Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Hagbard lit a pipe and passed it over. "Alamout Black hash," he said croakingly, holding the smoke down. "Hassan i Sabbah's own private formula. Does wonders when heavy metaphysics is coming at you."

George inhaled and felt an immediate hit like cocaine or some other forebrain stimulant. "Christ, what's this shit cut with?" he gasped, as somebody somewhere seemed to turn colored lights on in the gold-and-nautical-green room and on that outasight lavender sweater.

"Oh," Hagbard said casually, "a hint of belladonna and stramonium. That was old Hassan's secret, you know. All that crap in most books about how he had turned his followers on with hash, and they'd never i had it before so they thought it was magic, is unhistorical. Hashish was known in the Mideast since the neolithic age; archeologists have dug it up in tombs. Seems our ancestors buried their priests with a load of hash to help them negotiate with their gods when they got to Big Rock Candy Mountain or wherever they thought they were going. Hassan's originality was blending hashish with just the right chemical cousins to produce a new synergetic effect."

"What's synergetic?" George asked slowly, feeling seasick for the first time aboard the Leif Erikson.

"Nonadditive. When you put two and two together and get five instead of four. Buckminster Fuller uses synergetic gimmicks all the time in his geodesic domes. That's why they're stronger than they look." Hagbard took another toke and passed the pipe again.

What the hell? George thought. Sometimes increasing the dose got you past the nausea. He toked, deeply. Hadn't they started out to discuss Truth, though?

George giggled. "Just as I suspected. Instead of using your goddam prajna or whatever it is to spy on the Illuminati, you're just another dirty old man. You use it to play Peeping Tom in other people's heads."

"Heads?" Hagbard protested, laughing. "I never scan the heads. Who the hell wants to watch people eliminating their wastes?"

"I thought you were going to be Socrates," George howled between lunatic peals of tin giggles, "and I was prepared to be Plato, or at least Glaucon or one of the minor characters. But you're as stoned as I am. You can't tell me anything important. All you can do is make bad puns."

"The pun," Hagbard replied with dignity (ruined somewhat by an unexpected chortle), "is mightier than the sword. As James Joyce once said."

"Don't get pedantic."

"Can I get semantic?"

"Yes. You can get semantic. Or antic. But not pedantic."

"Where were we?"

"Truth."

"Yes. Well, Truth is like marijuana, my boy. A drug on the market."

"I'm getting a hard-on."

"You too? That's the way the balling bounces. At least, with Alamout Black. Nausea, then microamnesia, then the laughing jag, then sex. Be patient. The clear light comes next. Then we can discuss Truth. As if we haven't been discussing it all along."

"You're a hell of a guru, Hagbard. Sometimes you sound even dumber than me."

"If the Elder Malaclypse were here, he'd tell you a few about some other gurus. And geniuses. Do you think Jesus never whacked off? Shakespeare never got on a crying jag at the Mermaid Tavern? Buddha never picked his nose? Gandhi never had the crabs?"

"I've still got a hard-on. Can't we postpone the philosophy while I go look for Stella- I mean, Mavis?"

"That's Truth."

"What is Truth?"

"Up in the cortex it makes a difference to you whether it's Stella or Mavis. Down in the glands, no difference. My grandmother would do as well."

"That's not Truth. That's just cheap half-assed Freudian cynicism."

"Oh, yes. You saw the mandala with Mavis."

"And you were inside my head somehow. Dirty voyeur."

"Know thyself."

"This will never take its place beside the Platonic Dialogues, not in a million years. We're both stoned out of our gourds."

"I love you, George."

"I guess I love you, too. You're so damned overwhelming. Everybody loves you. Are we gonna fuck?"

(Mavis had said, "Wipe the come off your trousers." Fantasizing Sophia Loren while he masturbated. Or fantasizing that he masturbated while actually…)

"No. You don't need it. You're starting to remember what really happened in Mad Dog jail."

"Oh, no." Coin's enormous, snaky cock… the pain… the pleasure…

"I'm afraid so."

"Damn it, now I'll never know. Did you put that in my head, or did it really happen? Did I fantasize the interruption then or did I fantasize the rape just now?"

"Know thyself."

"Did you say that twice or did I just hear it twice?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. I don't know, right now. I just don't know. Is this some devious homosexual seduction?"

"Maybe. Maybe it's a murder plot. Maybe I'm leading up to cutting your throat."

"I wouldn't mind. I've always had a big self-destructive urge. Like all cowards. Cowardice is a defense against suicide."

Hagbard laughed. "I never knew a young man who had so much pussy and risked death so often. And there you sit, still worrying about being whatever it was they called you when you first started letting your hair grow long in your early teens."

"Sissy. That was the word in good old Nutley, New Jersey. It meant both faggot and coward. So I've never cut my hair since then, to prove they couldn't intimidate me."

"Yeah. I'm tracking a black guy now, a musician, who's balling a white lady, a fair flower from Texas. Partly, because she really turns him on. But partly because she could have a brother who might come after him with a gun. He's proving they can't intimidate him."

"That's the Truth? We spend all our time proving we can't be intimidated? But all the time we are intimidated on another level?" The colors were coming back strong again; it was that kind of trip. Every time you thought you were the pilot, it would go off in an unexpected direction to remind you that you were just a passenger.

"That's part of the Truth, George. Another part is that every time you think you're intimidated you're really rebelling on another level. Oh, what idiots the IIluminati really are, George. I once collected statistics on industrial accidents in a sample city- Birmingham, England, actually. Fed all the relevant facts into FUCKUP and got just what I expected. Sabotage. Unconscious sabotage. Every case was a blind insurrection. Every man and woman is in rebellion, but only a few have the guts to admit it. The others jam the system by accident, har har har, or by stupidity, har har har again. Let me tell you about the Indians, George."

"What Indians?"

"Did you ever wonder why nothing works right? Why the whole world seems completely fucked up all the time?"

"Yeah. Doesn't everybody?"

"I suppose so. Pardon me, I've got to get more stoned. In a little while, I go into FUCKUP and we put our heads together- literally, I attach electrodes to my temples- and I'll try to track down the problem in Las Vegas. I don't spend all my time on random voyeurism," Hagbard pronounced with dignity. He refilled the pipe, asking pettishly, "Where was I?"

"The Indians in Birmingham. How did they get there?"

"There weren't any fucking Indians in Birmingham. You're getting me confused." Hagbard toked deeply.

"You're getting yourself confused. You're bombed out of your skull."

"Look who's talking."

Hagbard toked again. "The Indians. The Indians weren't in Birmingham. Birmingham was where I did the study that convinced me most industrial accidents are unconscious sabotage. So are most misfiled documents among white-collar workers, I'd wager. The Indians are another story. I was a lawyer once, when I first came to your country and before I went in for piracy. I usually don't admit that, George. I usually tell people I played the piano in a whorehouse or something else not quite so disreputable as the truth. If you want to know why nothing makes sense in government forms, remember there are two hundred thousand lawyers working for the bureaucracy these days.