The illuminatus! trilogy (44 page)

It was getting to be a trip. His ego went away somewhere, and he was all body, letting it all happen. If was fucking Tarantella, and If was coming—and, judging by the sounds she was making and the wetness in which his penis was sloshing, she was coming, too.

There followed two more blow jobs. Then Tarantella pulled something that looked like an electric razor out of the bed-table drawer. She plugged it into the wall and began to stroke his penis with its vibrating head, pausing every so often to lick and lubricate the areas she was working on.

George closed his eyes and rolled his hips from side to side as he felt yet another orgasm coming on. From a great distance he heard Tarantella Serpentine say, “My greatness lies in the life I can generate in limp pricks.”

George’s pelvis began to pump up and down. It was really going to be that superorgasm Hemingway described. It began to happen. It was pure electricity. No juice—all energy pouring out like lightning through the magic wand at the center of his being. He wouldn’t be surprised to discover that his balls and cock were disintegrating into whirling electrons. He screamed, and behind his tight-clenched eyes, he saw, very clearly, the smiling face of Mavis.

He awoke in the dark, and his instinctive groping motion told him that Tarantella was gone.

Instead, Mavis, in a white doctor’s smock, stood at the foot of the bed, watching him with large bright eyes. The darkened Drake bedroom had turned into a hospital ward, and was suddenly brightly lit.

“How did you get here?” he blurted. “I mean—how did I get here?”

“Saul,” she said kindly, “it’s almost all over. You’ve come through it.”

And suddenly he realized that he felt, not twenty-three, but sixty-three years old.

“You’ve won,” he admitted, “I’m no longer sure who I am.”

“You’ve won,” Mavis contradicted. “You’ve gone through ego loss and now you’re beginning to discover who you really are, poor old Saul.”

He examined his hands: old man’s. Wrinkled. Goodman’s hands.

“There are two forms of ego loss,” Mavis went on, “and the Illuminati are masters of both. One is schizophrenia, the other is illumination. They set you on the first track, and we switched you to the other. You had a time bomb in your head, but we defused it.”

Malik’s apartment. The Playboy Club. The submarine. And all the other past lives and lost years. “By God,” Saul Goodman cried, “I’ve got it. I
am
Saul Goodman, but I am all the other people, too.”

“And all time is this time,” Mavis added softly.

Saul sat upright, tears gleaming in his eyes. “I’ve killed men. I’ve sent them to the electric chair. Seventeen times. Seventeen suicides. The savages who cut off fingers or toes or ears for their gods are more sensible. We cut off whole egos, thinking they are not ourselves but separate. God God God,” and he burst in sobs.

Mavis rushed forward and held him, cradling his head to her breast. “Let it out,” she said. “Let it all out. It’s not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don’t understand until it makes you weep.”

queens. Psychoanalysts in living cells, moving in military ordure, and a shitty outlook on life and sex, dancing coins in harry’s krishna. It all coheres, even if you approach it bass ackwards. It coheres.

“Gruad the grayface!” Saul screamed, weeping, beating his fist against the pillow as Mavis held his head, stroked his hair. “Gruad the damned! And I have been his servant, his puppet, sacrificing myselves on his electric altars as burnt offerings.”

“Yes, yes,” Mavis cooed in his ear. “We must learn to give up our sacrifices, not our joys. They have taught us to give up everything except our sacrifices, and those are what we must give up. We must sacrifice our sacrifices.”

“The Grayface, the lifehater!” Saul shrieked. “The bastard motherfucker! Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, I know him
under all his aliases. Grayface, Grayface, Grayface! I know his wars and his prisons, the young boys he shafts up the ass, the George Dorns he tries to turn into killers like himself. And I have served him all my life. I have sacrificed men on his bloody pyramid!”

“Let it out,” Mavis repeated, holding the old man’s trembling body “Let it all out, baby…. ”

NOTHUNG. Woden you gnaw it, when you herd those flying sheeps with wagner’s loopy howls? Hassan walked this loony valley, he had to wake up by himself. August 23, 1966: before he ever heard of the SSS, the Discordians, the JAMs or the Illuminati: stoned and beatific, Simon Moon is browsing in a Consumer Discount store on North Clark street, digging the colors, not really intending to buy anything. He stops in a frieze, mesmerized by a sign above the timeclock:

“God’s pajamas,” Simon mutters, incredulous.

“Pajamas? Aisle seven,” a clerk says helpfully.

“Yes. Thanks,” Simon speaks very distinctly, edging away, hiding his high. God’s
pajamas and spats
, he thinks in a half-illuminated trance, either I’m more stoned than I think or that sign is absolutely the whole clue to how the show runs.

RAGS. Hail Ghoulumbia, her monadmen are fled and all she’s left now is a bloody period. “The funny part,” Saul said, smiling while a few tears still flowed, “is that I’m not ashamed of this. Two days ago I would have rather died than be seen weeping—especially by a woman.”

“Yes,” Mavis said,
“especially by a woman.”

“That’s it—isn’t it?” Saul gasped. “That’s their whole gimmick. I couldn’t see you without seeing a
woman
. I couldn’t see that editor, Jackson, without seeing a
Negro
. I couldn’t see anybody without seeing the attached label and classification.”

“That’s how they keep us apart,” Mavis said gently. “And that’s how they train us to keep our masks on. Love was the hardest bond for them to smash, so they had to create patriarchy, male supremacy, and ail that crap—and
the ‘masculine protest’ and ‘penis envy’ in women came in as a result—so even lovers couldn’t look at one another without seeing a separate category.”

“O my God, my God,” Saul moaned, beginning to weep heavily again. “‘A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.’ O my God.
And you were with them!”
he cried suddenly, raising his head. “You’re a former Illuminatus—that’s why you’re so important to Hagbard’s plan. And that’s why you have that tattoo!”

“I was one of the Five who run the U.S.,” Mavis nodded. “One of the Insiders, as Robert Welch calls them. I’ve been replaced now by Atlanta Hope, the leader of God’s Lightning.”

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” Saul said, laughing. “I looked every way but the right way before.
He’s
inside the Pentagon. That’s why they build it in that shape, so
he
couldn’t escape. The Aztecs, the Nazis … and now us …”

“Yes,” Mavis said grimly. “That’s why thirty thousand Americans disappear every year, without trace, and their cases end up in the unsolved files.
He
has to be fed.”

“‘A man, though naked, may be in rags.’” Saul quoted. “Ambrose Bierce knew about it.”

“And Arthur Machen,” Mavis added. “And Lovecraft. But they had to write in code. Even so, Lovecraft went too far, mentioning the
Necronomicon
by name. That’s why he died so suddenly when he was only forty-seven. And his literary executor, August Derleth, was persuaded to insert a note in every edition of Lovecraft’s works, claiming that the
Necronomicon
doesn’t exist and was just part of Lovecraft’s fantasy.”

“And the
Lloigor?”
Saul asked. “And the
dois?”

“Real,” Mavis said. “All real. That’s what causes bad acid trips and schizophrenia. Psychic contact with
them
when the ego wall breaks. That’s where the Illuminati were sending you when we raided their fake Playboy Club and short-circuited the process.”

“Du hexen Hose,”
Saul quoted. And he began to tremble.

UNHEIMLICH. Urvater whose art’s uneven, horrid be thine aim. Harpoons in him, corpus whalem: take ye and hate.

Fernando Poo was given prominent attention in the world press only once before the notorious Fernando Poo
Incident. It occurred in the early 1970s (while Captain Tequilla y Mota was first studying the art of the Coup d’Etat and laying his first plans,) and was occasioned by the outrageous claims of the anthropologist J. N. Marsh, of Miskatonic University, that artifacts he had found on Fernando Poo proved the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis. Although Professor Marsh had an impeccable reputation for scholarly caution and scientific rigor before this, his last published book,
Atlantis and Its Gods
, was greeted with mockery and derision by his professional colleagues, especially after his theories were picked up and sensationalized by the press. Many of the old man’s friends, in fact, blame this campaign of ridicule for his disappearance a few months later, which they suspect was the suicide of a broken-hearted and sincere searcher after truth.

Not only were Marsh’s theories now beyond all scientific credibility, but his methods—such as quoting Allegro’s
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
or Graves’
The White Goddess
as if they were as reputable as Boas, Mead, or Frazer—seemed to indicate senility. This impression was increased by the eccentric dedication “To Ezra Pound, Jacques De Molay and Emperor Norton I.” The real scientific scandal was not the theory of Atlantis (that was a bee that had haunted many a scholarly bonnet) but Marsh’s claim that the gods of Atlantis actually existed; not as supernatural beings, of course, but as a superior class of life, now extinct, which had preexisted mankind and duped the earliest civilization into worshiping them as divine and offering terrible sacrifices at their altars. That there was absolutely no archaeological or paleontological evidence that such beings ever existed, was the mildest of the scholarly criticisms aimed at this hypothesis.

Professor Marsh’s rapid decline, in the few months between the book’s unanimous rejection by the learned world and his sudden disappearance, caused great pain to colleagues at Miskatonic. Many recognized that he had acquired some of his notions from Dr. Henry Armitage, generally regarded as having gone somewhat bananas after too many years devoted to puzzling out the obscene metaphysics of the
Necronomicon
. When the librarian Miss Horus mentioned at a faculty tea shortly after the disappearance that Marsh had spent much of the past month with that volume, one Catholic professor urged, only half-
jokingly, that Miskatonic should rid itself of scandals once and for all by presenting “that damned book” (he emphasized the word very deliberately) to Harvard.

Missing Persons Department of the Arkham police assigned the Marsh case to a young detective who had previously distinguished himself by tracing several missing infants to one of the particularly vile Satanist cults that have festered in that town since the witch-hunting days of 1692. His first act was to examine the manuscript on which the old man had been working since the completion of
“Atlantis and Its Gods.”
It seemed to be a shortish essay, intended for an anthropological magazine, and was quite conservative in tone and concept, as if the professor regretted the boldness of his previous speculations. Only one footnote, expressing guarded and qualified endorsement of Urqhuart’s theory about Wales being settled by survivors from Mu, showed the bizarre preoccupations of the Atlantis book. However, the final sheet was not related to this article at all and seemed to be notes for a piece which the Professor evidently intended to submit, brazenly and in total contempt of academic opinion, to a pulp publication devoted to flying saucers and occultism. The detective puzzled over these notes for a long time:

The detective then spent an afternoon at Miskatonic library, browsing through the writings of Ambrose Bierce, J-K Huysmans, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft. He found that all repeated certain key words; dealt with lost continents or lost cities; described superhuman beings trying to misuse or victimize mankind in some unspecified manner; suggested that there was a cult, or group of cults, among mankind who served these beings; and described certain books (usually not giving their titles: Lovecraft was an exception) that reveal the secrets of these beings. With a little further research, he found that the occult and Satanist circles in Paris in the 1880s had influenced the fiction of both Huysmans and Machen, as well as the career of the egregious Aleistair Crowley, and that Seabrook (who knew Crowley) hinted at more than he stated outright in his book on Witchcraft, published two years before his suicide. He then wrote a little table: