The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  Volpe swallowed again, and said, “There’s one more thing I oughta tell you. I went down to the grassy knoll, after the cops run from there to the School Book Depository. I thought I might find the guy who did the shooting still hanging around and tell you what he looked like. He was long gone, though. But here’s what so spooky. I ran into another galoot, who was sneaking down from the triple underpass. Long, skinny guy with buck teeth, kind of reminded me of a python or some kind of snake. He just looks at me and my umbrella and guesses what’s in it. His mouth falls open. ‘Jesus Christ and his black bastard brother Harry,’ he says, ‘how the fuck many people does it take to kill a President these days?’”

  (“And they’re teaching them about perversions as well,” Smiling Jim was building toward his climax. “Homosexuality and lesbianism are being taught in our schools and we’re paying for it out of our tax money. Now is that communism or isn’t it?”)

  “Welcome to the Playboy Club,” the beautiful blonde said, “I’m your bunny, Virgin.”

  Saul took his seat in the dark wondering if he had heard correctly. Virgin was an odd name for a bunny; perhaps she had actually said Virginia. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

  “How do you wish your steak, sir?” the bunny was asking. A stake through the heart, for a vampire.

  “Medium well,” Saul said, wondering why his mind was wandering in such odd directions. (“Odd erections,” somebody said in the nearby dark—or was it a distorted echo of his own voice?)

  “Medium well,” the bunny repeated, seemingly speaking to the wall. A medium wall, Saul thought.

  Immediately the wall opened and Saul was looking into a combination kitchen and butcher shop. A steer was standing not five feet from him, but before he could recover from this shock a male figure, stripped to the waist and wearing the hood of a medieval executioner, caught his attention. With one stroke of a huge hammer, this figure knocked the steer unconscious and it fell to the floor with a crash. Immediately the executioner produced an axe and chopped its head off; blood gushed in a crimson pool from its neck.

  The wall closed, and Saul had the terrifying feeling that the whole scene had been a hallucination—that he was losing his mind.

  “All our lunches are educational today,” the bunny said in his ear. “We believe every customer should understand fully what’s on the end of his fork and how it got there, before he takes a bite.”

  “Good God,” Saul said, getting to his feet. This wasn’t a Playboy Club, it was some den of lunatics and sadists. He stumbled toward the door.

  “No way out,” a man at another table said softly as he passed.

  “Saul, Saul,” the maître d’ murmured politely, “why dost thou persecute me? Hab’ rochmunas.”

  “It’s a drug,” Saul said thickly, “you’ve given me a drug.” Of course, that was it—something like mescaline or LSD—and they were guiding his hallucinations by providing proper stimuli. Perhaps they were even faking some of the hallucinations. But how had he fallen into their hands? The last thing he remembered, he was in Joe Malik’s apartment with Barney Muldoon…. No, there was a voice saying, “Now, Sister Victoria,” as they came out the door onto Riverside Drive….

  “No man should marry a woman more than thirty years younger than himself,” the maître d’ said mournfully. How did they know about that? Had they investigated his whole life? How long had they held him?

  “I’m getting out of here,” he shouted, pushing the maître d’ aside and bolting for the door.

  Hands grasped for him and missed (they weren’t really trying, he realized: he was being allowed to reach the door). When he plunged through the doorway, he realized why: he was not on the street but in another room. This was the next ordeal.

  A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card, light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:

  ALL JEW GIRLS LIKE TO BALL WITH BUCK NIGGERS

  “Sons of bitches,” Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca. Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her sexual devotion.

  The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca’s, in her nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like a baby nursing.

  “Motherfuckers,” Saul screamed. “It’s a fake. That’s not Rebecca—it’s an actress with makeup. You forgot the mole on her hip.” They could drug his senses but not his mind.

  There was a nasty laugh in the darkness. “Try this one, Saul,” a voice said coldly.

  A new picture slid into view: Adolph Hitler, in full Nazi uniform, and a naked Rebecca backing up to him, taking his penis in her rectum. Her face showed both pain and pleasure—and the mole on her hip was visible. Another fake—Rebecca was born years after Hitler died. But they hadn’t produced the slide in the thirty seconds after his shout, and that meant they knew her body, intimately…. And they also knew how skeptical and quick his mind was, and were prepared to administer a series of jolts until something got past his ability to doubt.

  “No comment?” the voice asked mockingly.

  “I don’t believe a man who died thirty years ago would be buggering any woman today,” Saul said drily. “Your tricks are kind of corny.”

  “Sometimes, with the vulgar, we must communicate vulgarly,” the voice replied—and it was almost gentle and pitying this time.

  A new picture appeared—and this time, without doubt, it was Rebecca. But it was Rebecca three years ago, when he first met her. She sat at a table in a cheap East Village pad, wearing the emaciated and self-pitying look he remembered from those days; and she was preparing to inject a needle in her arm. It was the real thing, but the terror was in its implications: they had been watching him that long ago. Perhaps—it was hard to date the picture precisely, although he remembered her apartment in those days—they even knew he would fall in love with her before he knew it himself. No; more likely, a friend of hers in those days had taken the picture and they had somehow found it when they became interested in him. Their resources must be fantastic.

  A new card came on the screen:

  ONCE A JUNKIE ALWAYS A JUNKIE

  A new picture quickly followed: Rebecca, as she looked today, sitting in his kitchen—with the new café curtains they had just hung last week—once again injecting a needle into her arm.

  “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 wit
h 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 fourposter 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 sensation pricked his neck: a needle, another drug. Just as he was guessing they had given him a strongger 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.�
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  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.