The fifth week, Canvera took a new turn, denouncing the masses for their stupidity and proclaiming that the boobs probably deserved being governed by the Illuminati since most of them were too dumb to find their own behinds in a dark room even using both hands. He had been browsing through a volume of H. L. Mencken (sent to him over a year earlier by El Haj Stackerlee Mohammed, né Pearson, after one of his put-prayers-back-in-the-public-schools tirades); but he had also been pondering an invitation to join the Illuminati. This document, which came in an envelope with no return address, informed him that he was too smart to stay with the losers all his life and ought to climb on the winning side before it was too late. It added that membership dues were $3125, which should be put in a cigar box and buried in his back yard, after which it promised “one of our underground agents will contact you.” At first, Canvera had considered this a hoax—he received many put-ons in the mail, together with pornography, Rosicrucian pamphlets, illustrated with the eye-and-pyramid design, and pretended fan letters signed by such names as Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel Castro, Anton Szandor Levay or Judge Crater, all of course cooked up by his Lincoln Avenue audience. Later, however, it struck him that 3125 was five to the fifth power and that convinced him a True Illuminatus was indeed communicating with him. He took the $3125 out of his savings account, buried it as instructed, made a pro-Illuminati recording as a gesture of good faith and waited. The next day he was shot, several times, in the head and shoulders, dying of natural causes as a result.
(In present time again, Rebecca Goodman enters the Hotel Tudor lobby in answer to the second mysterious phone call of the day, while Hagbard decides George Dorn needs to be illuminized further before Ingolstadt, and Esperando Despond clears his throat and says, “I want to explain the mathematics of plague to you men…”)
Actually, poor old Canvera’s death had nothing to do with the Illuminati or with his former compatriots in WHORE. The man had been practicing the libertine philosophy of his post-AUM phone editorials and had tampered with Cassandra Acconci, the beloved daughter of Ronald Acconci, Chicago Regional Commander of God’s Lightning and a long-time contributor to KCUF. Acconci arranged, via State’s Attorney Milo A. Flanagan, for the local Maf to do a hit on Canvera. But there are no endings, any more than there are any beginnings; it next developed that Canvera’s seed lived on in wedlock with Cassandra’s ovum and was in danger of becoming a human being within her previously trim abdomen.
Saul Goodman had no idea that the room he was in had last been rented to George Dorn; he was conscious only of his impatience, not knowing that Rebecca was at that moment on an elevator approaching his floor … And a mile north, Peter Jackson, still trying to put together the July issue of Confrontation virtually singlehanded, dives into the slush pile (which is the magazine industry’s elegant name for unsolicited manuscripts) and comes up with more fallout from the Moon-Malik AUM project of 1970. “Orthodox Science: The New Religion,” he reads. Well, let’s sample it, what the hell. Opening at random he finds:
Einstein’s concept of spherical space, furthermore, suffers from the same defect as the concept of a smoothly or perfectly spherical earth: it rests upon the use of the irrational number, π. This number has no operational definition; there is no place on any engineer’s scale to which one can point and say “This is exactly π,” although these scales are misleadingly marked with such a spot. π, in fact, can never be found in the real world, and there are historical and archeological reasons to believe it was created by a Greek mathematician under the influence of the mind-warping hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria. It is pure surrealism. You cannot write π as a real number; you can only approximate it, as 3.1417 … etc. Chemistry knows no such units: three atoms of an element may combine with four atoms of another element, but you will never find π atoms combining with anything. Quantum physics reveals that an electron may jump three units or four units, but it will not jump π units. Nor is π necessary to geometry, as is sometimes claimed; R. Buckminster Fuller has created an entire geometric system, at least as reliable as that of the ancient Greek dope fiends, in which π does not appear at all. Space, then, may be slanted or kiltered in various ways, but it cannot be smoothly spherical …
“What the ring-tailed rambling hell?” Peter Jackson said aloud. He flipped to the end:
In conclusion, I want to thank a strange and uncommon man, James Mallison, who provided the spark which set me thinking about these matters. In fact, it was due to my meeting with Mr. Mallison that I sold my hardware business, returned to college and majored in cartography and topology. Although he was a religious fanatic (as I was at the time of our meeting) and would, therefore, not appreciate many of my discoveries, it is due to this man’s perverse, peculiar and yet brilliant prodding that I embarked on the search which has lead to this new theory of a Pentahedroidal Universe.
W. Clement Cotex, Ph.D
“Far fucking out,” Peter muttered. James Mallison was a pen name Joe Malik sometimes used, and here was another James Mallison inspiring this guy to become a Ph.D. and invent a new cosmological theory. What was the word Joe used for such coincidences? Synch-something …
(“1472,” Esperando Despond concludes his gloomy mathematical calculations. “That’s the number of plague cases we might have right now, at noon, if the girl had only two contacts after leaving Dr. Mocenigo. Now, if she had three contacts …” The assembled FBI agents are gradually turning a pale greenish color from the neck up. Carmel, the only actual contact, is busy two blocks away stuffing money into a briefcase.)
“That’s him!” Mrs. Edward Coke Bacon cried excitedly, addressing Basil Banghart, another FBI agent, in an office in Washington. She is pointing at a photo of Albert “the Teacher” Stern. “Ma’am” Banghart says kindly, “that can’t be him. I don’t even know why his picture’s still in the file. That’s a no-account junkie who once got on our most-wanted list because he confessed to a murder he didn’t even commit.” In Cincinnati, an FBI artist is completing a portrait under the direction of the widow of a slain TV repairman: the face of the killer, gradually emerging, combines various features of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, George Dorn and the lead vocalist of the American Medical Association, which group was at that moment boarding a plane at Kennedy International Airport for the Ingolstadt gig. Rebecca Goodman, rising in the Hotel Tudor elevator, has a flash memory of a nightmare of the night before: Saul being shot by the same vocalist, dressed as a monk, in red-and-white robes, while a Playboy bunny danced in front of some kind of giant pyramid. In Princeton, New Jersey, a nuclear physicist named Nils Nosferatu—one of the few survivors of the early morning shootings—babbles to the detective and police stenographer at his bedside, “Tlaloc sucks. You can’t trust them. The midget is the one to watch. We’ll be moved, all right, when the tear gas hits. Fun is fun, Omega. George’s brother met the dolphins first, and that was the psychic hook that brought George in. She’s at the door. She’s buried in the desert. Any deviation will result in termination. Unify the forces. You hold the hose. I’ll get Mark.”
“I’ve got to start telling you the truth, George,” Hagbard began hesitantly, as the Midget, Carmel and Dr. Horace Naismith collided in front of the door of the Sands Hotel (“Watch the fuck where you’re going” Carmel growled), and she was at the door, her heart was pounding, an intuition was forming in her mind, and she knocked (and Peter Jackson began dialing Epicene Wildeblood), and she was sure of it, and she was afraid of being sure because she might be wrong, and the Midget said to Dr. Naismith “Rude bastard, wasn’t he?” and the door opened, and the door of Milo O. Flanagan’s office opened to admit Cassandra Acconci, and her heart stopped, and Dr. Nosferatu screamed, “The door. She’s in the door. The door in the desert. He eats Carmels,” and it was him and she was in his arms and she was weeping and laughing and asking, “Where have you been, baby?” And Saul closed the door behind her and drew her further into the room. “I’m not a cop anymore,” he said, “I’m on the other side.”
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br /> “What?” Rebecca noticed there was a new thing in his eyes, a thing for which she had no word.
“You can stop worrying that you’ll get back on horse,” he went on gaily. “And if you’ve ever been afraid of your sexual fantasies, don’t be. We’ve all got them. Saint Bernards!”
But even that wasn’t as weird as the new thing in his eyes.
“Baby,” she said, “baby. What the hell is this?”
“I wanted sex with my father, when I was two years old. When did you have that thing about the Saint Bernard?”
“When I was eleven or twelve, I think. Just before my first period. My God, you must have been a lot further away than I ever imagined.” She was beginning to recognize the new thing. It wasn’t intelligence; he had always had that. With awe, she realized it was what the ancients called wisdom.
“I’ve always had a thing about black women, just like your thing about black men,” he went on. “I think everybody in this country has a touch of it. The blacks have it about us, too. I was in one head, a brilliant black guy, musician, scientist, poet, a million talents, and white women were like the Holy Grail to him. And your fantasy about Spiro Agnew—I had one just like that about Use Koch, a Nazi bitch from before your time. It was the same thing in both cases, revenge. Not real sex, hate-sex. Oh, we’re all so crazy-in-the-head.”
Rebecca backed up and sat down on the bed. “It’s too much, too fast, I’m scared. I can see you don’t have any contempt for me, but, Lord, can I live knowing that somebody else knows every single repressed desire I have?”
“Yes,” Saul said calmly. “And you’re mistaken about Time. I can’t know every secret, darling. I’ve only had a smattering of them. A handful. There are a dozen people right now who’ve been through my head the same way, and I can look any one of them in the eye. The things I know about them!” He laughed.
“It’s still too fast,” Rebecca said. “You disappear, and then you come back knowing things about me that I only half know myself, and you’re not a cop anymore … What do you mean, you’ve joined ‘the other side’? The Mafia? The Morituri groups?”
“No,” Saul answered happily. “Much further out than that. Darling, I’ve been driven mad by the world’s best brainwashers and put back together again by a computer that does psychotherapy, predicts the future and steers a submarine all at once. On the way, I learned things about humanity and the universe that it would take a year to tell you. And I don’t have much time right now, because I’ve got to fly to Las Vegas. In two or three days, if everything works out, I’ll be able to show you, not just tell you—”
“Are you reading my mind right now?” Rebecca asked, still awed and nervous.
Saul laughed again. “It isn’t that simple. It takes years of training, and even then it’s like an old radio full of static. If I ‘tune in’ right now, I’ll get a flash of whatever’s in your head, but it will be so jumbled with other things that relate to my resonance in one way or another that I won’t know for sure which part is you.”
“Do it,” Rebecca said. “I’ll be more comfortable with you if I see a sample of whatever-it-is that you’ve become.”
Saul sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand. “Okay,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ll do it aloud, and don’t be afraid. I’m the same man, darling, there’s just more of me now.” He inhaled deeply. “Here goes … Five million bucks. Never find her where I buried her. 1472. George, don’t make no bull moves. Unify the forces. One helping hand deserves another. New York Jew doctors. Remember Carcosa! In quick and out quick, a cowboy. They’re all coming back. Lie down on the floor and keep calm. It’s a League of Nations, a young people’s League of Nations. One was for fighting, the other for fun … Good Lord,” he broke off and closed his eyes. “I’ve got a whole street and I can see them. They’re still singing. ‘We rose up in arms and none failed to come, we’re the Vets of the Sex Revoloooootion!’ What the hell?” He turned to her and explained, “It’s like a split-screen movie, but split a thousand ways, and with a thousand soundtracks. I only pick up a few random bits. When one jumps out like that last one, it’s important; I’ll bet that street is in Las Vegas and I’ll be walking on it myself in a few hours. Anyway,” he added, “none of that seemed to come from you. Did it?”
“No,” she said, “and I’m glad. This takes some reorientation. When you said you’re going to show me in a few days, did you mean show me how to do it?”
“You are doing it. Everybody is. All the time.”
“But?”
“But most of the time it’s just background noise. I can teach you to become more aware of it. Learning to focus—to pick out one person and one time—that takes years, decades.”
Rebecca finally smiled. “You sure did go a long way in a day and a half.”
“If it were a year and a half,” Saul said simply, “or a century and a half—I’d still be trying to find my way back to you all through it”
She kissed him. “Yes, it’s still you,” she said, “just more of you. Tell me: if we both studied it for years and years could we get to the point where we were reading each other’s minds constantly, tuned in on each other completely?”
“Yes,” Saul said, “there are couples like that.”
“Mm. That’s even more intimate than sex.”
“No. It is sex.”
An intimation came to Rebecca, like a voice whispering far down at the end of a dark hall, and she knew that some part of her already knew, and had always known, what Saul was about to explain. “Your new friends who taught all this,” she said quietly. “They’re way ahead of Freud, aren’t they?”
“Way ahead. For instance, what am I thinking now?”
“You’re feeling horny,” Rebecca grinned. “But that’s not my background noise, or telepathy, that picked that up. It’s your breathing and the kind of light in your eyes and all sorts of other small cues that a woman learns to recognize. The way you moved a little closer after I kissed you. Things like that.”
Saul took her hand again. “How horny am I?” he asked.
“Very horny. In fact, you’ve already decided that you’ve got time enough and that’s more important than talking …”
Saul touched her cheek gently. “Did you read that from kinesic cues, or was it the background noise or telepathy?”
“I guess the background noise helped me to read the cues …”
Saul glanced at his watch. “I have to meet Barney Muldoon in the lobby in exactly fifty minutes. How would you like to hear a scientific lecture while you’re being laid? That’s a perversion we’ve never tried before.” His hand moved down from her cheek to her neck and then began unbuttoning her blouse.
(“There’s a Morituri bomb factory in your building,” Cassandra Acconci said flatly. “On the seventeenth floor. The name on the buzzer is the same as yours.”
“My brother!” Milo O. Flanagan bellowed. “Right under my nose! That freaking faggot!”)
“Oh, Saul. Oh, Saul, Saul,” Rebecca closed her eyes as the mouth tightened on her nipple … and Dr. Horace Naismith crossed the lobby of the Sands, affixing the VSR badge to his lapel, and passed the Midget again … “Well,” the Attorney General told the President, “one solution, of course, is to nuke Las Vegas. But that wouldn’t solve the problem of the possible carriers who could have hopped a plane already and might be anywhere in the country now, or anywhere in the world.” While the President washes down three Librium, a Tofranil and an Elavil, the Vice President asks thoughtfully, “Suppose we just distribute the antidote to party workers and ride this thing out?” He is feeling more than usually misanthropic, having had an appalling evening in New York due to his impulsiveness in answering a personal ad which had touched his heart …
(“Thank you Cassandra,” Milo A. Flanagan said fervently. “I’m eternally grateful to you.”
“One helping hand deserves another,” Cassandra replied; she remembered how Milo and Smiling Jim Trepomena had helped her get the ab
ortion the time she was knocked up by that Canvera character. Her father had wanted to send her to New York for a legal D & C, but Milo had pointed out that it would look kind of funny to some people for the daughter of a high KCUF spokesman to have an official abortion. “Besides,” Smiling Jim had added, “you don’t want to fool around with them New York Jew doctors. They might do dirty things to you. Just trust me, child; we’ve got the country’s best-qualified criminal abortionists in Cincinnati.” Actually, though, the real reason Cassandra was blowing the whistle on Padre Pederastia’s bomb emporium was to annoy Simon Moon, whom she had been trying to get into her bed ever since she met him at the Friendly Stranger Coffee House six months before. Simon hadn’t been interested, due to his obsession with black women, who represented the Holy Grail to him.)
“Wildeblood here,” the cultured drawl came over the wire.
“Have you finished your review yet?” Peter Jackson asked, crushing another cigarette butt in his ashtray and worrying about lung cancer.
“Yes, and you’ll love it. I really tear these two smart-asses apart.” Wildeblood was enthusiastic. “Listen to this: ‘a pair of nursery Nietzsches dreaming of a psychedelic Superman.’ And this: ‘a plot that is only a put-on, characters who are cardboard, and a pretense of scholarship that amounts to sheer bluff.’ But this is the crusher; listen: ‘a constant use of obscene language for shock effect until the reader begins to feel as depressed as an unwilling spectator at a quarrel between a fishwife and a lobster-pot pirate.’ Don’t you think that will get quoted at all the best cocktail parties this season?”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 42