The illuminatus! trilogy (20 page)

“Satan,” Simon said simply “is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It’s all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don’t look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn’t any.”

“Then this person—this being—” Joe protested, “really is supernatural—”

“Supernatural, schmupernatural,” Simon grimaced. “You’re still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I’m talking about
up
and
down
, so you say ‘supernatural.’ There is no ‘supernatural’; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that’s all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished ‘into thin air.’ Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it.”

“But the flash of light—”

“It’s an energy transformation,” Simon explained patiently. “Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That’s why the Illuminati—and some of the kids they’ve allowed to become partially illuminized lately—refer to ordinary science as ‘square.’ The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional—of course—and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the llluminati Pyramid of Egypt.”

“Five sides?” Joe objected. “It only has four.”

“You’re ignoring the bottom.”

“Oh. Go on.”

“Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he’s the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we’re concerned with is the one Fuller hasn’t discovered yet, although he’s said he’s looking for it—the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland—the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it—to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get….” Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:

“When the Pineal Eye opens—after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip—you can control the energy field entirely,” Simon went on. “An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply—in five words, of course—when he said
Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt:
‘All things that are, are lights.’ Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote
e
=
mc
²
. The actual transformation doesn’t require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you.”

“Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods,” Dillinger agreed. “But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, ‘cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That’s why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up. You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam—they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper. But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of
them
went and died, and Hoover’s Heroes caught
all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them.” The old man looked suddenly sad. “There was one possibility that we hated to think about…. But, luckily it didn’t come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect.”

“And everything really follows the Fives’ law?” Joc asked.

“More than you guess,” Dillinger remarked blandly.

“Even when you’re dealing with social fields,” Simon added. “We’ve run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt’s five-stage pattern:
Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft
and
Grummet
. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in
Beamtenherrschaft
and the younger generation is moving into
Grummet
rapidly.”

Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. “But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day—”

“Hell,” Simon said, “look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for
V
—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn’t miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: ‘lux fiat’—right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. ’23 Skidoo.’ The lyrics of rock songs like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’— how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of
Moby Dick
tells you he’s a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you can’t find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead—in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same
creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he’s hinting at. There’s a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black;
all
the critics miss the point.”

“‘Osiris is a black god,’” Joe quoted.

“Right on! You’re going to advance fast,” Simon said enthusiastically. “In fact, I think it’s time for you to
get
off the verbal level and really confront your own ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’—your own lady Isis.”

“Yes,” Dillinger said. “The
Leif Erikson
is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He’s got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We’ll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I’ll arrange for her to meet you there.”

“I don’t like dealing with Hagbard,” Simon said. “He’s a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang.”

“He’s one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati,” Dillinger said. “Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won’t accept anything but flaxscript—they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it.”

“Puerile,” Simon pronounced. “It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way.”

“Well,” Dillinger said, “Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can’t do it all alone, you know.”

“Sure,” Simon shrugged. “But it bugs me.” He stood up and put his drink on the table.

“Let’s go,” he said to Joe. “You’re going to be illuminized.”

Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, “A word of advice about the Rite.”

“Yes?”

Dillinger lowered his voice. “Lie down on the floor and keep calm,” he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.

Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit, and it seemed to him a freeze and a frieze in time: a moment
that would linger, as another stage of illumination, forever in his mind. Sister Cecilia, back in Resurrection School, spoke out of the abyss of memory: “Stand in the corner, Joseph Malik!” And he remembered too, the chalk that he crumbled slowly between his fingers, the feeling of needing to urinate, the long wait, and then Father Volpe entering the classroom, his voice like thunder: “Where is he? Where is the boy who dared to disagree with the good Sister that God sent to instruct him?” And the other children, led out of the classroom and across the street to the church to pray for his soul, while the priest harangued him: “Do you know how hot hell is? Do you know how hot the worst part of hell is? That’s where they send people who have the good fortune to be born into the church and then rebel against it, misled by Pride of Intellect.”
And five years later, those two faces came back: the priest, angry and dogmatic, demanding obedience, and the bandit, sardonic, encouraging cynicism, and Joe understood that he might someday have to kill Hagbard Celine. But more years had to pass, and the Fernando Poo incident had to pass, and Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight before he knew that he would, in fact, kill Celine without compunction if it were necessary
….

But on March 31, in that year of fruition for all the Illuminati’s plans, while the President of the United States went on the air to threaten “all-out thermonuclear heck,” a young lady named Concepcion Galore lay nude on a bed in the Hotel Durrutti in Santa Isobel and said, “It’s a Iloigor.”

“What’s a Iloigor?” asked her companion, an Englishman named Fission Chips, who had been born on Hiroshima Day and named by a father who cared more for physics than for the humanities.

The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant
Veronica
on an unconvincingly drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, “Oh, a Iloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very bad god.”

Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to
himself than to the peasant girl, “Looks vaguely like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu
tikis.”

“The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues,” Concepcion said, just to be making conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn’t going to be ready to prong her again for at least another half hour.

“Indeed?” Chips said, equally bored. “Who are the Starry Wisdom people?”

“A church. Down on Tequilla y Mota Street. What used to be Lumumba Street and was Franco Street when I was a girl. Funny church.” The girl frowned, thinking about them. “When I worked in the telegraph office I was always seeing their telegrams. All in code. And never to another church. Always to banks all over Europe and North and South America.”

“You don’t say,” drawled Chips, no longer bored but trying to sound casual; his code number in British Intelligence was, of course, 00005. “Why are they interested in these statues?” He was thinking that statues, properly hollowed out, could transport heroin; he was already sure that Starry Wisdom was a front for BUGGER.

(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, “Now, the child feels frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler’s system: not sex, but the will to power itself. The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche …” Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see
anything;
and Tochus himself didn’t really see either. The child, Drake had decided—it was the cornerstone of his own system of psychology—was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple; except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time, the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role. Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his
lack of superego, continued to dream of how he would seize the dominant role … In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake’s psychic twin, stood before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goat’s-head mask, and repeated, “I will forever hele, always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts….”)

You look like a robot
, Joe Malik says in a warped room in a skewered time in San Francisco.
I mean, you move and walk like a robot
.