The illuminatus! trilogy (5 page)

Sheriff Cartwright slapped his thigh. “Oh, but it was. It
was
telepathy. Now just what made you think it wasn’t telepathy brung me here?” He laughed, seized George’s arm in a grip of iron, and pushed him toward the hotel-room door. George felt a bottomless terror as if the pit of hell were opening beneath his feet and Sheriff Jim Cartwright were about to pitchfork him into the bubbling sulfur. And I must admit that was more or less the case;
there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.

(“Keep on hanging out with those wild boys from Passaic and you’ll end up in jail,” George’s mother said. “You mark my words, George.” And, another time, at Columbia, after a very late meeting, Mark Rudd said so berly, “A lot of us are going to spend some time in the Man’s jails before this shit-storm is over;” and George, together with the others, nodded glumly but bravely
. The marijuana he had been smoking was raised in Cuernavaca by a farmer named Arturo Jesus Maria Ybarra y Mendez, who had sold it in bulk to a young
Yanqui
named Jim Riley, the son of a Dayton, Ohio, police officer, who in turn smuggled it through Mad Dog after paying a suitable bribe to Sheriff Jim Cartwright. After that it was resold to a Times Square dealer called Rosetta the Stoned and a Miss Walsh from
Confrontation’s
research department bought ten ounces from her, later reselling five ounces to George, who then carried it back to Mad Dog without any suspicion that he was virtually completing a cycle, The original seed was part of that strain recommended by General George Washington in the famous letter to Sir John Sinclair in which he writes, “I find that, for all purposes, the Indian hemp is in every way superior to the New Zealand variety previously cultivated here.”
In New York, Rebecca Goodman, deciding that Saul will not be home tonight, slips out of bed, dons a robe and begins to browse through her library. Finally she selects a hook on Babylonian mythology and begins to read:
“Before all of the gods, was Mummu, the spirit of Pure Chaos….”
In Chicago, Simon and Mary Lou Servix sit naked on her bed, legs intertwined in the yabyum lotus position. “No,” Simon is saying, “You don’t move, baby; you wait for
it
to move you.”
Clark Kent and His Supermen swing into a reprise: “We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight … We’re gonna rock rock rock till broad day light.”)

George’s cellmate in Mad Dog County Jail had a skull-like face with large, protruding front teeth. He was about six and a half feet tall and lay curled up on his cell bunk like a coiled python.

“Have you asked for treatment?” George asked him.

“Treatment for what?”

“Well, if you think you’re an assassin—”

“I don’t think, baby brother. I’ve killed four white men and two niggers. One in California, the rest down here. Got paid for every one of them.”

“Is that what you’re in for?” My God, they don’t stick murderers in the same cell with potheads, do they?

“I’m in for vagrancy,” said the man scornfully. “Actually, I’m just here for safekeeping, till they give me my orders. Then it’s good-bye to whoever—President, civil rights leader, enemy of the people. Someday I’ll be famous. I’m gonna write a book about myself someday, Ace. Course, I’m no good at writing. Look, maybe we can do a deal. I’ll have Sheriff Jim bring you some writing paper if you’ll write about my life. They gonna keep you here forever, you know. I’ll come and visit you between assassinations, and you’ll write the book, and Sheriff Jim’ll keep it safe till I retire. Then you have the book published and you’ll make a lot of money and be real comfortable in jail. Or maybe you can even hire a lawyer to get you out.”

“Where will you be?” said George. He was still scared, but he was feeling sleepy, too, and he was deciding that this was all bullshit, which had a calming effect on his nerves. But he’d better not go to sleep in the cell while this guy was awake. He didn’t really believe this assassin talk, but it was safe to assume that anybody you met in prison was homosexual.

As if reading his mind, his cellmate said, “How’d you like to let a famous assassin shove it up to you? How would that be, huh, Ace?”

“Please,” said George. “That’s not my bag, you know? I really couldn’t do it.”

“Shit, piss, and corruption,” said the assassin. He suddenly uncoiled and slid off the bunk. “I been wasting my time with you. Now bend the hell over and drop your pants. You are getting it, and there ain’t no further way about it.” He stepped toward George, fists clenched.

“Guard! Guard!” George yelled. He grabbed the cell door in both hands and began rattling it frantically.

The man caught George a cuff across the face. Another blow to the jaw knocked George against the wall.

“Guard!”
he screamed, his head spinning with pot and panic.

A man in a blue uniform came through the door at the end of the corridor. He seemed miles away and vastly disinterested, like a god who had grown bored with his creations.

“Now, what the hell is all this yelling about in here?” he asked, his hand on the butt of his revolver, his voice still miles away.

George opened his mouth, but his cellmate spoke first. “This little long-haired communist freak won’t drop his pants when I tell him. Ain’t you supposed to make sure I’m happy in here?” The voice shifted to a whine. “Make him do what I say.”

“You’ve got to protect me,” said George. “You’ve got to get me out of this cell.”

The god-guard laughed. “Well, now, you might say this is a very enlightened prison we have here. You come down from New York and you probably think we’re pretty backward. But we ain’t. We got no police brutality. Now, if I interfered between you and Harry Coin here, I might have to use force to keep him away from your young ass. I know you people believe all cops ought to be abolished. Well, in this here situation I hereby abolish myself. Furthermore, I know you people believe in sexual freedom, and I do, too. So Harry Coin gonna have his sexual freedom without any interference or brutality from me.” His voice was still distant and disinterested, almost dreamy.

“No,” said George.

The guard drew his pistol. “Now, sonny. You take down your pants and bend over. You are gonna get it up the ass from Harry Coin here, and no two ways about it. And I am gonna watch and see that you let him do it right. Otherwise, you get no forty years. You get killed, right now. I put a bullet in you and I say you are resisting arrest. Now make up your mind what it’s gonna be. I really will kill you if you don’t do like he tells you to. I really will. You are totally expendable and he ain’t. He’s a very important man, and it’s my job to keep him happy.”

“And I’ll fuck you either way, dead or alive,” the demented Coin laughed, like an evil spirit. “So there’s no way you can escape it, Ace.”

The door at the end of the corridor clanged, and Sheriff Jim Cartwright and two blue-uniformed policemen strode down to the cell. “What’s going on here?” said the Sheriff.

“I caught this queer punk George Dorn here trying to commit homosexual rape on Harry,” said the guard. “Had to draw my pistol to stop him.”

George shook his head. “You guys are unbelievable. If you’re acting out this little game for my benefit, you can quit now, because you’re certainly not fooling each other, and you’re not fooling me.”

“Dorn,” said the Sheriff, “you’ve been attempting unnatural acts in my jail, acts forbidden by the Holy Bible and the laws of this state. I don’t like that. I don’t like it one little bit. Come on out here. I wanna have a little talk with you. We goin’ to the main interrogation room for some speakin’ together.”

He unlocked the cell door and motioned George to precede him. He turned to the two policemen who had accompanied him. “Stay behind and take care of that other
little matter.”
The last words were strangely emphasized.

George and the Sheriff walked through a series of corridors and locked doors until at last they came to a room whose walls were made of embossed sheet tin painted bottle-green. The Sheriff told George to sit on one chair, while he straddled the back of the chair facing him.

“You’re a bad influence on my prisoners,” he said. “I got a good mind to see that some kind of accident happens to you. I don’t want to see you corrupting prisoners in my jail—mine or anyone’s—for forty years.”

“Sheriff,” said George. “What do you want from me? You got me on a pot charge. What more do you want? Why did you stick me in that cell with that guy? What’s all this scare stuff and threats and questioning for?”

“I wanna know some things,” said the Sheriff. “I want to find out everything you can tell me about certain matters. So, from this moment be prepared to tell me only the truth. If you do, maybe things will go easier on you, after.”

“Yes, Sheriff,” said George. Cartwright squinted at him. He really does look like a pig, thought George. Most do. Why do so many of them get so fat and have such little eyes?

“Well, then,” said the Sheriff. “What was your purpose in coming down here from New York?”

“I’m simply on an assignment from
Confrontation
, the magazine—”

“I know it. It is a smutty magazine, and a communist magazine. I have read it.”

“You’re using loaded words. It’s a left-wing libertarian magazine, to be exact.”

“My pistol is loaded, too, boy. So talk straight. All right. Tell me what you came down here to write about.”

“Sure. You ought to be as interested in this as I am, if you’re really interested in law and order. There have been rumors circulating throughout the country for more than a decade now that all the major political assassinations in America—Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Medgar Evers, King, Nixon, maybe even George Lincoln Rockwell—are the work of a single, conspiratorial, violence-oriented right-wing organization, and that this organization has its base right here in Mad Dog. I came down to see what I could find out about this group.”

“That’s what I figured,” said the Sheriff. “You poor, sad little turd. You come down here with your long hair and you expect to get, as you put it, a line on a right-wing organization. Why, it’s lucky for you you didn’t meet any of our real right-wingers, like God’s Lightning for instance. The ones around here would have tortured you to death by this time, boy. You really are dumb. OK, I’m not gonna waste any more of my time with you. Come on, I’ll take you back to your cell. You might as well get used to looking at the moon through bars.”

They walked back the same way they had come. At the entrance to the corridor where George’s cell was, the Sheriff opened the door and yelled, “Come and get him, Charley.”

George’s guard, his face pale and his mouth set in a lipless line, took George by the arm. The corridor door clanged shut behind the Sheriff. Charley took George to his cell and pushed him in wordlessly. But at least he was three-dimensional now and less like a marijuana phantom.

Harry Coin wasn’t there. The cell was empty. George became aware of a shadow in the corner of his vision. Something in the cell next to him. He turned: His heart stopped. There was a man hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. George went over and stared through the bars. The body was swaying slightly. It was attached to the pipe by a leather belt which was buckled around the neck. The face, with the staring eyes, was that of Harry Coin. George’s glance went lower. Something was coming out of
Harry Coin’s midsection and was dangling down to the floor. It wasn’t suicide. They had disemboweled Harry Coin, and someone had thoughtfully moved a shit-can under him for his bloody intestines to dangle into.

George screamed. There was no one around to answer him. The guard had vanished like Hermes.

(But in Cherry Knolls mental hospital in Sunderland, England, where it was already eleven the following morning, a schizophrenic patient who hadn’t spoken in ten years abruptly began exhorting a ward attendant: “They’re all coming back—Hitler, Goering, Streicher, the whole lot of them. And, behind them, the powers and persons from the other spheres who control them….” But Simon Moon in Chicago still calmly and placidly retains the lotus position and instructs Mary Lou sitting in his lap: “Just hold it, hold it with your vaginal wall like you’d hold it with your hand, gently, and feel its warmth, but don’t think about orgasm, don’t think about the future, not even a minute ahead, think about the now, the only now, the only now, the only now that we’ll ever have, just my penis in your vagina now and the simple pleasure of it, not a greater pleasure to work toward….” “My back hurts,” Mary Lou said.)

WE’RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TO NIGHT

There are Swedish and Norwegian kids, Danes, Italian and French kids, Greeks, even Americans. George and Hagbard move through the crowd trying to estimate its number—200,000? 300,000? 500,000? Peace symbols dangling about every neck, nudes with body paint, nudes without body paint, long and dangling hair on boys and girls alike, and over all of it the hypnotic and unending beat. “Woodstock Europa,” Hagbard says drily. “The last and final Walpurgisnacht and Adam Weishaupt’s Erotion finally realized.”

WE’RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

“It’s a League of Nations,” George says, “a young people’s League of Nations.” Hagbard isn’t listening. “Up there,” he points, “to the Northwest is the Rhine, where
die Lorelei
was supposed to sit and sing her deadly songs. There will be deadlier music on the Danube tonight.”

WE’RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT

(But that was still seven days in the future, and now
George lies unconscious in Mad Dog County Jail. And it began—that phase of the operation, as Hagbard called it—over thirty years before when a Swiss chemist named Hoffman climbed on his bicycle and pedaled down a country road into new dimensions.)

“And will they all come back?” George asked.

“All of them,” Hagbard answered tightly “When the beat reaches the proper intensity … unless we can stop it.”