“Seventy-two is the cabalistic number for the Holy Unspeakable Name of God, used in all black magic, and thirteen is the number in a coven,” Simon explains. “That’s why.” The Volkswagen purrs toward San Francisco.
Carmel comes down the steps of the Las Vegas Public Library, a copy of J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit under his arm, an anticipatory smirk on his face, and Simon is finally ejected from the Sheraton-Chicago shouting, “Faggots! I think you’re all a bunch of faggots!”
“And here’s one of their jokes” Simon adds. “Over the eagle’s head, do you dig that Star of David? They put that one in—one single six-pointed Jewish star, made up of all the five-pointed stars—just so some right-wing cranks could find it and proclaim it as proof that the Elders of Zion control the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.”
Overlooking the crowd in UN Plaza, Zev Hirsch, New York State Commander of God’s Lightning, watches his thick-shouldered troops, swinging their wooden crosses like tomahawks, drive back the lily-livered peaceniks. There is an obstacle. A blue line of policemen has formed between the men of God’s Lightning and their prey. Over the cops’ shoulders, the peaceniks are screeching dirty words at their plastic-hatted enemies. Zev’s eyes scan the crowd. He catches the eye of a red-faced cop with gold braid on his cap. Zev gives the Police Captain a questioning look. The Captain winks. A minute later the Captain makes a small gesture with his left hand. Immediately, the line of police vanishes, as if melted in the bright spring sun that beats down on the plaza. The battalion of God’s Lightning falls upon their anguished, outraged, and astonished victims. Zev Hirsch laughs. This is a lot more fun than the old days in the Jewish Defense League. All the servants are drunk. And the rain continues.
At an outdoor café in Jerusalem two white-haired old men wearing black are drinking coffee together. They try to mask their emotions from the people around them, but their eyes are wild with excitement. They are staring at an inside page of a Yiddish newspaper, reading two ads in Yiddish, a large, quarter-page announcement of the greatest rock festival of all time to be held near Ingolstadt, Bavaria—bands of all nations, people of all nations, to be known as Woodstock Europa. On the same page is the paper’s personals column, and the watery eyes of the two old men are re-reading for the fifth time the statement, in Yiddish, “In thanks to St. Jude for favors granted.—A. W.”
One old man points at the page with a trembling finger. “It is coming,” he says in German.
The other one nods, a beatific smile on his withered face. “Jawohl. It is coming very soon. Der Tag. Soon we must to Bavaria go. Ewige Blumenkraft!”
Carlo put the gun on the table between us. “This is it, George,” he said, “Are you a revolutionary, or are you just on an ego trip playing at being a revolutionary? Can you take the gun?”
I wiped my eyes. The Passaic was flowing below me, a steady stream of garbage from the Paterson falls down to Newark and the Atlantic Ocean. Like the garbage that was my contemptible, cowardly soul…. The God’s Lightning troopers fan out, clubbing each person wearing an I WON’T DIE FOR FERNANDO POO button. Blood dances in the air, fragile red bubbles, before the tomblike slab of the UN building…. Dillinger’s breathing slows down. He stares at the ruby eye atop the 13-step pyramid hidden in the UN building, and he thinks of pentagons.
“I’m a God’s Lightning,” Carlo said. “This is no joke, baby, I’m going to do the whole bit.” His intense eyes burned into mine as the switchblade came out of his pocket. “Motherfuckin’ commie,” he screamed suddenly, leaping up so quickly that the chair fell over behind him. “You’re not getting off with a beating this time. I’m gonna cut your balls off and take them home as a souvenir.” He slashed forward with the knife, deflecting his swing at the last minute. “Made you jump, you long-haired faggotty freak. I wonder if you have any balls to cut off. Well, I’ll find out.” He inched forward, the knife weaving snakelike patterns in the air.
“Look,” I said desperately, “I know you’re only playacting.”
“You don’t know nothing, baby. Maybe I’m FBI or CIA. Maybe this is just an excuse to get you to go for the gun so I can kill you and claim self-defense. Life isn’t all demonstrations and play-acting, George. There comes a time when it gets serious.” He lunged again with the knife, and I stumbled clumsily backward. “Are you going to take the gun or am I going to cut your balls off and tell the Group you’re no fucking good and we couldn’t use you?”
He was totally mad and I was totally sane. Is that a more flattering way of telling it, instead of the truth, that he was brave and I was yellow?
“Listen,” I said, “I know you won’t really stab me and you know I won’t really shoot you—”
“Shit on you know and I know” Carlo hit me in the chest with his free hand, hard. “I’m a God’s Lightning, really a God’s Lightning. I’m gonna do the whole scene. This is a test, but the test is for real.” He hit me again, jarring my balance, then slapped my face, twice, rapidly, back and forth like a windshield wiper. “I always said you longhaired commie freaks don’t have no guts. You can’t even fight back. You can’t even feel angry, can you? You just feel sorry for yourself, right?”
It was too damned true. A nerve twinged deep down inside at the unfairness of it, of his ability to see into me more than I usually dared see into myself; and at last I grabbed the gun from the table, screaming, “You sadistic Stalinist son-of-a-bitch!”
“And look at the eagle,” Simon says. “Look real close. That ain’t really no olive branch in his left claw, baby. That’s our old friend Maria Juana. You never really looked at a dollar bill before, did you?
“And the real symbolism of the pyramid is alchemical, of course. The traditional code represents the three kinds of sex by a cube, a pyramid, and a sphere. The cube is that travesty we call ‘normal’ sex, in which the two nervous systems never actually merge at the orgasm, like the two parallel sides of the cube. The pyramid is the two coming together and joining, the magical-telepathic orgasm. The sphere is the Tantric ritual, endlessly prolonged, with no orgasm at all. The alchemists used that code for over two thousand years. The Rosicrucians among the founding fathers used the pyramid as a symbol of their kind of sex magic. Aleister Crowley used that symbol the same way, more recently. The eye on the pyramid is the two minds meeting. Neurological interlock. The opening of the Eye of Shiva. Ewige Schlangekraft—the eternal serpent power. The joining of the Rose and Cross, vagina and penis, into Rose-Cross. The astral leap. Mind escaping from physiology.”
The AUM was supposed to work almost instantly, according to what the scientists at ELF had told Hagbard, so Joe approached the first man who had sampled the punch and started a conversation. “Nice talk Smiling Jim gave,” he said earnestly. (I rammed the gun into Carlo’s gut and saw him go white about the lips. “No, don’t worry,” I said, smiling. “I’m not using it on you. But when I come back there’ll be a dead pig on the streets somewhere in Morningside Heights.” He started to speak, and I jabbed downward with the gun, grinning as he gasped for air. “Comrade,” I added.) “Yeah, Smiling Jim was born with a silver tongue,” the other man said.
“A silver tongue,” Joe agreed solemnly, then added, holding out his hand, “by the way, I’m Jim Mallison from the New York delegation.”
“Knew by your accent,” the other said shrewdly. “I’m Clem Cotex from down Little Rock.” They shook. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“Too bad about that kid that got thrown out,” Joe said, lowering his voice. “It looked to me like that usher really was—you know—touching him.”
Cotex looked surprised for a moment, but then shook his head in doubt. “Can’t tell nowadays, especially in big cities. Do you really think an Andy Frain usher could be a—fairy?”
“Like you said, nowadays in big cities …” Joe shrugged. “I’m just saying that it looked like it to me. Of course, maybe the usher isn’t one. Maybe he’s just a cheap thief who was trying to pick the kid’s pocket. A lot of that goes on the
se days, too.” Cotex involuntarily reached back to check his own wallet, and Joe went on blandly. “But I wouldn’t rule out the other, not by a long shot. What sort of man would want to be an usher at a KCUF meeting, if you stop and think about it? You must have observed how many homosexuals there are in our organization.”
“What?” Cotex’s eyes bulged.
“You haven’t noticed it?” Joe smiled loftily. “There are very few of us who are really Christians. Most of the membership are just a little bit lavender, know what I mean? I think it’s one of our biggest problems, and we ought to bring it out into the open and discuss it frankly. Clear the air, right? For instance, take the way Smiling Jim always puts his arm around your shoulder when he talks to you—”
Cotex interrupted, “Hey, mister, you’re pretty darn bright. Just now hit me like a flash—some of the men here, when Smiling Jim showed those beaver shots to prove how bad some magazines are getting, they really shuddered. They didn’t just disapprove—it really honest-to-Pete revolted them. What kind of man actually finds a naked lady disgusting?”
Go, baby, go, Joe thought. The AUM is working. He quickly derailed the conversation. “Another thing that bothers me. Why don’t we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?”
“Huh?”
“Look,” Joe said. “If all the scientists and eggheads and commies and liberals are pushing it in our schools all the time, there must be something a little fishy about it. Did you ever stop to think that there’s no way—just no way at all—to reconcile a spherical earth with the story of the Flood, or Joshua’s miracle, or Jesus standing on the pinnacle of the Temple and seeing all the kingdoms of the earth? And I ask you, man to man, in all your travels have you ever seen the curvature anywhere? Every place I’ve been is flat. Are we going to trust the Bible and the evidence of our own senses, or are we going to listen to a bunch of agnostics and atheists in laboratory smocks?”
“But the earth’s shadow on the moon during an eclipse …”
Joe took a dime out of his pocket and held it up. “This casts a circular shadow, but it’s flat, not spherical.”
Cotex stared into space for a long moment, while Joe waited with suppressed excitement. “You know something?” Cotex said finally, “all the Bible miracles and our own travels and the shadow on the moon would make sense if the earth was shaped like a carrot and all the continents were on the flat end—”
Praise be to Simon’s god, Bugs Bunny, Joe thought elatedly. It’s happening—he’s not only gullible—he’s creative.
I followed the cop—the pig, I corrected myself—out of the cafeteria. I was so keyed up that it was a Trip. The blue of his uniform, the neon signs, even the green of the lampposts, all were coming in superbright. That was adrenalin. My mouth was dry—dehydration. All the classic flight-fight symptoms. The activation syndrome, Skinner calls it. I let the cop—the pig—get half a block ahead and reached in my pocket for the revolver.
“Come on, George!” Malik shouted. George didn’t want to move. His heart was thumping, his arms and legs trembling so hard he knew they’d be useless to him in a fight. But he just didn’t want to move. He’d had enough of running from these motherfuckers.
But he couldn’t help himself. As the men in blue shirts and white helmets came on, the crowd surged away from them, and George had to move back with the crowd or be knocked down and trampled.
“Come on, George.” It was Pete Jackson at his side now, with a good, hard grip on his arm, tugging him.
“Goddam it, why do we have to run away from them?” George said, stumbling backward.
Peter was smiling faintly. “Don’t you read your Mao, George? Enemy attacks, we retreat. Let the Morituri fanatics stand and get creamed.”
I couldn’t do it. My hand held the gun, but I couldn’t take it out and hold it in front of me any more than I could take out my penis and wave it around. I was sure, even though the street was empty except for me and the pig, that a dozen people would jump out of doorways yelling, “Look, he took it out of his pants.”
Just like right now, when Hagbard said, “Button up your asshole. We’re in for a fight,” I stood frozen like I stood frozen on the embankment above the Passaic.
“Are you on an ego trip playing at being a revolutionary?” Carlo asked.
And Mavis: “All the militant radicals in your crowd ever do is take out the Molotov cocktail diagram that they carefully clipped from The New York Review of Books, hang it on the bathroom door, and jack-off in connection with it.”
Howard sang:
The foe is attacking, their ships coming near,
Now is the time to fight without fear!
Now is the time to look death in the eye
Before we submit, we’ll fight till we die!
This time I got the gun out of my pocket—standing there, looking down at the Passaic—and raised it to my forehead. If I didn’t have the courage for homicide, Jesus knows I have despair enough for a hundred suicides. And I only have to do it once. Just once, and then oblivion, I cock the firing pin. (More play-acting, George? Or will you really do it?) I’ll do it, damn you, damn all of you. I pull the trigger and fall, with the explosion, into blackness.
(AUM was a product of the scientists at ELF—the Erisian Liberation Front—and shared by them with the JAMs. An extract of hemp, boosted with RNA, the “learning” molecule, it also had small traces of the famous “Frisco Speedball”—heroin, cocaine, and LSD. The effect seemed to be that the heroin stilled anxiety, the RNA stimulated creativity, the hemp and acid opened the mind to joy, and the cocaine was there to fit the Law of Fives. The delicate balance created no hallucinations, no sense of “high”—just a sudden spurt in what Hagbard Celine liked to call “constructive gullibility.”)
It was one of those sudden shifts of movement that occur in a mob scene. Instead of pushing George and Peter back, the crowd between them and the white helmets were parting. A slender man fell heavily against George, anguish in his eyes. There was a terrible thump, and the man fell to the ground.
George saw the dark brown wooden cross before he saw the man who wielded it. There was blood and hair at the end of the crossarm. The God’s Lightning man was dark, broad and muscular, with a blue shadow on his cheeks. He looked Italian or Spanish—he looked, in fact, a lot like Carlo. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open and he was breathing heavily. The expression was neither rage nor sadistic joy—just the unthinking panting alertness of a man doing a difficult and fatiguing job. He bent over the fallen slender man and raised the cross.
“All right!” snapped Peter Jackson. He pushed George aside. There was a silly-looking yellow plastic water pistol in his hand. He squirted the oblivious God’s Lightning man in the back of the neck. The man screamed, arched backward, the cross flying end over end into the air. He fell on his back and lay screaming and writhing.
“Come on now, motherfucker!” Pete snarled as he dragged George into the crowd, broken-field running toward Forty-second Street.
“An hour and a half to go,” Hagbard says, finally beginning to show suppressed tension. George checks his watch—it’s exactly 10:30 p.m., Ingolstadt time. The Plastic Canoe is wailing KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE.
(Under the noon sun, two days earlier, Carmel speeds in his jeep away from Las Vegas.)
“Who am I going to meet at the Norton Cabal?” Joe asks. “Judge Crater? Amelia Earhart? Nothing would surprise me now.”
“A few real together people,” Simon replies. “But no one like that. But you’ll have to die, really die, man, before you’re illuminated.” He smiles gently. “Aside from death and resurrection, you won’t find anything you’d call ‘supernatural’ with this bunch. Not even a whiff of old Chicago-style Satanism.”
“God,” Joe says, “was that only a week ago?”
“Yep,” Simon grins, gunning his VW around a Chevrolet with Oregon license plates, “It’s still nineteen sixty-nine, even if you seem to have lived several years since we met at the anarc
hist caucus.” His eyes are amused as he half turns to glance at Joe.
“I suppose that means you know what’s been happening in my dreams. I’m getting the flashforwards already.”
“Always happens after a good dirty Black Mass with pot mixed in the incense,” Simon says. “What sort of thing you getting? Is it happening when you’re awake yet?”
“No, only in my dreams.” Joe pauses, thinking. “I only know it’s the real article because the dreams are so vivid. One set has to do with some kind of pro-censorship rally at the Sheraton-Chicago hotel, I think about a year from now. There’s another set that seems farther in the future—five or six years—where I’m impersonating a doctor for some reason. And a third group of images comes to me, now and then, that seems to be the set of a Frankenstein movie, except that the extras are all hippies and there seems to be a rock festival going on.”
“Does it bother you?”
“A little. I’m used to waking up in the morning with the future ahead of me, not behind me and ahead of me both.”
“You’ll get used to it. You’re just beginning to contact what old Weishaupt called ‘die Morgensheutegesternwelt’—the tomorrow-today-yesterday world. It gave Goethe the idea for Faust, just like Weishaupt’s ‘Ewige Blumenkraff’ slogan inspired Goethe’s ‘Ewige Weibliche.’ I’ll tell you what,” Simon suggested, “You might try wearing three wristwatches, like Bucky Fuller does—one showing the time where you’re at, one showing the time where you’re going, and one showing the time at some arbitrary place like Greenwich Mean Time or your home town. It’ll help you get used to relativity. Meanwhile, never whistle while you’re pissing. And you might repeat to yourself, when you get disoriented, Fuller’s sentence, ‘I seem to be a verb.’”
They drove in silence for a while, and Joe pondered on being a verb. Hell, he thought, I have enough trouble understanding what Fuller means when he says God is a verb. Simon let him mull it over, and began humming again: “Rameses the Second is dead, my love/He’s walking the fields where the BLESSED liiiiive….” Joe realized he was starting to doze … and all the faces at the luncheon table looked at him in astonishment. “No, seriously,” he said. “Anthropologists are too timid to say it out in the open, in public, but corner one of them in private and ask him.”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 26