“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.
“I’m talking about adventure, George. I’m talking about seeing things and being with people that will really liberate your mind—not just replacing liberalism with Marxism so you can shock your parents. I’m talking about getting altogether off the grubby plane you live on and taking a trip with Hagbard to a transcendental universe. Did you know that on sunken Atlantis there is a pyramidal structure built by ancient priests and faced with a ceramic substance that has withstood thirty thousand years of ocean burial so that the pyramid is clean and white as polished ivory—except for the giant red mosaic of an eye at its top?”
“I find it hard to believe that Atlantis ever existed,” I said. “In fact”—I shook my head angrily—“you’re conning me into qualifying that. The fact is I simply don’t believe Atlantis ever existed. This is pure bullshit.”
“Atlantis is where we’re going next, friend. Do you trust the evidence of your senses? I hope so, because you’ll see Atlantis and the pyramid, just as I said. Those bastards, the Illuminati, are trying to get gold to further their conspiracies by looting an Atlantean temple. And Hagbard is going to foil them by robbing it first. Because I fight the Illuminati every chance I get. And because I’m an amateur archeologist. Will you join us? You’re free to leave right now, if you wish. I’ll put you ashore and even supply you with money to get back to New York.”
I shook my head. “I’m a writer. I write magazine articles for a living. And even if ninety percent of what you say is bullshit, moonshine, and the most elaborate put-on since Richard Nixon, this is the best story I’ve ever come across. A nut with a gigantic golden submarine whose followers include beautiful guerrilla women who blow up southern jails and take out the prisoners. No, I’m not leaving. You’re too big a fish to let get away.”
Hagbard Celine slapped me on the shoulder. “Good man. You’ve got courage and initiative. You trust only the evidence of your eyes and believe what no man tells you. I was right about you. Come on down to my stateroom.” He pressed a button and we entered the golden elevator and sank rapidly till we came to an eight-foot-high archway barred by a silver gate. Celine pressed a button and the elevator door and the gate outside both slid back. We stepped out into a carpeted room with a lovely black woman sitting at one end under an elaborate emblem concocted of anchors, seashells, Viking figureheads, lions, ropes, octopi, lightning bolts, and, occupying the central position, a golden apple.
“Kallisti,” said Celine, saluting the girl.
“All hail Discordia,” she answered.
“Aum Shiva,” I contributed, trying to enter the spirit of the game.
Celine led me down a long corridor, saying, “You’ll find this submarine is opulently furnished. I have no need to live in monklike surroundings like those masochists who become naval officers. No Spartan simplicity for me. This is more like an ocean liner or a grand European hotel of the Edwardian era. Wait till you see my suite. You’ll like your stateroom, too. To please myself, I built this thing on the grand scale. No finicky naval architects or parsimonious accountants in my business. I believe you’ve got to spend money to make money and spend the money you make to enjoy money. Besides, I have to live in the damned thing.”
“And what precisely is your business, Mr. Celine?” I asked. “Or should I call you Captain Celine?”
“You should certainly not. No bullshit authority titles for me. I’m Freeman Hagbard Celine, but the conventional Mister is good enough. I’d prefer you called me by my first name. Hell, call me anything you want to. If I don’t like it, I’ll punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there’d be fewer wars. I’m in smuggling mostly. With a spot of piracy, just to keep ourselves on our toes. But that only against the Illuminati and their communist dupes. We aim to prove that no state has the right to regulate commerce in any way. Nor can it, when it is up against free men. My crew are all volunteers. We have among us liberated sailors who were indentured to the navies of America, Russia, and China. Excellent fellows. The governments of the world will never catch us, because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who works for a government is a slave.”
“Then you’re a gang of Objectivists, basically? I’ve got to warn you, I come from a long line of labor agitators and Reds. You’ll never convert me to a right-wing position.”
Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. “Objectivists?” he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. “We’re anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn’t you understand that much? We’ve got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You’re talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We’re outside the system’s categories. You’ll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we’re political non-Euclideans. But even that’s not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.”
“I don’t know Latin,” I said, overwhelmed by his outburst.
“‘I will not serve,’” he translated. “And here’s your room.”
He threw open an oaken door, and I entered a living room furnished in handsome teak and rosewood Scandinavian, upholstered in bright solid colors. He hadn’t been exaggerating about the scale: you could have parked a Greyhound bus in the middle of the carpet and the room would still seem uncluttered. Above an orange couch hung a huge oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame easily a foot deep on all sides. The painting was essentially a cartoon. It showed a man in robes with long, flowing white hair and beard standing on a mountaintop staring in astonishment at a wall of black rock. Above his head a fiery hand traced flaming letters with its index finger on the rock. The words it wrote were:
THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!
As I started to laugh, I felt, through the soles of my feet, an enormous engine beginning to throb.
And, in Mad Dog, Jim Cartwright said into a phone with a scrambler device to evade taps, “We let Celine’s crowd take Dorn, according to plan, and, Harry Coin is, ah, no longer with us.”
“Good,” said Atlanta Hope. “The Four are heading for Ingolstadt. Everything is go.” She hung up and dialed again at once, reaching Western Union. “I want a flat rate telegram, same words, twenty-three different addresses,” she said crisply. “The message is, Insert the advertisement in tomorrow’s newspapers.’ Signature, ‘Atlanta Hope.’” She then read off the twenty-three addresses, each located in a large city in the United States, each a regional headquarters of God’s Lightning. (The following day, April 25, the newspapers in those cities ran an obscure ad in the personals columns; it said “In thanks to Saint Jude for favors granted. A.W.” The plot, accordingly, thickened.)
And then I sat back and thought about Harry Coin. Once I imagined I could make it with him: there was something so repulsive, so cruel, so wild and psychopathic there … but, of course, it hadn’t worked. The same as every other man. Nothing. “Hit me,” I screamed. “Bite me. Hurt me. Do something.” He did everything, the most agreeable sadist in the world, but it was the same as if he had been the gentlest, most poetic English instructor at Antioch. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing…. The closest miss was that strange banker, Drake, from Boston. What a scene. I’d gotten into his office on Wall Street, seeking a contribution for God’s Lightning. Old white-haired buzzard, between sixty and seventy: typical of our wealthier members, I thought. I started the usual spiel, communism, sexism,
smut, and all the time his eyes were bright and hard as a snake’s. It finally hit me that he didn’t believe a word of it, so I started to cut it off, and then he pulled out his checkbook and wrote and held it up so I could see it. Twenty thousand dollars. I didn’t know what to say, and I started something about how all true Americans would appreciate this great gesture and so on, and he said, “Rubbish. You’re not rich but you’re famous. I want to add you to my collection. Deal?” The coldest bastard I ever met, even Harry Coin was human by comparison, yet his eyes were such a clear blue I couldn’t believe they could be so frightening, a real madman in a perfectly sane way, not even a psychopath but something they don’t have a name for, and it clicked, the humiliation of whoredom and the predatory viciousness in his face plus the twenty grand; I nodded. He took me into a private suite off of his business office and he touched one button, the lights dimmed, another button, down came a movie screen, a third button, and I was watching a pornographic movie. He didn’t approach me, just watched, and I tried to get excited, wondering if the actress was really making it or just faking it, and then a second film began, four of them this time in permutations and combinations, he led me to the couch, every time I opened my eyes I could still see the film over his shoulder, and it was the same, the same, as soon as he got his thing inside me, nothing, nothing, nothing, I kept looking at the actors trying to feel something, and then, as he came, he whispered in my ear, “Heute die Welt, Morgens das Sonnensystem!” That was the only time I almost made it. Sheer terror that this maniac knew….
Later, I tried to find out about him, but nobody above me in the Order would say a word, and those below me didn’t know anything. But I finally found out: he was very big in the Syndicate, maybe the top. And that’s how I figured out that the old rumor was true, the Syndicate was run by the Order, too, just like everything else….
But that cold sinister old man never said another word about it. I kept waiting while we dressed, when he gave me the check, when he escorted me to the door, and even his expression seemed to deny that he had said it or knew what it meant. When he opened the door for me, he put an arm on my shoulder and spoke, so his secretary could hear it, “May your work hasten the day when America returns to purity.” Even his eyes weren’t mocking and his voice sounded completely sincere. And yet he had read me to the core, knew I was faking, and guessed that terror alone could unlock my reflexes: maybe he even knew that I had already tried physical sadism and it hadn’t worked. Out on Wall Street in the crowd, I saw a man with a gas mask—they were still rare that year—and I felt the whole world was moving faster than I could understand and that the Order wasn’t telling me nearly as much as I needed to know.
Brother Beghard, who is actually a politician in Chicago under his “real” name, once explained the Law of Fives to me in relation to the pyramid-of-power principle. Intellectually, I understand: it’s the only way we can work, each group a separate vector so that the most any infiltrator can learn is a small part of the design. Emotionally, though, it does get frightening at times: do the Five at the top really have the whole picture? I don’t know, and I don’t see how they can predict a man like Drake or guess what he’s planning next. There’s a paradox here, I know:
I joined the Order seeking power, and now I am more a tool, an object, than ever before. If a man like Drake ever thought that, he might tear the whole show apart.
Unless the Five really do have the powers they claim; but I’m not gullible enough to believe that bull. Some of it’s hypnotism, and some is plain old stage magic, but none of it is really supernatural. Nobody has sold me on a fairy tale since my uncle got into me when I was twelve with his routine about stopping the bleeding. If my parents had only told me the truth about menstruation in advance …
Enough of that. There was work to be done. I hit the buzzer on my desk and my secretary, Mr. Mortimer, came in. As I’d guessed, it was past nine o’clock and he’d been out there in the reception area straightening up and worrying about my mood for God knows how long, while I was daydreaming. I studied my memo pad, while he waited apprehensively. Finally, I noticed him and said, “Be seated.” He sank into the dictation chair, putting his head right under the point of the lightning bolt on the wall—an effect I always enjoyed—and opened his pad.
“Call Zev Hirsch in New York,” I said watching his pencil fly to keep up with my words. “The Foot Fetishist Liberation Front is having a demonstration. Tell him to cream them; I won’t be satisfied unless a dozen of the perverts are put in the hospital, and I don’t care how many of our people get arrested doing it. The bail fund is available, if they need it. If Zev has any objections, I’ll talk to him, but otherwise you handle it. Then make up the standard number-two press release, where I deny any knowledge of illegal activities by that chapter and promise we will investigate and expel anybody guilty of mob action— have that ready for release this afternoon. Then get me the latest sales figures on Telemachus Sneezed….” Another busy day at the national headquarters of God’s Lightning was started; and Hagbard Celine, feeding Mavis’s report on George’s sexual and other behavior into FUCKUP, came out with a coding of C-1472-B-2317A, which caused him to laugh immoderately.
“What’s so damned funny?” Mavis asked.
“From out of the west come the thundering hooves of the great horse, Onan,” Hagbard grinned. “The lonely stranger rides again!”
“What the hell does all that mean?”
“We’ve got sixty-four thousand possible personality types,” Hagbard explained, “and I’ve only seen that reading once before. Guess who it was?”
“Not me,” Mavis said quickly, beginning to color.
“No, not you.” Hagbard laughed again. “It was Atlanta Hope.”
Mavis was startled. “That’s impossible. She’s frigid for one thing.”
“There are many kinds of frigidity,” Hagbard said. “It fits, believe me. She joined women’s liberation at the same age George joined Weatherman, and they both split after a few months. And you’d be surprised how similar their mothers were, or how the successful careers of their older brothers annoy them—”
“But George is a nice guy, underneath it all.”
Hagbard Celine knocked an ash off his long Italian cigar. “Everybody is a nice guy, underneath it all,” he said. “What we become when the world is through messing us over is something else.”
At Chateau Thierry, in 1918, Robert Putney Drake looked around at the dead bodies, knew he was the last man alive in the platoon, and heard the Germans start to advance. He felt the cold wetness on his thighs before he realized he was urinating in his pants; a shell exploded nearby and he sobbed. “O God, please, Jesus. Don’t let them kill me. I’m afraid to die. Please, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus …”
Mary Lou and Simon are eating breakfast in bed, still naked as Adam and Eve. Mary Lou spread jam on toast and asked, “No, seriously: which part was hallucination and which part was real?”
Simon sipped at his coffee. “Everything in life is a hallucination,” he said simply. “Everything in death, too,” he added. “The universe is just putting us on. Handing us a line.”
THE THIRD TRIP, OR BINAH
The Purple Sage cursed and waxed sorely pissed and cried out in a loud voice: A pox upon the accursed Illuminati of Bavaria; may their seed take no root.
May their hands tremble, their eyes dim and their spines curl up, yea, verily, like unto the backs of snails; and may the vaginal orifices of their women be clogged with Brillo pads.
For they have sinned against God and Nature; they have made of life a prison; and they have stolen the green from the grass and the blue from the sky.
And so saying, and grimacing and groaning, the Purple Sage left the world of men and women and retired to the desert in despair and heavy grumpiness.
But the High Chapperal laughed, and said to the Erisian faithful: Our brother torments himself with no cause, for even the malign Illuminati are unconscious pawns of the Divine Plane of Our Lad
y.
—Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.,
“The Book of Contradictions,” Liber 555
October 23, 1970, was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Arthur Flegenheimer (alias “The Dutchman,” alias “Dutch Schultz”), but this dreary lot has no intention of commemorating that occasion. They are the Knights of Christianity United in Faith (the group in Atlantis were called Mauls of Lhuv-Kerapht United for the Truth; see what I mean?) and their president, James J. (Smiling Jim) Treponema, has noted a bearded and therefore suspicious young man among the delegates. Such types were not likely to be KCUF members and might even be dope fiends. Smiling Jim told the Andy Frain ushers to keep a watchful eye on the young man so no “funny business” could occur, and then went to the podium to begin his talk on “Sex Education: Communist Trojan Horse in Our Schools.” (In Atlantis, it was “Numbers: Nothingarian Squid-Trap in Our Schools.” The same drivel eternally.) The bearded young man, who happened to be Simon Moon, adviser to Teenset magazine on Illuminati affairs and instructor in sexual yoga to numerous black young ladies, observed that he was being observed (which made him think of Heisenberg) and settled back in his chair to doodle pentagons on his note pad. Three rows ahead, a crew-cut middle-aged man, who looked like a surburban Connecticut doctor, also settled back comfortably, awaiting his opportunity: the funny business that he and Simon had in mind would be, he hoped, very funny indeed.
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 10