The illuminatus! trilogy (70 page)

This was a myth, Hagbard had confided to George. Until Harry Coin had completed his course in the Celine System, it was better if he believed himself the world’s most unsuccessful assassin rather than face the truth: that he had goofed only on his first job (Dallas, November 22, 1963) and really had killed five men since then. Of course, even if Hagbard wasn’t a holy man any longer, he was still tricky: maybe Harry had, indeed, missed every time. Perhaps Hagbard was keeping the image of Harry as mass murderer in George’s mind to see if George could relate to the man’s present instead of being hung up on his “past.”

At least I’ve learned this much, George thought. The word “past” is always in quotes for me, now.

“The Mohawk,” Stella said, leaning back lazily (George’s male organ or penis or dick or whatever the hell is the natural word, if there is a natural word, well, my cock, then, my delicious ever-hungry cock rose a centimeter as her blouse tightened on her breasts, Lord God, we’d been humping like wart hogs in rutting season for hours and hours and hours and I was still horny and still in love with her and I probably always would be, but then again maybe I’m the Martian). Well, in fact, the old pussy hunter didn’t rise more than a millimeter, not a centimeter, and he was as slow as an old man getting out of bed in January. I had just about fucked until my brains came out my ears, even before Harry brought in the hash and wanted to talk. Looking for the Martian. Looking for the governor of Dorn. Looking for the Illuminati. Krishna chasing his tail around the curved space of the Einsteinian universe until he disappears up his own ass, leaving behind a behind: the back of the void: the Dorn theory of circutheosodomognosis. “Owned some land,” she continued. That beautiful black face, like ebon melody: yes, no painter could show but Bach could hint the delight of those purple-tinted lips in that black face, saying, “And the government wanted to steal the land. To build a dam.” The inside of her cunt had that purple hue to it, also, and there was a tawny beige in her palm, like a Caucasian’s skin, there were so many delights in her body, and in mine, too, treasures that couldn’t be spent in a million years of the most tender and violent fucking. “Hagbard was the engineer hired to build the dam, but when he found out that the Indians would be dispossessed and relocated on less fertile ground, he refused the job.” Eris, Eros spelled sideways. “He broke his contract, so the government sued him,” she said. “That’s how he got to be a close friend with the Mohawk.”

Which was all pure crapperoo. Obviously, Hagbard had gone to court as a lawyer for the Indians, but that one touch of shame in him had kept him from admitting to Stella that he had once been a lawyer, so he
made up that bit about being the engineer on the dam to explain how he got involved in the case.

“He helped them move when they were dispossessed.” I could see bronze men and women moving in twilight, a hill in the background. “This was a long time ago, back in the ’50s, I think. (Hagbard was a hell of a lot older than he looked.) One Indian was carrying a raccoon he said was his grandfather. He was a very old man himself. He said Grandfather could remember General Washington and how he changed after he became President. (He would be there tonight, that being who had once been George Washington and Adam Weishaupt: he of whom Hitler had said, “He is already among us. He is intrepid and terrible. I am afraid of him.”) Hagbard says he kept thinking of Patrick Henry, the one man who saw what had happened at the Constitutional Convention. It was Henry who had looked at the Constitution and said right away, ‘I smell a rat. It squints toward monarchy.’ The Old Indian, whose name was Uncle John Feather, said that Grandfather, when he was a man, could speak to all animals. He said the Mohawk Nation was more than the living, it was the soul and the soil joined together. When the land was taken, some of the soul died. He said that was why he couldn’t speak to all animals but only to those who had once been part of his family.” The soul is in the blood, moving the blood. It is in the night especially. Nutley is a typical Catholic-dominated New Jersey town, and the Dorns are Baptists, so I was hemmed in two ways, but even as a boy I used to walk along the Passaic looking for Indian arrowheads, and the soul would move when I found one. Who was the anthropologist who thought the Ojibway believed all rocks were alive? A chief had straightened him out: “Open your eyes,” he said, “and you’ll see
which
rocks are alive.” We haven’t had our Frobenius yet. American anthropology is like virgins writing about sex.

“
I
know
who
the
Martian
is,” Coin crooned in a singsong. “But I’m not telling. Not yet.” That man who was either the most successful or the most unsuccessful
assassin of the 20th century and who had raped me (which was supposed to destroy my manhood forever according to some idiots) was smashed out of his skull and he looked so happy that I was happy
for
him.

“Hagbard,” Stella went on, “stood there like a tree. He was paralyzed. Finally, old Uncle John Feather asked what was the matter.”

Stella leaned forward, her face more richly black against the golden octopus on the wall. “Hagbard had foreseen the ecological catastrophe. He had seen the rise of the Welfare State, Warrior Liberalism (as he calls it) and the spread of Marxism out of Russia across the world. He saw why it all had to happen, with or without the Illuminati helping it along. He understood the Snafu Principle.”

He had worked all that night, after explaining to Uncle John Feather that he was troubled in his heart at the tragedy of the Mohawk (not mentioning the more enormous tragedy coming at the planet, the tragedy which the old man understood already in his own terms); hard work, carrying pitiful cheap furniture from cabins onto trucks, tying whole households’ possessions with tough ropes; he was sweating and winded when they finished shortly before dawn. The next day, he had burned his naturalization papers and put the ashes in an envelope addressed to the President of the United States, with a brief note: “Everything relevant is ruled irrelevant. Everything material is ruled immaterial. An ex-citizen.” The ashes of his Army Reserve discharge went to the Secretary of Defense with a briefer note:
“Non serviam
. An ex-slave.” That year’s income tax form went to the Secretary of the Treasury, after he wiped his ass on it; the note said: “Try robbing a poor box.
Der Einziege”
His fury still mounting, he grabbed his copy of
Das Kapital
off the bookshelf, smiling bitterly at the memory of his sarcastic marginal notes, scrawled “Without private property there is no private life” on the flyleaf, and mailed it to Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. Then he buzzed his secretary, gave her three months pay in lieu of notice of dismissal
and walked out of his law office forever. He had declared war on all governments of the world.

His afternoon was spent giving away his savings, which at that time amounted to seventy thousand dollars. Some he gave to drunks on the street, some to little boys or little girls in parks; when the Stock Exchange closed, he was on Wall Street, handing out fat bundles of bills to the wealthiest-looking men he could spot, telling them, “Enjoy it. Before you die, it won’t be worth shit.” That night he slept on a bench in Grand Central Terminal; in the morning, flat broke, he signed on as A.B.S. aboard a merchant ship to Norway.

That summer he tramped across Europe working as tourist guide, cook, tutor, any odd job that fell his way, but mostly talking and listening. About politics. He heard that the Marshall Plan was a sneaky way of robbing Europe under the pretense of helping it; that Stalin would have more trouble with Tito than he had had with Trotsky; that the Viet Minh would surrender soon and the French would retake Indo-China; that nobody in Germany was a Nazi anymore; that everybody in Germany was still a Nazi; that Dewey would unseat Truman easily.

During his last walking tour of Europe, in the 1930s, he had heard that Hitler only wanted Czechoslovakia and would do anything to avoid war with England; that Stalin’s troubles with Trotsky would never end; that all Europe would go socialist after the next war; that America would certainly enter the war when it came; that America would certainly stay out of the war when it came.

One idea had remained fairly constant, however, and he heard it everywhere. That idea was that more government, tougher government, more honest government was the answer to all human problems.

Hagbard began making notes for the treatise that later became
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing
. He began with a section that he later moved to the middle of the book:

That autumn, Hagbard settled in Rome. He worked as a tourist guide, amusing himself by combining authentic Roman history with Cecil B. DeMille (none of the tourists ever caught him out); he also spent long hours scrutinizing the published reports of Interpol. His
Wanderjahr
was ending; he was preparing for action. Never subject to guilt or masochism, he had one reason only for his dispersal of his savings: to prove to himself that what he intended could be done starting from zero. When winter arrived, his studies were complete: Interpol’s crime statistics had very kindly provided him with a list of those commodities which, either because of tariffs intended to stifle competition or because of “morals” laws, could become the foundation of a successful career in smuggling.

One year later, in the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street in New York, Hagbard was placed under arrest by two U.S. narcotics agents named Calley and Eichmann. “Don’t take it too hard,” Calley said. “We’re only following orders.”