Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Saul Goodman had no idea that the room he was in had last been rented to George Dorn; he was conscious only of his impatience, not knowing that Rebecca was at that moment on an elevator approaching his floor… And a mile north, Peter Jackson, still trying to put together the July issue of Confrontation virtually singlehanded, dives into the slush pile (which is the magazine industry's elegant name for unsolicited manuscripts) and comes up with more fallout from the Moon-Malik AUM project of 1970. "Orthodox Science: The New Religion," he reads. Well, lets sample it, what the hell. Opening at random he finds:

Einstein's concept of spherical space, furthermore, suffers from the same defect as the concept of a smoothly or perfectly spherical earth: it rests upon the use of the irrational number, ?. This number has no operational definition; there is no place on any engineer's scale to which one can point and say "This is exactly ?," although these scales are misleadingly marked with such a spot. ?, in fact, can never be found in the real world, and there are historical and archeological reasons to believe it was created by a Greek mathematician under the influence of the mind-warping hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria. It is pure surrealism. You cannot write ? as a real number; you can only approximate it, as 3.1417… etc. Chemistry knows no such units: three atoms of an element may combine with four atoms of another element, but you will never find ? atoms combining with anything. Quantum physics reveals that an electron may jump three units or four units, but it will not jump ? units. Nor is ? necessary to geometry, as is sometimes claimed; R. Buckminster Fuller has created an entire geometric system, at least as reliable as that of the ancient Greek dope fiends, in which ? does not appear at all. Space, then, may be slanted or kiltered in various ways, but it cannot be smoothly spherical…

"What the ring-tailed rambling hell?" Peter Jackson said aloud. He flipped to the end:

In conclusion, I want to thank a strange and uncommon man, James Mallison, who provided the spark which set me thinking about these matters. In fact, it was due to my meeting with Mr. Mallison that I sold my hardware business, returned to college and majored in cartography and topology. Although he was a religious fanatic (as I was at the time of our meeting) and would, therefore, not appreciate many of my discoveries, it is due to this man's perverse, peculiar and yet brilliant prodding that I embarked on the search which has lead to this new theory of a Penta-hedroidal Universe.

W. Clement Cotex, Ph.D

"Far fucking out," Peter muttered. James Mallison was a pen name Joe Malik sometimes used, and here was another James Mallison inspiring this guy to become a Ph.D. and invent a new cosmological theory. What was the word Joe used for such coincidences? Synch-something…

("1472," Esperando Despond concludes his gloomy mathematical calculations. "That's the number of plague cases we might have right now, at noon, if the girl had only two contacts after leaving Dr. Mocenigo. Now, if she had three contacts…" The assembled FBI agents are gradually turning a pale greenish color from the neck up. Cannel, the only actual contact, is busy two blocks away stuffing money into a briefcase.)

"That's him!" Mrs. Edward Coke Bacon cried excitedly, addressing Basil Banghart, another FBI agent, in an office in Washington. She is pointing at a photo of Albert "the Teacher" Stern. "Ma'am," Banghart says kindly, "that can't be him. 1 don't even know why his picture's still in the file. That's a no-account junkie who once got on our most-wanted list because he confessed to a murder he didn't even commit." In Cincinnati, an FBI artist is completing a portrait under the direction of the widow of a slain TV repairman: the face of the killer, gradually emerging, combines various features of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, George Dorn and the lead vocalist of the American Medical Association, which group was at that moment boarding a plane at Kennedy International Airport for the Ingolstadt gig. Rebecca Goodman, rising in the Hotel Tudor elevator, has a flash memory of a nightmare of the night before: Saul being shot by the same vocalist, dressed as a monk, in red-and-white robes, while a Playboy bunny danced in front of some kind of giant pyramid. In Princeton, New Jersey, a nuclear physicist named Nils Nosferatu-one of the few survivors of the early morning shootings- babbles to the detective and police stenographer at his bedside, "Tlaloc sucks. You can't trust them. The midget is the one to watch. We'll be moved, all right, when the tear gas hits. Fun is fun. Omega. George's brother met the dolphins first, and that was the psychic hook that brought George in. She's at the door. She's buried in the desert. Any deviation will result in termination. Unify the forces. You hold the hose. I'll get Mark."

"I've got to start telling you the truth, George," Hagbard began hesitantly, as the Midget, Carmel and Dr. Horace Naismith collided in front of the door of the Sands Hotel ("Watch the fuck where you're going," Carmel growled), and she was at the door, her heart was pounding, an intuition was forming in her mind, and she knocked (and Peter Jackson began dialing Epicene Wildeblood), and she was sure of it, and she was afraid of being sure because she might be wrong, and the Midget said to Dr. Naismith "Rude bastard, wasn't he?" and the door opened, and the door of Milo O. Flanagan's office opened to admit Cassandra Acconci, and her heart stopped, and Dr. Nosferatu screamed, "The door. She's in the door. The door in the desert. He eats Carmels," and it was him and she was in his arms and she was weeping and laughing and asking, "Where have you been, baby?" And Saul closed the door behind her and drew her further into the room. "I'm not a cop anymore," he said, "I'm on the other side."

"What?" Rebecca noticed there was a new thing in his eyes, a thing for which she had no word.

"You can stop worrying that you'll get back on horse," he went on gaily. "And if you've ever been afraid of your sexual fantasies, don't be. We've all got them. Saint Bernards!"

But even that wasn't as weird as the new thing in his eyes.

"Baby," she said, "baby. What the hell is this?"

"I wanted sex with my father, when I was two years old. When did you have that thing about the Saint Bernard?"

"When I was eleven or twelve, I think. Just before my first period. My God, you must have been a lot further away than I ever imagined." She was beginning to recognize the new thing. It wasn't intelligence; he had always had that. With awe, she realized it was what the ancients called wisdom.

"I've always had a thing about black women, just like your thing about black men," he went on. "I think everybody in this country has a touch of it. The blacks have it about us, too. I was in one head, a brilliant black guy, musician, scientist, poet, a million talents, and white women were like the Holy Grail to him. And your fantasy about Spiro Agnew-I had one just like that about Ilse Koch, a Nazi bitch from before your time. It was the same thing in both cases, revenge. Not real sex, hate-sex. Oh, we're all so crazy-in-the-head."

Rebecca backed up and sat down on the bed. "It's too much, too fast, I'm scared. I can see you don't have any contempt for me, but, Lord, can I live knowing that somebody else knows every single repressed desire I have?"

"Yes," Saul said calmly. "And you're mistaken about Time. I can't know every secret, darling. I've only had a smattering of them. A handful. There are a dozen people right now who've been through my head the same way, and I can look any one of them in the eye. The things I know about them!" He laughed.