Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"Baby," he said. "You could wake the dead."

He enjoyed his second orgasm about a half hour later, and his third a half hour after that. The second time Tarantella lay on her back and George lay on top of her, and the third time she was on her stomach and he was straddling her from the rear. There was something about the mood Tarantella created that was crucial to what she called her "specialty." Though she had boasted about her ability to make a man come repeatedly, when it came right down to doing things she made him feel that it didn't really matter what happened with him. She was fun-loving, playful, carefree. He did not feel obligated in any sense to stiffen, to come. Tarantella might view men as a challenge, but she made it clear that George was not to see her as a challenge.

After a short nap, he woke to find her sucking his rapidly hardening penis. It took much longer this time for him to come, but he enjoyed every second of mounting pleasure. After that they lay side by side and talked for a while. Then Tarantella went to the bedside table and took a tube of petroleum jelly out of a drawer. She began applying it to his penis, which grew erect during the process. Then she rolled over and presented him with her rosy asshole. It was the first time George had had a woman that way, and he came rather quickly after insertion from the novelty and excitement of it all.

They slept for a while and he awoke to find her masturbating him. Her fingers were very clever and seemed quickly to find their way to all the most sensitive parts of his penis- with special attention to that area just behind the crown of the head. He opened his eyes wide when he came and saw, after a few seconds, a small, pale, pearl-like drop of semen appear on the end of his dick. A wonder there was any at all.

It was getting to be a trip. His ego went away somewhere, and he was all body, letting it all happen. It was fucking Tarantella, and it 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 life-hater!" 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:

NO EMPLOYEE MAY, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, PUNCH

THE TIME CARD FOR ANY OTHER EMPLOYEE.

ANY DEVIATION WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION.

THE MGT.

"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 all 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."