He remembered that Sister Kenny, at the time he and thousands of others were cured by her polio therapy, had been denounced as a quack by the same entrenched medical bureaucrats who imprisoned the Orgone researchers. How convenient, he thought, aghast, to assume that all the injustices happen in other countries and other ages: that Dreyfus may have been innocent, but the Rosenbergs never; that Pasteur may have been right, but not the researcher ostracized from the American Association for the Advancement of Science-not the professor denied tenure at our university, not the man in our prison. Blake Williams came to the Great Doubt without bitterness but with increased awareness that society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence. On his own, and at some expense, he repeated all of Dr. Reich's experiments and drew his own conclusions.
"There were only eighteen," he used to say, deliberately cryptic, sucking his pipe, deadpan, whenever anybody enthused about scientific freedom in his presence. If the victim inquired, "Only eighteen what?" Blake would reply, with the same deadpan, "Only eighteen physicians who signed the petition against the burning of Reich's books in 1957." He was not disappointed in his expectation that nine out of every ten researchers would angrily reply, "But Reich really was a quack." The tenth was the only one who would ever hear Williams's real thoughts on any subject.
The turning point, however, didn't come until 1977. It was then that Williams read a book entitled Cosmic Trigger. The author, a rather too clever fellow named Robert An-ton Wilson, who wrote in a style as opulent as a Moslem palace, claimed to be in communication with a Higher Intelligence from the system of the dog star, Sirius. He also provided evidence, of a sort, that Aleister Crowley, G. I. Gurdjieff, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Timothy Leary, a Flying Saucer contactee named George Hunt Williamson, and the priesthood of ancient Egypt, among others, had also been contacted by ESP transmitters from Sirius. Williams found that he actually believed this preposterous yarn. The discovery thrilled him, since it didn't really matter whether the pretentious Wilson's pompous claims were true or not. What mattered was that he, Blake Williams was free at last. (Remembering: "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last," the tombstone which had so moved him in 1968.) Despite B.S. and M.S. and Ph.D., Blake Williams was free. He did not have to think what other academics thought. He had somehow liberated himself from conditioned consciousness.
Project Pan, in a sense, began at that moment. Blake Williams knew that he was going to do something great and terrible with his newfound freedom, and he was resolved that, unlike Reich (and Leary and Semmelweiss and Galileo and the long, sad list of martyrs to scientific freedom), he would not be punished for it. "Screw the Earthlings," he said bitterly and with mucho cojones, "I'm wise to their game. The trick is to be independent but not to let them know about it."
That night he wrote in his diary, "Challenge a remaining taboo." It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo "Thou shalt not question Aristotle." Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.
Blake Williams began looking around for a remaining taboo to violate.
This was by no means easy in Unistat at that time.
LIVING IN A NOVEL
Let there be a form distinct from the form.
–G. spencer brown, Laws of Form
Jo Malik once thought she was a transsexual. She had even gone to Dr. John Money, the pioneer of transsexual therapy and surgery, at Johns Hopkins, back in the mid-sixties.
"I think I'm a man living in a woman's body," she said.
Dr. Money nodded; that was normal in his business. He began asking her questions-the standard ones-and in only a half hour she was convinced that she was not a transsexual; she was just a confused woman. Dr. Money kindly gave her the name of a good psychiatrist in New York, where she lived, for a more conventional form of therapy.
After three months the psychiatrist announced that Jo's problem was not Penis Envy. That was hardly exciting; she had never thought her problem was quite that simple.
The therapy ground along. She learned a great deal about her Father Complex, her Mother Complex, her Sibling Rivalries, and her habit of hiding resentments. It was enlightening, in a painful way, but she was still confused.
Then the Women's Liberation Movement began, and Jo dropped out of therapy to enter politics.
She no longer defined herself as a man trapped in a woman's body, but as a human being trapped in male definitions of femininity.
It was a very satisfactory resolution of her problems. She no longer had to take responsibility for anything; everything was the fault of the men. There was no need to stifle resentments-the correct political stance was to express them, in a strident voice and with a maximum of emotional-territorial rage. She had finally learned the ABC's of primate politics. She even learned to swell her muscles and howl.
It was all so much relief after years of self-doubt that Jo remained in 1968 while the rest of the world moved into 1970 and 1974 and 1980 and 1983. That was why she was wearing a BRING BACK THE SIXTIES button at Epicene Wildeblood's party.
Jo still had one problem left over from pre-Women's Lib days. Sometimes just before sleep, she heard a voice saying, "No wife, no horse, no mustache."
Of course she knew that everybody occasionally heard such voices in the hypnagogic reverie before true sleep. You were wigging out only if you heard them all day long. Still, she wondered where it came from and why it had such a cryptic message.
Jo Malik hadn't had a sexual relationship with a man since 1968, and looked it.
She was also sixty-four years old, and looked it.
Nevertheless, there was an Unidentified Man at the Wildeblood party, and Jo suspected him of having designs on her bod. That was because he kept trying to get into every conversation group that she intercepted. He was following her, she was convinced.
"Mother very easily made a jam sandwich using no peanuts, mayonnaise, or glue," Blake Williams said.
"Of course, Skull Island was Cooper's Chinatown," Jus-tin Case said at the same moment.
"Wham! That arbral with his showers sooty? The fugs come in on tinny-cut foets," Moon droned along.
Jo decided that she had taken perhaps a little too much of the Afghan hash that was going around. It seemed that everybody in the room-the creme de la creme of Manhattan intelligentsia-were all talking gibberish. She eased out onto the balcony for some fresh air and restful silence.
Eight stories below a marquee blinked up at her: DEEP THROAT, it said. Male chauvinism.
She breathed deeply, mingling oxygen with the cannabis molecules in her blood.
And the Unidentified Man appeared. "Hello," he said casually. "I thought I'd find you out here."
"Who the hell are you, buster?" Jo barked-the first warning.
"My name doesn't matter," he said. He was tall, and handsome, and very gentle in his eyes. The worst kind of Male Chauvinist Pig. The Seducer.