leon, Clio, Boris and The Others. All my thoughts fused together and made sense, those thoughts I thought as I walked along the Thames. Her face shone with ageless freedom as she discussed topics that would have been ambitious to all but the elusive Madame Sosostris.

  I reclined more deeply into the pillow-chair and the wind swept across the gray, rippling water. I turned into a forgotten side street and made my way to Charring Cross Road. The Thames then turned into the Tiber and I found myself gazing through the Oculus of the Pantheon. Armed with Ockham’s razor, I cut through cobwebs with scalpel-like precision and witnessed two schools of the most opposing thought imaginable inhabiting separate sides of a bookshop.

  Why would these people live together? I thought.

  Our hostess surely smiled when I created that idea, for I was thinking at the same frequency when I had questioned whether the illustrious Madame Sosostris had exaggerated the origins of her tea service.

  On one side of the room were the best minds of the generation, angel-haired hipsters. In fact, angels were everywhere on the best minds of the generation side: mohammedan angels, visionary angels, blond and naked angels and some angel known as Bop Kabballah.

  They were all flying around celebrating their freedom from some false deity who quenched primal desire with denarii and dracma, sesterses and plata – an extravagant speculator feared for its ability to eat wood and fart dust, a creature known as Cocorocho- the-Turd-and- his- Attornies.

  The other side of the bookshop, however, could not have been more different and must have given the hipsters . . . fastidio as they say in the land of the Renaissance. These occupants had huge, fuzzy sideburns that were tucked into and sizzled out of starched white collars that blanketed their ears like snowcaps on Everest. Adding to their fashion statement,
they sported bow-tied ribbon cravats and upheld a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. These self-proclaimed hermeneutics experts held a monopoly on the Truth and let everyone know it, including the Angeli, who thought the collared caretakers of veracity were idiots.

  Then I saw one of the custodians of aesthetics go after Bop Kabballah with a first edition Swift. Soon it was a free-for-all as a plain woman rounded a corner wielding a copy of Slaughter House Five. It was none other than Shakespeare’s sister. She called the archivists of culture Philistines and threatened to slay them all with the jaw bone of an Ass. It was, at this point, that the curators of the canon beat a hasty retreat.

  Seeking an alternative to Psychology, Marcel discovered the practice of Pro Tempore. Masters of this discipline remove the concept of causation from their consciousness and create an identity with no chronological understanding. Masters also control a gong in their minds on which they project an animal; striking the gong, the animal’s energy radiates through a master’s aura in the realm of form.

  Marcel progressed through this discipline receiving no belts, no sashes, no milk and cookies. Although he never mastered mental shape shifting, he did remove much of the chronology and causation from his mind. He also learned that Pro Tempore means for the time being. The ancient wisdom taught, however, that when you’re it, you don’t call it anything. This is precisely why Marcel never refers to himself, even in his Vita, as a time being.

  His new acquaintance with mental discipline, but especially his proclivity for outrage, landed him a position in the Philosophy department of Ivy University, named for the vast amounts of ivy growing over the campus and buildings. It crept into the classrooms and auditoriums and was particularly virulent in the microfiche collection.

  Marcel quickly distinguished himself at IU as a leader in criticism. He was outraged at the ivy and at everything. His fault finding acumen initially won him the respect of his peers. But his reputation soared with the publication of his memoir: My Life and Who I Spied On Volume One. He was immediately proclaimed a dream sage and given an office of his own.

  Now an adjunct professor, Marcel posted a cryptic message to his office door that none of his colleagues could decipher; yet none would admit they didn’t understand the Cyrillic alphabet, so they all acted like the passage was incredible. The young lecturer was immediately proclaimed a disciple of Nietzsche and quickly earned the title: Zarathustra.

  Marcel, also known as Zarathustra, advanced his reputation by conducting a study into the effect of hyphenated words on the consumer. Freshly-ground, flavor-baked, mountain-brewed nonsense. His preliminary findings lead him to further research and the seminal conclusion that Humanity is Collectively Insane.

  While on sabbatical, he copied the following email to his colleagues: The power of absurdity, my friends. This is what makes the world turn. This is the answer, laughter. You have heard it said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but I say to you comedians are the ultimate arbiters.

  Upon returning from sabbatical, Zarathustra coined the phrase horizontally challenged then dove headlong into research. He discovered that the first humans to inhabit Tahiti referred to themselves as The People. Thus, he concluded that the first Tahitians were Proto-Marxists. Marcel was immediately proclaimed a friend of the Proletariat and his fame sky-rocketed.

  Although outraged at everything, he accepted a request to give a plenary lecture. Ivy filled the air with green scent as it wound its way through the Aula Magna. The audience sat, poised to hear what was rumored to be Zarathustra’s Magnum Opus. The provost, a mixture of institutionalized intellect and manufactured manners, introduced the Keynote Speaker. The plenary audience whispered Zarathustra in hushed tones.

  Marcel began: You have heard it said that religion is the opiate of the masses but I say to you: religion is the meth of the masculine.

  The provost squirmed as Marcel continued his iconoclastic assault: You have also heard it asked rhetorically: How can you love others if you don’t love yourself? This is ridiculous, psychological nonsense. Psychology, together with Religion, has confused self-love with egomania. This is the cause of suffering and of humanity’s collective insanity. It has led us deeper into madness because it has confused the self with the ego. This collusion of Psychology and Religion feeds a craven beast that is poised to destroy our species.

  The provost, at this point, wanted to pull the plug on Zarathustra. But the tiny, time being continued: Comedians, my friends, should be your spiritual leaders.

  As for me, I have been on an epic quest for imported Extravergine Olive Oil, but now I realize the futility of my pursuit. My father is a felon and my mother is some deluded being who thinks she’s Victor Frankl. So, I know the challenges you face.

  Finally, you have heard it said write what you know, but I say to you: write what you see and you will know it.

  After the lecture the provost, who was a Forensic Psychologist, an Officer of the Court and a PTSD expert, stripped Marcel of the title Zarathustra and terminated his employment, citing a cut in the budget. Much to the dismay of his ardent supporters, Marcel had been cast from the corridors of the ivy elite.

  My ears popped as I saw Madame Sosostris driving a slay pulled by flying polar bear. On Horace! On Juvenal! she proclaimed as the smiling bears executed precision aerial maneuvers in unison with, none other than, Boris. Once they had landed in front of the glorious Fire Space, Clio laid down a rhythmic beat and Leon started to prance. I wanted to tease him because he had no eyelids, but that moment was gone. We all formed a circle into which Leon strode. He donned his most extravagant boa, strutting like a jazz queen. His eyes outlined with rosepetal paint, I knew instinctively that Leon would dance his story.

  The radiant Madame smiled as Boris borrowed Clio’s bongos and laid down another beat - thaght thaaght, thaght thaaght, thaght thaaght – Clio joined in with an Indian Husk flute – thaght thaaght, thaght thaaght- Leon’s snake body slithering, hissing, fangs spread; he wrapped his belly in the boa, uncoiling rhythmically, he danced:

  Joao was not always a pimp, but he had always been fascinated by prostitution. Although rumored to be from Dubrovnik, we know from his autobiography, published under his pen name Rue Morgan and entitled From Preacher to Pimp: A Story of Excess, Surrender and How I became the Lead Dog, that he grew up on an outpost somewhere between French Guyana and Sierra Leone.

  Joao had traveled from Coimbra to Cartegena, from Rio to Reno and was known as the best meat broker west of the Mississippi. His specialty: two-fist salamis. After mastering this art, he made a radical shift and joined the 3rd Avenue Seminary, which was one block from the 4th Avenue Church. Joao, also known as Rue Morgan, did not realize that the Latin origin of the word Seminarium literally means: hothouse, a place where young shoots are cultivated into mature flowers under controlled conditions. Rue Morgan knew nothing of Latin, Greek, Hebrew – nothing of exegesis nor anything of Qumran, the Septuagint or the Dead Sea Scrolls. He did not care about these things. He cared about prostitution and, after his retirement as a two-fist salami salesman, he determined that the best way to indulge his fascination with flesh was to join the 3rd Avenue Seminary.

  Morgan fed his curiosity by contemplating texts without reading them, texts such as The Merchant of Venice and The Gorgeous, and ancient dialogue between a panderer and maid. One interval changed into another as Rue Morgan was poised to graduate from the four week course that would certify him as a pastor. The final was an oral exam proctored by a creature who sounded like a mouth-harp.

  Illiterate in four languages, Morgan was glad the exam had no written component. All he had to do was repeat the chorus of the mouth-harp and he would pass the course, receive the titles Doctor and Pastor and get a congregation of his own.

  What Morgan did, however, was shocking.

  I do not need your sanction, he said to the mouth-harp. I have wasted four weeks of my life in this over-heated asyl
um. I will return to the streets and found my own congregation; they will take orders only from me.

  Well, said the mouth-harp, if you ever want to become a bishop, let me know. We have a six week program terminating in the episcopacy. If you play your cards right, I might be able to get you on the waitlist.

  Rue Morgan turned away from the mouth-harp and set out to assemble his congregation.

  The Forces of Balance could not let Morgan operate with impunity. So they called upon two high-level operatives: remarkable beings known as Visa Versa and Billy the Bongo Player. They had carried out numerous covert missions and had memorized the complete works of Pliny the Elder, so they were as prepared as they could be to confront the sociopath, Rue Morgan.

  Following a lead, they found themselves at The Sand Bar, a seedy dive sometimes frequented by the preacher turned pimp. Max and Laroy were the proprietors of this establishment; twins, they were known to have had traumatic experiences as young tuna. Visa Versa and Billy spied through the smoked salmon glass. No visibility in the murky depths.