John Wayne, nearly one hundred years old, but looking and feeling around thirty due to FOREVER, and totally cured of all cancers by the Org pills, also went to Hell. He was rumored to be one of the richest slave traders and War Chiefs in the Western sector.
"HELL IS HEAVEN" was the proud slogan of the region.
WHITE LIGHT
Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family's black maid, Sophie Hage. She had observed his precocity and wasn't surprised at the timing; and the deed itself, she had learned, was par for the sons and the female servants of the best families on Park Avenue. What was not normal was the passion that endured over several months, and the extent to which she herself was picked up and carried by it. Soon they were sharing secrets, just as if they were true lovers and equals, not master and servant.
"Nails and glass in your shoes?" she asked him on the day that Nazi tanks crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.
"I read about it in a book about saints that I got from the library on Forty-second Street," he said.
"But that's crazy, mon." She was from Haiti.
"But it worked," he said. "I saw Jesus."
"You saw Jesus?"
"Well," he said bashfully. "That wasn't just from the nails in my shoes. It was after I whipped my back with wet rope for six hours."
Sophie gazed at him thoughtfully for a long time. "What you trying to do, boy?"
"I'm learning how to live without fear," he said simply. "You know my dad. He's afraid of everything and everybody. Jews, Catholics, bad omens, the government, a broken mirror… you know. I just don't want to live my life that way."
Sophie thought about it for three days. Then she told him there was a man he ought to meet.
"What sort of man?" he asked.
"A high priest of Voudon."
RED EYE
Mister, what does it mean when a man crashes out?
–ida lupino in High Sierra, script by john huston
DECEMBER 24, 1983:
The Eye, diamond-bright and glowing with a red inflammation, floated in the air at the head of the couch as Joe Malik returned to the Euclidean flatland at the bottom of the gravity well. Bloodshot eyes I've got to be haunted by, he thought bitterly, still dealing with the dimensions of the triangle. 3 X 3 x 3. No doubt about it. 333. The number of the Mighty Devil Choronzon, who had afflicted Dr. Dee and Sir Edward Kelley in the seventeenth century and raised hell for Aleister Crowley earlier in this century. Choronzon, the Lurker at the Threshold, who drove back any occultist who tried to push open the final door, cross the boundary of the unmarked state. Choronzon, avatar of the Great Lie, spirit of Constriction, protector of the Illuminati.
Choronzon with a hangover, to judge by the redness of the eye.
"Jeez that was great oh honey ah you doll you lovely Arab sheikh you," Carol was bubbling happily.
But Blake Williams plows on:
"The Freudian, of course, sees much more in Krazy's love for Ignatz. Sadomasochism, in fact. 'Li'1 dollink, always fetful,' Krazy mutters contentedly as each brick bounces off her head. And worse: Krazy is female only in some sequences. In others this remarkable feline is indisputably male. Herriman, the psychoanalyst would suggest, had some AC-DC hang-ups when he conceived this fantasy.
"Sometimes, Professor, you remind me of Burroughs," Natalie said.
"Well, I do admire much of his work, especially The Job …" Williams was pleased by the comparison.
"No, the other one, the guy who wrote Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs."
"I? Remind you? Of Edgar Rice Burroughs?"
"Of something he said once. He said that he had a lot of fun with his imagination and that he knew in a small way what a grand time God had in creating the universe."
Joe Malik didn't even believe in Choronzon. The Skeptic within him had decided that the most operational model for those events which naive occultists attribute to "Choronzon" was to classify them as synchronicities activated by the presence of the Trickster God archetype, in the Jungian collective unconscious, or Leary's neurogenetic archives, or somewhere back down there in the thalamus or brainstem. To assume, even for a minute, that Choronzon had an objective existence beyond the archetype in the unconscious circuitry of the central nervous system was to collapse into prescientific theology and demonology.
But, alas, the Skeptic was only one program inside the Malik biocomputer, and not at his best at moments like this. The Shaman tape began running in its own programs as the Skeptic faded out, and Joe noticed again for the thousandth time how the ego circuit melded with the new program as easily as it had with the old, so now he "was" Joe Malik the Shaman, son of a thousand years of Sufis, and if Choronzon was really messing around he betta watcha his ass.
"It's that motherfuckin' loa," Carol said angrily. "We didn't do the exorcism right…"
"Choronzon" was a mind-construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered "Both." This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his Laws of Form.
A loa was a mind-construct of those primates who specialized in Santaria, also called Magicko de Chango or Voudon. A loa, just like the Gentry, might on occasion be kindly disposed; but a guardian loa who was set on a woman to prevent her from copulating (except with the primate who had through Santaria created/projected/contacted said loa) was well known to be extremely malign, devious, fiendish, impish, devilish, and a Royal pain in the ass. The has, like the Gentry and the various Cabalistic angels and demons, operated beneath the space-time continuum in "dream time," where the true Free Masons create reality friezes.
An archetype was a mind-construct of a primate named Carl Jung, who specialized in preneurological psychology. An archetype existed at the "psychoid" level, which was below that of individual or collective unconsciousness, where the organic and the inorganic meld and merge into psychoid matrices which, if nudged by the right archetype, would produce a reality-construct so astonishing that it would appear like magick or a very strange "coincidence." Jung called these psychoid archetypal effects synch ronicities.
And Marvin Gardens, coked to the nines, is reading on and on with absolute absorption:
Syngamy forms a zygote, which develops into a new diploid form, and the cycle begins anew
Cycles that's it, he thinks excitedly, we're all permutations and combinations of that first amoeba every ejaculation another birthdeath or node in the everybranching whatchamacallit. Oh man this is heavy and I'm really grooving with it cycles in time great wheels turning like the Mayan calendar the genetic clock like music but oh shit maybe it's just the coke I still haven't figured out if the damn amoeba is immortal.
But Malik is maintaining his cool, albeit with some effort. "So all right," he said aloud, facing the Eye unblinking, "are you just trying to scare me to death, or do you have a message for me?" Treat all of Them in a lofty way, lest They have cause to think thee weak, said Dr. Dee.
"We better do the exorcism again," whispered Carol Christmas-nude, golden, and delicious-also maintaining her cool.
Carol had a great deal of experience at maintaining her cool. Her career had been typical of self-directed Unistat females who matured in the early 1970s: one rape at age fifteen while hitchhiking (she never hitchhiked again); two abortions; husband #1, who turned out to be so free of Macho and the Male Stereotype that even God's Lightning couldn't accuse him of Chauvinism (he wept most pite-ously when Carol got tired of supporting him and threw him out); husband #2, who was brilliant, kind, generous, sensitive, and a junky; a succession of mediocre lovers
, with one or two she still treasured in memory but wouldn't want to live with again for all the tea in Acapulco; producers who believed that an actress as gorgeous as she should only be cast in roles that justified getting all her clothes off sometime during the third act and several times in their private offices; husband #3, who had put the goddamned loa on her when they separated; and Ronnie
"Ronnie is doing very well for a special child," the doctor had told her the last time she visited the home. That was a hell of an elaborate euphemism for Mongolian idiot, she thought angrily; but the doctor was trying to be kind, and she forgave him.
But two nights later she opened in another Off-Off-Off Broadway, Hiroshima Werewolf, and one critic described her as having "a special childlike quality reminiscent of Monroe." She felt a wave of vertigo on reading that: If the doctor and the critic were not in cahoots to drive her over the edge, then those words were the most sinister kind of synchronicity. But she maintained her cool.
Now she had a goddamned loa on top of everything else.
She maintained.
And Justin Case, deeper asleep, dapper as loop, was just waltzing along Owld Broadway with Judge Wish-ingdone, past Punker Hall, and there was a patchy fog and a zoo city zoo, one nixson and a vegetable. And he was blowin to adams and tilling the tyler, Don Judge Lincoln, mercurial and zany and hoppy, that high on the thigh-angle of him, cruising the dollarwars and emanstirpating his sklavs until he was caught with Topsy! in the barn!! on the farce of youlie!!! No martha! that's jokeson's guile for you, toomsayer.
But they were in the cherrytreeattric warld, an honest ape, he couldna tell a phone. One nukied individual, with Ma in her gurdjef and Pop in the easel, to the republic for witch's hands, by the Donzerly Light. And who comes up but Indrarambam and Rashowsunnier and Shivabull, loads and toads of them, forty of them, with their fords and hords and their gauchos and cheekos and jumbos and harpoons inem (corpus whalem!) asking about the launches and donors and the thousand and ninety things they ask, irking and rooking and snooping, prying and preying, forty of them, all buyers cotter, infernal reamin you sodage, doubt's eternal fact, by all Chinatown howdials.
Justin moans in his sleep as the Iranian Rastuys Shiites close in on him.
"Papa Legba, Papa Legba, Papa Legba," Joe Malik chants along with Carol Christmas, while the astral/ electrical/prajna/orgone/psionic/bioplasmic/odyle energy, or the Power of Imagination, in the room continues to escalate toward quantum wobble.
Papa Legba was the Opener of the window, according to the Santaria metaphor. Like Maxwell's Demon, he could increase or decrease entropy at whim, and take you into alternative etgenstates. He was the Boss Honcho on the astral potentia level, the alpha male of the pack. He'd kick the ass of any loa intruding on his good friends, and Carol had learned to be one of his very good friends since living with Hugo de Naranja.
Joe Malik didn't know from Papa Legba, but he understood the exorcism in his own terms. Papa Legba was the guise in which Thoth, that master Quick Change Artist, appeared in the Santaria or Voudon game. Joe knew about Thoth from Hagbard Celine, who always employed the Cabalistic/Golden Dawn metaprograms when attempting quantum alterations in the fabric of reality. Thoth commandered seventy-eight servitors, each one encoded in his Book of Signals to mankind, ordinarily known as the Tarot deck. Each Tarot card was synchronistic with a different quantum eigenvalue and the arrangement of the cards, when shuffled at random, revealed the Hidden Variable causing the "acausal" quantum jump to the next reality-mesh.
Malik the Skeptic tended to regard that explanation as pseudoscientific balderdash, but Malik the Shaman found it useful as a working hypothesis when critters like Chronozon went bump in the night.
"Zeno of Elias on the other hand my dear reminds us that before the brick can ever hit Krazy it must first travel half of the distance from Ignatz's paw to Krazy's head, but before it can do that it must cover half of that distance that is to say a quarter of the original distance…"
THE FETUS PEOPLE
John Disk had originally become involved in morality and ideology due to the Fetus People, as Pussycat genially labeled the antiabortion movement of the 1970s. The Fetus People did not like this description; they called themselves the Right to Life Committee.
Disk was in his teens then and had the usual hormones flowing through his adolescent primate body. He thought he was continually tormented by sinful desires, not understanding the role of testosterone in pubescent primates.
He was a member of the True Roman Catholic Church, a splinter group formed after Vatican II had taken the main body of the Romish religion off into heresy and modernism. The members were survivors of the Irish-American fascism that had once rallied behind Father Coughlin, Father Feeney, and Senator Joe McCarthy. They regarded the English Mass as being almost as sacrilegious as abortion and Social Security as only one step from Stalinism.
The Fetus People or the Right to Life Committee was an amalgamation of True Roman Catholics with the kind of Fundamentalists Protestants seldom seen north of Bad Ass, Texas. They were, like all primate ideologists and moralists, chiefly concerned with finding no-good shits and dumping on them.
They believed the abortionists were in league with all the other no-good shits, including the Rockefellers, the international Communist sex educators, life-extension researchers, cattle mutilators, NASA, and the intergalactic Black Magicians of the Illuminati, under the leadership of the infamous Cagliostro the Great.
They also believed that the Unistat government had never waged an unjust war, that the hair of the seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, and most of what they read in Reader's Digest.
By 1982 the legal struggles over abortion were over and the whole issue seemed as remote as the War of the Roses. This was because a 100 percent effective morning-after contraceptive had been on the market since 1980 and had proven so effective that requests for abortions had dwindled to virtually zero.
By 1983 the economic demand for abortions was about as microscopic as the demand for buggy whips in 1923, after every town in Unistat had switched from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. Another quantum jump in sociology had occurred.
Actually, the morning-after pill was a chemical abortifa-cient, as any biochemist knew. The biochemists never talked about this in public, since they were all agnostic liberals and it was against their principles to either lie by denying the facts or to help the Fetus People by telling the truth.
As a result of this policy by the biochemists only a handful of the Fetus People turned their attack against the pill when abortion was no longer a live issue. Since the resultant of the morning-after pill was, to the human eye, no different from ordinary menstruation, opposing this seemed exceedingly eccentric even for Fetus People.
The majority of the Fetus People, deprived of their. raison d'etre, began splitting amoebalike into factions and subfactions.
Some few of them, who had really been concerned with the rights of the unborn, became concerned at last with the rights of the born and launched new groups to oppose the surviving vestiges of war, capital punishment, or poverty in backward parts of the planet.
The majority, who had been mainly preoccupied with finding no-good shits and dumping on them, joined organizations like NOODLE (National Organization Organized for Decent Literature and Entertainment) or the First Bank of Religiosophy.
John Disk drifted into White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, a group mostly concerned with combating parapsychology, psychics, UFO demons, sex educators, cattle mutilators, and, of course, the loathsome Cagliostro the Great.
ROSENFELT HAS DESTROYED ME
In 1941 the Carter Brothers Carnival played Xenia, Ohio, and some students from Antioch College tried to throw Cagliostro a whammy with a dragon-headed Japanese condom. His handling of that challenge aroused the admiration and awe of old carny hands; and they were even more amazed by his friendship with Rambo, the lion.
Sandoz, the lion tamer, in particular, was astonished at Cagliostro's a
bility 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!"
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