The illuminatus! trilogy (83 page)

His briefcase weighed down by Cartwright’s manuscript, which he’d decided to take home with him, he stood in the lobby of his office building, gazing gloomily at the tanks full of tropical fish in the window of the pet store. One tank had, as an ornament, a china model of a sunken pirate ship. It made Joe think again of Hagbard Celine. Did he trust Hagbard or didn’t he? Was it possible to really believe in a Hagbard with the Captain Nemo psychosis, brooding over tubes and jars full of bacteria cultures, one hairy finger hovering tentatively over a button that would send a torpedo full of Anthrax Tau germs out into the inky waters of the Atlantic? Within a week all humans would die, Cartwright
had said. And it was hard to think that Cartwright was lying, since he knew so much about so many other things.

When Joe got home he put on his favorite Museum of National History record,
The Language and Music of the Wolves
, and lit up a joint. He liked listening to the wolves when he was high, and trying to understand their language. Then he took Cartwright’s manuscript out of his briefcase and looked at the title page. It didn’t say a word about consciousness energy, indeed, it referred to a subject Joe found much more interesting:

“Well,” said Joe, “I’ll be fucked.”

“It was quite a trip,” said Hagbard Celine
.

“You’re quite a tripper,” Miss Portinari replied. “You really did Harry Coin very well. Probably just the way he’ll do it, when he gets up the nerve to come see me.”

“It was simpler than doing my own trip,” Hagbard said wearily. “My guilt is much deeper, because I know more. It was easier to take his guilt trip than to take my own.”

“And it’s over? Your fur no longer bristles?”

“I know who I am and why I’m here. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine.”

“How did you ever forget?”

Hagbard grinned. “It’s easy to forget. You know
that.”

She smiled back. “Blessed be, Captain.”

“Blessed be,” he said.

Returning to his stateroom, he was still subdued. The vision of the self-begotten and the serpent eating its own tail had broken the lines of word, image, and emotional energy that were steering him toward the Dark Night of the Soul again—but resolving his personal problem did not rescue the Demonstration or help him cope with the oncoming disaster. It merely freed him to begin anew. It merely reminded him that the end is the beginning and humility is endless.
It merely, merrily, turned the Wheel another Tarot-towery connection …

He realized he was still tripping a little. That was readily fixed: Harry Coin was tripping, and he wasn’t Harry Coin right now.

Hagbard, remembering again who he was and why he was there, opened his stateroom door. Joe Malik sat in a chair, under an octopus mural, and regarded him with a level glance.

“Who killed John Kennedy?” Joe asked calmly. “I want a straight answer this time, H.C.”

Hagbard relaxed into another chair, smiling gently. “That one finally registered, eh? I told John, all those years ago, to emphasize that you should never trust anyone with the initials H.C, and yet you’ve gone on trusting me and never noticing.”

“I noticed. But it seemed too wild to take seriously.”

“John Kennedy was killed by a man named Harold Canvera who lived on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, near the Seminary Restaurant, where you and Simon first discussed his theories of numerology. Dillinger had moved back to that neighborhood for a while in the late fifties, because he liked to go to the Biograph Theatre for old times’ sake, and Canvera was his landlord. A very sane, ordinary, rather dull individual. Then, in Dallas in 1963, John saw him blow the President’s head off before Oswald or Harry Coin or the Mafia gun could fire.” Hagbard paused to light a cigar. “We investigated Canvera afterward, like scientists investigating the first extraterrestrial life form. You can imagine how thorough we were. He had no politics at all at the time, which puzzled the hell out of us. It turned out that Canvera had put a lot of money into Blue Sky, Inc., a firm that made devices for landing on low-gravity planets. That was back in the very early fifties. Finally, Eisenhower’s hostility to the space program drove Blue Sky to the bottom of the board, and Canvera sold out at a terrible loss. Then Kennedy came in and announced that the U.S. was going to put a man on the moon. The stocks he’d sold were suddenly worth millions. Canvera’s brain snapped—that was all. Killing Kennedy and getting away with it turned him schizzy finally. He went in for spiritualism for a while, and then later joined White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, one of
the really paranoid anti-Illuminati groups, and ran a telephone message service giving WHORE propaganda.”

“And nobody else ever suspected?” Joe asked. “Canvera is still there in Chicago, going about his business, just another face on the street?”

“Not quite. He was shot a few years ago. Due to you.”

“Due to
me?”

“Yes. He was one of the subjects in the first AUM test. He subsequently made the mistake of knocking up the daughter of a local politician. It appears that the AUM made him susceptible to libertine ideas.”

WE’RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

“You sound very convincing, and I almost believe you,” Joe said slowly. “Why, all of a sudden? Why no more put-ons and runarounds?”

“We’re getting to the chimes at midnight,” Hagbard replied simply, with a Latin shrug. “The spell is ending. Soon the coach turns back to a pumpkin, Cinderella goes back to the kitchen, everybody takes their masks off, and the carnival is over. I mean it,” he added, his face full of sincerity. “Ask me anything and you get the truth.”

“Why are you keeping George and me apart? Why do I have to skulk around the sub like a wanted fugitive and eat with Calley and Eichmann? Why don’t you want George and me to compare notes?”

Hagbard sighed. “The real explanation for that would take a day. You’d have to understand the whole Celine System first. In the baby talk of conventional psychology, I’m taking away George’s father figures. You’re one: his first and only boss, an older man he trusts and respects. I became another very quickly, and that’s one of the thousand and one reasons I turned the guru-hood over to Miss Portinari. He had to confront Drake, the bad father, and lose you and me, the good fathers, before he could really learn to ball a woman. The next step, if you’re curious, is to take the woman away from him. Temporarily,” Hagbard added quickly. “Don’t be so jumpy. You’ve been through a large part of the Celine System, and it hasn’t killed you. You’re stronger because of it, aren’t you?”

Joe nodded, accepting this, but shot the next question immediately. “Do you know who bombed
Confrontation?”

“Yes, Joe. And I know
why
you did it.”

YOU’RE NOT A THING AT ALL

“Okay, then, here’s the payoff, and your answer better be good. Why are you helping the Illuminati to immanentize the Eschaton, Hagbard?”

“It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time, as a very wise man once said.”

“Jesus,” Joe said wearily. “I thought I had crossed that
ports asinorum
. When I figured out how you get the goose out of the bottle in the Zen riddle—you do nothing and wait for the goose to peck its way out, just like a chick pecks its way out of an
egg
—I realized ‘Do what thou wilt’ becomes ‘the whole of the law’ by a mathematical process. The equation balances when you realize who the ‘thou’ is, as distinguished from the ordinary ‘you.’ The whole fucking works, the universe—all of it alive in the same way we’re alive, and mechanical in the same way we’re mechanical. The Robot. The one more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages. Oh, Christ, yes, I thought I understood it all. But this, this…this stone fatalism—
what the hell are we going to Ingolstadt for, if we can’t do anything?”

“The coin has two sides. It’s the only coin that comes up at this time, but it still has two sides.” Hagbard leaned forward intensely. “It’s mechanical
and
alive. Let me give you a sexual metaphor, since you usually hang out with New York intellectuals. You look at a woman across a room and you know you’re going to bed with her before the night is over. That’s mechanical: Something has happened when your eyes met. But the orgasm is organic; what it will be like, neither of you can predict. And I know, just as the Illuminati know, that immanentization is going to happen on May first because of a mechanical process Adam Weishaupt started on another May first two centuries ago, and because of other processes other people started before then and since then. But neither I nor the Illuminati know what form immanentization will take. It doesn’t have to be hell on earth. It can be heaven on earth. And that’s why we’re going to Ingolstadt.”

THREE O’CLOCK TWO O’CLOCK ONE O’CLOCK

ROCK

I became a cop because of Billie Freshette. Well, I don’t want to jive you—that wasn’t the whole reason. But she sure as hell was one bodacious big part of the reason, and that’s the curious thing about what finally happened, and how Milo Flanagan assigned me to infiltrate the Lincoln
Park anarchist group, getting me in right up to my black ass in all that international intrigue and yoga-style balling with Simon Moon. But maybe I should start over from the beginning again, from Billie Freshette. I was a little kid and she was an old woman—it was in the early 1950s, you see (Hassan i Sabbah X was operating in the open then, going around the South Side preaching that the greatest of the White Magicians had just died recently in England and now the age of the Black Magicians was beginning; everybody thought he was one stone-crazy stud), and my father was a cook in a restaurant on Halsted. He pointed her out to me on the street once (it must have been just a while before she went back to the reservation in Wisconsin to die). “See that old woman, child? She was John Dillinger’s girl friend.”

Well, I looked, and I saw she was really heavy and together and that whatever the law had done to her never broke her, but I also saw that sorrow hung around her like a dark halo. Daddy went on and told me a lot more about her, and about Dillinger, but it was the sorrow that got printed all over every cell in my little baby brain. It took years for me to figure it out, but what it really meant, as an omen or conjure, was that she was basically just like the women of the black gang leaders on the South Side, even if she was an Indian. There’s just one way for a black in Chicago, and that’s to join a gang—Solidarity Forever, as Simon would say—but I dug that there was only one gang that was really safe, the biggest gang of all, Mister Charlie’s boys, the motherfucking establishment

I guess every black cop has that in the back of his head, before he finds out that we never really can join that gang, not as full members anyway. I found out quicker, being not just black but female. So I was in the gang, the baddest and heaviest gang, but I was always looking for something better, the impossible, the boss gimmick that would get me off the Man’s black-and-white chessboard entirely into some place where I was myself and not just a pawn being moved around at Charlie’s whim.

Otto Waterhouse never had that feeling, at least not until near the end of the game. I never did get inside his head enough to know what was going on there (he was a real cop and got into my head almost as soon as we met, and I could always feel him watching me, waiting for the time
when I would round on Charlie and go over to the other side), so the best I can do in making him is to say that he was no Tom in the ordinary sense: He didn’t screw blacks for the Man, he screwed blacks for himself; it was strictly his own trip.

Otto was my drop after I got assigned to underground work. We met in a place that I could always have an excuse to visit, a rundown law firm called Washington, Weishaupt, Budweiser and Kief, on 23 North Clark. Later, for some reason I was never told, they changed the name to Ruly, Kempt, Sheveled and Couth, and then to Weery, Stale, Flatt and Profitable, and to keep up the front they actually did hire a couple of lawyers and did some real law work for a corporation called Blue Sky, Inc.

On April 29, still harboring a cargo of doubt about Hagbard, Joe Malik decided to try the simplest method of Tarot divination. Concentrating all his energy on the question, he cut the deck and picked out one card that would reveal Hagbard Celine’s true nature, if the divination worked. With a sinking heart, he saw that he had come up with the Hierophant. Running the mnemonics Simon had taught him, Joe quickly identified this figure with the number five, the Hebrew letter
Vau
(meaning “nail”), and the traditional interpretation of a false show: a hypocrisy or a trick. Five was the number of
Grummet
, the destructive and chaotic end of a cycle.
Vau
was the letter associated with quarrels, and the meaning “nail” was often related to the implement of Christ’s death. The card was telling him that Hagbard was a hypocritical trickster aiming at destruction, a murderer of the Dreamer-Redeemer aspect of humanity. Or, taking a more mystical reading, as was usually advisable with the Tarot, Hagbard only seemed to be these things, and was actually an agent of Resurrection and Rebirth—as Christ had to die before he could become the Father, as (in Vedanta) the false “self” must be obliterated to join the great Self. Joe swore. The card was only reflecting his own uncertainty. He rummaged in the bookshelf Hagbard had provided for his stateroom and found three books on the Tarot. The first, a popular manual, was absolutely useless: It identified the Hierophant with the letter of religion in contrast to the spirit, with conformity, and with all the plastic middle-class values Hagbard conspicuously lacked. The second (by a true adept of the Tarot) just led him back to
his own confused reading of the card, remarking that the Hierophant is “mysterious, even sinister. He seems to be enjoying a very secret joke at somebody’s expense.” The third work raised more doubts: It was
Liber 555
, by somebody named Mordecai Malignatus, which vaguely reminded Joe that the old
East Village Other
chart of the Illuminati conspiracy showed a “Mordecai the Foul” in charge of the Sphere of Chaos—and “Mordecai Malignatus” was a fair Latinization of “Mordecai the Foul.” Mordecai, Joe remembered, was, according to that half-accurate and half-deceptive chart, in dual control (along with Richard Nixon, then living) of the Elders of Zion, the House of Rothschild, the Politburo, the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. Communist Party, and Students for a Democratic Society. Joe flipped the pages to see what the semimythical Mord had to say about the Hierophant. The chapter was brief; it was in “The Book of Republicans and Sinners,” and said: