The illuminatus! trilogy (35 page)

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Authors: Robert Shea,Robert Anton Wilson

Tags: #Science fiction; American, #General, #Science fiction, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Visionary & Metaphysical

BOOK: The illuminatus! trilogy
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When Burroughs told me that, I flipped, because I was 23 that year and lived on Clark Street. Besides, I immediately saw the application to the Law of Fives: 2 + 3 = 5 and Clark has 5 letters.

I was mulling this over when I happened to notice the shipwreck in Pound’s Canto 23. That’s the only shipwreck mentioned in the whole 800-page poem, in spite of all the nautical voyages described. Canto 23 also contains the line, “with the sun in a golden cup,” which Yeats says inspired his own lines, “the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon.”
Golden apples, of course, brought me back to Eris, and I realized I was onto something hot.

Then I tried adding the Illuminati Five to 23, and I got 28. The average menstrual period of Woman. The lunar cycle. Back to the silver apples of the moon—and I’m Moon. Of course, Pound and Yeats both have five letters in their names.

If this be schizophrenia, I said with a P. Henry twist (one better than an O. Henry twist), make the most of it!

I looked deeper.

Through a bullhorn, a police captain began to shout, CLEAR THE PLAZA CLEAR THE PLAZA.

The first reports of the annihilation camps were passed on to the OSS by a Swiss businessman evaluated as being one of the most trustworthy informants on affairs in Nazi Europe. The State Department decided that the stories were not confirmed. That was early in 1943. By autumn of that year, more urgent reports from the same source transmitted still through the OSS forced a major policy conference. It was again decided that the reports were not true. As winter began, the English government asked for another conference to discuss similar reports from their own intelligence networks and from the government of Rumania. The delegates met in Bermuda for a warm, sunny weekend, and decided that the reports were not true; they returned to their work refreshed and tanned. The death trains continued to roll. Early in 1944, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, was reached by dissenters in the State Department, examined the evidence, and forced a meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shaken by the assertions in Morgenthau’s documents, Roosevelt pledged that he would act at once. He never did. It was said later that the State Department convinced him, once again, of their own analysis: the reports simply were not true. When Mr. Hitler said
Vernichtung
he had not really meant
Vernichtung
. An author, Ben Hecht, then placed an ad in the
New York Times
, presenting the evidence to the public; a group of prominent rabbis attacked him for alarming Jews unnecessarily and undermining confidence in America’s Chief Executive during wartime. Finally, late that year, American and Russian troops began liberating the camps, and General Eisenhower
insisted that news photographers take detailed movies which were released to the whole world. In the interval between the first suppressed report by the Swiss businessman and the liberation of the first camp, six million people had died.

“That’s what we call a Bavarian Fire Drill,” Simon explained to Joe. (It was another time; he was driving another Volkswagen. In fact, it was the night of April 23 and they were going to meet Tobias Knight at the UN building.) “It was one official named Winifred who’d been transferred from the Justice Department to a key State Department desk where every bit of evidence passed for evaluation. But the same principles apply everywhere. For instance—we’re half an hour early for the meeting anyhow—I’ll give you an illustration right now.” They were approaching the corner of Forty-third Street and Third Avenue and Simon had observed that the streetlight was changing to red. As he stopped the car, he opened the door and said to Joe, “Follow me.”

Puzzled, Joe got out as Simon ran to the car behind them, beat on the hood with his hand and shouted “Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” He made vigorous but ambiguous motions with his hands and ran to the car next back. Joe saw the first subject look dubiously at his companion and then open the door and get out, obediently trailing behind Simon’s urgent and somber figure.

“Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” Simon was already shouting at the third car back.

As Joe trotted along, occasionally adding his own voice to persuade the more dubious drivers, every car gradually emptied and people formed a neat line heading back toward Lexington Avenue. Simon then ducked between two cars and began jogging toward the front of the line at Third Avenue again, shouting to everybody, “Complete circle! Stay in line!” Obediently, everyone followed in a great circle back to their own cars, reentering from the side opposite to that from which they had left. Simon and Joe climbed back into the VW, the light changed, and they sped ahead.

“You see?” Simon asked. “Use words they’ve been conditioned to since childhood—‘fire drill,’ ‘stay in line,’ like that—and never look back to see if they’re obeying. They’ll follow. Well, that’s the way the Illuminati guaranteed that the Final Solution wouldn’t be interrupted. Winifred,
one guy who had been around long enough to have an impressive title, and his scrawl ‘Evaluation: dubious’ on the bottom of each memo … and six million died. Hilarious, isn’t it?”

And Joe remembered from the little book by Hagbard Celine,
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing
(privately printed, and distributed only to members of the JAMs and the Legion of Dynamic Discord): “The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.”

(On November 23, 1970, the body of Stanislaus Oedipuski, forty-six, of West Irving Park Road, was found floating in the Chicago river. Death, according to the police laboratory, did not result from drowning but from beating about the head and shoulders with a square-ended object. The first inquiries by homicide detectives revealed that Oedipuski had been a member of God’s Lightning and the theory was formed that a conflict between the dead man and his former colleagues might have resulted in his being snuffed with their wooden crosses. Further investigation revealed that Oedipuski had been a construction worker and until very recently well liked on his job, behaving in a normal, down-to-earth manner, bitching about the government, cursing the lazy bums on Welfare, hating niggers, shouting obscene remarks at good-looking dolls who passed construction sites and—when the odds were safely above the 8-to-1 level—joining other middle-aged workers in attacking and beating young men with long hair, peace buttons, or other un-American stigmata. Then, about a month before, all that had changed. He began bitching about the bosses as well as the government—almost sounding like a communist at times; when somebody else cussed the crumb-bums on Welfare, Stan remarked thoughtfully, “Well, you know, our union keeps them from getting jobs, fellows, so what else can they do but go on Welfare? Steal?” He even said once, when some of the guys were good-humoredly giving the finger and making other gallant noises and signals toward a passing eighteen-year-old girl, “Hey, you know, that might really be embarrassing and scaring her …!” Worse yet, his own hair begun to grow surprisingly long in the back, and his wife told friends that he didn’t look at TV much anymore but instead sat in a chair most evenings reading
books
. The police found that was indeed true, and his small library—gathered in less
than a month—was remarkable indeed, featuring works on astronomy, sociology, Oriental mysticism, Darwin’s
Origin of the Species
, detective novels by Raymond Chandler,
Alice in Wonderland
, and a college-level text on number theory with the section on primes heavily marked with notes in the margin; the gallant, and now pathetic, tracks of a mind that was beginning to grow after four decades of stagnation, and then had been abruptly stomped. Most mysterious of all was the card found in the dead man’s pocket, which although waterlogged, could still be read. One side said

THERE IS NO ENEMY ANYWHERE

and the other side, even more mysteriously, was inscribed:

The police might have tried to decipher this, but then they discovered that Oedipuski had resigned from God’s Lightning—giving his fellow members a lecture on tolerance in the process—the night before his death. That closed the case, definitely. Homicide did not investigate murders clearly connected with God’s Lightning, since the Red Squad had its own personal accommodation with that burgeoning organization. “Poor motherfucker,” a detective said, looking at Oedipuski’s photographs; and closed the file forever. Nobody ever reopened it, or traced the change in the dead man back to his attendance at the meeting, one month before, of KCUF at the Sheraton-Chicago, where the punch was spiked with AUM.)

In the act of conception, of course, the father contributes 23 chromosomes and the mother contributes another 23. In the
I Ching
, hexagram 23 has connotations of “sinking” or “breaking apart,” shades of the unfortunate Captain Clarks …

Another woman just came by, collecting for the Mothers March against Muscular Dystrophy. I gave her a quarter. Where was I? Oh, yes: James Joyce had five letters in both his front name and his hind name, so he was worth looking into.
A Portrait of the Artist
has five chapters, all well and good, but
Ulysses
has 18 chapters, a stumper, until I remembered that 5 + 18 = 23. How about
Finnegans Wake?
Alas, that has 17 chapters, and I was bogged down for a while.

Trying another angle, I wondered if Frank Sullivan, the poor cluck who got shot instead of John at the Biograph Theatre that night, could have lingered until after midnight, dying on July 23 instead of July 22 as usually stated. I looked it up in Toland’s book,
The Dillinger Days
. Poor Frank, sad to say, died before midnight, but Toland included an interesting detail, which I told you that night at the Seminary bar: 23 people died of heat prostration that day in Chicago. He added something else: 17 people had died of heat prostration the day before. Why did he mention that? I’m sure he doesn’t know—but there it was again, 23 and 17. Maybe something important is going to happen in the year 2317? I couldn’t check that, of course (you can’t navigate precisely in the
Morgensheutegesternwelt)
, so I went back to 1723, and struck golden apples. That was the year Adam Smith and Adam Weishaupt were both born (and Smith published
The Wealth of Nations
the same year Weishaupt revived the Illuminati: 1776.)

Well, 2 + 3 = 5, fitting the Law of Fives, but 1 + 7 = 8, fitting nothing. Where did that leave me? Eight, I reflected, is the number of letters in Kallisti, back to the golden apple again, and 8 is also 2
3
, hot damn. Naturally, it came as no surprise when the 8 defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, which grew out of our little Convention Week Carnival, were tried on the 23rd floor of the Federal Building, amid a flurry of synchronicity—a Hoffman among the defendants, a Hoffman as judge; the Illuminati pyramid, or Great Seal of the U.S. right inside the door of the building and a Seale getting worse abuse than the other defendants; five-letter names and proliferating—Abbie, Davis, Foran, Seale, Jerry Rubin (twice), and the clincher, Clark (Ramsey, not Captain) who was torpedoed and sunk by the judge before he could testify.

I got interested in Dutch Shultz because he died on October 23. A cluster of synchronicity, that man: he ordered the shooting of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll (remember Mad Dog, Texas); Coll was shot on 23rd Street, when he was 23 years old; and Charlie Workman,
who allegedly shot Schultz, served 23 years in prison for it (although rumor has it that Mendy Weiss—two five-letter names, again—did the real shooting.) Does 17 come in? You bet. Shultz was first sentenced to prison at the age of 17.

Around this time I bought Robert Heinlein’s
The Puppet Masters
, thinking the plot might parallel some Illuminati operations. Imagine how I felt when Chapter Two began, “23 hours and 17 minutes ago, a flying saucer landed in Iowa …”

And, in New York, Peter Jackson is trying to get the next issue of
Confrontation
out on time—although the office is still a shambles, the editor and star researcher have disappeared, the best reporter has gone ape and claims to be at the bottom of the Atlantic with a wax tycoon, and the police are hounding Peter to find out why the first two detectives assigned to the case can’t be located. Sitting in his apartment (now the magazine’s office) in his shirt and shorts, Peter dials his phone with one hand, adding another crushed cigarette to the pile in the ashtray with the other. Throwing a manuscript onto a basket marked “Ready for Printer,” he crosses off “lead article—The Youngest Student Ever Admitted to Columbia Tells Why He Dropped Out by L. L. Durrutti” from a list on the pad before him. His pencil moves down to the bottom, “Book Review,” as he listens to the phone ring. Finally, he hears the click of a lifted receiver and a rich, flutey voice says, “Epicene Wildeblood here.”

“Got your book review ready, Eppy?”

“Have it tomorrow, dear boy. Can’t be any faster,
honestly!”

“Tomorrow will do,” Peter says writing
call again
—A.M. next to “Book Review.”

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