The illuminatus! trilogy (87 page)

“How you doing, Malik?” called Hagbard.

“Great, Hagbard, just great,” said Joe.

“We’re gonna save the earth, aren’t we, Joe?” Hagbard yelled. “Gonna save the earth, that right?”

“Jesus saves,” said George. He began to sing:

Hagbard and Stella laughed and applauded. Harry Coin shook his head and muttered, “Takes me back. Sure does take me back.”

Joe took a few steps away from George, moving so he could face Hagbard across the table. “What do you mean, save the earth?”

Hagbard looked at him stupidly, his mouth hanging open. “If you don’t know that, why are you here?”

“I just want to know—we’re going to save the earth, but are we going to save the people?”

“What people?”

“The people that live on the earth.”

“Oh—those people,” said Hagbard. “Sure, sure, we’re gonna save
everybody.”

Stella frowned. “This is the silliest conversation I’ve ever heard.”

Hagbard shrugged. “Stella, honey, why don’t you go on back to the
Leif Erikson?”

“Well, fuck you, Charley.” Stella stood up and flounced off, her peasant skirt swinging.

At that moment a little wall-eyed man tapped Joe on the shoulder. “Sit down, Joe. Have a drink. Sit down with George and me.”

“I’ve seen you before,” said Joe.

“Perhaps. Come, sit down. Let’s have some of this good Bavarian beer. It has great integrity. Have you ever tried it? Waitress!” The newcomer snapped his fingers impatiently, all the while staring owlishly at Joe through lenses as thick as the bottoms of beer glasses. Joe let himself be led to a chair.

“You look exactly like Jean-Paul Sartre,” said Joe as he sat down. “I’ve always wanted to meet Jean-Paul Sartre.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, then, Joe,” said the man. “Put your hand into my side.”

“Mal, baby!” Joe cried, attempting to embrace the apparition and ending up hugging himself while George, bleary-eyed, stared and shook his head. “Am I glad to see you here,” Joe went on. “But how come you’re doing Jean-Paul Sartre instead of your hairy taxi driver?”

“This is a good cover,” said Malaclypse. “People would expect Jean-Paul Sartre to be here, covering the world’s biggest rock festival from an existentialist point of view. On the other hand, this is Lon Chaney, Jr., country, and if I started showing up as Sylvan Martiset, with a face covered with fur, I’d have a mob of peasants carrying torches looking for me all over town.”

“I saw a hairy chauffeur today,” said George. “Do you suppose it was Lon Chaney, Jr.?”

“Don’t worry, George,” said Malaclypse with a smile. “The hairy people are on our side.”

“Really?” said Joe. He looked around. Hagbard Celine was the hairiest person at the table. His fingers, hands, and bare forearms were black with hair. The stubble of his
beard came high up on his cheekbones, just below his eyes. On the back of his neck the hair didn’t stop growing, but continued down into his collar. Stripped, Joe thought, the man must look like a bear rug. Many of the other people at the table had long hair or Afro haircuts, and the men had beards and mustaches. Joe remembered Miss Mao’s hairy armpits. The peasant blouses on the women in this room hid their armpits from examination, George, of course, had that shoulder-length blond hair that made him look like a Giotto angel. But, Joe thought, what about me? I’m not hairy at all. I keep my hair in a crew cut because I prefer it that way. Where does that leave me?

“What difference does hair make?” he asked Malaclypse.

“Hair is the most important thing in this society,” said George. “I’ve tried repeatedly to explain that to you, Joe, and you’ve always never listened. Hair is the whole thing.”

“Hair in this society at this moment is a symbol,” said Malaclypse. “However, there is a real aspect to hair which enables me, for instance, to look around this room and surmise that many of these people are enemies of the Illuminati. You see, all humans were once fur-bearing.”

Joe nodded. “I saw that in the movie.”

“Oh, yes, you saw
When Atlantis Ruled the Earth
, didn’t you?” said Malaclypse. “Well, hairlessness, you’ll recall, was Gruad’s peculiarity. Most of the people whom the Illuminati permitted to live—and to eventually become recivilized, Illuminati-style—were mated with or raped by descendants of Gruad. But the fur-bearing gene, found in all humans before the catastrophe, has not disappeared. It is quite common in enemies of the Illuminati. My suspicion is that if we knew the histories of ELF and the Discordians and the JAMs, we’d find that they go back to Atlantean origins and preserve to some extent the genes of Gruad’s foes. I’m inclined to believe that hairy people, in whom the genes of Atlanteans other than Gruad predominate, are inherently predisposed to anti-Illuminati activities. Conversely, people who work against the Illuminati are also likely to favor lots of hair. These factors have given rise to legends about werewolves, vampires, beast-men of all kinds, abominable snowmen, and furry demons. Note the general success of the Illuminati propaganda campaign to portray all such hirsute beings as fearsome and evil. The propensity for hairiness among anti-Illuminati types also explains why lots of
hair is a common characteristic of bohemians, beatniks, leftists generally, scientists, artists, and hippies. All such people tend to make good recruits for the anti-Illuminati organizations.”

“Sometimes we make it sound as if the Illuminati were the only menace on earth,” said Joe. “Isn’t it equally possible that people who are opposed to the Illuminati may be dangerous?”

“Oh, yes indeed,” said Malaclypse. “Good and evil are two ends of the same street. But the street was built by the Illuminati. They had excellent reasons, from their viewpoint, to preach the Christian ethic to the masses, you know. What is John Guilt?”

Joe remembered what he’d said to Jim Cartwright several years ago:
Sometimes I wonder if we’re not all working for them, one way or another
. He hadn’t meant it at the time, but now he realized it was probably true. He might be doing the Illuminati’s work right now, when he thought he was saving the human race. Just as Celine might be doing the will of the Illuminati while thinking that he was preserving the earth.

George, bleary-eyed and smiling, said, “Where’d you meet Sheriff Jim, Joe?”

Joe stared at him. “What?”

“Hairlessness is the reason why Gruad and his successors were partial to reptiles,” said Malaclypse, adjusting his thick glasses. “They had a real feeling of kinship. One of their symbols was a serpent with its tail in its mouth, which was intended to refer both to Gruad’s Ophidian assassins and to his other experiments with reptilian lifeforms.”

Joe, still shaken by George’s question, yet not wanting to probe further in that direction, said, “All kinds of myths involving serpents crop up in all parts of the world.”

“All of them go back to Gruad,” said Malaclypse. “The serpent symbol and the Atlantean catastrophe gave rise to the myth that Adam and Eve, tempted by the serpent, fell into misery when they acquired the knowledge of good and evil. Just as Atlantis fell through the moralistic ideology of Gruad the serpent-scientist. Then there’s the old Norse myth of the World Serpent with its tail in its mouth that holds the universe together. The Illuminati serpent symbol was also the origin of the brazen serpent of Moses, the plumed serpent of the Aztecs, and their legend of the eagle
devouring the snake, the caduceus of Mercury, St. Patrick casting the snakes out of Ireland, various Baltic tales of the serpent king, legends of dragons, the monster guarding the fabulous treasure at the bottom of the Rhine, the Loch Ness monster, and a whole raft of other stories connecting serpents with the supernatural. In fact, the name ‘Gruad’ comes from an Atlantean word that translates variously as ‘worm,’ ‘serpent,’ or ‘dragon,’ depending on context.”

“I’d say he was all three,” said Joe. “From what I know.”

George said, “I saw the Loch Ness monster today. Hagbard called it a she, which surprised me. But this is the first I’ve heard about this serpent business. I thought the Illuminati symbol was an eye in a pyramid.”

“The Big Eye is their most important symbol,” said Malaclypse, “but it isn’t the only one. The Rosy Cross is another. But most widely copied is the serpent symbol. The eye in the pyramid and the serpent are often seen in combination. Together they represent the sea monster Leviathan, whose tentacles are depicted as serpents and whose central body is shown as an eye in a pyramid. Since each of Leviathan’s tentacles is said to have an independent brain, that’s not half bad. The swastika, which was a pretty important symbol around these parts some decades ago, was originally a stylized drawing of Leviathan and his many tentacles. Early versions of it have more than four hooks, and they often include a triangle, sometimes even an eye-and-triangle, in the center. A common transitional form is a triangle with the sides extended and then hooked to form tentacle shapes. There are two tentacles for each of the three angles, which yields a twenty-three. Polish archeologists found a swastika painted in a cave. The drawing dated back to Cro-Magnon times, not long after the fall of Atlantis, and there were twenty-three swirling tentacles around a beautifully executed pyramid with an ocher eye in its center.”

George held his breath. Mavis had come into the room. Instead of the peasant-skirt outfit Hagbard had decreed, she was wearing what might have been called hot lederhosen, a very short, very tight pair of leather breeches that made her legs look fantastically long and underlined the round curves of her ass.

“Wow—that’s some attractive woman,” said Joe.

“Don’t you know her?” asked George. “Well, that puts me one up on you. You’re going to meet her.”

Mavis came over, and George said, “Mavis, this is Joe Malik, the guy who put me in the cell you got me out of.”

“That’s a little unfair,” Joe said, taking Mavis’s hands with a smile, “but I did send him down to Mad Dog.”

“Excuse me,” said Mavis. “I want to talk with Hagbard.” She disengaged her hand and walked away. Both Joe and George looked stricken. Malaclypse merely smiled.

Just then a tall, stern-looking black man came into the room. He too was wearing Bavarian peasant costume. He went up to Hagbard and shook hands.

“Hey, it’s Otto Waterhouse, the infamous killer cop and cop killer!” roared Hagbard, swilling down beer from his huge stein. Waterhouse looked pained for a moment, then sat down and surveyed the room through narrowed eyes.

“Where’s my Stella?” he demanded gruffly. George felt his hackles rise. He knew he had no right of possession where Stella was concerned. But then, neither did this guy. Exclusive possession seemed the one type of sexual relationship not practiced among the Discordians and their allies. There was a kind of tribal, general love among them which didn’t prevent anybody from sleeping with anybody else. An unsympathetic observer might call it “promiscuity,” but that word, as George understood it, meant using another’s body for sex without feeling anything for the person you were physically involved with. The Discordians were all too close, too concerned about each other as people, for the word “promiscuity” to fit their sex lives. And George loved them all: Hagbard, Mavis, Stella, the other Discordians, Joe, even Harry Coin, maybe even Otto Waterhouse, who had just appeared.

Mavis said, “Stella’s gone down to the submarine, Otto. She’ll join us at the proper time.”

Hagbard suddenly lurched to his feet.
“Quiet!”
he roared. A silence fell around the smoky room. People stared at Hagbard curiously.

“We’re all here now,” he said. “So, I got an announcement to make. I want you to all join me in drinking to an engagement announcement.”

“Engagement?”
somebody called incredulously.

“Shut the fuck up,” Hagbard snarled. “I’m talking, and if anybody interrupts me again I’ll throw them out. Yes, I’m talking about an engagement. To be married. Day after tomorrow, when the Eschaton has been immanentized and all
of this is over—lift your steins—Mavis and I will be married aboard the
Leif Erikson
by Miss Portinari.”

George sat there still for a moment, absorbing it, looking at Hagbard. He looked from Hagbard to Mavis, and tears started to well up in his eyes. He stood and lifted his stein.

“Here’s to ya, Hagbard!” he said, and he drew his arm back in a sidearm motion so as not to spill any of the beer and then let the whole stein fly at Hagbard’s head. Laughing, Hagbard swayed to one side, a movement so casual it didn’t appear that he was ducking. The stein struck the painted head of Emperor Henry IV. The painting apparently had been done on a heavy board, because the stein smashed to bits without marking it. A waiter rushed forward to wipe the beer away, looking reproachfully at George.

“Sorry,” said George. “Hate to damage a work of art. You should have kept your head in place, Hagbard. It would have been less of a loss.” He took a deep breath and roared, “Sinners! Sinners in the hands of an angry God! You are all spiders in the hand of the Lord!” He held out his hand, palm upward. “And he holds you over a fiery pit!” George turned his palm over. He noticed suddenly that everyone in the room was silent and looking at him. Then he passed out, falling into the arms of Joe Malik.

“Beautiful,” said Hagbard. “Exquisite.”

“Is that what you meant by taking the woman away from him?” said Joe angrily as he eased George into a chair. “You’re a sadistic prick.”

“That’s only the first step,” said Hagbard. “And I said it was
temporary
. Did you see the way he threw that stein? His aim was perfect. He would have brained me if I hadn’t known it was coming.”

“He should have,” said Joe. “You mean you were lying about you and Mavis getting married? You were just saying that to bug George?”

“He certainly was not,” said Mavis. “Hagbard and I have both had it with this catch-as-catch-can single life. And I’ll never find another man who more perfectly fits my value system than Hagbard. I don’t need anybody else.” As if to prove that she meant what she said, she knelt abruptly and kissed Hagbard’s hairy left instep.