"You didn't take the acid, did you?" she said, looking at him sadly.
"No. I knew what Hagbard was doing. This is too serious a moment to play games about the Passion of Christ."
Mavis smiled. She pressed her body closer to him and began playing with his limp penis, rubbing the head gently into her bush. "Joe, you were raised as a Catholic. Catholics have a finer appreciation of blasphemy than anybody. That's why Hagbard chose you. How's your passion, Joe? Is it mounting?" Pressing her naked body against his, she whispered, "How'd you like to fuck the Virgin Mary?"
Joe saw his mother's face, and he felt the blood throbbing in his penis. Now he thought perhaps he knew what Hagbard meant when he said his mother was in the tent.
A little later, when he was in her, she said, "I am a perpetual virgin, Joe. And every woman is, if only you have eyes to see. We wanted to give you eyes tonight. But you refused the Sacrament. You've chosen the hardest way of all, Joe. If you're going to make it through this night you're going to have to find a way to see for yourself. By other means than the one Hagbard provided. You'll have to find your own Sacrament."
And after she came, and he came, she whispered, "Was that the Sacrament?"
He pushed himself up and looked down at the triangular red tattoo between her breasts. "No. You're not the Virgin Mary. You're still Mavis."
"And you still have to make the decision," she said. "Good-bye, Joe. Send George to me."
As Joe was dressing, feeling the weight of the pistol in his trouser pocket, Mavis rolled over so that she was lying on her stomach, not looking at him. Her naked buttocks seemed utterly defenseless. He looked at the pillow on which her bottom had been resting during their lovemaking. It was a cloth-of-gold pillow, and embroidered on it in swirling letters was the word KALLISTI. Joe shook his head and left the tent.
As he emerged, Hagbard was saying in a low voice to Otto Waterhouse, "… would have been up your alley if we hadn't had other work for you. Anthrax Leprosy Pi can wipe out the whole population of the earth in a matter of days."
Suddenly, the white of Hagbard's shirt, the gold of the tent cloth, the blazing spotlights of the festival, all were coming in super-bright. That was adrenalin. My mouth was dry-dehydration. All the classic flight-fight symptoms. The activation syndrome, Skinner calls it. I was so keyed up that it was a trip.
"Hello, Joe," said Hagbard softly. Joe suddenly realized that his hand was clenched around the pistol. Hagbard smiled at him, and Joe felt like a little boy caught playing with himself, with his hand in his pocket. He took his hand out quickly.
"She wants George," Joe said weakly. He turned his back on Hagbard to look down at the stage, where the sign, glowing in the darkness, said LOAF AND THE FISHES. They were singing, "I circle around, I circle around, the borders of the earth…"
On a pile of cushions behind a diaphanous veil at one end of the tent lay Stella, wearing nothing but a red chiffon pajama top.
"Were you letting Joe fuck you?" George said. "Joe has never fucked me," Stella replied. "You'll be the first person to do that tonight. Look, George, we've got to get every bit of available energy flowing to combat the Illuminati. Come over here and get the energies going with me."
"This is Danny Pricefixer," Doris Horus said. "I met him on the plane coming over."
("Holy Jesus," said Maria Imbrium, vocalist with the Sicilian Dragon Defense, "there are angels coming out of the lake. Angels in golden robes. Look!")
("You're tripping on that Kabouter Kool-Aid, baby," a much-bandaged Hun told her. "There's nothing coming out of the lake.")
("Something is coming out of the lake," the drummer with the Sicilian Dragons said, "and you're so stoned you don't see it.")
("And what is it, if it isn't angels?" Maria demanded.)
("Christ, I don't know. But whoever they are, they're walking on the water.")
Wearing my long green feathers, as I fly,
I circle around, I circle around…
("Jesus. Walking on the water. You people are zonked out of your skulls.")
("It's just a bunch of surfers, wearing green capes for some crazy reason.")
("Surfers? My ass! That's some kind of gang of Bavarian demons. They all look like the Frankenstein monster wrapped up in seaweed.")
"Pricefixer?" said Kent. "Didn't 1 meet you five or six years ago in Arkham? Aren't you a cop?"
("It's a gigantic green egg… and it loves me…")
John Dillinger muttered to Hagbard, "That red-headed guy over there- the one with the black musician and the girl with the fantastic boobs. He's a cop on the New York Bomb Squad. Wanta bet he's here investigating the Confrontation bombing?"
"He must have been talking to Mama Sutra," Hagbard said thoughtfully.
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES
When Otto Waterhouse entered the tent, it was Miss Mao who was waiting for him. "I never fucked a Chinese broad," said Otto, stripping off his clothing. "I don't think Stella is going to like this."
"It will be okay with Stella," said Miss Mao. "We need to get all the energies moving to combat the Illuminati. And we need your help." She held out her arms.
"You don't have to ask twice," said Otto, crouching over her.
At 5:45 in Washington, D.C., the switchboard at the Pentagon was warned that bombs planted somewhere in the building would go off in ten minutes. "You killed hundreds of us today in the streets of Washington," said the woman's voice. "But we are still giving you a chance to evacuate the building. You do not have time to find the bombs. Leave the Pentagon now, and let history be the judge of which side truly fought for life and against death."
The highest-ranking personnel in the Pentagon (and, with revolution breaking out in the nation's capital, everybody was there) were immediately moved to underground bombproof shelters. The Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that there was a 95 percent probability that the threat was a hoax, intended to disrupt the job of coordinating the suppression of revolution across the nation. A search would be instituted, but meanwhile work would go on as usual. "Besides," the Secretary of Defense joked to the Chief of Staff, Army, "one of those little radical bombs would do as much damage to this building as a firecracker would to an elephant."
Somehow the fact that the caller had said bombs (plural) had not gotten through. And the actual explosions were far more powerful than the caller had implied. Since a proper investigation was never subsequently undertaken, no one knows precisely what type of explosive was used, how many bombs there were, how they were introduced into the Pentagon, Where they were placed, and how they were set off. Nor was the most interesting question of all ever satisfactorily answered: Who done it? In any case, at 5:55 P.M., Washington time, a series of explosions destroyed one-third of the river side of the Pentagon, ripping through all four rings from the innermost courtyard to the outermost wall.
There was great loss of life. Hundreds of people who had been working on that side of the building were killed. Although the explosion had not visibly touched their bombproof shelter, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous other high-ranking military persons were found dead; it was assumed that the concussion had killed them, and in the ensuing chaos nobody bothered to examine the bodies carefully. After the explosions the Pentagon was belatedly evacuated, in the expectation that there might be more of the same. There was no more, but the U.S. military establishment was temporarily without a head.
Another casualty was Mr. H. C. Winifred of the U.S. Department of Justice. A civil servant with a long and honorable career behind him, Winifred, apparently deranged by the terrible events of that day of infamy, took the wheel of a Justice Department limousine and drove wildly, running twenty-three red lights, to the Pentagon. He raced to the scene of the explosion brandishing a large piece of chalk, and was trying to draw a chalk line from one side of the gap in the Pentagon wall to the other when he collapsed and died, appare
ntly of a heart attack.
At 11:45 Ingolstadt time the loudspeakers and the sign over the stage announced the American Medical Association. After a ten-minute ovation, the four strange-eyed, ash-blond young people began to play their most popular song, "Age of Bavaria." (In Los Angeles the Mercalli scale on the UCLA seismograph jumped abruptly to grade 1. "Gonna be a little disturbance," Dr. Vulcan Troll said calmly, noting the rise. Grade 1 wasn't serious.) "What made you think we'd find him down here?" Saul asked.
"Common sense and psychology," Dillinger said. "I know pimps. He'd shit purple before he'd get the guts to try to cross a border. They're strictly mama's boys. The first place I looked was his own cellar, because he might have a hidden room there."
Barney laughed. "That's the first place Saul looked, too."
"We seem to think alike, Mr. Dillinger," Saul said drily.
"There isn't much difference between a cop and a crook, psychologically speaking," Dillinger mused.
"One of my own observations," Hagbard agreed. "What conclusion do you draw from it?"
"Well," Dillinger said. "Pricefixer didn't just pick up that girl because he wanted a lay. She has to fit somehow."
"The musician doesn't know that," Hagbard commented. "Watch his hands. He's repressing a fight impulse; in a few minutes he'll start a quarrel. He and the lady were lovers once- see the way her pelvis tilts when she talks to him?- and he wants Whitey to go away. But Whitey won't go away. He has her linked with the case he's working on."
"I used to be a cop," Danny said with an engaging imitation of frankness. "But that was years ago, and the work really didn't appeal to me. I'm a salesman for Britannica now. Better hours, and people only slam doors in my face - they don't shoot at me through them."
"Listen," Doris said excitedly. "The AMA is playing 'Age of Bavaria.' " It was the song that, more than any other, both expressed and mocked the aspirations of youth around the world, and the accuracy with which it expressed their yearnings and the savagery with which it denied them had won them over.
It started almost the instant the music began. A mile below the surface of the lake, near the opposite shore, an army began to rise from the dead. The black-uniformed corpses broke loose from their moorings, rose to the surface, and began to drift toward shore. As more and more of the semblance of life returned, the drifting became swimming motions, then wading. They fell into ranks on the shore. Under the steel helmets their complexions were greenish, their eyes heavily lidded, their black lips drawn back in wide grimaces. The mouths of the officers and non-coms moved, forming words of command, though no sound came forth. No sound was needed, it seemed, for the orders were instantly obeyed. Once again the power that had been granted to Adolf Hitler by the Illuminated Lodge in 1923 ("Because you are so preposterous," they told him at the time)- the power that had manifested itself in steel-helmed armies that had won Hitler an empire stretching from Stalingrad to the Atlantic, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert-once again that power was visible on the earth.
"They are coming. I can feel it," Werner whispered to his twin, Wilhelm, as Wolfgang thundered on the drums and Winifred belted out:
This is the dawning of the Age of Bavaria- Age of Bavaria- Bavaria-Bavaria!
The tanks and artillery were rolling into position. The caterpillar treads of the troop carriers were churning. Motorcycle couriers sped up and down the beach. A squadron of partially dismantled Stukas was lined up in the road. After the festivalgoers had been massacred and Ingolstadt had been overrun, the planes would be trucked to the nearby Ingolstadt Aerodrome, where they would be assembled and ready to fly by morning.
The dead men removed black rubber sheaths from rolled up red-white-and-black banners and unfurled them. Many of them were the familiar swastika flags and banners of the Third Reich, with one addition: a red eye-and-pyramid device superimposed on the center of each swastika. Other banners carried Gothic-lettered mottos such as DRANG NACH OESTEN and HEUTE DIE WELT, MORGENS DAS SONNENSYSTEM.
At last all was in readiness. The blue-black lips of General-of-the-SS Rudolf Hanfgeist, thirty years dead, shaped the command to march, which was relayed in similar fashion from the higher-ranking officers to the lower-ranking officers to the men. The lights and music on the opposite shore beckoned across the dark, bottomless waters. Moonlight glinting on the death's heads on their caps and runic SS insignia on their collars, the soldiers moved out, company by company. The only sound was the growl of the diesel engines of troop carriers and the clank of weapons.
"They're coming," said the woman under Hagbard, who was neither Mavis nor Stella nor Mao, but a woman with straight black hair, olive skin, fierce black eyebrows, and a bony face.
"Coming, Mother," said Hagbard, giving himself up to the irresistible onward sweep of sensation to the brink of orgasm and over.
"I'm not your mother," said the woman. "Your mother was a blond, blue-eyed Norweigian. And I look Greek now, I think."
"You're the mother of all of us," said Hagbard, kissing her sweat-damp neck.
"Ah," said the woman. "Is that who I am? Then we're getting somewhere."
Then I started to flip, Malik eclipsed by Malaclypse and Celine hardly serene, Mary Lou I Worship You, the Red Eye is my own Mooning, what is the meaning of moaning? and suchlike seminal semantic antics (my head is a Quick-tran quicksand where The Territorial Imperative always triggers Stay Off My Turf, the Latin and the Saxon at' war in poor Simon's synapses, dead men fighting for use of my tongue, turning Population Explosion into We're Fucking Overcrowded and backward also, so it might emerge Copulation Explosion, and besides Hag barred straights from this Black-and-White Mass, the acid was in me, I was tripping, flipping, skipping, ripping, on my Way with Maotsey Taot-sey for the number of Our Lady is an hundred and fifty and six- there is Wiccadom!), but I never expected it this way.
"What do you see?" I asked Mary Lou.
"Some people who were swimming, coming out of the lake. What do you see?"
"Not what I'm supposed to see."
For the front line, clear as claritas, was Mescalito from my peyote visions and Osiris with enormous female breasts and Spider Man and the Tarot Magus and Good Old Charlie Brown and Bugs Bunny with a Tommy gun and Jughead and Archie and Captain America and Hermes Thrice-Blessed and Zeus and Athene and Zagreus with his lynxes and panthers and Micky Mouse and Superman and Santa Claus and Laughing Buddha Jesus and a million million birds, canaries and budgies and, gaunt herons and holy crows and crowly hose and eagles and hawks and mourning doves (for mourning never ends), and they'd all been stoned since the late Devonian period, when they first started eating hemp seeds, no wonder Huxley found birds "the most emotional class of life," singing all the time, stoned out of their bird-brained skulls, all singing "I circle around, I circle around," except the mynah Birds squawking "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!" and I remembered again that existence isn't sensible any more than it's hot or red or high or sour, only parts of existence have those qualities, and then there was the Zig-Zag man and my God my god my father leading them in singing
SOLIDARITY FOREVER
SOLIDARITY FOREVERRRR
THE UNION MAKES US STRONG
"I say," said an Englishman, "I thought he was a monster, and he's only Toad of Toad Hall… with Rat… and Tinker Bell… and Wendy… and Bottom…"
"That's who you are," said Hagbard, "if you can call that any kind of a fucking identity."
"I think it's time you went up on stage and made our little announcement," said the woman. "I think everyone is ready for that."
"I'll send Dillinger in to you."
"Goody!"
"It's not true, you know. That was the other guy, Sullivan."
"I wasn't thinking about that. I don't care if it's no bigger than my little finger. It's just the idea of fucking with John Dillinger. If that doesn't put me over, nothing will."
Hagbard stood up and laughed. "You're starting to look and sound like Mavis again. I think you're slipping, Super-bitch."
As soon as Pearson saw Hagbard he motioned his men to stop playing. A murmur arose from the audience. "Well, all right, Hagbard," said Robert Pearson, "I was wondering if you were ever going to show up." He walked over to the side of the stage where Hagbard and his group were standing.
"Good evening, Waterhouse," said Pearson. "How's my gal, Stella?"
"Where the fuck do you get off calling her your girl?" said Waterhouse, his tone containing nothing but menace.
"The acid only opens your eyes, George. It doesn't work miracles."
And it shall come to pass, that whosoever call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
"Wonder what the hell is in that suitcase," Dillinger murmured.
"I'll open it," Saul said. "We'll all have to take the antidote anyway, after this. I have a supply out in the car." And he leaned forward, parted Carmel's stiff blue hands, and tugged the suitcase free. Barney, Dillinger, and Markoff Chancy crowded close to look as he snapped the lock and lifted the top.
"I'll be damned and double damned," Barney Muldoon said in a small, hollow voice.
"Hagbard has been putting us on all along," Simon says dreamily. (It doesn't matter in the First Bardo.) "Those Nazis have been dead for thirty years, period. He just brought us here to put us on a Trip. Nothing is coming out of the lake. I'm hallucinating everything."
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 67