After a short nap, he woke to find her sucking his rapidly hardening penis. It took much longer this time for him to come, but he enjoyed every second of mounting pleasure. After that they lay side by side and talked for a while. Then Tarantella went to the bedside table and took a tube of petroleum jelly out of a drawer. She began applying it to his penis, which grew erect during the process. Then she rolled over and presented him with her rosy asshole. It was the first time George had had a woman that way, and he came rather quickly after insertion from the novelty and excitement of it all.
They slept for a while and he awoke to find her masturbating him. Her fingers were very clever and seemed quickly to find their way to all the most sensitive parts of his penis—with special attention to that area just behind the crown of the head. He opened his eyes wide when he came and saw, after a few seconds, a small, pale, pearl-like drop of semen appear on the end of his dick. A wonder there was any at all.
It was getting to be a trip. His ego went away somewhere, and he was all body, letting it all happen. If was fucking Tarantella, and If was coming—and, judging by the sounds she was making and the wetness in which his penis was sloshing, she was coming, too.
There followed two more blow jobs. Then Tarantella pulled something that looked like an electric razor out of the bed-table drawer. She plugged it into the wall and began to stroke his penis with its vibrating head, pausing every so often to lick and lubricate the areas she was working on.
George closed his eyes and rolled his hips from side to side as he felt yet another orgasm coming on. From a great distance he heard Tarantella Serpentine say, “My greatness lies in the life I can generate in limp pricks.”
George’s pelvis began to pump up and down. It was really going to be that superorgasm Hemingway described. It began to happen. It was pure electricity. No juice—all energy pouring out like lightning through the magic wand at the center of his being. He wouldn’t be surprised to discover that his balls and cock were disintegrating into whirling electrons. He screamed, and behind his tight-clenched eyes, he saw, very clearly, the smiling face of Mavis.
He awoke in the dark, and his instinctive groping motion told him that Tarantella was gone.
Instead, Mavis, in a white doctor’s smock, stood at the foot of the bed, watching him with large bright eyes. The darkened Drake bedroom had turned into a hospital ward, and was suddenly brightly lit.
“How did you get here?” he blurted. “I mean—how did I get here?”
“Saul,” she said kindly, “it’s almost all over. You’ve come through it.”
And suddenly he realized that he felt, not twenty-three, but sixty-three years old.
“You’ve won,” he admitted, “I’m no longer sure who I am.”
“You’ve won,” Mavis contradicted. “You’ve gone through ego loss and now you’re beginning to discover who you really are, poor old Saul.”
He examined his hands: old man’s. Wrinkled. Goodman’s hands.
“There are two forms of ego loss,” Mavis went on, “and the Illuminati are masters of both. One is schizophrenia, the other is illumination. They set you on the first track, and we switched you to the other. You had a time bomb in your head, but we defused it.”
Malik’s apartment. The Playboy Club. The submarine. And all the other past lives and lost years. “By God,” Saul Goodman cried, “I’ve got it. I am Saul Goodman, but I am all the other people, too.”
“And all time is this time,” Mavis added softly.
Saul sat upright, tears gleaming in his eyes. “I’ve killed men. I’ve sent them to the electric chair. Seventeen times. Seventeen suicides. The savages who cut off fingers or toes or ears for their gods are more sensible. We cut off whole egos, thinking they are not ourselves but separate. God God God,” and he burst in sobs.
Mavis rushed forward and held him, cradling his head to her breast. “Let it out,” she said. “Let it all out. It’s not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don’t understand until it makes you weep.”
queens. Psychoanalysts in living cells, moving in military ordure, and a shitty outlook on life and sex, dancing coins in harry’s krishna. It all coheres, even if you approach it bass ackwards. It coheres.
“Gruad the grayface!” Saul screamed, weeping, beating his fist against the pillow as Mavis held his head, stroked his hair. “Gruad the damned! And I have been his servant, his puppet, sacrificing myselves on his electric altars as burnt offerings.”
“Yes, yes,” Mavis cooed in his ear. “We must learn to give up our sacrifices, not our joys. They have taught us to give up everything except our sacrifices, and those are what we must give up. We must sacrifice our sacrifices.”
“The Grayface, the lifehater!” Saul shrieked. “The bastard motherfucker! Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, I know him under all his aliases. Grayface, Grayface, Grayface! I know his wars and his prisons, the young boys he shafts up the ass, the George Dorns he tries to turn into killers like himself. And I have served him all my life. I have sacrificed men on his bloody pyramid!”
“Let it out,” Mavis repeated, holding the old man’s trembling body “Let it all out, baby…. ”
NOTHUNG. Woden you gnaw it, when you herd those flying sheeps with wagner’s loopy howls? Hassan walked this loony valley, he had to wake up by himself. August 23, 1966: before he ever heard of the SSS, the Discordians, the JAMs or the Illuminati: stoned and beatific, Simon Moon is browsing in a Consumer Discount store on North Clark street, digging the colors, not really intending to buy anything. He stops in a frieze, mesmerized by a sign above the timeclock:
NO EMPLOYEE MAY, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, PUNCH THE TIME CARD FOR ANY OTHER EMPLOYEE. ANY DEVIATION WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION. THE MGT.
“God’s pajamas,” Simon mutters, incredulous.
“Pajamas? Aisle seven,” a clerk says helpfully.
“Yes. Thanks,” Simon speaks very distinctly, edging away, hiding his high. God’s pajamas and spats, he thinks in a half-illuminated trance, either I’m more stoned than I think or that sign is absolutely the whole clue to how the show runs.
RAGS. Hail Ghoulumbia, her monadmen are fled and all she’s left now is a bloody period. “The funny part,” Saul said, smiling while a few tears still flowed, “is that I’m not ashamed of this. Two days ago I would have rather died than be seen weeping—especially by a woman.”
“Yes,” Mavis said, “especially by a woman.”
“That’s it—isn’t it?” Saul gasped. “That’s their whole gimmick. I couldn’t see you without seeing a woman. I couldn’t see that editor, Jackson, without seeing a Negro. I couldn’t see anybody without seeing the attached label and classification.”
“That’s how they keep us apart,” Mavis said gently. “And that’s how they train us to keep our masks on. Love was the hardest bond for them to smash, so they had to create patriarchy, male supremacy, and ail that crap—and the ‘masculine protest’ and ‘penis envy’ in women came in as a result—so even lovers couldn’t look at one another without seeing a separate category.”
“O my God, my God,” Saul moaned, beginning to weep heavily again. “‘A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.’ O my God. And you were with them!” he cried suddenly, raising his head. “You’re a former Illuminatus—that’s why you’re so important to Hagbard’s plan. And that’s why you have that tattoo!”
“I was one of the Five who run the U.S.,” Mavis nodded. “One of the Insiders, as Robert Welch calls them. I’ve been replaced now by Atlanta Hope, the leader of God’s Lightning.”
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” Saul said, laughing. “I looked every way but the right way before. He’s inside the Pentagon. That’s why they build it in that shape, so he couldn’t escape. The Aztecs, the Nazis … and now us …”
“Yes,” Mavis said grimly. “That’s why thirty thousand Americans disappear every year, without trace, and their cases end up in the unsolved files. He has to be fed.”
“‘A man, though naked, may be in rags.�
��” Saul quoted. “Ambrose Bierce knew about it.”
“And Arthur Machen,” Mavis added. “And Lovecraft. But they had to write in code. Even so, Lovecraft went too far, mentioning the Necronomicon by name. That’s why he died so suddenly when he was only forty-seven. And his literary executor, August Derleth, was persuaded to insert a note in every edition of Lovecraft’s works, claiming that the Necronomicon doesn’t exist and was just part of Lovecraft’s fantasy.”
“And the Lloigor?” Saul asked. “And the dois?”
“Real,” Mavis said. “All real. That’s what causes bad acid trips and schizophrenia. Psychic contact with them when the ego wall breaks. That’s where the Illuminati were sending you when we raided their fake Playboy Club and short-circuited the process.”
“Du hexen Hose,” Saul quoted. And he began to tremble.
UNHEIMLICH. Urvater whose art’s uneven, horrid be thine aim. Harpoons in him, corpus whalem: take ye and hate.
Fernando Poo was given prominent attention in the world press only once before the notorious Fernando Poo Incident. It occurred in the early 1970s (while Captain Tequilla y Mota was first studying the art of the Coup d’Etat and laying his first plans,) and was occasioned by the outrageous claims of the anthropologist J. N. Marsh, of Miskatonic University, that artifacts he had found on Fernando Poo proved the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis. Although Professor Marsh had an impeccable reputation for scholarly caution and scientific rigor before this, his last published book, Atlantis and Its Gods, was greeted with mockery and derision by his professional colleagues, especially after his theories were picked up and sensationalized by the press. Many of the old man’s friends, in fact, blame this campaign of ridicule for his disappearance a few months later, which they suspect was the suicide of a broken-hearted and sincere searcher after truth.
Not only were Marsh’s theories now beyond all scientific credibility, but his methods—such as quoting Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross or Graves’ The White Goddess as if they were as reputable as Boas, Mead, or Frazer—seemed to indicate senility. This impression was increased by the eccentric dedication “To Ezra Pound, Jacques De Molay and Emperor Norton I.” The real scientific scandal was not the theory of Atlantis (that was a bee that had haunted many a scholarly bonnet) but Marsh’s claim that the gods of Atlantis actually existed; not as supernatural beings, of course, but as a superior class of life, now extinct, which had preexisted mankind and duped the earliest civilization into worshiping them as divine and offering terrible sacrifices at their altars. That there was absolutely no archaeological or paleontological evidence that such beings ever existed, was the mildest of the scholarly criticisms aimed at this hypothesis.
Professor Marsh’s rapid decline, in the few months between the book’s unanimous rejection by the learned world and his sudden disappearance, caused great pain to colleagues at Miskatonic. Many recognized that he had acquired some of his notions from Dr. Henry Armitage, generally regarded as having gone somewhat bananas after too many years devoted to puzzling out the obscene metaphysics of the Necronomicon. When the librarian Miss Horus mentioned at a faculty tea shortly after the disappearance that Marsh had spent much of the past month with that volume, one Catholic professor urged, only half-jokingly, that Miskatonic should rid itself of scandals once and for all by presenting “that damned book” (he emphasized the word very deliberately) to Harvard.
Missing Persons Department of the Arkham police assigned the Marsh case to a young detective who had previously distinguished himself by tracing several missing infants to one of the particularly vile Satanist cults that have festered in that town since the witch-hunting days of 1692. His first act was to examine the manuscript on which the old man had been working since the completion of “Atlantis and Its Gods.” It seemed to be a shortish essay, intended for an anthropological magazine, and was quite conservative in tone and concept, as if the professor regretted the boldness of his previous speculations. Only one footnote, expressing guarded and qualified endorsement of Urqhuart’s theory about Wales being settled by survivors from Mu, showed the bizarre preoccupations of the Atlantis book. However, the final sheet was not related to this article at all and seemed to be notes for a piece which the Professor evidently intended to submit, brazenly and in total contempt of academic opinion, to a pulp publication devoted to flying saucers and occultism. The detective puzzled over these notes for a long time:
The usual hoax: fiction presented as fact. This hoax described here opposite to this: fact presented as fiction.
Huysmans’ La-Bos started it, turns the Satanist into hero.
Machen in Paris 1880s, met with Huysman’s circle.
“Dois” and “Aklo letters” in Machen’s subsequent “fiction.” Same years: Bierce and Chambers both mention Lake of Hali and Carcosa. Allegedly, coincidence.
Crowley recruiting his occult circle after 1900.
Bierce disappears in 1913.
Lovecraft introduces Hali, dois, Aklo, Cthulhu after 1923.
Lovecraft dies unexpectedly, 1937.
Seabrook discusses Crowley, Machen, etc. in his “Witchcraft,” 1940.
Seabrook’s “suicide,” 1942.
Emphasize: Bierce describes Oedipus Complex in “Death of Halpin Frazer,” BEFORE Freud, and relativity in “Inhabitant of Carcosa,” BEFORE Einstein. Lovecraffs ambiguous descriptions of Azathoth as “blind idiot-god” “Demon-Sultan” and “nuclear chaos” circa 1930: fifteen years before Hiroshima.
Direct drug references in Chambers’ “King in Yellow” Machen’s “White Powder” Lovecraffs “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “Mountains of Madness”
The appetites of the Lloigor or Old Ones in Bierce’s “Damned Thing” Machen’s “Black Stone” Love-craft (constantly.)
Atlantis known as Thule both in German and Panama Indian lore, and of course, “coincidence” again the accepted explanation. Opening sentence for article: “The more frequently one uses the word ‘coincidence’ to explain bizarre happenings, the more obvious it becomes that one is not seeking, but evading, the real explanation” Or, shorter: “The belief in coincidence is the prevalent superstition of the Age of Science”
The detective then spent an afternoon at Miskatonic library, browsing through the writings of Ambrose Bierce, J-K Huysmans, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft. He found that all repeated certain key words; dealt with lost continents or lost cities; described superhuman beings trying to misuse or victimize mankind in some unspecified manner; suggested that there was a cult, or group of cults, among mankind who served these beings; and described certain books (usually not giving their titles: Lovecraft was an exception) that reveal the secrets of these beings. With a little further research, he found that the occult and Satanist circles in Paris in the 1880s had influenced the fiction of both Huysmans and Machen, as well as the career of the egregious Aleistair Crowley, and that Seabrook (who knew Crowley) hinted at more than he stated outright in his book on Witchcraft, published two years before his suicide. He then wrote a little table:
Huysmans—hysteria, complaints about occult attacks, final seclusion in a monastery.
Chambers—abandons such subjects, turns to light romantic fiction.
Bierce—disappears mysteriously. Lovecraft—dead at an early age.
Crowley—hounded into silence and obscurity.
Machen—becomes a devout Catholic. (Huysmans’ escape?)
Seabrook—alleged suicide.
The detective then went back and reread, not skimming this time, the stories by these writers in which drugs were specifically mentioned, according to Marsh’s notes. He now had a hypothesis: the old man had been lured into a drug cult, as had these writers, and had been terrified by his own hallucinations, finally ending his own life to escape the phantoms his own narcotic-fogged brain had created. It was a good enough theory to start with, and the detective conscientiously set about interviewing every friend on campus of old Marsh, leading into th
e subject of grass and LSD very slowly and indirectly. He made no headway and was beginning to lose his conviction when good fortune struck, in the form of a remark by another anthropology professor about Marsh’s preoccupation in recent years with amanita muscaria, the hallucinogenic mushroom used in ancient Near Eastern religions.
“A very interesting fungus, amanita,” this professor told the detective. “Some sensationalists without scholarly caution have claimed it was every magic potion in ancient lore: the soma of the Hindus, the sacrament used in the Dionysian and Eleusinian mysteries in Greece, even the Holy Communion of the earliest Christians and Gnostics. One chap in England even claims amanita, and not hashish, was the drug used by the Assassins in the Middle Ages, and there’s a psychiatrist in New York, Puharich, who claims it actually does induce telepathy. Most of that is rubbish, of course, but amanita certainly is the strongest mind-altering drug in the world. If the kids ever latch onto it, LSD will seem like a tempest in a teapot by comparison.”
The detective now concentrated on finding somebody—anybody—who had actually seen old Marsh when he was stoned out of his gourd. The testimony finally came from a young black student named Pearson, who was majoring in anthropology and minoring in music. “Excited and euphoric? Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I saw old Joshua that way once. It was in the library of all places—that’s where my girl works—and the old man jumped up from a table grinning about a yard wide and said out loud, but talking to himself, you know, ‘I saw them—I saw the fnords!’ Then he ran out like Jesse Owens going to get his ashes hauled. I was curious and went over to peek at what he’d been reading. It was the New York Times editorial page, and not a picture on it, so he certainly didn’t see the fnords, whatever the hell they are, there. You think he was maybe bombed a little?”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 34