The illuminatus! trilogy (33 page)

THIS IS THE VOICE OF YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER MAN SPEAKING. YOU MUST REALIZE THAT YOU ARE NOT JOSEPH WENDELL MALIK.

Hell’s Angels on motorcycles do not fit the structure of the race at all, so they endlessly orbit around the heroic statue of General Logan in Grant Park (“finish” for the uphill crucifixion racers) and can be considered as isolated from the “action,” which is, of course, America.

When Jesus falls the first time, this can be considered as a puncture and Simon operates an air pump on his tires, but the threat to throw LSD in the water supply constitutes a “foul” and this team thereby is driven back three squares
by Mace, clubs, and the machine guns of the Capone mob unleashed from another time track in the same multiverse. Willard Gibbs, far more than Einstein, created the modern cosmos, and his concept of contingent or statistical reality, when cross-fertilized with the Second Law of Thermodynamics by Shannon and Wiener, led to the definition of information as the negative reciprocal of probability, making the clubbings of Jesus by Chicago cops just another of those things that happens in this kind of quantum jump.

A centurion named Semper Cuni Linctus passes Simon in Grant Park looking for the uphill bike race. “When we crucify a man,” he mutters, “he should confounded well
stay
crucified.” The three Marys clutch handkerchiefs to their faces as the teargas and Zyklon B pours upward on the hill, to the spot where the crosses and the statue of General Logan stand…. “Nor dashed a thousand kim,” croons Saint Toad looking through the door at Fission Chips…. Arthur Flegenheimer and Robert Putney Drake ascend the chimney…. “You don’t have to believe in Santa Claus,” H. P. Lovecraft explains…. “Ambrose,” the Dutchman says to him imploringly.

“But it can’t be,” Joe Malik says, half weeping. “It can’t be that crazy. Buildings wouldn’t stand. Planes wouldn’t fly. Dams would collapse. Engineering colleges would be lunatic asylums.”

“They aren’t already?” Simon asks. “Have you read the latest data on the ecological catastrophe? You have to face it, Joe. God is a crazy woman.”

“There are no straight lines in curved space,” Stella adds.

“But my mind is dying,” Joe protests, shuddering.

Simon holds up an ear of corn and tells him urgently, “Osiris is a black god!”

(Sir Charles James Napier, bearded, long-haired and sixty-odd years old, General of Her Majesty’s Armies in India, met a most engaging scoundrel in January 1843 and immediately wrote to his cronies in England about this remarkable person, whom he described as brave, clever, fabulously wealthy, and totally unscrupulous. Since this curious fellow was also regarded as God by his followers, who numbered over three million, he charged twenty rupees for permission to kiss his hand, asked—and got—the sexual favors of the wives or daughters of any True Believers who took his fancy, and proved his divinity by brazenly
and openly committing sins which any mortal would shrivel with shame to have acknowledged. He also proved, at the Battle of Miani, where he aided the British against the rebellious Baluchi tribesmen, that he could fight like ten tigers. All in all, General Napier concluded, a most unusual human being—Hasan ali Shah Mahallat, forty-sixth Imam, or living God, of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, direct descendant of Hassan i Sabbah, and first Aga Khan.)

“If you want to know the extent of their control,” Simon told Joe (speaking this time, not writing a letter; they were driving to San Francisco after leaving Dillinger), “take a dollar bill out of your wallet and look at it. Go
ahead—do it now. I want to make a point.” Joe took out his wallet and looked for a single. (A year later, in the city Simon called Czechago in honor of the synchronous invasions in August 1968, the KCUF convention is taking its first luncheon break after Smiling Jim’s sock-it-to-’em opening speech. Simon brushes against an usher, shouts, “Hey, you damned faggot, keep your hands off my ass,” and in the ensuing tumult Joe has no trouble slipping the AUM in the punch.)

“Do I have to get a library card just to look at one book?” Carmel asks the librarian in the Main Branch of the Las Vegas Library, after Maldonado had failed to produce any lead to a communist agent.

“One of the most puzzling acts of Washington’s Presidency,” Professor Percival Petsdeloup tells an American history class at Columbia, back in ’68, “was his refusal to aid Tom Paine when Paine was condemned to death in Paris.” … Why puzzling? George Dorn thinks in the back of the class, Washington was an Establishment fink….
“First of all, look at that face on the front,” Simon says. “It isn’t Washington at all, it’s Weishaupt. Compare it with any of the early, authentic pictures of Washington and you’ll see what I mean. And look at that cryptic half-smile on his face.”
(The same smile Weishaupt wore when he finished the letter explaining to Paine why he couldn’t help him; sealed it with the Great Seal of the United States whose meaning only he knew; and settling back in his chair, murmured to himself, “Jacques De Molay, thou art again avenged!”)

“What do you mean, I’m creating a disturbance? It was that faggot there, with his big mitts on my ass.”

(“Well, I don’t know which particular book, honey. Something that tells how the communists work. You know, how a patriotic citizen can spot a commie spy ring if there’s one in his neighborhood. That kind of thing,” Carmel explained.)

A swarm of men in blue shirts and white plastic helmets rushes down the steps at Forty-third Street and UN Plaza, past the inscription reading, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, neither shall they study war any more.” Waving heavy wooden crosses and shouting angry battle cries, the helmeted men surge into the crowd like a wave hitting a sand
castle. George sees them coming, and his heart skips a beat.

“And when you turn the bill over, the first thing you see is the Illuminati pyramid. You’ll notice it says seventeen seventy-six on it, but our government was founded in seventeen eighty-eight. Supposedly, the seventeen seventy-six is there because that’s when the Declaration of Independence was signed. The real reason is that seventeen seventy-six is the year Weishaupt revived the Illuminati. And why do you suppose the pyramid has seventy-two segments in thirteen layers?” Simon asks in nineteen sixty-nine
…. “Misunderstanding, my eye! When a guy gropes my butt that way I understand exactly what he wants,” Simon shouts in nineteen seventy….
George nudges Peter Jackson. “God’s Lightning,” he says. The plastic hats gleam in the sunlight, more of them jostling down the stairs, a banner, red letters on a white background unfurling above:
“AMERICA: LOVE IT OR WE’LL STOMP YOU….
“Christ on roller-skates,” Peter says, “now watch the cops do a vanishing act.”
… Dillinger settles down cross-legged in a five-sided chamber under the UN meditation room. He curls into the lotus posture with an ease that would appear unusual in an American in his late sixties were there anyone to witness it.

“Seventy-two is the cabalistic number for the Holy Unspeakable Name of God, used in all black magic, and thirteen is the number in a coven,” Simon explains. “That’s why.” The Volkswagen purrs toward San Francisco
.

Carmel comes down the steps of the Las Vegas Public Library, a copy of J. Edgar Hoover’s
Masters of Deceit
under his arm, an anticipatory smirk on his face,
and Simon is finally ejected from the Sheraton-Chicago shouting, “Faggots! I think you’re all a bunch of faggots!”

“And here’s one of their jokes” Simon adds. “Over the eagle’s head, do you dig that Star of David? They put that one in—one single six-pointed Jewish star, made up of all the five-pointed stars—just so some right-wing cranks could find it and proclaim it as proof that the Elders of Zion control the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.”

Overlooking the crowd in UN Plaza, Zev Hirsch, New York State Commander of God’s Lightning, watches his thick-shouldered troops, swinging their wooden crosses like tomahawks, drive back the lily-livered peaceniks. There is
an obstacle. A blue line of policemen has formed between the men of God’s Lightning and their prey. Over the cops’ shoulders, the peaceniks are screeching dirty words at their plastic-hatted enemies. Zev’s eyes scan the crowd. He catches the eye of a red-faced cop with gold braid on his cap. Zev gives the Police Captain a questioning look. The Captain winks. A minute later the Captain makes a small gesture with his left hand. Immediately, the line of police vanishes, as if melted in the bright spring sun that beats down on the plaza. The battalion of God’s Lightning falls upon their anguished, outraged, and astonished victims. Zev Hirsch laughs. This is a lot more fun than the old days in the Jewish Defense League. All the servants are drunk. And the rain continues.

At an outdoor café in Jerusalem two white-haired old men wearing black are drinking coffee together. They try to mask their emotions from the people around them, but their eyes are wild with excitement. They are staring at an inside page of a Yiddish newspaper, reading two ads in Yiddish, a large, quarter-page announcement of the greatest rock festival of all time to be held near Ingolstadt, Bavaria—bands of all nations, people of all nations, to be known as Woodstock Europa. On the same page is the paper’s personals column, and the watery eyes of the two old men are re-reading for the fifth time the statement, in Yiddish, “In thanks to St. Jude for favors granted.—A. W.”

One old man points at the page with a trembling finger. “It is coming,” he says in German
.

The other one nods, a beatific smile on his withered face. “Jawohl. It is coming very soon. Der Tag. Soon we must to Bavaria go. Ewige Blumenkraft!”

Carlo put the gun on the table between us. “This is it, George,” he said, “Are you a revolutionary, or are you just on an ego trip playing at being a revolutionary? Can you take the gun?”

I wiped my eyes. The Passaic was flowing below me, a steady stream of garbage from the Paterson falls down to Newark and the Atlantic Ocean. Like the garbage that was my contemptible, cowardly soul
…. The God’s Lightning troopers fan out, clubbing each person wearing an I WON’T DIE FOR FERNANDO POO button. Blood dances in the air, fragile red bubbles, before the tomblike slab of the UN building….
Dillinger’s breathing slows down. He stares at the ruby eye atop the 13-step pyramid hidden in the UN
building, and he thinks of pentagons
.

“I’m a God’s Lightning,” Carlo said. “This is no joke, baby, I’m going to do the whole bit.” His intense eyes burned into mine as the switchblade came out of his pocket. “Motherfuckin’ commie,” he screamed suddenly, leaping up so quickly that the chair fell over behind him. “You’re not getting off with a beating this time. I’m gonna cut your balls off and take them home as a souvenir.” He slashed forward with the knife, deflecting his swing at the last minute. “Made you jump, you long-haired faggotty freak. I wonder if you have any balls to cut off. Well, I’ll find out.” He inched forward, the knife weaving snakelike patterns in the air.

“Look,” I said desperately, “I know you’re only playacting.”

“You don’t know
nothing
, baby. Maybe I’m FBI or CIA. Maybe this is just an excuse to get you to go for the gun so I can kill you and claim self-defense. Life isn’t all demonstrations and play-acting, George. There comes a time when it gets serious.” He lunged again with the knife, and I stumbled clumsily backward. “Are you going to take the gun or am I going to cut your balls off and tell the Group you’re no fucking good and we couldn’t use you?”

He was totally mad and I was totally sane. Is that a more flattering way of telling it, instead of the truth, that he was brave and I was yellow?

“Listen,” I said, “I know you won’t really stab me and you know I won’t really shoot you—”

“Shit on
you know
and
I know”
Carlo hit me in the chest with his free hand, hard. “I’m a God’s Lightning, really a God’s Lightning. I’m gonna do the whole scene. This is a test, but the test is for real.” He hit me again, jarring my balance, then slapped my face, twice, rapidly, back and forth like a windshield wiper. “I always said you longhaired commie freaks don’t have no guts. You can’t even fight back. You can’t even feel angry, can you? You just feel sorry for yourself, right?”

It was too damned true. A nerve twinged deep down inside at the unfairness of it, of his ability to see into me more than I usually dared see into myself; and at last I grabbed the gun from the table, screaming, “You sadistic
Stalinist
son-of-a-bitch!”

“And look at the eagle,” Simon says. “Look real close. That ain’t really no olive branch in his left claw, baby.
That’s our old friend Maria Juana. You never really looked at a dollar bill before, did you?