The illuminatus! trilogy (90 page)

“I
used to be
a cop,” Danny said with an engaging imitation of frankness. “But that was years ago, and the work really didn’t appeal to me. I’m a salesman for
Britannica
now. Better hours, and people only slam doors in my face —they don’t shoot at me through them.”

“Listen,” Doris said excitedly. “The AMA is playing ‘Age of Bavaria,’” It was the song that, more than any other, both expressed and mocked the aspirations of youth around the world, and the accuracy with which it expressed
their yearnings and the savagery with which it denied them had won them over.

It started almost the instant the music began. A mile below the surface of the lake, near the opposite shore, an army began to rise from the dead. The black-uniformed corpses broke loose from their moorings, rose to the surface, and began to drift toward shore. As more and more of the semblance of life returned, the drifting became swimming motions, then wading. They fell into ranks on the shore. Under the steel helmets their complexions were greenish, their eyes heavily lidded, their black lips drawn back in wide grimaces. The mouths of the officers and noncoms moved, forming words of command, though no sound came forth. No sound was needed, it seemed, for the orders were instantly obeyed. Once again the power that had been granted to Adolf Hitler by the Illuminated Lodge in 1923 (“Because you are so preposterous,” they told him at the time)—the power that had manifested itself in steel-helmed armies that had won Hitler an empire stretching from Stalingrad to the Atlantic, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert—once again that power was visible on the earth.

“They are coming. I can feel it,” Werner whispered to his twin, Wilhelm, as Wolfgang thundered on the drums and Winifred belted out:

The tanks and artillery were rolling into position. The caterpillar treads of the troop carriers were churning. Motorcycle couriers sped up and down the beach. A squadron of partially dismantled Stukas was lined up in the road. After the festivalgoers had been massacred and Ingolstadt had been overrun, the planes would be trucked to the nearby Ingolstadt Aerodrome, where they would be assembled and ready to fly by morning.

The dead men removed black rubber sheaths from rolled up red-white-and-black banners and unfurled them. Many of them were the familiar swastika flags and banners of the Third Reich, with one addition: a red eye-and-pyramid device superimposed on the center of each swastika. Other banners carried Gothic-lettered mottos such as
DRANG NACH
OESTEN and HEUTE DIE WELT, MORGENS DAS SONNENSYSTEM
.

At last all was in readiness. The blue-black lips of General-of-the-SS Rudolf Hanfgeist, thirty years dead, shaped the command to march, which was relayed in similar fashion from the higher-ranking officers to the lower-ranking officers to the men. The lights and music on the opposite shore beckoned across the dark, bottomless waters. Moonlight glinting on the death’s heads on their caps and runic SS insignia on their collars, the soldiers moved out, company by company. The only sound was the growl of the diesel engines of troop carriers and the clank of weapons.

“They’re coming,” said the woman under Hagbard, who was neither Mavis nor Stella nor Mao, but a woman with straight black hair, olive skin, fierce black eyebrows, and a bony face.

“Coming, Mother,” said Hagbard, giving himself up to the irresistible onward sweep of sensation to the brink of orgasm and over.

“I’m not your mother,” said the woman. “Your mother was a blond, blue-eyed Norweigian. And I look Greek now, I think.”

“You’re the mother of all of us,” said Hagbard, kissing her sweat-damp neck.

“Ah,” said the woman. “Is that who I am? Then we’re getting somewhere.”

Then I started to flip, Malik eclipsed by Malaclypse and Celine hardly serene, Mary Lou I Worship You, the Red Eye is my own Mooning, What is the meaning of moaning? and suchlike seminal semantic antics (my head is a Quicktran quicksand where
The Territorial Imperative
always triggers
Stay Off My Turf
, the Latin and the Saxon at war in poor Simon’s synapses, dead men fighting for use of my tongue, turning Population Explosion into We’re Fucking Overcrowded and backward also, so it might emerge Copulation Explosion, and besides Hag barred straights from this Black-and-White Mass, the acid was in me, I was tripping, flipping, skipping, ripping, on my Way with Maotsey Taotsey for the number of Our Lady is an hundred and fifty and six—there is Wiccadom!), but I never expected it this way.

“What do you see?” I asked Mary Lou.

“Some people who were swimming, coming out of the lake. What do you see?”

“Not what I’m supposed to see.”

For the front line, clear as
claritas
, was Mescalito from my peyote visions and Osiris with enormous female breasts and Spider Man and the Tarot Magus and Good Old Charlie Brown and Bugs Bunny with a Tommy gun and Jughead and Archie and Captain America and Hermes Thrice-Blessed and Zeus and Athene and Zagreus with his lynxes and panthers and Micky Mouse and Superman and Santa Claus and Laughing Buddha Jesus and a million million birds, canaries and budgies and gaunt herons and holy crows and crowly hose and eagles and hawks and mourning doves (for mourning never ends), and they’d all been stoned since the late Devonian period, when they first started eating hemp seeds, no wonder Huxley found birds “the most emotional class of life,” singing all the time, stoned out of their bird-brained skulls, all singing “I circle around, I circle around,” except the mynah Birds squawking “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” and I remembered again that existence isn’t sensible any more than it’s hot or red or high or sour, only parts of existence have those qualities, and then there was the Zig-Zag man and my God my god my father leading them in singing

SOLIDARITY FOREVER

    
SOLIDARITY FOREV ERRRR

        
THE UNION MAKES US STRONG

“I say,” said an Englishman, “I thought he was a monster, and he’s only Toad of Toad Hall…with Rat…and Tinker Bell…and Wendy…and Bottom …”

“That’s who
you
are,” said Hagbard, “if you can call that any kind of a fucking identity.”

“I think it’s time you went up on stage and made our little announcement,” said the woman. “I think everyone is ready for that.”

“I’ll send Dillinger in to you.”

“Goody!”

“It’s not true, you know. That was the other guy, Sullivan.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that. I don’t care if it’s no bigger than my little finger. It’s just the idea of fucking with
John Dillinger
. If that doesn’t put me over, nothing will.”

Hagbard stood up and laughed. “You’re starting to look
and sound like Mavis again. I think you’re slipping, Super-bitch.”

The American Medical Association had left the stage, and Clark Kent and His Supermen were playing as Hagbard, accompanied by George, Harry, Otto, and Malaclypse, made his way down their own hill and up to the crest of the hill where the stage was erected. The journey took a half-hour as they picked their way through groups of people engaged in Mongolian clusterfuck, sitting Za-Zen, or just listening to the music. At the stage Hagbard took out a gold card, which he showed to a group of marshals guarding the area from intrusion. “I have an announcement to make,” he said firmly. The marshals allowed him to climb on stage, and told him to wait till the Supermen had finished their set.

As soon as Pearson saw Hagbard he motioned his men to stop playing. A murmur arose from the audience. “Well, all right, Hagbard,” said Robert Pearson, “I was wondering if you were ever going to show up.” He walked over to the side of the stage where Hagbard and his group were standing.

“Good evening, Waterhouse,” said Pearson. “How’s my gal, Stella?”

“Where the fuck do you
get
off calling her your girl?” said Waterhouse, his tone containing nothing but menace.

“The acid only opens your eyes, George. It doesn’t work miracles.”

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever call on the name of the Lord shall be saved
.

“Wonder what the hell is in that suitcase,” Dillinger murmured.

“I’ll open it,” Saul said. “We’ll all have to take the antidote anyway, after this. I have a supply out in the car.” And he leaned forward, parted Carmel’s stiff blue hands, and
tugged
the suitcase free. Barney, Dillinger, and Markoff Chaney crowded close to look as he snapped the lock and lifted the top.

“I’ll be damned and double damned,” Barney Muldoon said in a small, hollow voice.

“Hagbard has been putting us on all along,” Simon says dreamily. (It doesn’t matter in the First Bardo.) “Those Nazis have been dead for thirty years, period. He just
brought us here to put us on a Trip. Nothing is coming out of the lake. I’m hallucinating everything.”

“Something is happening,” Mary Lou insisted vehemently. “It’s got nothing to do with the lake—that’s a red herring to distract us from the real battle between your Hagbard and those crazy musicians up there. If I wasn’t tripping my head would work better, damn it. It’s got something to do with sound waves. The sound waves are turning solid in the air. Whatever it is, the rest of us aren’t supposed to understand it. This lake thing is just to give us something we can understand, or almost understand.” Her black face was intense with intelligence battling against the ocean of undigestible information pouring in through all of her senses.

“Dad!”
Simon cried, weeping happily. “Tell me the Word. You must know now. What is the Word?”

“Kether,” said Tim Moon blissfully.

“Kether? That’s all? Just Cabalism?” Simon shook his head. “It can’t be that simple.”

“Kether,” Tim Moon repeats firmly. “Right here in the middle of Malkuth. As above, so below.”

I see the throne of the world. One single chair twenty-three feet off the ground, studded with seventeen rubies, and brooding over it the serpent swallowing its tail, the Rosy Cross, and the Eye.

“Who was that nice man?” Mary Lou asked.

“My father,” Simon said, really weeping now. “And I may never see him again. Mourning never ends.”

And then I understood why Hagbard had given us the acid—why the Weather Underground and Morituri used it constantly—because I started to die, I literally felt myself dwindling to a point and approaching absolute zero. I was so shit-scared I grabbed Simon’s hand and said “help” in a weak voice, and if he had said “Admit you’re a cop first, then I’ll help,” I sure as hell would have told him everything, blurted it all out, but he just smiled, squeezed my hand gently, and murmured,
“It’s alive!”
—and it was, the point was giving off light and energy, my light and my energy but God’s also, and it wasn’t frightening because it was alive and growing. The word “omnidirectional halo” came to me from somewhere (was it Hagbard talking to Dillinger?), and I looked, holy Key-rizt, Dillinger split in two as I watched. That was the answer to one question: There
were two Dillingers, twins, in addition to the fake Dillinger who got shot at the Biograph, 0 = 2, I thought, feeling some abstract eternal answer there, along with the answer to some of the questions that had bugged so many writers about Dillinger’s criminal career (like why some witnesses claimed he was in Miami on that day in 1934 when other witnesses claimed he was robbing a bank and killing a bank guard in East Chicago, and why Hagbard had said something about him being in Las Vegas when I could see him right here in Ingolstadt), but it was all moving, moving, a single point, but everything coming out of it was moving, a star with swords and wands projecting outward as rays, a crown that was also a cup and a whirling disc, a pure white brilliance that said “I am Ptah, come to take you from Memphis to heaven,” but I only remembered the cops who beat Daddy up in Memphis and made him swear when he got back that he’d never go south again (and how did that tie in with why I became a cop?), and Ptah became Zeus, Iacchus, Wotan, and it didn’t matter, all were distant and indifferent and cold, not gods of humanity but gods above humanity, gods of the void, brilliant as the diamond but cold as the diamond, the three whirling in the point until they became a turning swastika, then the face of the doctor who gave me the abortion that time I got knocked up by Hassan i Sabbah X, saying, “You have killed the Son of God in your womb, black woman,” and I started to weep again, Simon holding my hand and repeating,
“It’s alive,”
but I felt that it was dying and I had somehow killed it. I was Otto Waterhouse in reverse: I wanted to castrate Simon, to castrate all white men, but I wouldn’t; I would go on castrating black men—the Nightmare Life-in-Death am I.

“It’s alive, baby,” Simon repeated, “it’s alive. And I love you, baby, even if you are a cop.”

(“The whole lake is
alive,”
the vibe man with the Fillet of Soul was trying to explain to the rest of that group, “one big spiral rising and turning, like the DNA molecule, but with a hawk’s head at the top …”)

“Good evening, Waterhouse,” said Pearson. “How’s my gal, Stella?”

“Where the fuck do you get off calling her
your
girl?” said Waterhouse, his tone containing nothing but menace.

“Cool it brother,” said Pearson reasonably.

“Don’t hand me that brother shit. I asked you a question.”

“You and your question come out of a weak, limp bag,” said Pearson.

Hagbard said, “Robert only fucks white women, Otto. I’m sure he’s never laid Stella Maris.”

“Don’t be
too
sure,” said Pearson.

“Don’t play with Otto, Robert,” said Hagbard. “He specializes in killing black men. In fact, he’s only just killed his first white man, and he’s not at all sure he enjoyed it.”

“I never knew what killing was before,” said Waterhouse. “I was crazy all those years, and I enjoyed what I did because I didn’t know what I was doing. After I killed Flanagan I understood what I’d been doing all along, and it was like I killed all the others all over again.” His cheeks were wet, and he turned away.