The illuminatus! trilogy (26 page)

Maldonado sat silently, rubbing his famous nose as he did when making a hard decision. “You’re a good boy, Bennie. I give you ten percent of the money, just for being honest. We need more honest young boys like you in the Brotherhood.”

Volpe swallowed again, and said, “There’s one more thing I oughta tell you. I went down to the grassy knoll, after the cops run from there to the School Book Depository. I thought I might find the guy who did the shooting still hanging around and tell you what he looked like. He was long gone, though. But here’s what so spooky. I ran into another galoot, who was sneaking down from the triple underpass. Long, skinny guy with buck teeth, kind of reminded me of a python or some kind of snake. He just looks at me and my umbrella and guesses what’s in it.
His mouth falls open. ‘Jesus Christ and his black bastard brother Harry,’ he says, ‘how the
fuck
many people does it take to kill a President these days?’”

(“And they’re teaching them about perversions as well,” Smiling Jim was building toward his climax. “Homosexuality and lesbianism are being taught in our schools and we’re paying for it out of our tax money. Now is that communism or isn’t it?”)

“Welcome to the Playboy Club,” the beautiful blonde said, “I’m your bunny, Virgin.”

Saul took his seat in the dark wondering if he had heard correctly. Virgin was an odd name for a bunny; perhaps she had actually said Virginia. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

“How do you wish your steak, sir?” the bunny was asking. A stake through the heart, for a vampire.

“Medium well,” Saul said, wondering why his mind was wandering in such odd directions. (“Odd erections,” somebody said in the nearby dark—or was it a distorted echo of his own voice?)

“Medium well,” the bunny repeated, seemingly speaking to the wall. A medium wall, Saul thought.

Immediately the wall opened and Saul was looking into a combination kitchen and butcher shop. A steer was standing not five feet from him, but before he could recover from this shock a male figure, stripped to the waist and wearing the hood of a medieval executioner, caught his attention. With one stroke of a huge hammer, this figure knocked the steer unconscious and it fell to the floor with a crash. Immediately the executioner produced an axe and chopped its head off; blood gushed in a crimson pool from its neck.

The wall closed, and Saul had the terrifying feeling that the whole scene had been a hallucination—that he was losing his mind.

“All our lunches are educational today,” the bunny said in his ear. “We believe every customer should understand fully what’s on the end of his fork and how it got there, before he takes a bite.”

“Good God,” Saul said, getting to his feet. This wasn’t a Playboy Club, it was some den of lunatics and sadists. He stumbled toward the door.

“No way out,” a man at another table said softly as he passed.

“Saul, Saul,” the maître d’ murmured politely, “why dost thou persecute me?
Hab’ rochmunas.”

“It’s a drug,” Saul said thickly, “you’ve given me a drug.” Of course, that was it—something like mescaline or LSD—and they were guiding his hallucinations by providing proper stimuli. Perhaps they were even faking some of the hallucinations. But how had he fallen into their hands? The last thing he remembered, he was in Joe Malik’s apartment with Barney Muldoon…. No, there was a voice saying,
“Now
, Sister Victoria,” as they came out the door onto Riverside Drive….

“No man should marry a woman more than thirty years younger than himself,” the maître d’ said mournfully. How did they know about that? Had they investigated his whole life? How long had they held him?

“I’m getting out of here,” he shouted, pushing the maître d’ aside and bolting for the door.

Hands grasped for him and missed (they weren’t really trying, he realized: he was being allowed to reach the door). When he plunged through the doorway, he realized why: he was not on the street but in another room. This was the next ordeal.

A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card, light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:

“Sons of bitches,” Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca. Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her sexual devotion.

The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca’s, in her nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like a baby nursing.

“Motherfuckers,” Saul screamed. “It’s a fake. That’s not Rebecca—it’s an actress with makeup. You forgot the mole on her hip.” They could drug his senses but not his mind.

There was a nasty laugh in the darkness. “Try this one, Saul,” a voice said coldly.

A new picture slid into view: Adolph Hitler, in full Nazi uniform, and a naked Rebecca backing up to him, taking his penis in her rectum. Her face showed both pain and pleasure—and the mole on her hip was visible. Another fake—Rebecca was born years after Hitler died. But they hadn’t produced the slide in the thirty seconds after his shout, and that meant they knew her body, intimately…. And they also knew how skeptical and quick his mind was, and were prepared to administer a series of jolts until something got past his ability to doubt.

“No comment?” the voice asked mockingly.

“I don’t believe a man who died thirty years ago would be buggering
any
woman today,” Saul said drily. “Your tricks are kind of corny.”

“Sometimes, with the vulgar, we must communicate vulgarly,” the voice replied—and it was almost gentle and pitying this time.

A new picture appeared—and this time, without doubt, it
was
Rebecca. But it was Rebecca three years ago, when he first met her. She sat at a table in a cheap East Village pad, wearing the emaciated and self-pitying look he remembered from those days; and she was preparing to inject a needle in her arm. It was the real thing, but the terror was in its implications:
they
had been watching him that long ago. Perhaps—it was hard to date the picture precisely, although he remembered her apartment in those days—they even knew he would fall in love with her before he knew it himself. No; more likely, a friend of hers in those days had taken the picture and they had somehow found it when they became interested in him. Their resources must be fantastic.

A new card came on the screen:

A new picture quickly followed: Rebecca, as she looked today, sitting in his kitchen—with the new café curtains they had just hung last week—once again injecting a needle into her arm.

“You’re the vulgar ones, O mighty Illuminati,” Saul said caustically. “I would have noticed the tracks on her arm, if she was shooting up again.”

The answer was nonverbal: the picture of Rebecca and the giant black man came back on the screen, and was immediately
followed by a close-up of her face, eyes closed, mouth open receiving the penis. It was in perfect focus, the work of an artist with the camera, and he could see no sign of any makeup that would help another woman to pass as Rebecca. He held to his memory that the mole on her hip was missing, but, perversely, his mind tasted at last the other possibility—makeup can change a face, and it can also hide a mole…. If they wanted him to use his skepticism, so that they could gradually destroy that, and, in the process, undermine his total psyche….

Another sign came on the screen:

Saul remembered, all too well, Rebecca’s passion in bed. “Shakespeare,” he called hoarsely. “Advertising your erudition at a time like this is worse than vulgarity. It’s petit-bourgeois pretentiousness.”

The answer was brutal: a whole series of slides, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, cascaded across the screen in such rapid succession that he couldn’t examine them carefully, except that the central character was Rebecca, always Rebecca, Rebecca with the black giant in other sexual positions, Rebecca with another woman, Rebecca with Spiro Agnew, Rebecca with a little seven-year-old boy, Rebecca, Rebecca, in a rising crescendo of perversion and abnormality, Rebecca with a Saint Bernard dog—and a peppermint-colored sine-wave, part of the drug still working on him, cutting across the scene….

“The true sadist has style,” Saul gasped fighting for control of his voice. “You people are about as evil and frightening as a bad B-movie.”

There was a whirring mechanical sound and a movie began in place of the slides. It was Rebecca and the Saint Bernard, with several close-ups, and her expressions were the ones he knew. Could any actress portray another woman’s individual style of sexual response? Yes—if necessary, these people would use hypnosis to get the effect letter-perfect.

The movie stopped abruptly and the projector had another message for him, held on the screen for minutes:

When he realized that there would be no further progress until he spoke, Saul said coldly, “Very entertaining. Where do I go to crumble into a bundle of neuroses?”

There was no answer. No sound. Nothing happened. He half-saw a latticework of red pentagons, but that was the drug—and it helped identify which drug, for geometric patterns were characteristic of the mescaline experience. As he considered that, the peppermint sine-waves appeared before the pentagons and the screen gave him a new message:

Suddenly, Saul was in Copenhagen, on a cruise boat, passing the mermaid of the harbor. She turned and looked at him. “This case is fishy,” she said—and as she opened her mouth a school of guppies swam out. “I’m a mouth-breeder,” she explained.

Saul had a reproduction of that famous statue in his home (which must be the source of the hallucination), yet he was strangely disturbed. Her punning words seemed to conceal a deeper meaning than mere casual references to the
Confrontation
bombing … something that went back … back through his whole life … and explained why he had purchased the statue in the first place.

I’m about to have one of those famous drug insights that hippies always talk about, he thought. But the mermaid broke apart into pentagons of red, orange, yellow….

And a unicorn winked at him. “Man,” it said, “am I ever horny!”

Those sketches I made the other day, Saul thought … but the screen asked him:

… and he suddenly understood for the first time what the words “a real thought” meant; what Hegel meant by defining the Absolute Idea as pure thought thinking about pure thought; what Bishop Berkeley meant by denying the reality of the physical world in seeming contradiction of all human experience and common sense; what every detective was secretly attempting to detect, although it was
always right out in the open; why he became a detective in the first place; why the universe itself became; why
everything;

and then he forgot it;

caught a fleeting glimpse of it again—it had something to do with the eye at the top of the pyramid;

and lost it again in visions of unicorns, stallions, zebras, bars, bars, bars.

Now his whole visual field was hallucinatory … octagons, triangles, pyramids, organic shapes of embryos and growing ferns. The drug was taking stronger hold on him. Criminals he had sent to jail appeared—sullen, hating faces—and the screen said

He laughed to keep from crying. They had touched his deepest doubt about his job—his career, his life’s work— precisely at the time the drug also was leading him there, with those damnable accusing faces. It was as if they could read his mind and see his hallucinations. No; it was just one lucky coincidence, because among all their tricks one was statistically likely to occur in tandem with an appropriate drug experience.

Saul laughed again, more wildly, almost hysterically; and knew, even more clearly than before, the tears hiding behind the laughter. Prisons reform nobody; my life is wasted; I offer society a delusion of security but not a real service. Worse yet, I have known it for years, and lied to myself. The sense of total failure and utter bitterness that washed over Saul at that moment was, he knew, not produced but only magnified by the drug. It had been with him a long, long time but always pushed aside, brushed away from his attention by concentrating on something else; the drug merely allowed him (forced him) to look at the emotion honestly and totally for a few wrenching moments.

A doorway suddenly lit up toward his right and a neon light came on above it, saying, “Absolution and Redemption.”

“OK,” he said icily, “I’ll play the next move.” He opened the door.

The room was tiny but furnished like the world’s most expensive brothel. Above the fourposter bed was an illustration of Alice and a mushroom labeled “Eat Me.” And on the bed, stripped of her Playboy costume, pinkly and beautifully naked with legs spread in anticipation, was the blonde bunny. “Good evening,” she said speaking rapidly and fixing his eyes with her own stare, “I’m your Virgin Bunny. Every man wants a Virgin Bunny, to eat on Easter to celebrate the miracle of the Resurrection. Do you understand the miracle of the Resurrection, sir? Do you know that nothing is true and everything is permissible and that a man who dares to break the robot conditioning of society and commit adultery dies in the moment of orgasm with his whore and wakes resurrected to a new life? Did they teach you that in
shule?
Or did they just fill you with a lot of monogamous Yiddish horseshit?” Most hypnotists spoke slowly, but she was obtaining the same effect by talking rapidly. “You thought you were going to eat a dead animal, which is disgusting even if this crazy society accepts it as normal, but instead you’re going to eat a desirable woman (and fuck her afterward), which is normal even if this crazy society thinks of it as disgusting. You are one of the Illuminated, Saul, but you never knew it. Tonight you are going to learn. You are going to find your real self as you were before your mother and father conceived you. And I’m not talking about reincarnation. I’m talking about something much more marvelous.”