“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 baccilli 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 archetypcal 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 buzzsaw 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?”
“No,” I told him wondering how many times he’d made that speech tonight.
“Just a moment,” said Hagbard, materializing out of the hallway. “I can make bail for this man.”
MR. KHARIS: Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?
MR. CELINE: I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea, Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: You become facetious, Mr. Celine.
MR. CELINE: I have never been more serious.
“What is your relationship to this young man?” Bushman asked angrily. He had been about to come when the cop dragged me off to jail, and he was strangling in some kind of gruesome S-M equivalent of coitus interruptus.
“He’s my wife,” Hagbard said calmly.
“What?”
“Common-law wife,” Hagbard went on. “Homose
xual marriage is not recognized in Illinois. But homosexuality per se isn’t a crime in this state, either, so don’t try to make waves, your honor. Let me pay and take him home.”
It was too much. “Daddy,” I said, camping like our friend the Padre. “You’re so masterful.”
Judge Bushman looked like he wanted to lay Hagbard out with a gavel upside of his head, but he controlled himself. “Count the money,” he told the bailiff. “Make sure he pays every penny. And then,” he told us, “I want the two of you out of this courtroom as quickly as possible. I’ll see you September fifteenth,” he added, to me.
MR. KHARIS: And we believe we have demonstrated the necessity of this dam. We believe we have shown that the doctrine of eminent domain is on sure constitutional grounds, and has been held to apply in numerous similar cases. We believe we have shown that the resettlement plan offered by the government will be no hardship for the plaintiffs….
“Fuckin’ faggots,” the cop said as we went out the door.
“All hail Discordia,” I told him cheerfully. “Let’s get out of this neighborhood,” I added to Hagbard.
“My car is right here,” he said, pointing to a goddam Mercedes.
“For an anarchist, you sure live a lot like a capitalist,” I commented as we got into that beautiful machine crystallized out of stolen labor and surplus value.
“I’m not a masochist,” Hagbard replied. “The world makes me uncomfortable enough. I see no reason to make myself more uncomfortable. And I’m damned if I’ll drive a broken-down jalopy that spends half its time in a garage being repaired merely because that would make me seem more ‘dedicated’ to you left-wing simpletons. Besides,” he added practically, “the police never stop a Mercedes and search it. How many times a week do you get stopped and harassed, with your beard and your psychedelic Slaveswagon, you damned moralist?”
“Often enough,” I admitted, “that I’m afraid to transport dope in it.”
“This car is full of dope,” he said blithely. “I’m making a big delivery to a dealer up in Evanston, on the Northwestern campus, tomorrow.”
“You’re in the dope business, too?”
“I’m in every illegal business. Every time a government declares something verboten, two groups move in to service the black market created: the Mafia and the LDD. That stands for Lawless Delicacy Dealers.”
“I thought it stood for Little Deluded Dupes.”
He laughed. “Score one for Moon. Seriously, I’m the worst enemy governments have, and the best protection for the average person. The Mafia has no ethics, you know. If it wasn’t for my group and our years and years of experience, everything on the black market, from dope to Canadian furs, would be shoddy and unreliable. We always give the customer his or her money’s worth. Half the dope you sell probably has passed through my agents on its way to you. The better half.”
“What was that homosexual business? Just buggin’ old Bushman?”
“Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball.”
“Hagbard,” I said, “what the hell is your game?”
“Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors,” he said crisply. We turned onto Lake Shore Drive and sped north.
“Thou, Jubela, did he tell you the Word?” asked the goat-headed man.
The gigantic black said, “I beat him and tortured him, but he would not reveal the Word.”
“Thou, Jubelo, did he tell you the Word?”
The fishlike creature said, “I tormented and vexed his inner spirit, Master, but he would not reveal the Word.”
“And thou, Jubelum, did he tell you the Word?”
The hunchbacked dwarf said, “I cut off his testicles and he was mute. I cut off his penis and he was mute. He did not tell me the Word.”
“A fanatic,” the goat-head said. “It is better that he is dead.”
Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn’t twitch a Jingle muscle: That last drug had been a narcotic, and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralyzed and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if the dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from the body before it rotted.
As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in darkness.
“Leave first, Jubela.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Leave next, Jubelo.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Leave last, Jubelum.”
“Yes, Master.”
Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn’t move. Let me not go mad, he thought.
Howard spotted the Lief Erikson ahead and sang: “Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I’ll meet Celine.” Maldonado’s sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of “America’s best-known financier-philanthropist,” Robert Putney Drake. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow, maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling with exhaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis’s eyes, but the king could not focus them. The blade fell: the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, “Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!”) Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, “The real crime of the Templars, however, was probably their association with the Hashishim.” George Dorn, hardly listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia entirely.
“And modern novels are the same,” Smiling Jim went on. “Sex, sex, sex—and not normal sex even. Every type of perverted, degenerate, unnatural, filthy, deviated, and sick kind of sex. This is how they’re gonna bury us, as Mr. Khrushchev said, without even firing a shot.”
Sunlight awakened Saul Goodman.
Sunlight and a headache, A hangover from the combination of drugs.
He was in a bed and his clothes were gone. There was no mistaking the garment he wore: a hospital gown. And the room—as he squinted against the sun—had the dull modern-penitentiary look of a typical American hospital.
He hadn’t heard the door open, but a weathered-looking middle-aged man in a doctor’s smock drifted into the room. He was carrying a clipboard; pens stuck their necks out of his smock pocket; he smiled benignly. His hornrimmed heavily black glasses and crewcut marked him as the optimistic, upward-mobile man of his generation, without either the depression/World War II memories that gave anxiety to Saul’s contemporaries or nuclear nightmares that gave rage and alienation to youth. He would obviously think of himself as a liberal and vote conservatively at least half the time.
A hopeless schmuck.
Except that he was probably none of those things, but another of their agents, doing a very convincing performance.
“Well?” he said brightly. “Feeling better, Mr. Muldoon?”
Muldoon, Saul thought. Here we go—another ride into their kitsch idea of the Heart of Darkness.
“My name is Goodman,” he said thinly. “I’m about as Irish as Moishe Dayan.”
“Oh, still playing that little game, are we?” the man spoke kindly. “And are you still a detective?”
“Go to hell,” Saul said, no longer in mood to fight back with wit and irony. He would dig into his hostility and make his last stand from a foxhole of bitterness and sullen brevity.
The man pulled up a chair and sat down. “Actually,” he said, “these remaining symptoms don’t bother us much. You were in a much worse state when you were first brought here six months ago. I doubt that you remember that. Electroshock mercifully removes a great deal of the near past, which is helpful in cases like yours. Do you know that you were physically assaulting people on the street, and tried to attack the nurses and orderlies your first month here? Your paranoia was very acute at that po
int, Mr. Muldoon.”
“Up yours, bubi,” Saul said. He closed his eyes and turned the other way.
“Such moderate hostility these days,” the man went on, bright as a bird in the morning grass. “A few months ago you would have tried to strangle me. Let me show you something.” There was a sound of paper.
Curiosity defeated resistance: Saul turned and looked. The man held out a driver’s license, from the State of New Jersey, for “Barney Muldoon.” the picture was Saul’s. Saul grinned maliciously, showing his disbelief.
“You refuse to recognize yourself?” the man asked quietly.
“Where is Barney Muldoon?” Saul shot back. “Do you have him in another room, trying to convince him he’s Saul Goodman?”
“Where is …?” the “doctor” repeated, seeming genuinely baffled. “Oh, yes, you admit you know the name but claim he was only a friend. Just like a rapist we had in here a while ago. He said all the rapes were committed by his roommate, Charlie. Well, let’s try another tack. All those people you beat up on the street—and that Playboy Club bunny you tried to strangle—do you still believe they were agents of this, um, Prussian Illuminati?”
“This is an improvement,” Saul said. “A very intriguing combination of reality and fantasy, much better than your group’s previous efforts. Let me hear the rest of it.”
“You think that’s sarcasm,” the man said calmly. “Actually, behind it, your recovery is proceeding nicely. You really want to remember, even as you struggle to keep up this Goodman myth. Very well: you are a sixty-year-old police officer from Trenton, New Jersey. You never were promoted to detective and that is the great grievance of your life. You have a wife named Molly, and three sons—Roger, Kerry, and Gregory. Their ages are twenty-eight, twenty-five, and twenty-three. A few years ago, you started a game with your wife; she thought it was harmless at first and learned to her sorrow that it wasn’t. The game was, that you pretended to be a detective and, late at night, you would tell her about the important cases you were working on. Gradually, you built up to the most important case of all—the solution to all the assassinations in America during the past decade. They were all the work of a group called the Illuminati, who were surviving top-level Nazis that had never been captured. More and more, you talked about their leader—Martin Borman, of course—and insisted you were getting a line on his whereabouts. By the time your wife realized that the game had become reality to you, it was too late. You already suspected your neighbors of being Illuminati agents, and your hatred for Nazism led you to believe you were Jewish and had taken an Irish name to avoid American anti-Semitism. This particular delusion, I must say, caused you acute guilt, which it took us a long time to understand. It was, we finally realized, a projection of a guilt you have long felt for being a policeman at all. But perhaps at this point, I might aid your struggle for self-recognition (and abort your equal and opposite struggle for self-escape) by reading you part of a report on your case by one of our younger psychiatrists. Are you game to hear it?”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 21