The illuminatus! trilogy (28 page)

He laughed. “Score one for Moon. Seriously, I’m the worst enemy governments have, and the best protection for the average person. The Mafia has no ethics, you know. If it wasn’t for my group and our years and years of experience, everything on the black market, from dope to Canadian furs, would be shoddy and unreliable. We always give the customer his or her money’s worth. Half the dope
you
sell probably has passed through my agents on its way to you. The better half.”

“What was that homosexual business? Just buggin’ old Bushman?”

“Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball.”

“Hagbard,” I said, “what the hell is your game?”

“Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors,” he said crisply. We turned onto Lake Shore Drive and sped north.

“Thou, Jubela, did he tell you the Word?” asked the goat-headed man.

The gigantic black said, “I beat him and tortured him, but he would not reveal the Word.”

“Thou, Jubelo, did he tell you the Word?”

The fishlike creature said, “I tormented and vexed his inner spirit, Master, but he would not reveal the Word.”

“And thou, Jubelum, did he tell you the Word?”

The hunchbacked dwarf said, “I cut off his testicles and he was mute. I cut off his penis and he was mute. He did not tell me the Word.”

“A fanatic,” the goat-head said. “It is better that he is dead.”

Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn’t twitch a Jingle muscle: That last drug had been a narcotic, and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralyzed and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if the dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from the body before it rotted.

As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in darkness.

“Leave first, Jubela.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Leave next, Jubelo.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Leave last, Jubelum.”

“Yes, Master.”

Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn’t move. Let me not go mad, he thought.

Howard spotted the
Lief Erikson
ahead and sang: “Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I’ll meet Celine.”
Maldonado’s sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of “America’s best-known financier-philanthropist,” Robert Putney Drake
. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow, maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling with exhaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis’s eyes, but the king could not focus them. The blade fell: the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, “Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!”) Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, “The real crime of the Templars, however, was probably their association with the Hashishim.” George Dorn, hardly listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia entirely.

“And modern novels are the same,” Smiling Jim went on. “Sex, sex, sex—and not normal sex even. Every type of perverted, degenerate, unnatural, filthy, deviated, and sick kind of sex. This is how they’re gonna bury us, as Mr. Khrushchev said, without even firing a shot.”

Sunlight awakened Saul Goodman
.

Sunlight and a headache, A hangover from the combination of drugs
.

He was in a bed and his clothes were gone. There was no mistaking the garment he wore: a hospital gown. And the room—as he squinted against the sun—had the dull modern-penitentiary look of a typical American hospital.

He hadn’t heard the door open, but a weathered-looking
middle-aged man in a doctor’s smock drifted into the room. He was carrying a clipboard; pens stuck their necks out of his smock pocket; he smiled benignly. His hornrimmed heavily black glasses and crewcut marked him as the optimistic, upward-mobile man of his generation, without either the depression/World War II memories that gave anxiety to Saul’s contemporaries or nuclear nightmares that gave rage and alienation to youth. He would obviously think of himself as a liberal and vote conservatively at least half the time.

A hopeless schmuck.

Except that he was probably none of those things, but another of their agents, doing a very convincing performance.

“Well?” he said brightly. “Feeling better, Mr. Muldoon?”

Muldoon, Saul thought. Here we go—another ride into their
kitsch
idea of the Heart of Darkness.

“My name is Goodman,” he said thinly. “I’m about as Irish as Moishe Dayan.”

“Oh, still playing that little game, are we?” the man spoke kindly. “And are you still a detective?”

“Go to hell,” Saul said, no longer in mood to fight back with wit and irony. He would dig into his hostility and make his last stand from a foxhole of bitterness and sullen brevity.

The man pulled up a chair and sat down. “Actually,” he said, “these remaining symptoms don’t bother us much. You were in a much worse state when you were first brought here six months ago. I doubt that you remember that. Electroshock mercifully removes a great deal of the near past, which is helpful in cases like yours. Do you know that you were physically assaulting people on the street, and tried to attack the nurses and orderlies your first month here? Your paranoia was very acute at that point, Mr. Muldoon.”

“Up yours, bubi,” Saul said. He closed his eyes and turned the other way.

“Such moderate hostility these days,” the man went on, bright as a bird in the morning grass. “A few months ago you would have tried to strangle me. Let me show you something.” There was a sound of paper.

Curiosity defeated resistance: Saul turned and looked. The man held out a driver’s license, from the State of New
Jersey, for “Barney Muldoon.” the picture was Saul’s. Saul grinned maliciously, showing his disbelief.

“You refuse to recognize yourself?” the man asked quietly.

“Where is Barney Muldoon?” Saul shot back. “Do you have him in another room, trying to convince him he’s Saul Goodman?”

“Where is …?” the “doctor” repeated, seeming genuinely baffled. “Oh, yes, you admit you know the name but claim he was only a friend. Just like a rapist we had in here a while ago. He said all the rapes were committed by his roommate, Charlie. Well, let’s try another tack. All those people you beat up on the street—and that Playboy Club bunny you tried to strangle—do you still believe they were agents of this, um, Prussian Illuminati?”

“This is an improvement,” Saul said. “A very intriguing combination of reality and fantasy, much better than your group’s previous efforts. Let me hear the rest of it.”

“You think that’s sarcasm,” the man said calmly. “Actually, behind it, your recovery is proceeding nicely. You really want to remember, even as you struggle to keep up this Goodman myth. Very well: you are a sixty-year-old police officer from Trenton, New Jersey. You never were promoted to detective and that is the great grievance of your life. You have a wife named Molly, and three sons—Roger, Kerry, and Gregory. Their ages are twenty-eight, twenty-five, and twenty-three. A few years ago, you started a game with your wife; she thought it was harmless at first and learned to her sorrow that it wasn’t. The game was, that you pretended to be a detective and, late at night, you would tell her about the important cases you were working on. Gradually, you built up to the most important case of all—the solution to all the assassinations in America during the past decade. They were all the work of a group called the Illuminati, who were surviving top-level Nazis that had never been captured. More and more, you talked about their leader—Martin Borman, of course—and insisted you were getting a line on his whereabouts. By the time your wife realized that the game had become reality to you, it was too late. You already suspected your neighbors of being Illuminati agents, and your hatred for Nazism led you to believe you were Jewish and had taken an Irish name to avoid American anti-Semitism. This particular delusion, I must say, caused you acute guilt, which it
took us a long time to understand. It was, we finally realized, a projection of a guilt you have long felt for being a policeman at all. But perhaps at this point, I might aid your struggle for self-recognition (and abort your equal and opposite struggle for self-escape) by reading you part of a report on your case by one of our younger psychiatrists. Are you game to hear it?”

“Go ahead,” Saul said. “I still find this entertaining.”

The man looked through the papers in his clipboard and smiled disarmingly. “Oh, I see here that it’s the Bavarian Illuminati, not the Prussian Illuminati, pardon my mistake.” He flipped a few more pages. “Here we are,” he said.

“The root of the subject’s problems,” he began to read, “can be found in the trauma of the primal scene, which was reconstructed under narco-analysis. At the age of three, he came upon his parents in the act of fellatio, which resulted in his being locked in his room for ‘spying.’ This left him with a permanent horror of being locked up and a pity for prisoners everywhere. Unfortunately, this factor in his personality, which he might have sublimated harmlessly by becoming a social worker, was complicated by unresolved Oedipal hostilities and a reaction formation in favor of ‘spying,’ which led him to become a policeman. The criminal became for him the father-symbol, who was locked up in revenge for locking him up; at the same time, the criminal was an ego-projection and he received masochistic gratification by identifying with the prisoner. The deep-buried homosexual desire for the father’s penis (present in all policemen) was next cathected by denial of the father,
via
denial of paternal ancestory, and he began to abolish all Irish Catholic traces from ego-memory, substituting those of Jewish culture, since the Jew, as persecuted minority, reinforced his basic masochism. Finally, like all paranoids, the subject fancies himself to be of superior intelligence (actually, on his test for the Trenton Police Force, he rated only one hundred ten on the Stanford-Binet IQ index) and his resistance to therapy will take the form of ‘outwitting’ his doctors by finding the ‘clues’ which reveal that they, too, are agents of the Illuminati and that his assumed identity as ‘Saul Goodman’ is, in fact, his actual identity. For therapeutic purposes, I would recommend …” The “doctor” broke off. “After that,” he said briefly, “it is of no interest to you. Well,” he added
tolerantly, “do you want to ‘detect’ the errors in this?”

“I’ve never been in Trenton in my life,” Saul said wearily. “I don’t know what anything in Trenton looks like. But you’ll just tell me that I’ve erased those memories. Let’s move to a deeper level of combat,
Herr Doktor
. I am quite convinced that my mother and father never performed fellatio in their lives. They were too old-fashioned.” This was the heart of the labyrinth, and their real threat: while he was sure that they could not break down his belief in his own identity, they were also insidiously undermining that identity by suggesting it was pathological. Many of the lines in the Muldoon case history could refer to any policeman and might, conceivably, refer to him; as usual, behind a weak open attack they were mounting a more deadly covert attack.

“Do you recognize these?” the doctor asked, producing a sketchbook open to a page with some drawings of unicorn.

“It’s my sketchbook,” Saul said. “I don’t know how you got it but it doesn’t prove a damned thing, except that I sketch in my spare time.”

“No?” The doctor turned the book around; a bookplate on the cover identified the owner as Barney Muldoon, 1472 Pleasant Avenue, Trenton, N.J.

“Amateur work,” Saul said. “Anybody can paste a bookplate onto a book.”

“And the unicorn means nothing to you?” Saul sensed the trap and said nothing, waiting, “You are not aware of the long psychoanalytical literature on the unicorn as symbol of the father’s penis? Tell me, then, why did you decide to sketch unicorns?”

“More amateurism,” Saul said. “If I sketched mountains, they would be symbols of the father’s penis, too.”

“Very well. You might have made a good detective if your—illness—hadn’t prevented your promotion. You do have a quick, skeptical mind. Let me try another approach—and I wouldn’t be using such tactics if I weren’t convinced you were on the road to recovery; a true psychotic would be driven into catatonia by such a blunt assault on his delusions. But, tell me, your wife mentioned that just before the acute stage of your—problem—you spent a lot of money, more than you could afford on a patrolman’s salary, on a reproduction of the mermaid of Copenhagen. Why was that?”

“Damn it,” Saul exclaimed, “it wasn’t a lot of money.” But he recognized the displaced anger and saw that the other man recognized it too. He was avoiding the question of the mermaid … and her relation to the unicorn.
There must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two….
“The mermaid,” he said, getting there before the enemy could, “is a mother symbol, right? She has no human bottom, because the male child dare not think about that area of the mother. Is that correct jargon?”

“More or less. You avoid, of course, the peculiar relevance in your own case: that the sex act in which you caught your mother was not a normal one but a very perverted and infantile act, which, of course, is the only sex act a mermaid can perform—as all collectors of mermaid statues or mermaid paintings unconsciously know.”

“It’s not perverted and infantile,” Saul protested. “Most people do it….” Then he saw the trap.

“But not
your
mother and father? They were different from most people?”

And then it clicked: the spell was broken. Every detail from Saul’s notebook, every physical characteristic Peter Jackson had described, was there. “You’re not a doctor,” he shouted. “I don’t know what your game is but I sure as hell know who you are. You’re Joseph Malik!”

George’s stateroom was paneled in teak, the walls hung with small but exquisite paintings by Rivers, Shahn, De Kooning, and Tanguy. A glass cabinet built into one wall held several rows of books. The floor was carpeted in wine red with a blue stylized octopus in the center, its waving tentacles radiating out like a sunburst. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling was a lucite model of that formidable jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war.