Part 15 (2/2)

”Like you said, nowadays in big cities ...” Joe shrugged. ”I'm just saying that it looked like it to me. Of course, maybe the usher isn't one. Maybe he's just a cheap thief who was trying to pick the kid's pocket. A lot of that goes on these days, too.” Cotex involuntarily reached back to check his own wallet, and Joe went on blandly. ”But I wouldn't rule out the other, not by a long shot. What sort of man would want to be an usher at a KCUF meeting, if you stop and think about it? You must have observed how many h.o.m.os.e.xuals there are in our organization.”

”What?” Cotex's eyes bulged.

”You haven't noticed it?” Joe smiled loftily. ”There are very few of us who are really Christians. Most of the members.h.i.+p are just a little bit lavender little bit lavender, know what I mean? I think it's one of our biggest problems, and we ought to bring it out into the open and discuss it frankly. Clear the air, right? For instance, take the way Smiling Jim always puts his arm around your shoulder when he talks to you-”

Cotex interrupted, ”Hey, mister, you're pretty darn bright. Just now hit me like a flash-some of the men men here, when Smiling Jim showed those beaver shots to prove how bad some magazines are getting, they really shuddered. They didn't just disapprove-it really honest-to-Pete revolted them. What kind of here, when Smiling Jim showed those beaver shots to prove how bad some magazines are getting, they really shuddered. They didn't just disapprove-it really honest-to-Pete revolted them. What kind of man man actually finds a naked lady disgusting?” actually finds a naked lady disgusting?”

Go, baby, go, Joe thought. The AUM is working. He quickly derailed the conversation. ”Another thing that bothers me. Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?”

”Huh?”

”Look,” Joe said. ”If all the scientists and eggheads and commies and liberals are pus.h.i.+ng it in our schools all the time, there must be something a little fishy about it. Did you ever stop to think that there's no way-just no way at all-to reconcile a spherical earth with the story of the Flood, or Joshua's miracle, or Jesus standing on the pinnacle of the Temple and seeing all the kingdoms of the earth? And I ask you, man to man, in all your travels have you ever seen seen the curvature anywhere? Every place the curvature anywhere? Every place I've I've been is flat. Are we going to trust the Bible and the evidence of our own senses, or are we going to listen to a bunch of agnostics and atheists in laboratory smocks?” been is flat. Are we going to trust the Bible and the evidence of our own senses, or are we going to listen to a bunch of agnostics and atheists in laboratory smocks?”

”But the earth's shadow on the moon during an eclipse ...”

Joe took a dime out of his pocket and held it up. ”This casts a circular shadow, but it's flat, not spherical.”

Cotex stared into s.p.a.ce for a long moment, while Joe waited with suppressed excitement. ”You know something?” Cotex said finally, ”all the Bible miracles and our own travels and the shadow on the moon would make sense if the earth was shaped like a carrot carrot and all the continents were on the flat end-” and all the continents were on the flat end-”

Praise be to Simon's G.o.d, Bugs Bunny, Joe thought elatedly. It's happening-he's not only gullible-he's creative.

I followed the cop-the pig, I corrected myself-out of the cafeteria. I was so keyed up that it was a Trip. The blue of his uniform, the neon signs, even the green of the lampposts, all were coming in superbright. That was adrenalin. My mouth was dry-dehydration. All the cla.s.sic flight-fight symptoms. The activation syndrome, Skinner calls it. I let the cop-the pig-get half a block ahead and reached in my pocket for the revolver.

”Come on, George!” Malik shouted. George didn't want to move. His heart was thumping, his arms and legs trembling so hard he knew they'd be useless to him in a fight. But he just didn't want to move. He'd had enough of running from these motherf.u.c.kers.

But he couldn't help himself. As the men in blue s.h.i.+rts and white helmets came on, the crowd surged away from them, and George had to move back with the crowd or be knocked down and trampled.

”Come on on, George.” It was Pete Jackson at his side now, with a good, hard grip on his arm, tugging him.

”G.o.ddam it, why do we have to run away from them?” George said, stumbling backward.

Peter was smiling faintly. ”Don't you read your Mao, George? Enemy attacks, we retreat. Let the Morituri fanatics stand and get creamed.”

I couldn't do it. My hand held the gun, but I couldn't take it out and hold it in front of me any more than I could take out my p.e.n.i.s and wave it around. I was sure, even though the street was empty except for me and the pig, that a dozen people would jump out of doorways yelling, ”Look, he took it out of his pants.” ”Look, he took it out of his pants.”

Just like right now, when Hagbard said, ”b.u.t.ton up your a.s.shole. We're in for a fight,” I stood frozen like I stood frozen on the embankment above the Pa.s.saic.

”Are you on an ego trip playing at being a revolutionary?” Carlo asked.

And Mavis: ”All the militant radicals in your crowd ever do is take out the Molotov c.o.c.ktail diagram that they carefully clipped from The New York Review of Books The New York Review of Books, hang it on the bathroom door, and j.a.c.k.-.o.f.f. in connection with it.”

Howard sang: The foe is attacking, their s.h.i.+ps coming near,Now is the time to fight without fear!Now is the time to look death in the eyeBefore we submit, we'll fight till we die!

This time I got the gun out of my pocket-standing there, looking down at the Pa.s.saic-and raised it to my forehead. If I didn't have the courage for homicide, Jesus knows I have despair enough for a hundred suicides. And I only have to do it once. Just once, and then oblivion, I c.o.c.k the firing pin. (More play-acting, George? Or will you really do it?) I'll do it, d.a.m.n you, d.a.m.n all of you. I pull the trigger and fall, with the explosion, into blackness.

(AUM was a product of the scientists at ELF-the Erisian Liberation Front-and shared by them with the JAMs. An extract of hemp, boosted with RNA, the ”learning” molecule, it also had small traces of the famous ”Frisco Speedball”-heroin, cocaine, and LSD. The effect seemed to be that the heroin stilled anxiety, the RNA stimulated creativity, the hemp and acid opened the mind to joy, and the cocaine was there to fit the Law of Fives. The delicate balance created no hallucinations, no sense of ”high”-just a sudden spurt in what Hagbard Celine liked to call ”constructive gullibility.”) It was one of those sudden s.h.i.+fts of movement that occur in a mob scene. Instead of pus.h.i.+ng George and Peter back, the crowd between them and the white helmets were parting. A slender man fell heavily against George, anguish in his eyes. There was a terrible thump, and the man fell to the ground.

George saw the dark brown wooden cross before he saw the man who wielded it. There was blood and hair at the end of the crossarm. The G.o.d's Lightning man was dark, broad and muscular, with a blue shadow on his cheeks. He looked Italian or Spanish-he looked, in fact, a lot like Carlo. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open and he was breathing heavily. The expression was neither rage nor s.a.d.i.s.tic joy-just the unthinking panting alertness of a man doing a difficult and fatiguing job. He bent over the fallen slender man and raised the cross.

”All right!” snapped Peter Jackson. He pushed George aside. There was a silly-looking yellow plastic water pistol in his hand. He squirted the oblivious G.o.d's Lightning man in the back of the neck. The man screamed, arched backward, the cross flying end over end into the air. He fell on his back and lay screaming and writhing.

”Come on now, motherf.u.c.ker!” Pete snarled as he dragged George into the crowd, broken-field running toward Forty-second Street.

”An hour and a half to go,” Hagbard says, finally beginning to show suppressed tension. George checks his watch-it's exactly 10:30 p.m., Ingolstadt time. The Plastic Canoe is wailing KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE.

(Under the noon sun, two days earlier, Carmel speeds in his jeep away from Las Vegas.) ”Who am I going to meet at the Norton Cabal?” Joe asks. ”Judge Crater? Amelia Earhart? Nothing would surprise me now.”

”A few real together people,” Simon replies. ”But no one like that. But you'll have to die, really die, man, before you're illuminated.” He smiles gently. ”Aside from death and resurrection, you won't find anything you'd call 'supernatural' with this bunch. Not even a whiff of old Chicago-style Satanism.”

”G.o.d,” Joe says, ”was that only a week ago?”

”Yep,” Simon grins, gunning his VW around a Chevrolet with Oregon license plates, ”It's still nineteen sixty-nine, even if you seem to have lived several years since we met at the anarchist caucus.” His eyes are amused as he half turns to glance at Joe.

”I suppose that means you know what's been happening in my dreams. I'm getting the flashforwards already.”

”Always happens after a good dirty Black Ma.s.s with pot mixed in the incense,” Simon says. ”What sort of thing you getting? Is it happening when you're awake yet?”

”No, only in my dreams.” Joe pauses, thinking. ”I only know it's the real article because the dreams are so vivid. One set has to do with some kind of pro-censors.h.i.+p rally at the Sheraton-Chicago hotel, I think about a year from now. There's another set that seems farther in the future-five or six years-where I'm impersonating a doctor for some reason. And a third group of images comes to me, now and then, that seems to be the set of a Frankenstein movie, except that the extras are all hippies and there seems to be a rock festival going on.”

”Does it bother you?”

”A little. I'm used to waking up in the morning with the future ahead of me, not behind me and and ahead of me ahead of me both.” both.”

”You'll get used to it. You're just beginning to contact what old Weishaupt called 'die Morgensheutegesternwelt' 'die Morgensheutegesternwelt'-the tomorrow-today-yesterday world. It gave Goethe the idea for Faust Faust, just like Weishaupt's 'Ewige Blumenkraff' 'Ewige Blumenkraff' slogan inspired Goethe's slogan inspired Goethe's 'Ewige Weibliche.' 'Ewige Weibliche.' I'll tell you what,” Simon suggested, ”You might try wearing three wrist.w.a.tches, like Bucky Fuller does-one showing the time where you're at, one showing the time where you're going, and one showing the time at some arbitrary place like Greenwich Mean Time or your home town. It'll help you get used to relativity. Meanwhile, never whistle while you're p.i.s.sing. And you might repeat to yourself, when you get disoriented, Fuller's sentence, 'I seem to be a verb.'” I'll tell you what,” Simon suggested, ”You might try wearing three wrist.w.a.tches, like Bucky Fuller does-one showing the time where you're at, one showing the time where you're going, and one showing the time at some arbitrary place like Greenwich Mean Time or your home town. It'll help you get used to relativity. Meanwhile, never whistle while you're p.i.s.sing. And you might repeat to yourself, when you get disoriented, Fuller's sentence, 'I seem to be a verb.'”

They drove in silence for a while, and Joe pondered on being a verb. h.e.l.l, he thought, I have enough trouble understanding what Fuller means when he says G.o.d G.o.d is a verb. Simon let him mull it over, and began humming again: ”Rameses the Second is dead, my love/He's walking the fields where the BLESSED liiiiive....” Joe realized he was starting to doze ... is a verb. Simon let him mull it over, and began humming again: ”Rameses the Second is dead, my love/He's walking the fields where the BLESSED liiiiive....” Joe realized he was starting to doze ... and all the faces at the luncheon table looked at him in astonishment. ”No, seriously,” he said. ”Anthropologists are too timid to say it out in the open, in public, but corner one of them in private and ask him.” and all the faces at the luncheon table looked at him in astonishment. ”No, seriously,” he said. ”Anthropologists are too timid to say it out in the open, in public, but corner one of them in private and ask him.”

Every detail was clear: it was the same room in the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel, and the faces were the same. (I've been here before and said this before.) ”The rain dances of the Indians work. The rain always comes. So why isn't it possible that their G.o.ds are real and ours isn't? Have you ever prayed to Jesus for something and really gotten it?” There is a long silence and finally an old tight-faced woman smiles youthfully and declares, ”Young man, I'm going to try it. How do I meet an Indian in Chicago?”

Like tomahawks the crosses of G.o.d's Lightning rose and fell on the slender man's defenseless skull. They'd found their injured comrade lying on the street twisting and moaning beside his erstwhile victim. A couple of them hauled the wounded G.o.d's Lightning man away, while the rest took their revenge on the unconscious peace demonstrator.

(”You, Luke,” says Yeshua ben Yosef, ”don't write that down.”) s.p.a.ce-time, then, may be slanted or kiltered when you're lost out here: Fernando Poo looks through his gla.s.s at a new island, not guessing that it will be named after himself, not imagining that someday Simon Moon will write ”In Fourteen Hundred and Seventy Two, Fernando Poo discovered Fernando Poo,” and Hagbard says, ”Truth is a tiger,” while Timothy Leary does a Crown Point Pavanne out of San Luis Obispo Jail and four billion years earlier one squink says to another, ”I've solved the ecology problem on this new planet.” The other squink, partner to the first (they own Swift Kick Inc., the shoddiest contractors in the Milky Way) says ”How?” The first squink laughs coa.r.s.ely. ”Every organism produced will be programmed with a Death Trip. It'll give them a rather gloomy outlook, I admit, especially the more conscious ones, but it will sure minimize costs for us.” Swift Kick Inc. cut the edges every other way they could think, and Earth emerged as the Horrible Example invoked in all cla.s.ses on planetary design throughout the galaxy.

When Burroughs told me that, I flipped, because I was 23 that year and lived on Clark Street. Besides, I immediately saw the application to the Law of Fives: 2 + 3 = 5 and Clark has 5 letters.I was mulling this over when I happened to notice the s.h.i.+pwreck in Pound's Canto 23. That's the only s.h.i.+pwreck mentioned in the whole 800-page poem, in spite of all the nautical voyages described. Canto 23 also contains the line, ”with the sun in a golden cup,” which Yeats says inspired his own lines, ”the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon.” Golden apples, of course, brought me back to Eris, and I realized I was onto something hot.Then I tried adding the Illuminati Five to 23, and I got 28. The average menstrual period of Woman. The lunar cycle. Back to the silver apples of the moon-and I'm Moon. Of course, Pound and Yeats both have five letters in their names.If this be schizophrenia, I said with a P. Henry twist (one better than an O. Henry twist), make the most of it!I looked deeper.

Through a bullhorn, a police captain began to shout, CLEAR THE PLAZA CLEAR THE PLAZA.

The first reports of the annihilation camps were pa.s.sed on to the OSS by a Swiss businessman evaluated as being one of the most trustworthy informants on affairs in n.a.z.i Europe. The State Department decided that the stories were not confirmed. That was early in 1943. By autumn of that year, more urgent reports from the same source transmitted still through the OSS forced a major policy conference. It was again decided that the reports were not true. As winter began, the English government asked for another conference to discuss similar reports from their own intelligence networks and from the government of Rumania. The delegates met in Bermuda for a warm, sunny weekend, and decided that the reports were not true; they returned to their work refreshed and tanned. The death trains continued to roll. Early in 1944, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, was reached by dissenters in the State Department, examined the evidence, and forced a meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shaken by the a.s.sertions in Morgenthau's doc.u.ments, Roosevelt pledged that he would act at once. He never did. It was said later that the State Department convinced him, once again, of their own a.n.a.lysis: the reports simply were not true. When Mr. Hitler said Vernichtung Vernichtung he had not really meant he had not really meant Vernichtung Vernichtung. An author, Ben Hecht, then placed an ad in the New York Times New York Times, presenting the evidence to the public; a group of prominent rabbis attacked him for alarming Jews unnecessarily and undermining confidence in America's Chief Executive during wartime. Finally, late that year, American and Russian troops began liberating the camps, and General Eisenhower insisted that news photographers take detailed movies which were released to the whole world. In the interval between the first suppressed report by the Swiss businessman and the liberation of the first camp, six million people had died.

”That's what we call a Bavarian Fire Drill,” Simon explained to Joe. (It was another time; he was driving another Volkswagen. In fact, it was the night of April 23 and they were going to meet Tobias Knight at the UN building.) ”It was one official named Winifred who'd been transferred from the Justice Department to a key State Department desk where every bit of evidence pa.s.sed for evaluation. But the same principles apply everywhere. For instance-we're half an hour early for the meeting anyhow-I'll give you an ill.u.s.tration right now.” They were approaching the corner of Forty-third Street and Third Avenue and Simon had observed that the streetlight was changing to red. As he stopped the car, he opened the door and said to Joe, ”Follow me.”

Puzzled, Joe got out as Simon ran to the car behind them, beat on the hood with his hand and shouted ”Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” He made vigorous but ambiguous motions with his hands and ran to the car next back. Joe saw the first subject look dubiously at his companion and then open the door and get out, obediently trailing behind Simon's urgent and somber figure.

”Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” Simon was already shouting at the third car back.

As Joe trotted along, occasionally adding his own voice to persuade the more dubious drivers, every car gradually emptied and people formed a neat line heading back toward Lexington Avenue. Simon then ducked between two cars and began jogging toward the front of the line at Third Avenue again, shouting to everybody, ”Complete circle! Stay in line!” Obediently, everyone followed in a great circle back to their own cars, reentering from the side opposite to that from which they had left. Simon and Joe climbed back into the VW, the light changed, and they sped ahead.

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