“And nobody else ever suspected?” Joe asked. “Canvera is still there in Chicago, going about his business, just another face on the street?”
“Not quite. He was shot a few years ago. Due to you.”
“Due to me?”
“Yes. He was one of the subjects in the first AUM test. He subsequently made the mistake of knocking up the daughter of a local politician. It appears that the AUM made him susceptible to libertine ideas.”
WE’RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
“You sound very convincing, and I almost believe you,” Joe said slowly. “Why, all of a sudden? Why no more put-ons and runarounds?”
“We’re getting to the chimes at midnight,” Hagbard replied simply, with a Latin shrug. “The spell is ending. Soon the coach turns back to a pumpkin, Cinderella goes back to the kitchen, everybody takes their masks off, and the carnival is over. I mean it,” he added, his face full of sincerity. “Ask me anything and you get the truth.”
“Why are you keeping George and me apart? Why do I have to skulk around the sub like a wanted fugitive and eat with Calley and Eichmann? Why don’t you want George and me to compare notes?”
Hagbard sighed. “The real explanation for that would take a day. You’d have to understand the whole Celine System first. In the baby talk of conventional psychology, I’m taking away George’s father figures. You’re one: his first and only boss, an older man he trusts and respects. I became another very quickly, and that’s one of the thousand and one reasons I turned the guru-hood over to Miss Portinari. He had to confront Drake, the bad father, and lose you and me, the good fathers, before he could really learn to ball a woman. The next step, if you’re curious, is to take the woman away from him. Temporarily,” Hagbard added quickly. “Don’t be so jumpy. You’ve been through a large part of the Celine System, and it hasn’t killed you. You’re stronger because of it, aren’t you?”
Joe nodded, accepting this, but shot the next question immediately. “Do you know who bombed Confrontation?”
“Yes, Joe. And I know why you did it.”
YOU’RE NOT A THING AT ALL
“Okay, then, here’s the payoff, and your answer better be good. Why are you helping the Illuminati to immanentize the Eschaton, Hagbard?”
“It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time, as a very wise man once said.”
“Jesus,” Joe said wearily. “I thought I had crossed that ports asinorum. When I figured out how you get the goose out of the bottle in the Zen riddle—you do nothing and wait for the goose to peck its way out, just like a chick pecks its way out of an egg—I realized ‘Do what thou wilt’ becomes ‘the whole of the law’ by a mathematical process. The equation balances when you realize who the ‘thou’ is, as distinguished from the ordinary ‘you.’ The whole fucking works, the universe—all of it alive in the same way we’re alive, and mechanical in the same way we’re mechanical. The Robot. The one more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages. Oh, Christ, yes, I thought I understood it all. But this, this…this stone fatalism—what the hell are we going to Ingolstadt for, if we can’t do anything?”
“The coin has two sides. It’s the only coin that comes up at this time, but it still has two sides.” Hagbard leaned forward intensely. “It’s mechanical and alive. Let me give you a sexual metaphor, since you usually hang out with New York intellectuals. You look at a woman across a room and you know you’re going to bed with her before the night is over. That’s mechanical: Something has happened when your eyes met. But the orgasm is organic; what it will be like, neither of you can predict. And I know, just as the Illuminati know, that immanentization is going to happen on May first because of a mechanical process Adam Weishaupt started on another May first two centuries ago, and because of other processes other people started before then and since then. But neither I nor the Illuminati know what form immanentization will take. It doesn’t have to be hell on earth. It can be heaven on earth. And that’s why we’re going to Ingolstadt.”
THREE O’CLOCK TWO O’CLOCK ONE O’CLOCK
ROCK
I became a cop because of Billie Freshette. Well, I don’t want to jive you—that wasn’t the whole reason. But she sure as hell was one bodacious big part of the reason, and that’s the curious thing about what finally happened, and how Milo Flanagan assigned me to infiltrate the Lincoln Park anarchist group, getting me in right up to my black ass in all that international intrigue and yoga-style balling with Simon Moon. But maybe I should start over from the beginning again, from Billie Freshette. I was a little kid and she was an old woman—it was in the early 1950s, you see (Hassan i Sabbah X was operating in the open then, going around the South Side preaching that the greatest of the White Magicians had just died recently in England and now the age of the Black Magicians was beginning; everybody thought he was one stone-crazy stud), and my father was a cook in a restaurant on Halsted. He pointed her out to me on the street once (it must have been just a while before she went back to the reservation in Wisconsin to die). “See that old woman, child? She was John Dillinger’s girl friend.”
Well, I looked, and I saw she was really heavy and together and that whatever the law had done to her never broke her, but I also saw that sorrow hung around her like a dark halo. Daddy went on and told me a lot more about her, and about Dillinger, but it was the sorrow that got printed all over every cell in my little baby brain. It took years for me to figure it out, but what it really meant, as an omen or conjure, was that she was basically just like the women of the black gang leaders on the South Side, even if she was an Indian. There’s just one way for a black in Chicago, and that’s to join a gang—Solidarity Forever, as Simon would say—but I dug that there was only one gang that was really safe, the biggest gang of all, Mister Charlie’s boys, the motherfucking establishment
I guess every black cop has that in the back of his head, before he finds out that we never really can join that gang, not as full members anyway. I found out quicker, being not just black but female. So I was in the gang, the baddest and heaviest gang, but I was always looking for something better, the impossible, the boss gimmick that would get me off the Man’s black-and-white chessboard entirely into some place where I was myself and not just a pawn being moved around at Charlie’s whim.
Otto Waterhouse never had that feeling, at least not until near the end of the game. I never did get inside his head enough to know what was going on there (he was a real cop and got into my head almost as soon as we met, and I could always feel him watching me, waiting for the time when I would round on Charlie and go over to the other side), so the best I can do in making him is to say that he was no Tom in the ordinary sense: He didn’t screw blacks for the Man, he screwed blacks for himself; it was strictly his own trip.
Otto was my drop after I got assigned to underground work. We met in a place that I could always have an excuse to visit, a rundown law firm called Washington, Weishaupt, Budweiser and Kief, on 23 North Clark. Later, for some reason I was never told, they changed the name to Ruly, Kempt, Sheveled and Couth, and then to Weery, Stale, Flatt and Profitable, and to keep up the front they actually did hire a couple of lawyers and did some real law work for a corporation called Blue Sky, Inc.
On April 29, still harboring a cargo of doubt about Hagbard, Joe Malik decided to try the simplest method of Tarot divination. Concentrating all his energy on the question, he cut the deck and picked out one card that would reveal Hagbard Celine’s true nature, if the divination worked. With a sinking heart, he saw that he had come up with the Hierophant. Running the mnemonics Simon had taught him, Joe quickly identified this figure with the number five, the Hebrew letter Vau (meaning “nail”), and the traditional interpretation of a false show: a hypocrisy or a trick. Five was the number of Grummet, the destructive and chaotic end of a cycle. Vau was the letter associated with quarrels, and the meaning “nail” was often related to the implement of Christ’s death. The card was telling him that Hagbard was a hypocritical tricks
ter aiming at destruction, a murderer of the Dreamer-Redeemer aspect of humanity. Or, taking a more mystical reading, as was usually advisable with the Tarot, Hagbard only seemed to be these things, and was actually an agent of Resurrection and Rebirth—as Christ had to die before he could become the Father, as (in Vedanta) the false “self” must be obliterated to join the great Self. Joe swore. The card was only reflecting his own uncertainty. He rummaged in the bookshelf Hagbard had provided for his stateroom and found three books on the Tarot. The first, a popular manual, was absolutely useless: It identified the Hierophant with the letter of religion in contrast to the spirit, with conformity, and with all the plastic middle-class values Hagbard conspicuously lacked. The second (by a true adept of the Tarot) just led him back to his own confused reading of the card, remarking that the Hierophant is “mysterious, even sinister. He seems to be enjoying a very secret joke at somebody’s expense.” The third work raised more doubts: It was Liber 555, by somebody named Mordecai Malignatus, which vaguely reminded Joe that the old East Village Other chart of the Illuminati conspiracy showed a “Mordecai the Foul” in charge of the Sphere of Chaos—and “Mordecai Malignatus” was a fair Latinization of “Mordecai the Foul.” Mordecai, Joe remembered, was, according to that half-accurate and half-deceptive chart, in dual control (along with Richard Nixon, then living) of the Elders of Zion, the House of Rothschild, the Politburo, the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. Communist Party, and Students for a Democratic Society. Joe flipped the pages to see what the semimythical Mord had to say about the Hierophant. The chapter was brief; it was in “The Book of Republicans and Sinners,” and said:
5 Vau THE HIEROPHANT (nail) They nailed Love
to a Cross
Symbolic of their
Might
But Love was undefeated
It simply didn’t fight.
Five stoned men were in a courtyard when an elephant entered.
The first man was stoned on sleep, and he saw not the elephant but dreamed instead of things unreal to those awake.
The second man was stoned on nicotine, caffeine, DDT, carbohydrate excess, protein deficiency, and the other chemicals in the diet which the Illuminati have enforced upon the half-awake to keep them from fully waking. “Hey,” he said, “there’s a big, smelly beast in our courtyard.”
The third stoned man was on grass, and he said, “No, dads, that’s the Ghostly Old Party in its true nature, the Dark Nix on the Soul,” and he giggled in a silly way.
The fourth stoned man was tripping on peyote, and he said, “You see not the mystery, for the elephant is a poem written in tons instead of words,” and his eyes danced.
The fifth stoned man was on acid, and he said nothing, merely worshipping the elephant in silence as the Father of Buddha.
And then the Hierophant entered and drove a nail of mystery into all their hearts, saying, “You are all elephants!”
Nobody understood him.
(At eight o’clock in Ingolstadt an unscheduled group called the Cargo Cult managed to get the mike and began blasting out their own outer-space arrangement of an old children’s song:
SHE’LL BE COMING ’ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES
SHE’LL BE COMING ’ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES
And, in Washington, where it was still only two in the afternoon, the White House was in flames, while the National Guard machine-gunned an armed mob crossing the Mall in front of the Washington Monument, a single finger pointing upward in an eloquent and vulgar gesture which only the Illuminati knew meant “Fuck you!” … In Los Angeles, where it was eleven in the morning, the bombs started to go off in police stations…And in Lehman Cavern, Markoff Chaney disgustedly pointed out a graffito to Saul and Barney: HELP STAMP OUT SIZEISM: TAKE A MIDGET TO LUNCH.
“You see?” he demanded. “That’s supposed to be funny. It’s not funny at all. Not one damned bit”)
SHE’LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES
SHE’LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES
SHE’LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES WHEN SHE COMES
On April 29 Hagbard invited George to join him on the bridge of the Leif Erikson. They had been sailing through a smooth-walled tubular passage that was completely filled with water and was both underground and below sea level. It had been built by the Atlanteans and not only had survived the catastrophe but had been maintained in good condition for the next thirty thousand years by the Illuminati. There was even a salt lock, located, roughly, under Lyon, France, which served to keep the salt water of the Atlantic out of the further reaches of the passage and the underground freshwater Sea of Valusia. The underground waterways were connected with many lakes in Switzerland, Bavaria, and eastern Europe, Hagbard explained, and if salt water were found in all of those lakes the existence of the weird subsurface world of the Illuminati would be suspected. As the submarine approached a huge circular hatchway barring the passage, Hagbard turned off the devices that rendered the craft indetectable. Immediately the enormous round metal door swung toward them.
“Won’t the Illuminati know we’ve activated this machinery?” said George.
“No. This works automatically,” said Hagbard. “It’s never occurred to them that anyone else might use this passageway.”
“But they know you could. And you guessed wrong about their spider-ships being able to detect you.”
Hagbard whirled on George, a hairy arm lifted to punch him in the chest. “Shut up about the fucking spider-ships! I don’t want to hear any more about the spider-ships! Portinari’s running the show now. And she says it’s safe. Okay?”
“Commander, you’re out of your fucking mind,” George said firmly.
Hagbard laughed, his shoulders slumping slightly in relaxation. “All right. You can get off the sub any time you want to. We’ll just open the hatch and let you swim out.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind, but I’m stuck with you,” said George, clapping Hagbard on the shoulder.
“You’re either on the sub or off the sub,” said Hagbard. “Watch this.”
The Leif Erikson had sailed through the round metal gateway, which closed behind it Here the ceiling of the underwater passage was about fifty feet higher than it had been in the section they just left, and the tunnel was only partially filling with water. The air seemed to be coming from vents in the ceiling. There was another metal hatchway in the distance down the tunnel.
“This lock is pretty big,” George said. “The Illuminati must have sailed some enormous submarines through here.”
“And animals,” said Hagbard.
The hatchway ahead of them opened, and fresh water came pouring in. The water level in the lock rose until it reached the ceiling, and the Leif Erikson’s engines turned over and began to propel it forward once more. Now George is writing in his diary again:
April 29
And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn’t change too rapidly? How fast is evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to many kinds of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose the lifetime of your typical basic god was a hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes us to watch a movie.
So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It’s like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth, and now on the moon and Mars, and the whole process from the first of the protobionts to George Dorn and fellow humans takes no longer than
Hagbard’s voice over the intercom jolted him out of his reverie. “Come on back up, George. There’s more to see.”
This time Mavis was on the
bridge with Hagbard. As George entered, Hagbard withdrew his hand from her left breast in an unhurried movement. George wanted to kill Hagbard, but he was thankful that he hadn’t seen Mavis touching Hagbard in any sexual way. That would have been past bearing. He might have tested his new-found courage by taking a poke at Hagbard, and Goddess only knows what karate or yoga or magic would be the response. Besides, Mavis and Hagbard must be balling all the time. Who else but Hagbard would a woman like Mavis take for her regular lover? Who else but Hagbard could satisfy her?
Mavis greeted George with a comradely hug that made the entire front of his body ache. Hagbard pointed to an inscription carved into the wall of the cave. There was a row of symbols that George didn’t recognize, but above them was something quite familiar: a circle with a downward-pointing trident carved inside it.
“The peace symbol,” said George. “I didn’t know it was that old.”
“In the days when it was put up there,” said Hagbard, “it was called the Cross of Lilith Velkor, and its meaning is simply that anyone who attempts to thwart the Illuminati will suffer from the most horrible torture the Illuminati can devise. Lilith Velkor was one of the first of their victims. They crucified her on a revolving cross that looked very much like that.”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 64