Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"You mean the Mafia?" Joe asks.

"What? I didn't say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?"

"No, not the Mafia alone," Hagbard says. "The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf." The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Biscayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he's Captain Nemo. Still: we've got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can't do it alone. Hagbard, grinning, seemed to be noting Joe's return to present time. "You're reaching the critical stage," he said changing the subject. "You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without drugs. That's very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, was nothing more than the Mafia, of course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the Dutchman's last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his professor expected, and got an A for the course- but he also wrote another interpretation of the Dutchman's words, for his own purposes. He put copies in several bank vaults- he came from one of the oldest banking families in New England, and he was even then under family pressure to give up psychology and go into banking. His name was (Robert Putney Drake visited Zurich in 1935. He personally talked to Carl Jung about the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the I Ching, and the principle of synchronicity. He talked to people who had known James Joyce before that drunken Irish genius had moved to Paris, and learned much about Joyce's drunken claims to be a prophet. He read the published portions of Finnegans Wake and went back for further conversations with Jung. Then he met Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee and the other members of the Eastern Brotherhood and joined them in a mescaline ritual. A letter from his father arrived about then, asking when he was going to give up wasting his time and return to Harvard Business School. He wrote that he would return for the fall semester, but not to study business administration. A great psychologist was almost born then, and Harvard might have had its Timothy Leary scandal thirty years earlier. Except for Drake's power drive.)

I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR. Napalm sundaes for How Chow Mein, misfortune's cookie.

Josephine Malik lies trembling on the bed, trying to be brave, trying to hide her fear. Where, now, is the mask of masculinity?

This delusion that you are a man trapped in a woman's body can only be cured one way. I might be kicked out of the American Psychoanalystical Association if they knew about my methods. In fact, already had a spot of bother with them when one of my patients cured his Oedipus complex by actually fucking his mother, convincing himself extensionally as the semanticists would say that she really was an old lady and not the woman he remembered from infancy. Nevertheless, the whole world is going bananas as you must have observed, my poor girl, and we have to use heroic measures to save whatever sanity remains in any patient we encounter. (The psychiatrist is now naked. He joins her on the bed.) Now, my little frightened dove, I will convince you that you really are a true-born, honest-to-God woman…

Josephine feels his finger in her cunt and screams. Not at the touch: at the reality of it. She hadn't believed until then that the change was real.

Weishaupt bridge is falling down Falling down Falling down

And modern novels are the same: in the YMCA on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, looking out the window at the radio tower atop Brooklyn Technical High School, a man named Chancy (no relative of the movie family) spreads his pornographic tarot cards across the bed. One of them, he notes, is missing. Quickly, he arranges them in suits, and hunts for the lost card: it is the Five of Pentacles. He curses softly: that was one of his favorite orgy tableux.

Rebecca. The Saint Bernard.

"It's probably all jumbled in your head," I went on, furious that our plan was falling apart, that I needed his trust now but had no way to earn it. "We've been disintoxicating and dehypnotizing you, but you almost certainly can't tell where the Illuminati left off and we rescued you and started reversing the treatment. You're due to explode into psychosis within twenty-four hours and we're using the only techniques that can defuse that process."

"Why am I hearing everything twice?" Saul asked, balancing between wary skepticism and a sense that Malik was not playing games any more but urgently trying to help him.

"The stuff they gave you was an MDA derivative- very high on mescaline and methedrine both. It has an echo effect for seventy-two hours minimum. You're hearing what I'm going to say before I say it and then again when I do say it. That'll pass in a few minutes, but it'll be back, every half hour or so, for the next day yet. The end of the chain is psychosis, unless we can stop it."

"Unless we can stop it."

"It's easing up now," Saul said carefully, "Less of an echo that time. I still don't know whether to trust you. Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?"

"Because the psychic explosion is on Saul Goodman's time-track, not on Barney Muldoon's."

Ten big rhinoceroses, eleven big rhinoceroses…

"You Wascal Wabbit," Simon whispers through the Judas Window. Immediately the door opens and a grinning young man with the Frisco-style Jesus Christ hair-and-beard says, "Welcome to the Joshua Norton Cabal." Joe sees to his relief that it was a normal but untypically clean hippie hangout, and there are none of the sinister accoutrements of the Lake Shore Drive coven. At the same time, he hears the strange man in the bed asking, "Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?" My God, now it's happening when I'm awake as well as when I'm asleep. Simu-multi-taneously, he hears the alarm and cries, "The Illuminati must be attacking!"

"Attacking this building?" Saul asks confusedly.

"Building? You're on a submarine, man. The Lief Erickson, on its way to Atlantis!"

Twenty big rhinoceroses, twenty-one big rhinoceroses… .

"Number Seventeen," read Professor Curve, "Law and anarchists will give the American people a speedy Cadillac."

All the Helen Hokinson types are out today. Another one just hit me for the Mothers March Against Dandruff. I gave her a nickel.

1923 was a very interesting year for the occult, by the way. Not only did Hitler join the Illuminati and attempt the Munich putsch, but, glancing through the books of Charles Fort, I found quite a few suggestive events. On March 17th- which not only fits our IT-23 correlation but is also the anniversary of the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the day the Lord Nelson statue was bombed in Dublin in 1966 and, of course, good Saint Patrick's holy day- a naked man was seen mysteriously running about the estate of Lord Caernarvon in England. He appeared several times in the following days, but was never caught. Meanwhile, Lord Caernarvon himself died in Egypt- some said he was a victim of the curse of Tut-Ankh-Amen, whose tomb he had burglarized. (An archaeologist is a ghoul with credentials.) Fort also records two cases that May of a synchronistic phenomenon he has traced through the centuries: a volcanic eruption coinciding with the discovery of a new star. In September, there was a Mumiai scare in India-Mumiais are invisible demons that grab people in broad daylight. Throughout the year, there were reports of exploding coal in England; some tried to explain this by saying the embittered miners (it was a time of labor troubles) were putting dynamite in the coal, but the police couldn't prove this. The coal went on exploding. In the summer, French pilots began having strange mishaps, whenever they flew over Germany, and it was suggested that the Germans were testing an invisible ray machine. Considering the last three phenomena together- invisible demons in India, exploding coal in England, invisible rays over Germany- I guess somebody was testing something…