The illuminatus! trilogy (76 page)

Mary Lou bought Edison Yerby’s seventieth or eightieth novel in the airport, which suited me fine since I like to read on airplanes myself. Looking around, I spotted
Telemachus Sneezed
and decided, what the hell, let’s see how the other half thinks. So there we were at fifty thousand feet a few yards from the author herself and I was plunged deeply into the
donner-und-blitzen
metaphysics of God’s Lightning. Unlike the lamentable Austrian monorchoid, Atlanta wrote like she had balls, and she expressed her philosophy in a frame of fiction rather than autobiography. Pretty soon, I was in her prose up to my ass and sinking rapidly. Fiction always does that to me: I buy it completely and my critical faculties come into action only after I’m finished.

Briefly, then,
Telemachus Sneezed
deals with a time in the near future when we dirty, filthy, freaky, lazy, dope-smoking, frantic-fucking anarchists have brought Law and Order to a nervous collapse in America. The heroine, Taffy Rhinestone, is, like Atlanta was once herself, a member of Women’s Liberation and a believer in socialism, anarchism, free abortions and the charisma of Che. Then comes the rude awakening: food riots, industrial stagnation, a reign of lawless looting and plunder, everything George Wallace ever
warned us against—but the Supreme Court, who are all anarchists with names ending in
-stein
or
-farb
or
-berger
(there is no
overt
anti-Semitism in the book), keeps repealing laws and taking away the rights of policemen. Finally, in the fifth chapter—the climax of Book One—the heroine, poor toughy Taffy, gets raped
fifteen
times by an oversexed black brute right out of
The Birth of a Nation
, while a group of cops stand by cursing, wringing their hands and frothing at the mouth because the Supreme Court rulings won’t allow them to take any action.

In Book Two, which takes place a few years later, things have degenerated even further and factory pollution has been replaced by a thick layer of marijuana smoke hanging over the country. The Supreme Court is gone, butchered by LSD crazed Mau-Maus who mistook them for a meeting of the Washington chapter of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association. The President and a shadowy government-in-exile are skulking about Montreal, living a gloomy emigre existence; the Blind Tigers, a rather thinly disguised caricature of the Black Panthers, are terrorizing white women everywhere from Bangor to Walla Walla; the crazy anarchists are forcing abortions on women whether they want them or not; and television shows nothing but Maoist propaganda and Danish stag films. Women, of course, are the worst sufferers in this blightmare, and, despite all her karate lessons, Taffy has been raped so many times, not only by standard vage-pen but orally and anally as well, that she’s practically a walking sperm bank. Then comes the big surprise, the monstro-rape to end all rapes, committed by a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. “Everything is fire,” he tells her, as he pulls his prick out afterwards, “and don’t you ever forget it.” Then he disappears.

Well, it turns out that Taffy has gone all icky-sticky-gooey over this character, and she determines to find him again and make an honest man of him. Meanwhile, however, a subplot is brewing, involving Taffy’s
evil brother, Diamond Jim Rhinestone, an unscrupulous dope pusher who is mixing heroin in his grass to make everybody an addict and enslave them to him. Diamond Jim is allied with the sinister Blind Tigers and a secret society, the Enlightened Ones, who cannot achieve world government as long as a patriotic and paranoid streak of nationalism remains in America.

But the forces of evil are being stymied. A secret underground group has been formed, using the cross as their symbol, and their slogan is appearing scrawled on walls everywhere:

Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse, the Blind Tigers won’t be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven’t gotten to yet, and the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore, he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive—but our hero, it turns out, gives lengthy comments on them).

At this point there is a major digression, while a herd of minor characters get on a Braniff jet for Ingolstadt. It soon develops that the pilot is tripping on acid, the copilot is bombed on Tangier hash and the stewardesses are all speed freaks and dykes, only interested in balling each other. Atlanta then takes you through the lives of each of the passengers and shows that the catastrophe that is about to befall them is richly deserved: all, in one way or another, had helped to create the Dope Grope or Fucks Fix culture by denying the “self-evident truth” of some hermetic saying
by Heracleitus. When the plane does a Steve Brodie into the North Atlantic, everybody on board, including the acid-tripping Captain Clark, are getting just what they merit for having denied that reality is really fire.

Meanwhile, Taffy has hired a private detective named Mickey “Cocktails” Molotov to search for her lost Aryan rapist with hollow cheeks. Before I could get into that, however, I was wondering about the synchronistic implications of the previous section, and called over one of the stewardesses.

“Could you tell me the pilot’s name?” I asked.

“Namen?”
she replied.
“Ja, Gretchen.”

“No, not your name,” I said, “the pilot’s name.
Namen wiser
, um,
Winginmacher?”

“Winginmacher?”
she repeated, dubiously,
“Ein Augenblick”
She went away, while I looked up
Augenblick
in a pocket German-English dictionary, and another stewardess, with the identical uniform, the identical smile and the identical blue eyes, came over, asking,
“Was wollen sie haben?”

I gave up on
Winginmacher
, obviously a bad guess.
“Gibt mir, bitte,”
I said,
“die Namen unser Fliegenmacher”
I spread my arms, imitating the plane.
“Luft Fliegenmacher,”
I repeated, adding helpfully, “How about
Luft Piloten?”

“It’s
Pilot
, not
Piloten,”
she said with lots of teeth. “His name is Captain Clark. Heathcliffe Clark.”

“Danke
— Thanks,” I said glumly, and returned to
Telemachus Sneezed
, imagining friend Heathcliffe up front there weathering heights of saure-soaring and plunging into the ocean because, as Mallory said, it’s there. An Englishman piloting a kraut airline, no less, just to remind me that I’m surrounded by the paradoxical paranoidal paranormal parameters of synchronicity. Their wandering ministerial Eye. Lord, I buried myself again in Atlanta Hope’s egregious epic.

Cocktails Molotov, the private dick, starts looking for the Great American Rapist, with only one clue: an architectural blueprint that fell out of his pocket while he was tupping Taffy. Cocktails’s method of investigation
is classically simple: he beats up everybody he meets until they confess or reveal something that gives him a lead. Along the way he meets an effete snob type who makes a kind of William O. Douglas speech putting down all this brutality. Molotov explains, for seventeen pages, one of the longest monologues I ever read in a novel, that life is a battle between Good and Evil and the whole modern world is corrupt because people see things in shades of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet instead of in clear black and white.

Meanwhile, of course, everybody is still mostly involved in fucking, smoking grass and neglecting to invest their capital in growth industries, so America is slipping backward toward what Atlanta calls “crapulous precapitalist chaos.”

At this point, another character enters the book, Howard Cork, a one-legged madman who commands a submarine called the
Life Eternal
and is battling
everybody
—the anarchists, the Communists, the Diamond Jim Rhinestone heroin cabal, the Blind Tigers, the Enlightened Ones, the U.S. government-in-exile, the still-nameless patriotic Underground and the Chicago Cubs—since he is convinced they are
all
fronting for a white whale of superhuman intelligence who is trying to take over the world on behalf of the cetaceans. (“No normal whale could do this,” he says after every TV newscast reveals further decay and chaos in America, “but a whale of superhuman intelligence…!”) This megalomaniac tub of blubber—the whale, not Howard Cork—is responsible for the release of the famous late-1960s record
Songs of the Blue Whales
, which has hypnotic powers to lead people into wild frenzies, dope-taking, rape and loss of faith in Christianity. In fact, the whale is behind most of the cultural developments of recent decades, influencing minds through hypnotic telepathy. “First, he introduced W. C. Fields,” Howard Cork rages to the dubious first mate, “Buck” Star, “then, when America’s moral fiber was sufficiently weakened, Liz and Dick and Andy
Warhol and rock music. Now, the Songs of the Blue Whales!” Star becomes convinced that Captain Cork went uncorked and wigged when he lost his leg during a simple ingrown toenail operation bungled by a hip young chiropodist stoned on mescaline. This suspicion is increased by the moody mariner’s insistence on wearing an old cork leg instead of a modern prosthetic model, proclaiming, “I was born all Cork and I’m not going to die only three-fourths Cork!”

Then comes a turnabout scene, and it is revealed that Cork is actually not bananas at all but really a smooth apple. In a meeting with a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression, it develops that the Captain is an agent of the Underground which is called God’s Lightning because of Heracleitus’s idea that God first manifested himself as a lightning bolt which created the world. Instead of hunting the big white whale, as the crew thinks, the
Life Eternal
is actually running munitions for the government-in-exile and God’s Lightning. When the hollow-cheeked leader leaves, he says to Cork, “Remember: the
way up
is the
way down
.”

Meanwhile, the Gateless Gate swung creakingly open and I started picking up some of the “real” world. That is, I began to recognize myself, again, as the ringmaster. All of this information gets fed into me, entropy and negentropy all synergized up in a wodge of wonderland, and I compute it as well as my memory banks give it unto me to understand these doings.

But, as Harry Coin, I enter Miss Portinari’s suite somewhat diffidently. I am conscious of the ghosts of dead pirates, only partly induced by this room’s surrealist variety of Hagbard’s nautical taste in murals. In fact, Harry, in his own language, had an asshole tight enough to shit bricks. It was easy, now, to accept that long-haired hippie, George, and even his black girlfriend as equals, but it just didn’t seem right to be asked to accept a
teenage girl
as a superior. A couple days ago I would have been thinking how to get into
her panties. Now I was thinking how to get her into my head. That Hagbard and his dope sure have screwed up my sense of values worse than anything since I left Biloxi.

And, for some reason, I could hear the Reverend Hill pounding the Bible and hollering up a storm back there in Biloxi, long ago, “No remission without blood! No remission without blood, brothers and sisters! Saint Paul says it and don’t you forget it! No remission without the blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! Amen.”

And Hagbard reads FUCKUP’S final analysis of the strategy and tactics in the Battle of Atlantis. All the evidence is consistent with Assumption A, and inconsistent with Assumption B, the mathematical part of FUCKUP has decided. Hagbard grinds his teeth in a savage grimace: Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control, and Assumption B is that there were human beings aboard them.

—Trust not a man who’s rich in flax—his morals may be sadly lax.

“Ready for destruction of enemy ships,” Howard’s voice came back to him.

“Are your people out of the way?”

“Of course. Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian.”

(Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control.)

The sea is crueler than the land. Sometimes
.

(None of the evidence is consistent with Assumption B.)

Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively.
That’s all there is to it
, he said.

But that wasn’t all there was to it. He had decided, coolly and in his wrong mind, that if he was a murderer already the final gambit might as well be one that would salvage part of the Demonstration. He had sent George to Drake (Bob, you’re dead now, but did you ever understand, even for a moment, what I tried to
tell you? What Jung tried to tell you even earlier?) and then twenty-four real men and women were dead, and now the bloodshed was escalating, and he wasn’t sure that any part of the Demonstration could be saved.

“No remission without blood! No remission without blood, brothers and sisters…No remission without the blood of our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ!”

I got into the Illuminati in 1951, when Joe McCarthy was riding high and everybody was looking for conspiracies everywhere. In my own naive way (I was a sophomore at New York University at the time) I was seeking to find myself, and I answered one of those Rosicrucian ads in the back of a girlie magazine. Of course, the Rosicrucians aren’t a front in the simple way that the Birchers and other paranoids think; only a couple of plants at AMORC headquarters are Illuminati agents. But they select possible candidates at random, and we get slightly different mailings than those sent to the average new member. If we show the proper spirit, our mailings get more interesting and a personal contact is made. Well, pretty soon I swore the whole oath, including that silly part about never visiting Naples, which is just an expression of an old grudge of Weishaupt’s, and I was admitted as Illuminatus Minerval with the name Ringo Erigena. Since I was majoring in law, I was instructed to seek a career in the FBI.