Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"Hitler," Winifred replied, not hiding the sneer now. "Saw him in his more human form. He's… progressed… since then."

Tonight, Drake thought, as the thunder rose to a maddening crescendo, I will see him, or one of them. Surely, I could have picked a more agreeable form of suicide? The question was pointless; Jung had been right all along, with his Law of Opposites. Even Freud knew it: every sadist becomes a masochist at last.

On an impulse, Drake arose and fetched a pad and pen from the bedside Tudor table. He began to scribble by the light of the increasing electrical storm outside:

What am I afraid of? Haven't I been building up to this rendezvous ever since I threw the bottle at mother when I was 1 1/2 years old?

And it is kin to me. We both live on blood, do we not, even if I have prettied it over by taking the blood money instead of the blood itself?

Dimensions keep shifting, whenever it gets a fix on me. Prinn was right in his De Vermis Mysteriis, they don't really participate in the same space-time as us. That's what Alhazred meant when he wrote, "Their hand is at your throat but you see them not. They walk serene and unsuspected, not in the spaces we know, but between them."

"Pull me out," the Dutchman moaned. "I am half crazy. They won't let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Give me something. I am so sick."

I can see Kadath and the two magnetic poles. I must unify the forces by eating the entity.

Which me is the real me? Is it so easy to flow into my soul because there is so little soul left? Is that what Jung was trying to tell me about power?

I see Newark Hospital and the Dutchman. I see the white light and then the black that does not pulsate or move. I see George trying to drive the Rolls in this damnable rain. I see the whiteness of whiteness is black.

"Anybody," the Dutchman pleaded, "kindly take my shoes off. No, there's a handcuff on them. The Baron says these things."

I see Weishaupt and the Iron Boot. No wonder only five ever withstand the ordeal to become the top of the pyramid. Baron Rothschild won't let Rhodes get away with that. What is time or space, anyway? What is soul, that we claim to judge it? Which is real- the boy Arthur Flegenheimer, seeking for his mother, the gangster Dutch Schultz, dealing in murder and corruption with the cool of a Medici or a Morgan, or the mad poet being born in the Newark hospital bed as the others die?

And Elizabeth was a bitch. They sang "The Golden Vanity" about Raleigh, but none could speak a word against me. Yet he received the preference. The Globe Theatre, new drama by Will Shakespeare, down the street they torture Sackerson the bear for sport.

Christ, they opened the San Andreas Fault to hide the most important records about Norton. Sidewalks opening like mouths, John Barrymore falling out of bed, Will Shakespeare in his mind, my mind, Sir Francis's mind. Roderick Usher. Starry Wisdom, they called it.

"The sidewalk was in trouble," the Dutchman tried to explain, "and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control."

I can hear it! The very sounds recorded by Poe and Lovecraft: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li! It must be close.

I didn't mean to throw the bottle, mother. I just wanted your attention. I just wanted attention.

"Okay,' the Dutchman sighed. "Okay, I am all through. Can't do another thing. Look out, mama, look out for her. You can't beat Him. Police. Mama. Helen. Mother. Please take me out."

I can see it and it can see me. In the dark. There are things worse than death, vivisections of the spirit. I should run. Why do I sit here? The bicycle and the tricycle. 23 skiddoo. Inside the pentagon, the cold of interstellar space. They came from the stars and brought their images with them. Mother. I'm sorry.

"Come on, open the soap duckets," the Dutchman said hopelessly. "The chimney sweeps. Take to the sword."

It is like a chimney without end. Up and up forever, in deeper and deeper darkness. And the red all-seeing eye.

"Please help me up. French Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone."

I want to join it. I want to become it. I have no more will of my own. I take thee, old whore Death, as my lawful wedded wife. I am mad. I am half mad. Mother. The bottle. Linda, schlurped, sucked down.

Unity.

A nine-year-old girl named Patty Cohen lived three miles down the coast from the Drake estate, and she went mad in those early morning hours of April 25. At first, her parents thought she had gotten hold of some of the LSD which was known to be infiltrating the local grammar school and, being fairly hip, they fed her niacin and horse doctor's doses of vitamin C as she ran about the house alternately laughing and making faces at them, howling about "he's laying in his own piss" and "he's still alive inside it" and "Roderick Usher." By morning they knew it was more than acid, and months of sadness began as they took her to clinics and private psychiatrists and more clinics and more private psychiatrists. Finally, just before Chanukah in December, they took her to an elegant shrink on Park Avenue, and she had a virtual epileptic fit in the waiting room, staring at a statue on the end table and screaming, "Don't let him eat me! Don't let him eat me!" Her recovery began from that day, and the sight of that miniature representation of the giant Tlaloc in Mexico City.

But three hours after Drake's death, George Dorn lay on his bed in the Hotel Tudor, holding a phone to his ear, listening to it ring. A young woman's voice on the other end suddenly said hello.

"I'd like to speak to Inspector Goodman," said George.

There was a momentary pause, then the voice said, "Who's calling, please?"

"My name is George Dorn, but it probably wouldn't mean anything to the Inspector. But would you ask him to come to the phone please and tell him I have a message for him about the case of Joseph Malik."

There was a constricted silence, as if the woman on the other end of the phone wanted to scream and had stopped breathing. Finally she said, "My husband is working just now, but I'll be glad to give him any message you have."

"That's funny," said George. "I've been told Inspector Goodman's duty hours are noon to 9 P.M."

"I don't think it's any of your business where he is," the woman suddenly blurted. George felt a little shock. Rebecca Goodman was frightened and she didn't know where her husband was: something in the tone of her last three words revealed her mental state to George. I must be getting more sensitive to people, he thought.

"Do you ever hear from him?" he said gently. He was feeling sorry for Mrs. Inspector Saul Goodman, who was, come to think of it, the wife of a pig. If, just a few years ago, George had read in the paper that this woman's husband had been shot down at random by some unknown revolutionary-type assailants, he would probably have whispered, "Right on." One of George's own friends of that period might have killed Inspector Goodman. There was even a moment when George himself might have done it. Once, one of the kids in George's group had called up the young widow of a policeman killed one December by young blacks and called her a bitch and the wife of a pig and told her that her husband was guilty of crimes against the people and that those who had shot him would go down in history as heroes. George had approved of this verbal action as a means of hardening oneself against bourgeois sentimentality. The papers had been full of stories about how this policeman's three little kids would have no Christmas this year; such tripe made George urgently want to throw up.

But now this woman's anguish was coursing through the wire and he was feeling it, just because her husband was not known to be dead, just missing. And probably not dead at all; otherwise why would Hagbard have said that George should get in touch with him?