The illuminatus! trilogy (117 page)

THE DEAD EGYPTIAN MOUTH-BREEDERS
. There were five of them, of course.

DANNY PRICEFDŒR
. Shot in the line of duty two years after the events of this story. Loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

ADAM WEISHAUPT
. “He’s a deep one,” they used to say on the faculty of the University of Ingolstadt, “you never know what he’s really thinking.”

CARMEL
. One of his girls once cajoled a Hollywood character actor into calling him on the phone and pretending to be a researcher for the Kinsey Institute, seeking an interview. Carmel couldn’t see any money in it and was trying to end the conversation when the actor asked stuffily, “Well, all we want to know, actually, is do you have intercourse with your mother regularly, or does everybody in Las Vegas call you ‘Carmel the Motherfucker’ for some other reason?” For once Carmel was speechless. The girl spread the story, and everybody in town was laughing about it for weeks.

PETER JACKSON
. His great-grandfather was a slave. His son became the first President of the Luna Federation after the rebellion of the moon colonists in 2025. Much further back, a more remote ancestor was a king of Atlantis; and way in the future, a descendant was a slave on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. (Peter was one of the crew when Hagbard finally blasted off for the stars in 1999). That’s the way the cookie crumbles; and Peter had an intuitive sense of this paradoxical fatality, which caused him to tell Eldridge Cleaver once, “People who say ‘You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem’ are themselves part of the problem.” (Cleaver replied, wittily, “Fuck you.”)

THE LAB CHIEF WHO WAS DISINTERESTED IN ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA
. He later cracked up and wrote letters to the newspapers attacking the entire chemobiological warfare program of the United States government.
Spent the last seventeen years of his life receiving treatment in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., occupying the same quarters that once housed the ingenious poet Ezra Pound. His rantings were taken seriously in certain places, especially among some leftward-leaning fellow scientists, but the Vice-President described them to the press as “the despondent demagogy of a paranoid pedant.” A sample of the man’s delusions, from a letter to the three top television networks (never quoted on newscasts because it was too controversial): “The boast of the 19th century was its conquest of these accursed plagues that attack men, women, and helpless infants indifferently. What shall be said of the 20th century, which has recreated them, at great expense and through the efforts of thousands of brilliant but perverted scientific minds, and then stored them
live
in installations throughout the country, where it is virtually certain, statistically, that an accident will unleash them upon an unsuspecting public, sooner or later?” (Loonies often harbor morbid fears of that sort.) The poor man never responded favorably to any of the efforts of his psychiatrists, even though they gave him ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) so often that his brain was practically fried to the crispness of a Howard Johnson omelette by the time he finally died.

ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA
. A life form that could exist only by destroying other life-forms; in this respect, it was like many of us. The first of the products of Charlie Mocenigo’s fertile genius, it could boast only of being ten times as deadly as ordinary anthrax. Insofar as it had consciousness, in a vague and flickering way, it was like that inhabiting a subway train at 5 P.M., concerned only with getting where it was going and then eating. The other strains were much the same, up to Anthrax Leprosy Pi.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD
. Hero of a series of novels by Harold Weissburg, including
Whitewash, Whitewash II, Photographic Whitewash
, and
Oswald in New Orleans
. Villain of another novel, entitled
Report of the Presidential Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
, by Earl Warren, John McCone, et al. Also featured in other works of fiction by Mark
Lane, Penn Jones, Josiah Thompson, and various other writers.

JACK RUBY
. The Oliver Hardy to Oswald’s Stanley Laurel.

THOMAS JEFFERSON
. A revolutionary hemp-grower who once wrote, “[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly:
for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man
. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough too in their opinion.” Few of the pious tourists who read the italicized portion of this statement carved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., are aware of its context.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC IN CHERRY KNOLLS HOSPITAL
. His number was 124C41. Nobody, anywhere, remembered what his name had been.

MARY LOU SERVDC
. She finally married Jim Riley, the dope dealer from Dayton—but that’s another, rather longish, story, and not truly relevant.

MAYOR RICHARD DALEY
. Author of such immortal aphorisms as “After all, I am a liberal myself” (October 22, 1968); “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder” (September 23, 1968); “I have conferred with the Superintendent of Police this morning and I gave him instructions that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand” (April 17, 1968); “There wasn’t any shoot-to-kill order. That was a fabrication” (April 18, 1968); “You could say Senator Tower is doing a lousy job, but I don’t use that kind of words” (May 1, 1962); “I have lived in Chicago all my life and I still say we have no ghetto in Chicago” (July 8, 1963); “We will have a planned development and will take people out of the ghettos and slums and give them an opportunity to raise their families in decent surroundings” (April 17, 1969); “I didn’t create the slums, did I?” (September 3, 1968); “Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes” (March 13, 1967).

THE RUSSIAN PREMIER
. A comsymp.

CKARLES MOCENIGO’S FATHER
. A professional. He worked
for Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Federico Maldonado, and many other colorful American businessmen. Known in the trade as Jimmy the Shrew, because of his sharp, conniving expression. Saved his money, put his boy through MIT, killed people for a living. Found the original Frank Sullivan performing in Havana, 1934.

GENERAL LAWRENCE STEWART TALBOT
. Actually, there
was
something between him and that girl from Red Lion, Penn.

MALACLYPSE THE YOUNGER
, K.S.C. Author of the
Principia Discordia
. Disappeared mysteriously in late 1970. His last recorded words were, typically, “Comes the dawn, the sun shall rise in the west.” Then he walked into the Pacific Ocean.

JOHN HERBERT DILLINGER
. When Simon Moon read his biography in search of 23s, he missed a good one: John committed 26 robberies during his publicized career, but only 23 were for money. The other 3 (police stations) seem to have been strictly Art For Art’s Sake.

SIMON’S FATHER
. Tim Moon. He told Simon the lives of Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Frank Little at the age when most boys are being told about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Simon remembers: Joe Hill the night before his execution, wiring Wobbly headquarters in Chicago, “Don’t weep for me, boys: organize.” Bartolomeo Vanzetti: “Your laws, your courts, your false god will be a dim remembering of a cursed time when man was wolf to the man.” Tim and his cronies singing in the living room, “Which side are you on, man / Which
side
are you
on?”
until Molly complained, “You’ll wake the neighbors.” Tim explaining Big Bill: “Oh, yes, and he had a glass eye. Funny I should forget that. The real eye was knocked out by a cop during a strike.” But you’ll understand Tim best if you see Simon, age six, entering grammar school for the first time and addressing the first boy he meets: “I’m Simon Moon; what’s your name, Fellow Worker?”

PADRE PEDERASTIA
. His real name was Father James Flanagan.

TOBIAS KNIGHT
. The only quintuple agent in the history of espionage.

JAMES JOYCE
. After death, he met Yeats on the fifth plane and said, “Sir, I am now willing to learn from you, since you appear to have been right about Death after all.” Yeats replied, “Not at all. You’re dreaming this.” The remark so vexed Joyce that he immediately sought reincarnation (the fifth plane was full of mystics like Yeats and George Russell and Madame Blavatski, and Joyce knew his rational Aristotelian sensibility would be constantly abused by further conversation with them), entered the womb of Elizabeth Mullins of Ver-non, New Jersey, October 11, 1942, and was aborted December 10, 1942. Entered the womb of Rachel Stein of Ingolstadt, January 18, 1943, and was gassed with her, one month before birth was due, at Auschwitz, September 1, 1943. Thereafter, he retired to a monastery on the sixth plane and wrote his funniest, most bitter book. Parts of it, which he has been transmitting ever since, have been picked up by mediums on the six continents, all of whom assumed they were flipping out and refused to transcribe it.

CHARLES WORKMAN
. An entrepreneur.

MENDY WEISS
. Another entrepreneur.

JIMMY THE SHREW
. A third entrepreneur, more successful than the above. See entry under CHARLES MOCENIGO’S FATHER.

ALBERT “THE TEACHER” STEIN
. Not only did he lose his gamble with immortality when it was proven that he
didn’t
kill Dutch Schultz, but almost every book on the case misspells his name as Stern, a tradition which the present work has mostly refused to shatter.

HENRY FORD
. By importing the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
and beginning the mass production of automobiles, he managed to pollute both the mind and the air of the United States, but he meant well, or at least he meant something.

GEORGE DORN’S OLDER BROTHER
. His successful scientific career made George envious (and helped determine George’s choices of a liberal-arts curriculum at Columbia). He had an adventure with talking dolphins before George did (which set up a psychic resonance that made George’s recruitment interesting to Hag-bard); this story is recounted in
Tales Of the Cthulhu
Mythos
, edited by August Derleth (Arkham House, 1969).

MARKOFF CHANEY
. He slipped away from Saul and Barney shortly after they returned to Las Vegas, and none of our characters ever saw him again. However, one day in 1984 Hagbard Celine, using an alias and engaged in nefarious business, happened to be in the U.S. Government Printing Office on Capitol Street in Washington and noticed a bundle of pamphlets that had been stamped with both blue TOP SECRET: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and red FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE TO ALL MEDIA. Many loyal government servants would have headaches before it was ever clarified who had been responsible for which of those stamps—if, indeed, that ever could be clarified. Hagbard recalled much that Saul had told him about the Las Vegas caper and looked around thoughtfully. In one corner he saw a large coffee urn. He lit one of his long black cigars and strolled out into the street. The sun was bright, the air was clear, and it was Spring, which may explain why Hagbard began whistling as he walked with a brisk and determined pace toward the Senate Office Building. The tune was “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”