The illuminatus! trilogy (56 page)

The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but people
did
keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema’s two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks; by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge.

It was in college (Antioch, Yellow Springs, 1962)
that Markoff Chaney discovered another hidden joke in his name, and the circumstances were—considering that he was to become the worst headache the Illuminati ever encountered—appropriately synchronistic. It was in a math class, and, since this was Antioch, the two students directly behind the Midget were ignoring the professor and discussing their own intellectual interests; since this was Antioch, they were a good six years ahead of intellectual fads elsewhere. They were discussing ethology.

“So we keep the same instincts as our primate ancestors,” one student (he was from Chicago, his name was Moon, and he was crazy even for Antioch) was saying. “But we superimpose culture and law on top of this. So we get split in two, dig? You might say,” Moon’s voice betrayed pride in the aphorism he was about to unleash, “mankind is a statutory ape.”

“ … and,” the professor, old Fred “Fidgets” Digits, said at just that moment, “when such a related series appears in a random process, we have what is known as a Markoff Chain. I hope Mr. Chaney won’t be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the term, even if the related series of his appearances in class do seem part of a notably random process.” The class roared; another ton of bile was entered in the Midget’s shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died.

In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were times when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room,
Playboy
gatefold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women built like Playmates. Today, however,
Playboy
would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, Physical Anthropology (always good for a few humiliating moments), he hurried across David Street, passing Atlanta Hope without noticing her, and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind him.

Damn old Fidgets Digits, and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the
whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random factor. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy. He would be a random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits.

He took out the pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let’s have a Markoff Chain masturbation to start with, he thought with an evil grin.

And, thus, without ever contacting the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front or even the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney began his own crusade against the Illuminati, not even knowing that they existed.

His first overt act—his Fort Sumter, as it were—began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in Norton’s Emporium, a glorified 5 & 100 store, when he saw the sign:

What!
, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can’t find a superior? Years of school came back to him (“Please, may I leave the room, sir?”) and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly made sense in a sinister way. Mathematics, of course. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah! not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor “Sheets” Kelly’s intensive course on textual analysis of modern poetry. The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton’s and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:

He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process; Marx had been wrong, lacking cybernetics to enlighten him. Marx was like the engineers of his time, who thought of electricity in terms of work done, before Marconi thought of it in terms of information transmitted. Nothing signed “the mgt.” would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management.

At the same time, he noticed that the workers were more irritable; the shoppers picked this up and became grouchier themselves; sales, he guessed correctly; were falling off. Poetry was the answer: poetry in reverse. His interpolated phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness, bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious fashion. Let the market researchers and statisticians try to figure this one out with their computers and averages.

His father had been a stockholder in Blue Sky Inc., generally regarded as the worst turkey on the Big Board (it produced devices to be used in making landings on low-gravity planets); profits had soared when John Fitzgerald Kennedy had announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before 1970; the Midget now had a guaranteed annuity amounting to thirty-six hundred dollars per year, three hundred dollars per month. It was enough for his purposes. Revenge, in good measure, he would have. He would have revenge.

Living in Spartan fashion, dining often on a tin of sardines and a pint of milk from a machine, traveling always by Greyhound bus, the Midget criss-crossed the
country constantly, placing his improved surrealist signs whenever the opportunity presented itself. A slowly mounting wave of anarchy followed in his wake. The Illuminati never got a fix on him: he had little ego to discover, burning all his energies into Drive, like a dictator or a great painter—but, unlike a dictator or a great painter, he had no desire for recognition. For years, the Illuminati attributed his efforts to the Discordians, the JAMs or the esoteric ELF. Watts went up, and Detroit; Birmingham, Buffalo, Newark, a flaming picnic blanket spread across urban America as the Midget’s signs burned in the stores that had flaunted them; one hundred thousand marched to the Pentagon and some of them tried to expel the Demon (the Illuminati foiled that at the last minute, forbidding them to form a circle); a Democratic convention was held behind barbed wire; in 1970 a Senate committee announced that there had been three thousand bombings in the year, or an average of ten per day; by 1973 Morituri groups were forming in every college, every suburb; the SLA came and came back again; Atlanta Hope was soon unable to control God’s Lightning, which was going in for its own variety of terrorism years before Illuminati planning had intended.

“There’s a random factor somewhere,” technicians said at Illuminati International; “There’s a random factor somewhere,” Hagbard Celine said, reading the data that came out of fuckup; “There’s a random factor somewhere,” the Dealy Lama, leader of ELF, said dreamily in his underground hideout beneath Dealy Plaza.

Drivers on treacherous mountain roads swore in confusion at signs that said:

Men paid high initiation fees to revel in the elegance
of all-WASP clubs whose waiters were carefully trained to be almost as snobbish as the members, then felt vaguely let down by signs warning them:

The Midget became an electronic wizard in his spare time. All over the country, pedestrians stood undecided on curbs as electric signs said walk while the light was red and then switched to don’t walk when the light Went green. He branched out and expanded his activities; office workers received memos early in the morning (after he had spent a night with a Xerox machine) and puzzled over:

On April 26 of the year when the Illuminati tried to immanentize the Eschaton, the Midget experienced aches, pains, nausea, spots before his eyes, numbness in his legs and dizziness. He went to the hotel doctor, and a short while after describing his symptoms he was rushed in a closed car to a building that had a Hopi Indian Kachina Doll Shop in front and the Las Vegas CIA office in the back. He was fairly delirious by then, but he heard somebody say, “Ha, we’re ahead of the FBI
and
the Cesspool Cleaners on this one.” Then he got an injection and began to feel better, until a friendly silver-haired man sat down by his cot and asked who “the girl” was.

“What girl?” the Midget asked irritably.

“Look, son, we know you’ve been with a girl. She gave you this.”

“Was it the clap?” the Midget asked, dumbfounded. Except for his pornographic Tarot cards, he was still a virgin (the giant women were all so damned patronizing, but his own female equivalents bored him; the giantesses were the Holy Grail to him, but he had never had the courage to approach one). “I never knew the clap could be this bad,” he added, blushing. His greatest fear was that somebody would discover his virginity.

“No, it wasn’t the clap,” said the kindly man (who didn’t deceive the Midget one bit; if this guy couldn’t pump him, he knew, they would send in the mean, tough one; the nice cop and the nasty cop; oldest con in the business). “This girl had a certain, uh, rare disease, and we’re with the U.S. Public Health Service.” The gentle man produced forged credentials to “prove” this last allegation. Horseshit, the Midget thought. “Now,” the sweet old codger went on, “we’ve got to track her down, and see that she gets the antidote, or a
lot of people will get this disease. You understand?”

The Midget understood. This guy was Army Intelligence or CIA and they wanted to crack this before the FBI and get the credit. The disease was started by the government, obviously. Some fuckup in one of their biological war laboratories, and they had to cover it up before the whole country got wise. He hesitated; none of his projects had ever been consciously intended to lead to death, just to make things a little unpredictable and spooky for the giants.

“The U.S. Public Health Service will be eternally grateful to you.” the grandfatherly man said, eyes crinkling with sly affection. “It isn’t often that a
little
man gets a chance to do such a
big
job for his country.” That did it. “Well,” the Midget said, “she was blonde, in her mid-twenties I guess, and she told me her name was Sarah. She had a scar on her neck—I suppose somebody tried to cut her throat once. She was, let’s see, about five-five and maybe 110-115 pounds. And she was superb at giving head,” he concluded, thinking that was a very plausible Las Vegas whore he had just created. His mind was racing rapidly; they wouldn’t want people running around loose knowing about this. The antidote had been to keep him alive while they pumped him. He needed insurance. “Oh, and here’s a real lead for you,” he said “I just remembered. First, I want to explain something about, uh, people who are below average in stature. We’re very sexy. You see, our sex gland or whatever it’s called works extra, because our growth gland doesn’t work. So we never get enough.” He was making this up off the top of his head and enjoying it. He hoped it would spread; he had a beautiful vision of bored rich women seeking midgets as they now seek blacks. “So you see,” he went on, “I kept her a long time, having encores and encores and encores. Finally, she told me she’d have to raise her price, because she had another customer waiting. I couldn’t afford it so I let her go.” Now the clincher. “But she mentioned his name. She
said, ‘Joe Blotz will be pissed if I disappoint him,’ only the name wasn’t Joe Blotz.”

“Well, what was it?”

“That’s the problem,” the Midget said sadly. “I can’t remember. But if you leave me alone awhile,” he added brightly, “maybe it’ll come back to me.” He was already planning his escape.

And, twenty-five hours earlier, George Dorn, quoting Pilate, asked, “What is Truth?”
(Barney Muldoon just then, was lounging in the lobby of the Hotel Tudor, waiting for Saul to finish what he had called “a very important, very private conversation” with Rebecca; Nkrumah Fubar was experimentally placing a voodoo doll of the president of American Express inside a tetrahedron—their computer was still annoying him about a bill he’d paid over two months ago, on the very daynight that Soapy Mocenigo dreamed of Anthrax Leprosy Pi; R. Buckminster Fuller, unaware of this new development in his geodesic revolution, was lecturing the Royal Institute of Architects in London and explaining why there were no nouns in the real world; August Personage was breathing into a telephone in New York; Pearson Mohammed Kent was exuberantly balling a female who was not only
white
but
from Texas;
the Midget himself was saying “Rude bastard, isn’t he?” to Dr. Naismith; and our other characters were variously pursuing their own hobbies, predilections, obsessions and holy missions).
But Hagbard, with uncharacteristic gravity, said
, “Truth is the opposite of lies. The opposite of most of what you’ve heard all your life. The opposite of most of what you’ve heard from me.”