The illuminatus! trilogy (17 page)

Half in whimsy and half in despair, Joe decided to perform one of his chronic acts of faith and convince himself, at least for a while, that there was some kind of
meaning in Simon’s ramblings. His equally chronic skepticism, he knew, would soon enough reassert itself.

“What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises,” Simon had said, “and insanity is the only viable alternative.” That was a paradox worth some kind of consideration.

“About that 23,” Joe said, approaching Simon tentatively after the meeting broke up.

“It’s everywhere,” was the instant reply. “I just started to scratch the surface. All the great anarchists died on the 23rd day of some month or other—Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on May 23, Dutch on October 23—and Vince Coll was 23 years old when he was shot
on 23rd Street
—and even though John Dillinger died on the 22nd of July, if you look it up, like I did, in Toland’s book,
The Dillinger Days
, you’ll find he couldn’t get away from the 23 Principle, because 23 other people died that night in Chicago, too, all from heat prostration. ‘Nova heat moving in,’ dig? And the world began on October 23, in 4004 b.c., according to Bishop Usher, and the Hungarian Revolution started on October 23, too, and Harpo Marx was born on November 23, and—”

There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant, the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic significance of the letter
W
—23rd in the alphabet—and its presence in the words “woman” and “womb” as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagled legs of the copulating female. He even found some mystic meaning in the
W
in Washington, but was strangely evasive about explicating this.

“So, you see,” Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, “the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined
‘reality’
of capitalist society and creates its own reality. A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax—original sin, logical positivism, those restriction and constriction
myths—all that’s based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are limits, of course—nobody is nutty enough to deny
that
—but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as we’ve been taught to believe. It’s much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we’ve been on one restriction kick after another for a couple thousand years now, the world’s longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to shake up the foundations. This isn’t shit; I’ve got a degree in mathematics, man.”

“I studied engineering myself, a long time ago.” Joe said. “I realize that part of what you say is true….”

“It’s all true. The land belongs to the landlords, right now, because of magic. People worship the deeds in the government offices, and they won’t dare move onto a square of ground if one of the deeds says somebody else owns it. It’s a head-trip, a kind of magic, and you need the opposite magic to lift the curse. You need shock elements to break up and disorganize the chains of command in the brain, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that Blake wrote about. That’s the unpredictable elements, dads: the erratic, the erotic, the Eristic. Tim Leary said it: ‘People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.’ They can’t feel and touch and smell the real earth, man, as long as the manacles in the cortex tell them it belongs to somebody else. If you don’t want to call it magic, call it counter-conditioning, but the principle is the same. Breaking up the trip society laid on us and starting our own trip. Bringing back old realities that are supposed to be dead. Creating new realities. Astrology, demons, lifting poetry off of the written page into the acts of your daily life. Surrealism, dig? Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton put it in a nutshell in the First Surrealist Manifesto:
‘total transformation of mind, and all that resembles it.’
They knew all about the Illuminated Lodge, founded in Munich in 1923, and that it controlled Wall Street
and
Hitler
and
Stalin, through witchcraft. We gotta get into witchcraft ourselves to undo the hex they’ve cast on everybody’s mind. All hail Discordia! Do you read me?”

When they finally parted, and Joe headed back for his hotel, the spell ended. I’ve been listening to a spaced-out acid-head all night, Joe thought in his cab headed south toward the Loop, and almost managing to believe him. If I keep on with this little experiment, I
will
believe
him. And that’s how insanity always begins: you find reality unbearable and start manufacturing a fantasy alternative. With an effort of will, he forced himself back into his usual framework; no matter how cruel reality was, Joe Malik would face it and would not follow the Yippies and Crazies in the joy ride to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

But when he arrived at his hotel door, and noticed for the first time that he had Room 23, he had to fight the impulse to call Simon on the phone and tell him about the latest invasion of surrealism into the real world.

And he lay awake in his bed for hours remembering 23s that had occurred in his own life … and wondering about the origin of that mysterious bit of 1929 slang, “23 Skidoo….”

After being lost for an hour in Hitler’s old neighborhood, Clark Kent and His Supermen finally found
Ludwigstrasse
and got out of Munich. “About forty miles and we’ll be in Ingolstadt,” Kent-Mohammed-Pearson said.
“At last,”
one of the Supermen groaned. Just then a tiny Volkswagen inched past their VW bus, like an infant running ahead of its mother, and Kent looked bemused. “Did you check out that cat at the wheel? I saw him once before, and never forgot it because he was acting so weird. It was in Mexico City. Funny seeing him again, halfway around the world and umpteen years later.” “Go catch him,” another Superman commented. “With the AMA and the Trashers and other heavy groups we’re going to get buried alive. Let’s make sure that at least
he
knows we were in Ingolstadt for this gig.”

JUST LIKE A TREE THAT’S STANDING BY THE WAAAAAAATER

The morning after the Wobbly meeting Simon telephoned Joe.

“Listen,” he asked, “do you have to fly back to New York today? Can you possibly stay over a night? I’ve got something I’d like you to see. It’s time we started reaching people in your generation and really showing you instead of just telling you. Are you game?”

And Joe Malik—ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic—heard himself saying, “Yes.” And heard a louder voice, unspeaking, uttering a more profound “yes” deep inside himself. He was game—for astrology, for
I Ching
, for LSD, for demons, for whatever
Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.

(we shall not be moved)

  “God is dead,” the priest chanted.

“God is dead,” the congregation repeated in chorus.

“God is dead: we are all absolutely free,” the priest intoned more rhythmically.

“God is dead,” the congregation picked up the almost hypnotic beat, “we are all absolutely free.”

Joe shifted nervously in his chair. The blasphemy was exhilarating, but also strangely disturbing. He wondered how much fear of Hell still lingered in the back corridors of his skull, left over from his Catholic boyhood.

They were in an elegant apartment, high above Lake Shore Drive—“We always meet here,” Simon had explained, “because of the acrostic significance of the street name”—and the sounds of the automobile traffic far below mingled strangely with the preparations for what Joe already guessed was a black Mass.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” the priest chanted.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” Joe repeated with the rest of the congregation.

The priest—who was the only one who had not removed his clothes before the beginning of the ceremony—was a slightly red-faced middle-aged man in a Roman collar, and part of Joe’s discomfort derived from the fact that he looked so much like every Catholic priest he had known in his childhood. It had not helped matters that he had given his name, when Simon introduced Joe to him, as “Padre Pederastia”—which he pronounced with a very campy inflection, looking flirtatiously directly in Joe’s eyes.

The congregation divided, in Joe’s mind, into two easily distinguishable groups: poor full-time hippies, from the Old Town area, and rich part-time hippies, from Lake Shore Drive itself and, no doubt, also from the local advertising agencies on Michigan Avenue. There were only eleven of them, however, including Joe, and Padre Pederastia made twelve—where was the traditional thirteenth?

“Prepare the pentad,” Padre Pederastia commanded.

Simon and a rather good-looking young female, both quite unself-conscious in their nakedness, arose and left the group, walking toward the door which Joe had assumed led to the bedroom area. They stopped to take some chalk from a table on which hashish and sandal-wood incense were burning in a goat’s-head taper, then squatted to draw a large pentagon on the blood-red rug. A triangle was then added to each side of the pentagon, forming a star—the special kind of star, Joe knew, which was known as pentagram, symbol of werewolves and also of demons. He found himself remembering the corny old poem from the Lon Chaney, Jr., movies, but it suddenly didn’t sound like kitsch anymore:

“I-O,” the priest chanted raptly.

“I-O,” the chorus came.

“I-O, E-O, Evoe,” the chant rose weirdly.

“I-O, E-O, Evoe,” the rhythmic reply came in cadence.

Joe felt a strange, ashy, acrid taste gathering in his mouth, and a coldness creeping into his toes and fingers. The air, too, seemed suddenly greasy and unpleasantly, mucidly moist.

“I-O, E-O, Evoe, HE!” the priest screamed, in fear or in ecstasy.

“I-O, E-O, Evoe, HE!” Joe heard himself joining the others. Was it imagination, or were all their voices subtly changing, in a bestial and pongoid fashion?

“Ol sonuf vaoresaji,” the priest said, more softly.

“Ol sonuf vaoresaji,” they chorused.

“It is accomplished,” the priest said. “We may pass the Guardian.”

The congregation arose and moved toward the door. Each person, Joe noticed, was careful to step into the pentagram and pause there a moment gathering strength before actually approaching the door. When it was his turn, he discovered why. The carving on the door, which had seemed merely obscene and ghoulish from across the room, was more disturbing when you were closer to it. It was not easy—to convince yourself that those eyes were
just a trick of
trompe l’oeil
. The mind insisted on feeling that they very definitely looked at you, not affectionately, as you passed.

This—
thing
—was the Guardian which had to be pacified before they could enter the next room.

Joe’s fingers and toes were definitely freezing, and auto-suggestion didn’t seem a very plausible explanation. He seriously wondered about the possibility of frostbite. But then he stepped into the pentagram and the cold suddenly decreased, the eyes of the Guardian were less menacing, and a feeling of renewed energy flowed through his body, such as he had experienced in a sensitivity-training session after he had been cajoled by the leader into unleashing a great deal of pent-up anxiety and rage by kicking, screaming, weeping, and cursing.

He passed the Guardian easily and entered the room where the real action would occur.

It was as if he had left the twentieth century. The furnishings and the very architecture were Hebraic, Arabic, and medieval European, all mixed together in a most disorienting way, and entirely unrelieved by any trace of the modern or functional.

A black-draped altar stood in the center, and upon it lay the thirteenth member of the coven. She was a woman with red hair and green eyes—the traits which Satan supposedly relished most in mortal females. (There had been a time, Joe remembered, when any woman having those features was automatically suspected of witchcraft.) She was, of course, naked, and her body would be the medium through which this strange sacrament would be attempted.

What am I doing here?
Joe thought frantically.
Why don’t I leave these lunatics and get back to the world I know, the world where all the horrors are, after all, merely human?

But he knew the answer.

He could not—literally could not—attempt to pass the Guardian until all those present gave their consent.

Padre Pederastia was speaking. “This part of the ceremony,” he said, camping outrageously, “is very distasteful to me, as you all know. If only Our Father Below would allow us to substitute a boy on the altar when I’m officiating—but, alas, He is, as we all know, very rigid about such things. As usual, therefore, I will ask the newest member to take my place for this rite.”

Joe knew, from the
Malleus malificarum
and other grimoires, what the rite was, and he was both excited and frightened.

He approached the altar nervously, noting the others forming a pentagon around the nude woman and himself. She had a lovely body with large breasts and fine nipples, but he was still too nervous to become aroused physically.

Padre Pederastia handed him the Host. “I stole this from the church myself,” he whispered. “You can be sure it is fully consecrated and completely potent. You know what to do?”