The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  “No, it wasn’t the clap,” said the kindly man (who didn’t deceive the Midget one bit; if this guy couldn’t pump him, he knew, they would send in the mean, tough one; the nice cop and the nasty cop; oldest con in the business). “This girl had a certain, uh, rare disease, and we’re with the U.S. Public Health Service.” The gentle man produced forged credentials to “prove” this last allegation. Horseshit, the Midget thought. “Now,” the sweet old codger went on, “we’ve got to track her down, and see that she gets the antidote, or a lot of people will get this disease. You understand?”

  The Midget understood. This guy was Army Intelligence or CIA and they wanted to crack this before the FBI and get the credit. The disease was started by the government, obviously. Some fuckup in one of their biological war laboratories, and they had to cover it up before the whole country got wise. He hesitated; none of his projects had ever been consciously intended to lead to death, just to make things a little unpredictable and spooky for the giants.

  “The U.S. Public Health Service will be eternally grateful to you.” the grandfatherly man said, eyes crinkling with sly affection. “It isn’t often that a little man gets a chance to do such a big job for his country.” That did it. “Well,” the Midget said, “she was blonde, in her mid-twenties I guess, and she told me her name was Sarah. She had a scar on her neck—I suppose somebody tried to cut her throat once. She was, let’s see, about five-five and maybe 110-115 pounds. And she was superb at giving head,” he concluded, thinking that was a very plausible Las Vegas whore he had just created. His mind was racing rapidly; they wouldn’t want people running around loose knowing about this. The antidote had been to keep him alive while they pumped him. He needed insurance. “Oh, and here’s a real lead for you,” he said “I just remembered. First, I want to explain something about, uh, people who are below average in stature. We’re very sexy. You see, our sex gland or whatever it’s called works extra, because our growth gland doesn’t work. So we never get enough.” He was making this up off the top of his head and enjoying it. He hoped it would spread; he had a beautiful vision of bored rich women seeking midgets as they now seek blacks. “So you see,” he went on, “I kept her a long time, having encores and encores and encores. Finally, she told me she’d have to raise her price, because she had another customer waiting. I couldn’t afford it so I let her go.” Now the clincher. “But she mentioned his name. She said, ‘Joe Blotz will be pissed if I disappoint him,’ only the name wasn’t Joe Blotz.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “That’s the problem,” the Midget said sadly. “I can’t remember. But if you leave me alone awhile,” he added brightly, “maybe it’ll come back to me.” He was already planning his escape.

  And, twenty-five hours earlier, George Dorn, quoting Pilate, asked, “What is Truth?” (Barney Muldoon just then, was lounging in the lobby of the Hotel Tudor, waiting for Saul to finish what he had called “a very important, very private conversation” with Rebecca; Nkrumah Fubar was experimentally placing a voodoo doll of the president of American Express inside a tetrahedron—their computer was still annoying him about a bill he’d paid over two months ago, on the very daynight that Soapy Mocenigo dreamed of Anthrax Leprosy Pi; R. Buckminster Fuller, unaware of this new development in his geodesic revolution, was lecturing the Royal Institute of Architects in London and explaining why there were no nouns in the real world; August Personage was breathing into a telephone in New York; Pearson Mohammed Kent was exuberantly balling a female who was not only white but from Texas; the Midget himself was saying “Rude bastard, isn’t he?” to Dr. Naismith; and our other characters were variously pursuing their own hobbies, predilections, obsessions and holy missions). But Hagbard, with uncharacteristic gravity, said, “Truth is the opposite of lies. The opposite of most of what you’ve heard all your life. The opposite of most of what you’ve heard from me.”

  They were in Hagbard’s funky stateroom and George, after his experience at the demolished Drake mansion, found the octopi and other sea monsters on the wall murals distinctly unappetizing. Hagbard, as usual, was wearing a turtleneck and casual slacks; this time the turtleneck was lavender—an odd, faggoty item for him. George remembered, suddenly, that Hagbard had once told him, anent homosexuality, “I’ve tried it, of course,” but added something about liking women better. (Goodness, was that only two mornings ago?) George wondered what it would be like to “try it” and if he would ever have the nerve. “What particular lies,” he asked cautiously, “are you about to confess?”

  Hagbard lit a pipe and passed it over. “Alamout Black hash,” he said croakingly, holding the smoke down. “Hassan i Sabbah’s own private formula. Does wonders when heavy metaphysics is coming at you.”

  George inhaled and felt an immediate hit like cocaine or some other forebrain stimulant. “Christ, what’s this shit cut with?” he gasped, as somebody somewhere seemed to turn colored lights on in the gold-and-nautical-green room and on that outasight lavender sweater.

  “Oh,” Hagbard said casually, “a hint of belladonna and stramonium. That was old Hassan’s secret, you know. All that crap in most books about how he had turned his followers on with hash, and they’d never had it before so they thought it was magic, is unhistorical. Hashish was known in the Mideast since the neolithic age; archeologists have dug it up in tombs. Seems our ancestors buried their priests with a load of hash to help them negotiate with their gods when they got to Big Rock Candy Mountain or wherever they thought they were going. Hassan’s originality was blending hashish with just the right chemical cousins to produce a new synergetic effect.”

  “What’s synergetic?” George asked slowly, feeling seasick for the first time aboard the Leif Erikson.

  “Nonadditive. When you put two and two together and get five instead of four. Buckminster Fuller uses synergetic gimmicks all the time in his geodesic domes. That’s why they’re stronger than they look.” Hagbard took another toke and passed the pipe again.

  What the hell? George thought. Sometimes increasing the dose got you past the nausea. He toked, deeply. Hadn’t they started out to discuss Truth, though?

  George giggled. “Just as I suspected. Instead of using your goddam prajna or whatever it is to spy on the Illuminati, you’re just another dirty old man. You use it to play Peeping Tom in other people’s heads.”

  “Heads?” Hagbard protested, laughing. “I never scan the heads. Who the hell wants to watch people eliminating their wastes?”

  “I thought you were going to be Socrates,” George howled between lunatic peals of tin giggles, “and I was prepared to be Plato, or at least Glaucon or one of the minor characters. But you’re as stoned as I am. You can’t tell me anything important. All you can do is make bad puns.”

  “The pun,” Hagbard replied with dignity (ruined somewhat by an unexpected chortle), “is mightier than the sword. As James Joyce once said.”

  “Don’t get pedantic.”

  “Can I get semantic?”

  “Yes. You can get semantic. Or antic. But not pedantic.”

  “Where were we?”

  “Truth.”

  “Yes. Well, Truth is like marijuana, my boy. A drug on the market.”

  “I’m getting a hard-on.”

  “You too? That’s the way the balling bounces. At least, with Alamout Black. Nausea, then microamnesia, then the laughing jag, then sex. Be patient. The clear light comes next. Then we can discuss Truth. As if we haven’t been discussing it all along.”

  “You’re a hell of a guru, Hagbard. Sometimes you sound even dumber than me.”

  “If the Elder Malaclypse were here, he’d tell you a few about some other gurus. And geniuses. Do you think Jesus never whacked off? Shakespeare never got on a crying jag at the Mermaid Tavern? Buddha never picked his nose? Gandhi never had the crabs?”

  “I’ve still got a hard-on. Can’t we postpone the philosophy while I go look for Stella—I mean, Mavis?”

  “That’s Truth.”

&
nbsp; “What is Truth?”

  “Up in the cortex it makes a difference to you whether it’s Stella or Mavis. Down in the glands, no difference. My grandmother would do as well.”

  “That’s not Truth. That’s just cheap half-assed Freudian cynicism.”

  “Oh, yes. You saw the mandala with Mavis.”

  “And you were inside my head somehow. Dirty voyeur.”

  “Know thyself.”

  “This will never take its place beside the Platonic Dialogues, not in a million years. We’re both stoned out of our gourds.”

  “I love you, George.”

  “I guess I love you, too. You’re so damned overwhelming. Everybody loves you. Are we gonna fuck?”

  (Mavis had said, “Wipe the come off your trousers.” Fantasizing Sophia Loren while he masturbated. Or fantasizing that he masturbated while actually …)

  “No. You don’t need it. You’re starting to remember what really happened in Mad Dog jail.”

  “Oh, no.” Coin’s enormous, snaky cock…the pain…the pleasure …

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Damn it, now I’ll never know. Did you put that in my head, or did it really happen? Did I fantasize the interruption then or did I fantasize the rape just now?”

  “Know thyself.”

  “Did you say that twice or did I just hear it twice?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, right now. I just don’t know. Is this some devious homosexual seduction?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s a murder plot. Maybe I’m leading up to cutting your throat.”

  “I wouldn’t mind. I’ve always had a big self-destructive urge. Like all cowards. Cowardice is a defense against suicide.”

  Hagbard laughed. “I never knew a young man who had so much pussy and risked death so often. And there you sit, still worrying about being whatever it was they called you when you first started letting your hair grow long in your early teens.”

  “Sissy. That was the word in good old Nutley, New Jersey. It meant both faggot and coward. So I’ve never cut my hair since then, to prove they couldn’t intimidate me”

  “Yeah. I’m tracking a black guy now, a musician, who’s balling a white lady, a fair flower from Texas. Partly, because she really turns him on. But partly because she could have a brother who might come after him with a gun. He’s proving they can’t intimidate him.”

  “That’s the Truth? We spend all our time proving we can’t be intimidated? But all the time we are intimidated on another level?” The colors were coming back strong again; it was that kind of trip. Every time you thought you were the pilot, it would go off in an unexpected direction to remind you that you were just a passenger.

  “That’s part of the Truth, George. Another part is that every time you think you’re intimidated you’re really rebelling on another level. Oh, what idiots the Illuminati really are, George. I once collected statistics on industrial accidents in a sample city—Birmingham, England, actually. Fed all the relevant facts into FUCKUP and got just what I expected. Sabotage. Unconscious sabotage. Every case was a blind insurrection. Every man and woman is in rebellion, but only a few have the guts to admit it. The others jam the system by accident, har har har, or by stupidity, har har har again. Let me tell you about the Indians, George.”

  “What Indians?”

  “Did you ever wonder why nothing works right? Why the whole world seems completely fucked up all the time?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I suppose so. Pardon me, I’ve got to get more stoned. In a little while, I go into FUCKUP and we put our heads together—literally, I attach electrodes to my temples—and I’ll try to track down the problem in Las Vegas. I don’t spend all my time on random voyeurism,” Hagbard pronounced with dignity. He refilled the pipe, asking pettishly, “Where was I?”

  “The Indians in Birmingham. How did they get there?”

  “There weren’t any fucking Indians in Birmingham. You’re getting me confused.” Hagbard toked deeply.

  “You’re getting yourself confused. You’re bombed out of your skull.”

  “Look who’s talking.” Hagbard toked again. “The Indians. The Indians weren’t in Birmingham. Birmingham was where I did the study that convinced me most industrial accidents are unconscious sabotage. So are most misfiled documents among white-collar workers, I’d wager. The Indians are another story. I was a lawyer once, when I first came to your country and before I went in for piracy. I usually don’t admit that, George. I usually tell people I played the piano in a whorehouse or something else not quite so disreputable as the truth. If you want to know why nothing makes sense in government forms, remember there are two hundred thousand lawyers working for the bureaucracy these days.

  “The Indians were a band of Shoshones. I was defending them against the Great Land Thief, or as it pretentiously titles itself, the Government, in Washington. We were having a conference. You know what an Indian conference is like? Nobody talks for hours sometimes. A good yoga. When somebody does finally speak, you can be sure it comes from the heart. That old movie stereotype, ‘White man speak with forked tongue,’ has a lot of truth in it. The more you talk, the more your imagination colors things. I’m one of the most long-winded people alive and one of the worst liars.” Hagbard toked again and finally held the pipe out inquiringly; George shook his head. “But the story I wanted to tell was about an archeologist. He was hunting for relics of the Devonian culture, the Indians who lived in North America just before the ecological catastrophe of 10,000 B.C. He found what he thought was a burial mound and asked to dig into it. Grok this, George. The Indians looked at him. They looked at me. They looked at each other. Then the oldest man spoke and, very gravely, gave permission. The archeologist hefted his pick and shovel and went at it like John Henry trying to beat that steam drill. In two minutes he disappeared. Right into a cesspool. Then the Indians laughed.

  “Grok, George. I knew them as well as any white man ever knows Indians. They had learned to trust me, and I, them. And yet I sat there, while they played their little joke, and I didn’t get a hint of what was about to happen. Even though I had begun to discover my telepathic talents and even focus them a little. Think about it, George. Think about all the pokerfaced blacks you’ve seen. Think about every time a black has done something so fantastically, outrageously stupid that you had a flash of racism—which, being a radical, you were ashamed of, right?—and wondered if maybe they are inferior. And think of ninety-nine percent of the women in the Caucasian world, outside Norway, who do the Dumb Dora or Marilyn Monroe act all the time. Think a minute, George. Think.”

  There was a silence that seemed to stretch into some long hall of near-Buddhist emptiness—George recognized a glimpse, at last!, into the Void all his acidhead friends had tried to describe—and then he remembered this was not the trip Hagbard was pushing him toward. But the silence lingered as a quietness of spirit, a calm in the tornado of those last few days, and George found himself ruminating with total dispassion, without hope or dread or smugness or guilt; if not totally without ego, or in full darshana, at least without the inflamed and voracious ego that usually either leaped forward or shrunk back from naked fact. He contemplated his memories and was unmoved, objective, at peace. He thought of blacks and women and of their subtle revenges against their Masters, acts of sabotage that could not be recognized clearly as such because they took the form of acts of obedience; he thought of the Shoshone Indians and their crude joke, so similar to the jokes of oppressed peoples everywhere; he saw, suddenly, the meaning of Mardi Gras and the Feast of Fools and the Saturnalia and the Christmas Office Party and all the other limited, permissible, structured occasions on which Freud’s Return of the Repressed was allowed; he remembered all the times he had gotten his own back against a professor, a high school principal, a bureaucrat, or, further back, his own parents, by waiting for the occasion when, by doing exactly what he was told, he could produce some
form of minor catastrophe. He saw a world of robots, marching rigidly in the paths laid down for them from above, and each robot partly alive, partly human, waiting its chance to drop its own monkey wrench into the machinery. He saw, finally, why everything in the world seemed to work wrong and the Situation Normal was All Fucked Up. “Hagbard,” he said slowly. “I think I get it. Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created.”

  Hagbard, more hawk-faced than ever, said carefully, “You are approaching Truth. Walk cautiously now, George. Truth is not, as Shakespeare would have it, a dog that can be whipped out to kennel. Truth is a tiger. Walk cautiously, George.” He turned in his chair, slid open a drawer in his Danish Modern quasi-Martian desk and took out a revolver. George watched, as cool and alone as a man atop Everest, as Hagbard opened the chamber and showed six bullets inside. Then, with a snap, the gun was closed and placed on the desk blotter. Hagbard did not glance at it again. He watched George; George watched the pistol. It was the scene with Carlo all over again, but Hagbard’s challenge was unspoken, gnomic; his level glance did not even admit that a contest had begun. The gun glittered maliciously; it whispered of all the violence and stealth in the world, treacheries undreamed of by Medici or Machiavelli, traps set for victims who were innocent and blameless; it seemed to fill the room with an aura of its presence, and yes, it even had the more subtle menace of a knife, weapon of the sneak, or of a whip in the hands of a man whose smile is too sensual, too intimate, too knowing; into the middle of George’s tranquility it had come, inescapable and unexpected as a rattlesnake in the path on the afternoon of the sweetest spring day in the world’s most manicured and artificial garden, George heard the adrenalin begin to course into his bloodstream; saw the “activation syndrome” moisten his palms, accelerate his heart, loosen his sphincter a micrometer; and still, high and cool on his mountain, felt nothing.