The illuminatus! trilogy (4 page)

“What the hell is this Desert Door project?” the President had asked once, scrutinizing the budget. “Germ warfare,” an aide explained helpfully. “They started with something called Anthrax Delta and now they’ve worked their way up to something called Anthrax Mu and …” His voice was drowned out by the rumble of paper shredders in the next room. The President recognized the characteristic sound of the “cesspool cleaners” hard at work. “Never mind,” he said. “Those things make me nervous.” He scribbled a quick “OK” next to the item and went on to “Deprived Children,” which made him feel better. “Here,” he said, “this is something we can cut.”

He forgot everything about Desert Door, until the Fernando Poo crises. “Suppose, just suppose,” he asked the Joint Chiefs on March 29, “I go on the tube and threaten all-out thermonuclear
heck
, and the other side doesn’t blink. Have we got something that’ll scare them even more?”

The J.C.’s exchanged glances. One of them spoke tentatively. “Out near Las Vegas,” he said, “we have this Desert Door project that seems to be way ahead of the Comrades in b-b and b-c—”

“That’s biological-bacteriological and biological-chemical,” the President explained to the Vice-President, who was frowning. “It has nothing to do with B-B guns.” Turning his attention back to the military men, he asked, “What have we got specifically that will curdle Ivan’s blood?”

“Well, there’s Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu…. It’s worse than any form of anthrax. More deadly than bubonic and anthrax and leoprosy all in one lump. As a matter of
fact,” the General who was speaking smiled grimly at the thought, “our evaluation suggests that with death being so quick, the psychological demoralization of the survivors—if there are any survivors—will be even worse than in thermonuclear exchange with maximum ‘dirty’ fallout.”

“By golly,” the President said. “By
golly
. We won’t use that out in the open. My speech’ll just talk Bomb, but we’ll leak it to the boys in the Kremlin that we’ve got this anthrax gimmick in cold storage, too. By gosh, you just wait and see them back down.” He stood up, decisive, firm, the image he always projected on television. “I’m going to see my speechwriters right now. Meanwhile, arrange that the brain responsible for this Anthrax-Pi gets a raise. What’s his name?” he asked over his shoulder going out the door.

“Mocenigo. Dr. Charles Mocenigo.”

“A raise for Dr. Charles Mocenigo,” the President called from the hallway.

“Mocenigo?” the Vice-President asked thoughtfully. “Is he a wop?”

“Don’t say wop,” the President shouted back. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t say wop or kike or
any
of those words anymore.” He spoke with some asperity, since he lived daily with the dread that someday the secret tapes he kept of alt Oval Room transactions would be released to the public. He had long ago vowed that if that day ever came, the tapes would not be full of “(expletive deleted)” or “(characterization deleted).” He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in
the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.

In Central Park, the squirrel woke again as a car honked loudly in passing. Muttering angrily, he leaped to another tree and immediately went back to sleep.
At the all night Bickford’s restaurant on Seventy-second Street, a young man named August Personage left a phone booth after making an obscene call to a woman in Brooklyn; he left behind one of his
this phone booth reserved for clark Kent
stickers
. In Chicago, one hour earlier on the clock but the same instant, the phone booth closed, a rock group called Clark Kent and His Supermen began a revival of “Rock Around the Clock”: their leader, a tall black man with a master’s degree in anthropology, had been known as El Hajj Starkerlee Mohammed during a militant phase a few years earlier, and his birth certificate said Robert Pearson on it. He was observing his audience and noted that that bearded young white cat, Simon, was with a black woman as usual—a fetish Pearson-Mohammed-Kent could understand by reverse psychology, since he preferred white chicks himself. Simon, for once, was not entranced by the music; instead, he was deep in conversation with the girl and drawing a diagram of a pyramid on the table to explain what he meant. “Crown Point,” Pearson heard him say over the music.
And listening to “Rock Around the Clock” ten years earlier, George Dorn had decided to let his hair grow long, smoke dope and become a musician. He had succeeded in two of those ambitions
. The statue of Tlaloc in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico, D.F., stared inscrutably upward, toward the stars …
and the same stars glittered above the Carribean where the porpoise named Howard sported in the waves
.

The motorcade passes the Texas School Book Depository and moves slowly toward the Triple Underpass. At the sixth-floor window, Lee Harvey Oswald sights carefully
through the Carcano-Mannlicher: his mouth is dry, desert dry. But his heartbeat is normal; and no sweat stands out on his forehead. This is the moment, he is thinking, the one moment transcending time and hazard, heredity and environment, the final test and proof of free will and of my right to call myself a man. In this moment, now, as I tighten the trigger, the Tyrant dies, and with him all the lies of a cruel, mendacious epoch. It is a supreme exalation, this moment and this knowledge: and yet his mouth is dry, dust-dry, dry as death, as if his salivary glands alone rebelled against the murder which his intellect pronounced necessary and just.
Now:
He recalls the military formula BASS: Breathe, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. He breathes, he aims, he slacks, he starts to squeeze, as a dog barks suddenly—

And his mouth falls open in astonishment as three shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the Grassy Knoll and Triple Underpass.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better—omniscience. That smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it:
I know something you don’t know
. That grimace only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped two bullets into Lee’s frail fanatic body, and its secret went with him to the grave. But another part of the secret had already left Dallas on Friday afternoon’s TWA Whisperjet to Los Angeles, traveling behind the business suit, gray hair, and only moderately sardonic eyes of a little old man who was listed on the flight manifest as “Frank Sullivan.”

This is serious, Peter Jackson was thinking; Joe Malik wasn’t on a paranoid trip at all. The noncommital expressions of Muldoon and Goodman did not deceive him at all—he had long ago learned the black art of surviving in a white world, which is the art of reading not what is on a face but what is behind the face. The cops were worried and excited, like any hunters on the track of something both large and dangerous. Joe was right about the assassination plot, and his disappearance and the bombing were part of it. And that meant George Dorn was in danger,
too, and Peter liked George even if he was a snotty kid in some ways and an annoying ass-kisser about the race thing like most young white radicals. Mad Dog, Texas, Peter thought: that sure sounds like a bad place to be in trouble
.

(Almost fifty years before, a habitual bank robber named Harry Pierpont approached a young convict in Michigan City Prison and asked him, “Do you think there might be a true religion?”)

But why is George Dorn screaming while Saul Goodman is reading the memos? Hold on for another jump, and this one is a shocker. Saul is no longer human; he’s a pig. All cops are pigs. Everything you’ve ever believed is probably a lie. The world is a dark, sinister, mysterious and totally frightening place. Can you digest all that quickly? Then, walk into the mind of George Dorn for the second time, five hours before the explosion at
Confrontation
(four hours before, on the clock) and suck on the joint, suck hard and hold it down. (“One o’clock … two o’clock … three o’clock … rock!”). You are sprawled on a crummy bed in a rundown hotel, and a neon light outside is flashing pink and blue patterns into your room. Exhale slowly, feel the hit of the weed and see if the wallpaper looks any brighter yet, any less Unintentional Low Camp. It’s hot, Texas-dry hot, and you push your long hair back from your forehead and haul out your diary, George Dorn, because reading over what you wrote last sometimes helps you to learn what you’re really getting into. As the neon splotches the page with pink and blue, read this:

* * *

There was a knock at the door.

The Fear came over George. Whenever he was high, the least little detail wrong in his world would bring the Fear, irresistible, uncontrollable. He held his breath, not to contain the smoke in his lungs, but because terror had paralyzed the muscles in his chest. He dropped the little notebook in which he wrote his thoughts daily and clutched at his penis, a habitual gesture in moments of panic. The hand holding the roach drifted, automatically, over the hollowed-out copy of Sinclair Lewis’s
It Can’t Happen Here
, which lay beside him on the bed, and he dropped the half-inch twist of paper and marijuana on top of the plastic Baggie full of green grains. Instantly a brown smoldering dime-sized hole opened up on the bag, and the pot near the coal started to smoke.

“Stupid,” said George, as his thumb stabbed the smoking coal to crush it, and he drew back his lips in a grimace of pain.

A short fat man walked into the room, Law Officer written in every mean line of his crafty little face. George shrank back and started to close
It Can’t Happen Here;
like lightning, three stiff, concrete-hard fingers drove into his forearm. He screamed and the book jumped out of his hand, spilling pot all over the bedspread.

“Don’t touch that,” said the fat man. “An officer will be in to gather it up for evidence. I went easy with that karate punch. Otherwise you’d be nursing a compound fracture of the left arm in Mad Dog County Jail tonight, and no right-thinking doctor likely to have a mind to come out and treat you.”

“You got a warrant?” George tried to sound defiant.

“Oh, you think you have cojones.” The fat man’s breath stank of bourbon and cheap cigars. “Rabbit cojones. I have terrified you unto death, boy, and you know it and I know it, yet you find it in your heart to speak of warrants. Next you’ll want to see the American Civil Liberties Union.” He pulled aside the jacket of an irridescent gray summer suit that might have been new when
Heartbreak Hotel
was the top of the hit parade. A silver five-pointed star decorated his pink shirt pocket and a .45 automatic stuck in his pants-top dented the fat of his belly. “That is all the law I need when dealing with your type in Mad Dog. Walk careful with me, son, or you
won’t have nothing to grab onto next time one of us pigs, as you choose to call us in your little articles, busts in on you. Which is not likely to happen in the next forty years, while you rot and grow old in our state prison.” He seemed immensely pleased with his own oratorical style, like one of Faulkner’s characters. George thought:

He said, “You can’t hit me with forty years for possession. And grass is legal in most other states. This law is archaic and absurd.”

“Shit and onions, boy, you got too much of the killer weed there to call it mere possession. I call it possession with intent to sell. And the laws of this state are stern, and they are just and they are our laws. We know what that weed can do. We remember the Alamo and Santa Anna’s troops losing all fear because they were high on Rosa Maria, as they called it in those days. Get on your feet. And don’t ask to talk to a lawyer, neither.”

“Can I ask who you are?”

“I am Sheriff Jim Cartwright, nemesis of all evil in Mad Dog and Mad Dog County.”

“And I’m Tiny Tim,” said George, immediately saying to himself, Shut the fuck up, you’re too goddamn high. And he went right on and said, “Maybe your side would have won if Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie got stoned, too. And, by the way, Sheriff, how did you know you could catch me with pot? Usually an underground journalist would make it a point to be clean when he comes into this godforsaken part of the country. It wasn’t telepathy that told you I had pot on me.”