The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  One year later, in the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street in New York, Hagbard was placed under arrest by two U.S. narcotics agents named Calley and Eichmann. “Don’t take it too hard,” Calley said. “We’re only following orders.”

  “It’s okay,” Hagbard said, “don’t feel guilty. But what are you going to do with my cats?”

  Calley knelt on the floor and examined the kittens thoughtfully, scratching one under the chin, rubbing the ear of the other. “What’s their names?” he asked.

  “The male is called Vagina,” Hagbard said. “The female I call Penis.”

  “The male is called what?” Eichmann asked, blinking.

  “The male is Vagina, and the female is Penis,” Hagbard said innocently, “but there’s a metaphysic behind it. First, you have to ask yourself, which appeared earlier on this planet, life or death? Have you ever thought about that?”

  “This guy is nuts,” Calley told Eichmann.

  “You’ve got to realize,” Hagbard went on, “that life is a coming apart and death is a coming together. Does that help?”

  (“I never know whether Hagbard is talking profundity or asininity,” George said dreamily, toking away.)

  “Reincarnation works backward in time” Hagbard went on, as the narcs opened drawers and peered under chairs. “You always get reborn into an earlier historical period. Mussolini is a witch in the 14th century now, and catching hell from the Inquisitors for his bum karma in this age. People who ‘remember’ the past are all deluded. The only ones who really remember past incarnations remember the future, and they become science-fiction writers.”

  (A little old lady from Chicago walked into George’s room with a collection can marked Mothers March Against Phimosis. He gave her a dime and she thanked him and left. After the door closed, George wondered if she had been a hallucination or just a woman who had fallen through a space-time warp and landed on the Leif Erikson.)

  “What the hell are these?” Eichmann asked. He had been searching Hagbard’s closet and found some red, white and blue bumper stickers. The top half of each letter was blue with white stars, and the bottom half was red-and-white stripes; they looked patriotic as all get-out. The slogan formed this way was

  LEGALIZE ABORTION PREGNANCY IS A JEWISH PLOT!

  Hagbard had been circulating these in neighborhoods like the Yorkville section of Manhattan, the western suburbs of Chicago, and other places where old-fashioned Father Coughlin-Joe McCarthy style Irish Catholic fascism was still strong. This was a trial run on the logogram-biogram double-bind tactic out of which the Dealy Lama later developed Operation Mindfuck.

  “Patriotic stickers,” Hagbard explained.

  “Well, they look patriotic …” Eichmann conceded dubiously.

  (“Did a little woman from Chicago just walk through this room?” George asked.

  “No,” Harry Coin said, toking again. “I didn’t see any woman from Chicago. But I know who the Martian is.”)

  “What the hell are these?” Calley asked. He had found some business-size cards saying RED in green letters and GREEN in L. letters.

  (“When you’re out of it all the way, on the mountain,” George asked, “that’s neither the biogram nor the logogram, right? What the hell is it, then?”)

  “An antigram,” Hagbard explained, still helpful.

  “The cards are an antigram?” Eichmann repeated, bewildered.

  “I may have to place you under arrest and take you downtown,” Hagbard warned. “You’ve both been very naughty boys. Breaking and entering. Pointing a gun at me—that’s technically assault with a deadly weapon. Seizing my narcotics—that’s theft. All sorts of invasion of privacy. Very, very naughty.”

  “You can’t arrest us,” Eichmann whined. “We’re supposed to arrest you.”

  “Which is red and which is green?” Hagbard asked. “Look again,” They looked and RED was now really red and GREEN was really green. (Actually, the tints changed according to the angle at which Hagbard held the card, but he wasn’t giving away his secrets to them.) “I can also change up and down,” he added. “Worse yet, I clog zippers. Neither one of you can open your fly right now, for instance. My real gimmick, though, is reversing revolvers. Try to shoot me and the bullets will come out the back and you’ll never use your good right hand again. Try it and see if I’m bluffing.”

  “Can’t you go a little easy on us, officer?” Eichmann took out his wallet. “A cop’s salary ain’t the greatest in the world, eh?” He nudged Hagbard insinuatingly.

  “Are you trying to bribe me?” Hagbard asked sternly.

  “Why not?” Harry Coin whined. “You got nothing to gain by killing me. Take the money and put me off the sub at the first island you pass.”

  “Well,” Hagbard said thoughtfully, counting the money.

  “I can get more,” Harry added. “I can send it to you.”

  “I’m sure.” Hagbard put the money in his clam-shell ashtray and struck a match. There was a brief, merry blaze, and Hagbard asked calmly, “Do you have any other inducements to offer?”

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about the Illuminati!” Harry shrieked, really frightened now, realizing that he was in the hands of a madman to whom money meant nothing.

  “I know more about the Illuminati than you do,” Hagbard replied, looking bored. “Give me a philosophic reason, Harry. Is there any purpose in allowing a specimen like you to go on preying on the weak and innocent?”

  “Honest, I’ll go straight. I’ll join your side. I’ll work for you, kill anybody you want.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Hagbard conceded. “It’s a slim one, though. The world is full of killers and potential killers. Thanks to the Illuminati and their governments, there’s hardly an adult male alive who hasn’t had some military training. What makes you think I couldn’t go out on the streets of any large city and find ten better-qualified killers than you inside an afternoon?”

  “Okay, okay,” Harry said, breathing hard. “I don’t have no college education, but I’m not a fool either, Your men dragged me from Mad Dog Jail to this submarine. You want something, Ace. Otherwise, I’d be dead already.”

  “Yes, I want something.” Hagbard leaned back in his chair. “Now you’re getting warm, Harry. I want something but I won’t tell you what it is. You’ve got to produce it and show it to me without any clues or hints. And if you can’t do that, I really will have you killed. I shit you not, fellow. This is my version of a trial for your past crimes. I’m the judge and the jury and you’ve got to win an acquittal without knowing the rules. How do you like that game?”

  “It ain’t fair.”

  “It’s more of a chance than you gave any of the men you shot, isn’t it?”

  Harry Coin licked his lips. “I think you’re bluffing,” he ventured finally. “You’re some chicken-shit liberal who doesn’t believe in capital punishment. You’re looking for an excuse to not kill me.”

  “Look into my eyes, Harry. Do you see any mercy in them?”

  Coin began to perspire and finally looked down into his lap. “Okay,” he said hollowly. “How much time do I have?”

  Hagbard opened his drawer and took out his revolver. He cracked it open, showing the bullets, and quickly snapped it closed again. He slipped the safety catch—a procedure he later found unnecessary with George Dorn, who knew nothing about guns—and aimed at Harry’s belly. “Three days and three minutes are both too long,” he said casually. “If you’re ever going to get it, you’re going to get it now.”

  “Mama,” Coin heard himself exclaim.

  “You’re going to shit your pants in a moment,” Hagbard said coldly. “Better not. I find bad smells offensive, and I might shoot you just for that. And mama isn’t here, so don’t call her again.”

  Coin saw himself lunging across the room, the gun roaring in mid-leap, but at least trying to get his hands on this bastard’s throat before dying.

  “Pointless,” Hagbard grinned icily. “You’d
never get out of the chair.” His finger tightened slightly, and Coin’s gut churned; he knew enough about guns to know how easy it was to have an accident, and he thought of the gun going off even before the bastard Celine intended it to, maybe even as he was on the edge of guessing the goddam riddle, the pointlessness of it was the final horror, and he looked again into those eyes without guilt or pity or any weakness he could exploit; then, for the first time in his life, Harry Coin knew peace, as he relaxed into death.

  “Good enough,” Hagbard said from far away, snapping the safety back in place. “You’ve got more on the ball than either of us realized.”

  Harry slowly came back and looked at that face and those eyes. “God,” he said.

  “I’m going to give you the gun in a minute,” Hagbard went on. “Then it’s my turn to sweat. Of course, if you kill me you’ll never get off this sub alive, but maybe you’ll think that’s worthwhile, just for revenge. On the other hand, maybe you’ll be curious about that instant of peace—and you’ll wonder if there’s an easier way to get back there and if I can teach it to you. Maybe. One more thing, before I toss you the gun. Everybody who joins me does it by free choice. When you said you’d come over to my side just because you were afraid of dying, you had no value to me at all. Here’s the gun, Harry. Now, I want you to check it. There are no gimmicks, no missing firing pin or anything like that. No other tricks, either—nobody watching you through a peephole and ready to gun you down the minute you aim at me, or anything like that. I’m totally at your mercy. What are you going to do?”

  Harry examined the gun carefully, and looked back at Hagbard. He had never studied kinesics and orgonomy as Hagbard had, but he could read enough of the human face and body to know what was going on in the other man. Hagbard had that same peace he himself had experienced for a moment.

  “You win, you bastard,” Harry said, tossing the gun back. “I want to know how you do it.”

  “Part of you already knows,” Hagbard smiled gently, putting the gun back in the drawer. “You just did it, didn’t you?”

  “What would he have done if I did block?” Harry asked Stella in present time.

  “Something. I don’t know. A sudden act of some sort that scared you more than the gun. He plays it by ear. The Celine System is never twice the same.”

  “Then I was right, he wouldn’t have killed me. It was all bluff.”

  “Yes and no.” Stella looked past Harry and George, into the distance. “He wasn’t acting with you, he was manifesting. The mercilessness was quite real. There was no sentimentality involved in saving you. He did it because it’s part of his Demonstration.”

  “His Demonstration?” George asked, thinking of geometry problems and the neat Q.E.D. at the bottom, back in Nutley years and years ago.

  “I’ve known Hagbard longer than she has,” Eichmann said. “In fact, Calley and I were among the first people he enlisted. I’ve watched him over the years, and I still don’t understand him. But I understand the Demonstration.”

  “You know,” George said absently, “when you two first came in, I thought you were a hallucination.”

  “You never saw us at dinner, because we work in the kitchen,” Calley explained. “We eat after everybody else.”

  “Only a small part of the crew are former criminals,” Stella told George, who was looking confused. “Rehabilitating a Harry Coin—pardon me, Harry— doesn’t really excite Hagbard much. Rehabilitating policemen and politicians, and teaching them useful trades, is work that really turns Hagbard on.”

  “But not for sentimental reasons,” Eichmann emphasized. “It’s part of his Demonstration.”

  “It’s his Memorial to the Mohawk Nation, too,” Stella said. “That trial set him off. He tried a direct frontal assault that time, attempting to cut through the logogram with a scalpel. It didn’t work, of course; it never does. Then he decided: ‘Very well, I’ll put them where words can’t help, and see what they do then.’ That’s his Demonstration.”

  Hagbard, actually—well, not actually; this is just what he told me—had started with two handicaps, intending to prove that they weren’t handicaps. The first was that he would have a bank balance of exactly $00.00 at the beginning, and the second was that he would never kill another human being throughout the Demonstration. That which was to be proved (namely, that government is a hallucination, or a self-fulfilling prophecy) could be shown only if all his equipment, including money and people, came to him through honest trade or voluntary association. Under these rules, he could not shoot even in self-defense, for the biogram of government servants was to be preserved, and only their logograms could be disconnected, deactivated and defused. The Celine System was a consistent, although flexible, assault on the specific conditioned reflex—that which compelled people to look outside themselves, to a god or a government, for direction or strength. The servants of government all carried weapons; Hagbard’s insane scheme depended on rendering the weapons harmless. He called this the Tar-Baby Principle (“You Are Attached To What You Attack”).

  Being a man of certain morbid self-insight, he realized that he himself exemplified the Tar-Baby Principle and that his attacks on government kept him perpetually attached to it. It was his malign and insidious notion that government was even more attached to him; that his existence qua anarchist qua smuggler qua outlaw aroused greater energetic streaming in government people than their existence aroused in him: that, in short, he was the Tar Baby on which they could not resist hurling themselves in anger and fear: an electrochemical reaction in which he could bond them to himself just as the Tar Baby captured anyone who swung a fist at it.

  More (there was always more, with Hagbard), he had been impressed, on reading Weishaupt’s Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp, Weltspielen and Funfwissenschaft, by the passage on the Order of Assassins, which read:

  Surrounded by Moslem maniacs on one side and Christian maniacs on the other, the wise Lord Hassan preserved his people and his cult by bringing the art of assassination to esthetic perfection. With just a few daggers strategically placed in exactly the right throats, he found Wisdom’s alternative to war, and preserved the peoples by killing their leaders. Truly, his was a most exemplary life of grandmotherly kindness.

  “Grossmutterlich Gefälligkeit” muttered Hagbard, who had been reading this in the original German, “now where have I heard that before?”

  In a second, he remembered: the Mu-Mon-Kan or “Gateless Gate” of Rinzai Zen contained a story about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, “What is the Buddha?” Each time he asked, he got hit upside the head with the Master’s staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained, the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: “Go back to your previous Master at once,” he cried, “and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!”

  Hagbard was not surprised that Weishaupt evidently knew, in 1776 when Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp was written, about a book which hadn’t yet been translated into any European tongue; he was astonished, however, that even the evil Ingolstadt Zauberer had understood the rudiments of the Tar-Baby Principle. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati, he thought then —for the first time. He was to think it many times in the next two and a half decades.

  On April 24, when he told Stella to deliver some Kallisti Gold to George’s stateroom, Hagbard had already asked FUCKUP the odds that Illuminati ships would arrive in Peos within the time he intended to be there. The answer was better than 100-to-1. He thought about what that meant, then buzzed to have Harry Coin sent in.

  Harry swaggered to a chair, trying to look insolent, and said, “So you’re the leader of the Discordians, eh?”

  “Yes,” Hagbard said evenly, “and on this ship, my word is law. Wipe that silly grin off your face and sit up straight.” He observed the involuntary stiffening of Harry’s body before the man caught himself and remembered
to maintain his slouch. Typical: Coin could resist the key conditioning phrases, but only with effort. “Listen,” he said softly “I will tell you only one more time”—another Bavarian Fire Drill, that—“This is my ship. You will address me as Captain Celine, You will come to attention when I talk to you. Otherwise …” he let the phrase trail off.

  Slowly, Coin shifted to a more respectful kinesic posture—immediately modifying it by grinning more insolently. Well, that was good; the streak of rebellion ran deep. The breathing was not bad for a professional criminal: the only block seemed to be at the bottom of the exhalation. The grin was a defense against tears, of course, as with most chronic American smilers. Hagbard attempted a probe: Harry’s father was the kind who pretended to consider the case and to toy with forgiveness before he would administer the thrashing.

  “Is that better?” Harry asked, accentuating his respectful posture and grinning more sarcastically.

  “A little,” Hagbard said, sounding mollified. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Harry. That’s a bad bunch you’ve been mixed up with, very un-American.” He paused to get a reaction to the word; it came at once.

  “Their money is as good as anyone’s,” Harry said defiantly. His shoes crept backwards, as he spoke, and his neck decreased an inch—the turtle reflex, Hagbard called it; and it was a sure sign of the repressed guilt denied by the man’s voice.

  “You were born pretty poor, weren’t you?” Hagbard asked, in a neutral tone.

  “Poor? We was white niggers.”

  “Well, I guess there’s some excuse for you …” Hagbard watched: the grin grew wider, the body imperceptibly moved back toward slouching. “But, to turn on your own country, Harry. That’s bad. That’s the lowest thing a human being can do. It’s like turning against your own mother.” The toes curled inward again, tentatively. What did Harry’s father say before wielding the belt? Hagbard caught it: “Harry,” he repeated it gravely, “you haven’t been acting like a proper white man. You’ve been acting like you got nigger blood.”