"You're the vulgar ones, O mighty Illuminati," Saul said caustically. "I would have noticed the tracks on her arm, if she was shooting up again."
The answer was nonverbal: the picture of Rebecca and the giant black man came back on the screen, and was immediately followed by a close-up of her face, eyes closed, mouth open receiving the penis. It was in perfect focus, the work of an artist with the camera, and he could see no sign of any makeup that would help another woman to pass as Rebecca. He held to his memory that the mole on her hip was missing, but, perversely, his mind tasted at last the other possibility- makeup can change a face, and it can also hide a mole… If they wanted him to use his skepticism, so that they could gradually destroy that, and, in the process, undermine his total psyche… Another sign came on the screen:
THAT WE CAN CALL THESE DELICATE CREATURES OURS BUT NOT THEIR APPETITES
Saul remembered, all too well, Rebecca's passion in bed. "Shakespeare," he called hoarsely. "Advertising your erudition at a time like this is worse than vulgarity. It's petit-bourgeois pretentiousness."
The answer was brutal: a whole series of slides, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, cascaded across the screen in such rapid succession that he couldn't examine them carefully, except that the central character was Rebecca, always Rebecca, Rebecca with the black giant in other sexual positions, Rebecca with another woman, Rebecca with Spiro Agnew, Rebecca with a little seven-year-old boy, Rebecca, Rebecca, in a rising crescendo of perversion and abnormality, Rebecca with a Saint Bernard dog- and a peppermint-colored sine-wave, part of the drug still working on him, cutting across the scene…
"The true sadist has style," Saul gasped fighting for control of his voice. "You people are about as evil and frightening as a bad B-movie."
There was a whirring mechanical sound and a movie began in place of the slides. It was Rebecca and the Saint Bernard, with several close-ups, and her expressions were the ones he knew. Could any actress portray another woman's individual style of sexual response? Yes- if necessary, these people would use hypnosis to get the effect letter-perfect.
The movie stopped abruptly and the projector had another message for him, held on the screen for minutes:
ONLY THE MADMAN IS ABSOLUTELY SURE
When he realized that there would be no further progress until he spoke, Saul said coldly, "Very entertaining. Where do I go to crumble into a bundle of neuroses?"
There was no answer. No sound. Nothing happened. He half-saw a latticework of red pentagons, but that was the drug- and it helped identify which drug, for geometric patterns were characteristic of the mescaline experience. As he considered that, the peppermint sine-waves appeared before the pentagons and the screen gave him a new message:
HOW MUCH IS THE DRUG?
HOW MUCH IS OUR TRICKERY?
HOW MUCH IS REALITY?
Suddenly, Saul was in Copenhagen, on a cruise boat, passing the mermaid of the harbor. She turned and looked at him. "This case is fishy," she said- and as she opened her mouth a school of guppies swam out. "I'm a mouth-breeder," she explained.
Saul had a reproduction of that famous statue in his home (which must be the source of the hallucination), yet he was strangely disturbed. Her punning words seemed to conceal a deeper meaning than mere casual references to the Confrontation bombing… something that went back… back through his whole life… and explained why he had purchased the statue in the first place.
I'm about to have one of those famous drug insights that hippies always talk about, he thought. But the mermaid broke apart into pentagons of red, orange, yellow…
And a unicorn winked at him. "Man," it said, "am I ever horny!"
Those sketches I made the other day, Saul thought… but the screen asked him:
IS THE THOUGHT OF A UNICORN A REAL THOUGHT?
… and he suddenly understood for the first time what the words "a real thought" meant; what Hegel meant by defining the Absolute Idea as pure thought thinking about pure thought; what Bishop Berkeley meant by denying the reality of the physical world in seeming contradiction of all human experience and common sense; what every detective was secretly attempting to detect, although it was always right out in the open; why he became a detective in the first place; why the universe itself became; why everything; and then he forgot it; caught a fleeting glimpse of it again- it had something to do with the eye at the top of the pyramid; and lost it again in visions of unicorns, stallions, zebras, bars, bars, bars.
Now his whole visual field was hallucinatory… octagons, triangles, pyramids, organic shapes of embryos and growing ferns. The drug was taking stronger hold on him. Criminals he had sent to jail appeared- sullen, hating faces- and the screen said
GOODMAN IS A BAD MAN
He laughed to keep from crying. They had touched his deepest doubt about his job- his career, his life's work- precisely at the time the drug also was leading him there, with those damnable accusing faces. It was as if they could read his mind and see his hallucinations. No; it was just one lucky coincidence, because among all their tricks one was statistically likely to occur in tandem with an appropriate drug experience.
WHILE THERE IS A SOUL IN PRISON I AM NOT FREE
Saul laughed again, more wildly, almost hysterically; and knew, even more clearly than before, the tears hiding behind the laughter. Prisons reform nobody; my life is wasted; I offer society a delusion of security but not a real service. Worse yet, I have known it for years, and lied to myself. The sense of total failure and utter bitterness that washed over Saul at that moment was, he knew, not produced but only magnified by the drug. It had been with him a long, long time but always pushed aside, brushed away from his attention by concentrating on something else; the drug merely allowed him (forced him) to look at the emotion honestly and totally for a few wrenching moments.
A doorway suddenly lit up toward his right and a neon light came on above it, saying, "Absolution and Redemption."
"OK," he said icily, "I'll play the next move." He opened the door.
The room was tiny but furnished like the world's most expensive brothel. Above the four poster bed was an illustration of Alice and a mushroom labeled "Eat Me." And on the bed, stripped of her Playboy costume, pinkly and beautifully naked with legs spread in anticipation, was the blonde bunny. "Good evening," she said speaking rapidly and fixing his eyes with her own stare, "I'm your Virgin Bunny. Every man wants a Virgin Bunny, to eat on Easter to celebrate the miracle of the Resurrection. Do you understand the miracle of the Resurrection, sir? Do you know that nothing is true and everything is permissible and that a man who dares to break the robot conditioning of society and commit adultery dies in the moment of orgasm with his whore and wakes resurrected to a new life? Did they teach you that in shule? Or did they just fill you with a lot of monogamous Yiddish horseshit?" Most hypnotists spoke slowly, but she was obtaining the same effect by talking rapidly. "You thought you were going to eat a dead animal, which is disgusting even if this crazy society accepts it as normal, but instead you're going to eat a desirable woman (and fuck her afterward), which is normal even if this crazy society thinks of it as disgusting. You are one of the Illuminated, Saul, but you never knew it. Tonight you are going to learn. You are going to find your real self as you were before your mother and father conceived you. And I'm not talking about reincarnation. I'm talking about something much more marvelous."
Saul found his voice. "Your offer is appreciated but declined," he said. "Frankly, I find your tawdry mysticism even more adolescent than your sentimental vegetarianism and coarse lasciviousness. The trouble with the Illuminati is that you have no sense of true drama and not even a patina of subtlety."
Her eyes widened as he spoke, but not with surprise at his resistance- either she was really alarmed, and sorry for him, or she was a great actress. "Too bad," she said sadly. "You've refused Heaven, so you must travel the harder path through the halls of Hell."
Saul heard a movement behind him, but before he could turn a sharp sensat
ion pricked his neck: a needle, another drug. Just as he was guessing they had given him a stronger psychedelic to escalate the effect, he felt consciousness slipping away. It was a narcotic or a poison.
The wagon started with a jerk: we were off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of arse. What was it Hagbard had said to me, the first time we met, about straight lines, courtrooms, and shit? I couldn't remember, my mind drifted, Joseph K. opening the law books and finding pornographic illustrations (Kafka knew where it was at), deSade keeping a precise mathematical tally in the brothel, how many times he flogged the whores, how many times they flogged him, the Nazis counting every gold filling in the corpses at Auschwitz, Shakespeare scholars debating about that line in Macbeth (was it benches or banks of time?), the prisoner may approach the bench, you can bank on it, buddy, bank on it… PIGS EAT SHIT PIGS EAT SHIT… and Pound wrote "the buggering bank," he rejected Freud, but even so he got a whiff of the real secret… how one homo ominously loopses another…
"My God," the Englishman said. "When do we get out of the teargas area?"
"We're out of it," I told him wearily. "That's regular Chicago air now. Courtesy of Commonwealth Edison and U.S. Steel over in Gary."
The McCarthy woman was weeping quietly, although the Mace had worn off by now. The rest of us rode silently, a little caravan of dried snot and tears, the parmesan cheese odor of stale vomit, some lingering acrid Mace fumes, the urine of somebody who had peed himself, and that high sulphur dioxide and slaughterhouse aroma of Chicago's South Side. The quality of mercy is very strained; it drippeth like the pus from chancre. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Chairman Mao appeared and lectured us: "Ho is just a poetaster. Now, if you want to hear some real socialist verse, consider my latest composition:
There was a young lady from Queens
Who gobbled a plateful of beans
The beans fermented
And she was tormented
By embarrassing sounds in her jeans!
Indicates the anal orientation of capitalist society," he explained, dwindling into a pool of blood on the floor next to the kid with the broken arm.
(In 1923, Adolph Hitler stood beneath a pyramidal altar and repeated the words of a goat-headed man: "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel." James Joyce, in Paris, scrawled in crayon words that his secretary, Samuel Beckett, would later type: "Pre-Austeric Man in Pursuit of Pan-Hysteric Woman." In Brooklyn, New York, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, returning from a party at which Hart Crane had been perfectly beastly- thereby confirming Mr. Lovecraft's prejudice against homosexuals- finds a letter in his mailbox and reads with some amusement: "Some of the secrets revealed in your recent stories would better be kept out of the light of print. Believe me, I speak as a friend, but there are those who would prefer such half-forgotten lore to remain in its present obscurity, and they are formidable enemies for any man. Remember what happened to Ambrose Bierce…" And, in Boston, Robert Putney Drake screams, "Lies, lies, lies. It's all lies. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody says what he thinks…" His voice trails off.
"Go on," Dr. Besetzung says, "you were doing fine. Don't stop."
"What the use?" Drake replies, drained of anger, turning on the couch to look at the psychiatrist. "To you, this is just abreaction or acting-out or something clinical. You can't believe I'm right."
"Perhaps I can. Perhaps I agree more than you realize." The doctor looks up from his pad and meets Drake's eye. "Are you sure you're not just assuming I'll react like everybody else you've tried to tell this to?"
"If you agreed with me," Drake says carefully, "if you understood what I'm really saying, you'd either be the head of a bank, out there in the jungle with my father, grabbing your own share of the loot, or you'd be a bomb-throwing revolutionary, like those Sacco and Vanzetti fellows. Those are the only choices that make sense."
"The only choices? One must go to one extreme or the other?"
Drake looks back at the ceiling and talks abstractly. "You had to get an M.D. long ago, before you specialized. Do you know any case where germs gave up and went away because the man they were destroying had a noble character or sweet sentiments? Did the tuberculosis bacilli leave John Keat's lungs because he had a few hundred great poems still unwritten inside him? You must have read some history, even if you were never at the front lines like me: do you recall any battle that refutes Napoleon's aphorism about God always being on the side of the biggest cannons and the best tacticians? This bolshie in Russia, Lenin, he has ordered the schools to teach chess to everybody. You know why? He says that chess teaches the lesson that revolutionaries must learn: that if you don't mobilize your forces properly, you lose. No matter how high your morality, no matter how lofty your goal: fight without mercy, use every ounce of intelligence, or you lose. My father understands that. The people who run the world have always understood it. A general who doesn't understand it gets broken back to second lieutenant or worse. I saw a whole platoon wiped out, exterminated like an anthill under a boot. Not because they were immoral or naughty or didn't believe in Jesus. Because at that place, on that day, the Germans had superior fire power. That's the law, the one true law, of the universe, and everything that contradicts it- everything they teach in schools and churches- is a lie." He says the word listlessly now. "Just a lie."
"If you really believe that," the doctor asks, "why do you still have the nightmares and the insomnia?"
Drake's blue eyes stare at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says finally. "That's why I'm here.")
"Moon, Simon," the Desk Sergeant called.
I stepped forward, seeing myself through his eyes: beard, army surplus clothes, stains all over (my own mucus, somebody else's vomit). The archetypical filthy, dirty, disgusting, hippie-commie revolutionary.
"Well," he said, "another bright red rose."
"I usually look neater," I told him calmly. "You get a bit messed over when you're arrested in this town."
"The only way you get arrested in this town," he said, frowning, "is if you break the laws."
"The only way you get arrested in Russia is you break the laws," I replied cheerfully. "Or by mistake," I added.
That didn't set well at all. "Wise guy," he said gently. "We like wise guys here." He consulted my charge-slip. "Nice record for one night, Moon. Rioting, mob action, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace. Nice."
"I wasn't disturbing the peace," I said. "I was disturbing the war." I stole that one-liner from Ammon Hennacy, a Catholic Anarchist that Mom was always quoting. "The rest of the charges are all bullshit, too."
"Say, I know you," he said suddenly. "You're Tim Moon's son. Well, well, well. A second-generation anarchist. I guess we'll be locking you up as often as we locked him up."
"I guess so," I said. "At least until the Revolution. Afterward, we won't be locking you up, though. We're going to establish nice camps in places like Wisconsin, and send you there free to learn a useful trade. We believe that all policemen and politicians can be rehabilitated. But if you don't want to go to the camp and learn a productive trade, you don't have to. You can live on Welfare."
"Well, well, well," he said. "Just like your old man. I suppose if I looked the other way, while some of the boys took you in back and worked you over a bit, you'd come out still making wisecracks?"
"I'm afraid so," I smiled. "Irish national character, you know! We see the funny side of everything."
"Well," he said thoughtfully (he was awfully fond of that word), "I hope you can see the funny side of what comes next. You're going to be arraigned before Judge Bushman. You'll find yourself wishing you had fallen into a buzz saw instead. Give my regards to your father. Tell him Jim O'Malley says hello."
"He's dead," I said.
He looked down at his charge-slips. "Sorry to hear it," he mumbled. "Nanetti, Fred," he bawled, and the kid with the broken arm came forward.
A patrolman led me to the fingerprint room. This guy was a computer: "Right hand." I gave him my right hand. "Left hand." I
gave him my left hand. "Follow the officer." I followed the officer, and they took my picture. We went down some halls to the night court, and in a lonely section the patrolman suddenly hit me in the lower back with his club, the exact spot (he knew his business) to give me liver problems for a month. I grunted but refused to say anything that would set him off and get me another clout, so he spoke. "Yellow-bellied faggot," he said.
Just like Biloxi, Mississippi: one cop is nice, another is just impersonal, a third is a mean bastard- and it doesn't really matter. They're all part of the same machine, and what comes out the end of the gears and levers is the same product, whatever their attitude is. I'm sure Buchenwald was the same: some of the guards tried to be as humane as possible, some of them just did their job, some of them went out of their way to make it worse for the prisoners. It doesn't matter: the machine produces the effect it was designed for.
Judge Bushman (we slipped him AUM two years later, but that's another story, coming up on another trip) gave me his famous King Kong scowl. "Here are the rules," he said. This is an arraignment. You can enter a plea or stand mute. If you enter a plea, you retain the right to change it at your trial. When I set bond, you can be released by paying ten percent to the bailiff. Cash only, no checks. If you don't have the cash, you go to jail overnight. You people have the city tied up in knots and the bail bondsmen are too busy to cover every courtroom, so by sheer bad luck you landed in a courtroom they're not covering." He turned to the bailiff. "Charge sheet," he said. He read the record of my criminal career as concocted by the arresting officer. "Five offenses in one night. You're bad medicine, aren't you, Moon? Trial set for September fifteenth. Bail will be ten thousand dollars. Do you have one thousand dollars?"
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 20