The illuminatus! trilogy (54 page)

The third week was quite remarkable. Evidently, AUM, like LSD, changed some personality traits but left others fairly intact; in any event, in Canvera’s irregular evolution from right-wing authoritarianism to right-wing libertarianism, he had somehow managed to arrive at a thesis never before enunciated except by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. What this rare man did was to give a three-minute spiel in favor of the right of any person, of either sex, to use any other person, of either sex,
with or without
their consent, for sexual gratification of any sort needed or at least
desired
. The only option he granted the recipients of these intimate invasions was the reciprocal right to use the initiator for their own needs or desires. Now, most of the people who regularly called Canvera’s phone service were not offended by any of this; they were Lincoln Avenue hippies and dialed him only when stoned, for what they called “a really weird and far-out head trip,” and they were bored that he was no longer
as funky as in his old Negro-baiting, Jew-hating and Illuminati-castigating days. However, there were a few members of White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism who called occasionally to check that their contributions were still financing the dissemination of true Americanism, and these people were severely puzzled and finally disturbed. Some of them even wrote to WHORE headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, to complain that there was something a little bit peculiar in the Americanism lately. However, the president of WHORE, Dr. Horace Naismith, who also ran the John Dillinger Died for You Society, Veterans of the Sexual Revolution, and the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, was in it only for the money, sad to say, and had no time for such petty complaints. He was too busy implementing his newest fund-raising scheme, the Male Chauvinist Organization (MACHO), which he hoped would milk
mucho
denaros from Russ Meyers, illegal abortionists, pimps, industrialists who regularly paid female workers thirty percent of the salaries of men doing the same jobs, and all others threatened by the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The fourth week was, to be frank about it, definitely bizarre. Canvera discoursed at length on the lost civilization that once existed in the Gobi Desert and denounced those, such as Brion Gysin, who believed it had destroyed itself in atomic war. Rather, he asserted, it had been obliterated when the Illuminati arrived from the planet Vulcan in flying saucers. “Remember the Alamo” was now replaced by “Remember Carcosa,” Canvera having discerned that both Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft were describing this tragic Gobian society in their fiction. The hippies were again delighted—this was the funky kind of trip that had originally made Canvera a mock folk hero among them—and they especially appreciated his call for the U.S. to abandon the next moon shot and launch a punitive expedition to Vulcan both to wipe out Illuminism at its source and to avenge poor Carcosa. The
WHORE regulars, however, were again upset; all that concern with Carcosa struck them as creeping one-worldism.

The fifth week, Canvera took a new turn, denouncing the masses for their stupidity and proclaiming that the boobs probably deserved being governed by the Illuminati since most of them were too dumb to find their own behinds in a dark room even using both hands. He had been browsing through a volume of H. L. Mencken (sent to him over a year earlier by El Haj Stackerlee Mohammed, né Pearson, after one of his put-prayers-back-in-the-public-schools tirades); but he had also been pondering an invitation to
join
the Illuminati. This document, which came in an envelope with no return address, informed him that he was too smart to stay with the losers all his life and ought to climb on the winning side before it was too late. It added that membership dues were $3125, which should be put in a cigar box and buried in his back yard, after which it promised “one of our underground agents will contact you.” At first, Canvera had considered this a hoax—he received many put-ons in the mail, together with pornography, Rosicrucian pamphlets, illustrated with the eye-and-pyramid design, and pretended fan letters signed by such names as
Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel Castro, Anton Szandor Levay
or
Judge Crater
, all of course cooked up by his Lincoln Avenue audience. Later, however, it struck him that 3125 was
five to the fifth power
and that convinced him a True Illuminatus was indeed communicating with him. He took the $3125 out of his savings account, buried it as instructed, made a pro-Illuminati recording as a gesture of good faith and waited. The next day he was shot, several times, in the head and shoulders, dying of natural causes as a result.

(In present time again, Rebecca Goodman enters the Hotel Tudor lobby in answer to the second mysterious phone call of the day, while Hagbard decides George Dorn needs to be illuminized further before Ingolstadt, and Esperando Despond clears his throat
and says, “I want to explain the mathematics of plague to you men
…”)

Actually, poor old Canvera’s death had nothing to do with the Illuminati or with his former compatriots in WHORE. The man had been practicing the libertine philosophy of his post-AUM phone editorials and had tampered with Cassandra Acconci, the beloved daughter of Ronald Acconci, Chicago Regional Commander of God’s Lightning and a long-time contributor to KCUF. Acconci arranged, via State’s Attorney Milo A. Flanagan, for the local Maf to do a hit on Canvera. But there are no endings, any more than there are any beginnings; it next developed that Canvera’s seed lived on in wedlock with Cassandra’s ovum and was in danger of becoming a human being within her previously trim abdomen.

Saul Goodman had no idea that the room he was in had last been rented to George Dorn; he was conscious only of his impatience, not knowing that Rebecca was at that moment on an elevator approaching his floor
… And a mile north, Peter Jackson, still trying to put together the July issue of
Confrontation
virtually singlehanded, dives into the slush pile (which is the magazine industry’s elegant name for unsolicited manuscripts) and comes up with more fallout from the Moon-Malik AUM project of 1970. “Orthodox Science: The New Religion,” he reads.
Well, let’s sample it, what the hell
. Opening at random he finds:

“What the ring-tailed rambling hell?” Peter Jackson said aloud. He flipped to the end:

“Far fucking
out,”
Peter muttered. James Mallison was a pen name Joe Malik sometimes used, and here was another James Mallison inspiring this guy to become
a Ph.D. and invent a new cosmological theory. What was the word Joe used for such coincidences? Synch-something …

(“1472,” Esperando Despond concludes his gloomy mathematical calculations. “That’s the number of plague cases we might have right now, at noon, if the girl had only two contacts after leaving Dr. Mocenigo. Now, if she had three contacts …” The assembled FBI agents are gradually turning a pale greenish color from the neck up. Carmel, the only actual contact, is busy two blocks away stuffing money into a briefcase.)

“That’s him!” Mrs. Edward Coke Bacon cried excitedly, addressing Basil Banghart, another FBI agent, in an office in Washington. She is pointing at a photo of Albert “the Teacher” Stern. “Ma’am” Banghart says kindly, “that can’t be him. I don’t even know why his picture’s still in the file. That’s a no-account junkie who once got on our most-wanted list because he confessed to a murder he didn’t even commit.”
In Cincinnati, an FBI artist is completing a portrait under the direction of the widow of a slain TV repairman: the face of the killer, gradually emerging, combines various features of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, George Dorn and the lead vocalist of the American Medical Association, which group was at that moment boarding a plane at Kennedy International Airport for the Ingolstadt gig. Rebecca Goodman, rising in the Hotel Tudor elevator, has a flash memory of a nightmare of the night before: Saul being shot by the same vocalist, dressed as a monk, in red-and-white robes, while a Playboy bunny danced in front of some kind of giant pyramid. In Princeton, New Jersey, a nuclear physicist named Nils Nosferatu—one of the few survivors of the early morning shootings—babbles to the detective and police stenographer at his bedside, “Tlaloc sucks. You can’t trust them. The midget is the one to watch. We’ll be moved, all right, when the tear gas hits. Fun is fun, Omega. George’s brother met the dolphins first, and that was the psychic hook that brought George in. She’s at the door. She’s buried in the desert. Any deviation
will result in termination. Unify the forces. You hold the hose. I’ll get Mark.”

“I’ve got to start telling you the truth, George,” Hagbard began hesitantly,
as the Midget, Carmel and Dr. Horace Naismith collided in front of the door of the Sands Hotel (“Watch the fuck where you’re going” Carmel growled)
, and she was at the door, her heart was pounding, an intuition was forming in her mind, and she knocked
(and Peter Jackson began dialing Epicene Wildeblood)
, and she was sure of it, and she was afraid of being sure because she might be wrong,
and the Midget said to Dr. Naismith “Rude bastard, wasn’t he?”
and the door opened,
and the door of Milo O. Flanagan’s office opened to admit Cassandra Acconci
, and her heart stopped,
and Dr. Nosferatu screamed, “The door. She’s in the door. The door in the desert. He eats Carmels,”
and it was him and she was in his arms and she was weeping and laughing and asking, “Where have you
been
, baby?” And Saul closed the door behind her and drew her further into the room. “I’m not a cop anymore,” he said, “I’m on the other side.”

“What?”
Rebecca noticed there was a new thing in his eyes, a thing for which she had no word.

“You can stop worrying that you’ll get back on horse,” he went on gaily. “And if you’ve ever been afraid of your sexual fantasies, don’t be. We’ve all got them. Saint Bernards!”

But even that wasn’t as weird as the new thing in his eyes.

“Baby,” she said,
“baby
. What the hell is this?”

“I wanted sex with my father, when I was two years old. When did you have that thing about the Saint Bernard?”

“When I was eleven or twelve, I think. Just before my first period. My God, you must have been a lot further away than I ever imagined.” She was beginning to recognize the new thing. It wasn’t intelligence; he had always had that. With awe, she realized it was what the ancients called wisdom.

“I’ve always had a thing about black women, just like your thing about black men,” he went on. “I think everybody in this country has a touch of it. The blacks have it about
us
, too. I was in one head, a brilliant black guy, musician, scientist, poet, a million talents, and white women were like the Holy Grail to him. And your fantasy about Spiro Agnew—I had one just like that about Use Koch, a Nazi bitch from before your time. It was the same thing in both cases, revenge. Not real sex, hate-sex. Oh, we’re all so crazy-in-the-head.”

Rebecca backed up and sat down on the bed. “It’s too much, too fast, I’m scared. I can see you don’t have any contempt for me, but, Lord, can I
live
knowing that somebody else knows every single repressed desire I have?”

“Yes,” Saul said calmly. “And you’re mistaken about Time. I can’t know every secret, darling. I’ve only had a smattering of them. A handful. There are a dozen people right now who’ve been through my head the same way, and I can look any one of them in the eye. The things I know about
them!”
He laughed.

“It’s still too fast,” Rebecca said. “You disappear, and then you come back knowing things about me that I only half know myself, and you’re not a cop anymore … What do you mean, you’ve joined ‘the other side’? The Mafia? The Morituri groups?”

“No,” Saul answered happily. “Much further out than that. Darling, I’ve been driven mad by the world’s best brainwashers and put back together again by a computer that does psychotherapy, predicts the future and steers a submarine all at once. On the way, I learned things about humanity and the universe that it would take a year to tell you. And I don’t have much time right now, because I’ve got to fly to Las Vegas. In two or three days, if everything works out, I’ll be able to show you, not just tell you—”