“Good. I want to try to write about what I’ve seen and what has happened to me. I’ll see you guys later.”
“There’s to be a magnificent dinner tonight in the main dining salon,” said Hagbard.
Joe said, “Don’t forget, Confrontation has a first option on anything you write.”
“Fuck you,” George’s voice came back as the door of the bridge closed behind him.
“Wish I had something better to do than this. Gimme two,” said Otto Waterhouse.
“You do, don’t you?” said Harry Coin. “Ain’t that Nigra gal, Stella, your gal? Why ain’t you with her?”
“Because she doesn’t exist,” said Otto, picking up the two cards John-John Dillinger had slid across the polished teak-wood table to him. He studied his hand for a moment, then threw a five-ton flax note into the pot. “Any more than Mavis or Miss Mao exists. There’s a woman somewhere under all of those identities, but everything I’ve experienced has been a hallucination.”
“There isn’t a woman in the world you couldn’t say that about,” said Dillinger. “How many cards you want, Harry?”
“Three,” said Harry. “This is a lousy hand you dealt me, John-John. Come to think of it, you’re hallucinatin’ all the time when you have sex. That’s what makes it good. And that’s how come I can fuck anything.”
“I’ll just take one,” said Dillinger. “Dealt myself a pretty good hand. What do you see when you’re fucking trees and little boys and whatnot, Harry?”
“A white light,” said Harry. “Just a big beautiful clear white light. I’ll throw in ten tons of flax this time.”
“Must be your hand isn’t so lousy after all,” said Water-house.
“Come in,” said George. The stateroom door opened, and he put down his pen. It was Stella.
“We have a little problem, don’t we, George?” she said, coming into the room and sitting beside him on the bed. “I think you’re angry at me,” she went on, putting her hand on his knee. “You feel like this identity of mine is a sham. So, in a sense, I was deceiving you.”
“I’ve lost you and Mavis both,” said George. “You’re both the same person—which means you’re really neither. You’re immortal. You’re not human; I don’t know what you are.” Suddenly he looked at her hopefully. “Unless that was all a hallucination last night. Could it have been the acid? Can you really change into different people?”
“Yes,” said Mavis.
“Don’t do that,” said George. “It upsets me too much.” He darted a little glance to his side. It was Stella.
“I don’t really understand why it bothers me so much,” said George. “I ought to be able to take everything in stride by now.”
“Did it ever bother you that you were in love with Mavis, besides being in love with me?” said Stella.
“Not much. Because it hardly ever seemed to bother you. But I know why now. How could you be jealous when you and Mavis were the same person?”
“We’re not the same person, really.”
“What does that mean?”
“Did you ever read The Three Faces of Eve? Listen …”
Like all the best love stories, it began in Paris. She was well-known as a Hollywood actress (and was actually an Illuminatus); he was becoming fairly famous as a jet-set millionaire (and was actually a smuggler and anarchist). Envision Bogart and Bergman in the flashback sequences from Casablanca. It was like that: a passion so intense, a Paris so beautiful (recovering from the war it had been slipping toward in the Bogart-Bergman epic), a couple so radiant that any observer with an eye for nuance would have foretold a storm ahead. It came the night he confessed he was a magician and made a certain proposal to her; she left him at once. A month later, back in Beverly Hills, she realized that what he had asked was her destiny. When she tried to find him—as often happened with Hagbard Celine—he had dropped from public view, leaving his businesses in other hands temporarily, and was in camera.
A year later she heard that he was again a public figure, hobnobbing with English businessmen of questionable reputation and even more dubious Chinese import-export executives in Hong Kong. She violated her contract with the biggest studio in Hollywood and flew to the Crown colony, only to find he had dropped from sight again, while his recent friends were being investigated for involvement in the heroin business.
She found him in Tokyo, at the Imperial Hotel.
“A year ago, I decided to accept your proposal,” she told him, “but now, after Hong Kong, I’m not so sure.”
“Thelema,” he said, facing her across a room that seemed designed for Martians; it had actually been designed for Welshmen.
She sat down abruptly on a couch. “You’re in the Order?”
“In the Order and against the Order,” he said. “The real purpose is to destroy them.”
“I’m one of the top Five in the United States,” she said unsteadily. “What makes you think I’ll turn on them now?”
“Thelema,” he repeated. “It’s not just a password. It means Will.”
“‘The Order is my Will.’” She quoted from Weishaupt’s original Oath of Initiation.
“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re talking to me because part of you knows that a human being’s Will is never in an external organization.”
“You sound like a moralist. That’s odd—for a heroin merchant.”
“You sound like a moralist, too, and that’s very odd—for a servant of Agharti.”
“Nobody joins that lot,” she said with a pert Cockney accent, “without being a moralist to start with.” They both laughed.
“I was right about you,” Hagbard said.
But, George interrupted, is he really in the heroin business? That’s dirty.
You sound like a moralist too, she said. It’s part of his Demonstration. Any government could put him out of business within their borders—as England has done—by legalizing junk. So long as they refuse to do that, there’s a black market. He won’t let the Mafia monopolize it—he makes sure the black market is a free market. If it wasn’t for him a lot of junkies who are alive today would be dead of contaminated heroin. But let me go on with the story.
They rented a villa in Naples to begin the transformation. For a month the only humans she saw—aside from Hagbard—were two servants named Sade and Masoch (she later learned that their real names were Eichmann and Calley). They began each day by serving her breakfast and quarreling. The first day, Sade argued for materialism and Masoch for idealism; the second day, Sade expounded fascism and Masoch communism; the third day, Sade insisted on cracking eggs from the big end and Masoch was equally vehement about the little end. All the debates were on a high and lofty intellectual level, verbally, but seemed absurd because of the simple fact that Sade and Masoch always wore clown suits. The fourth day, they argued for and against abortion; the fifth day, for and against mercy-killing; the sixth day, for and against the proposition “Life is worth living.” She became more and more aware of the time and money Hagbard had spent in training and preparing them: Each argued with the skill of a first-rate trial lawyer and had a phalanx of carefully researched facts to support his position—and yet the clown suits made it hard to take either of them seriously. The seventh morning, they argued theism versus atheism; the eighth morning, the individual versus the State; the ninth, whether wearing shoes was or was not a sexual perversion. All arguments began to seem equally insubstantial. The tenth morning, they feuded over realism versus antinomianism; the eleventh, whether the statement “All statements are relative” is or is not self-contradictory; the twelfth, whether a man who sacrifices his life for his country is or is not insane; the fifteenth, whether spaghetti or Dante had had the greater influence on the Italian national character …
But that was only the start of the day. After breakfast (in her bedroom, where every article of furniture was gold but only vaguely rounded) she went to Hagbard’s study (where everything looked exactly like a golden apple) an
d watched documentary films concerning the early matriarchal stage of Greek culture. At ten random intervals the name “Eris” would be called; if she remembered to respond, a chocolate candy arrived from a wall shoot. At ten other random intervals, her own name was called; if she responded to this, she received a mild electric shock. After the tenth day the system was changed and intensified: The shock was stronger if she responded to her previous name, whereas if she responded to “Eris” Hagbard immediately entered and balled her.
During lunch (which always ended with golden apfelstrudel), Calley and Eichmann danced for her, a complex ballet which Hagbard called “Hodge-Podge;” as many times as she saw this, she never was able to determine how they changed costumes at the climax, in which Hodge became Podge and Podge became Hodge.
In the afternoon Hagbard came to her suite and gave lessons in yoga, concentrating on pranayama, with some training in asana. “The important thing is not being able to stand so still that you can balance a saucer of sulphuric acid on your head without getting hurt,” he stressed. “The important thing is knowing what each muscle is doing, if it must be doing something.”
In the evenings they went to a small chapel that had been part of the villa for centuries. Hagbard had removed all Christian decorations and redesigned it in classical Greek with a traditional magic pentagram on the floor. She sat, in the full lotus, within the internal pentagon, while Hagbard danced insanely around the five points (he was totally stoned), calling upon Eris.
“Some of what you’re doing seems scientific,” she told him after five days, “but some is plain damnfoolishness.”
“If the science fails,” he replied, “the damnfoolishness may work.”
“But last night you had me in that pentagon for three hours while you called on Eris. And she didn’t come.”
“She will,” Hagbard said darkly. “Before the month is over. We’re just establishing the foundation this week, laying down the proper lines of word and image and emotional energy.”
During the second week she was convinced Hagbard was quite mad as she watched him prance and caper like a goat around the five points, shouting, in the flickering candlelight and amid the heavy bouquet of burning incense and hemp. But at the end of that week she was responding to her former name exactly 0 percent of the time and responding to “Eris” exactly 100 percent of the time. “The conditioning is working better than the magic,” she said on the fifteenth day.
“Do you really think there’s a difference?” he asked curiously.
That night she felt the air in the chapel change in a strange way during his dancing invocations.
“Something’s happening,” she said involuntarily—but he replied only “Quiet,” and continued, more loudly and insanely, to call upon Eris. The phenomenon—the tingle—remained, but nothing else happened.
“What was it?” she asked later.
“Some call it Orgone and some call it the Holy Ghost,” he said briefly. “Weishaupt called it the Astral Light. The reason the Order is so fucked up is that they’ve lost contact with it.”
The following days Sade and Masoch argued whether God was male or female, whether God was sexed at all or neutral, whether God was an entity or a verb, whether R. Buckminster. Fuller really existed or was a technocratic solar myth, and whether human language was capable of containing truth. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs—all parts of speech—were losing meaning for her as these clowns endlessly debated the basic axioms of ontology and epistemology. Meanwhile, she was no longer rewarded for answering to the name Eris, but only for acting like Eris, the imperious and somewhat nutty goddess of a people as far gone in matriarchy as the Jews were in patriarchy. Hagbard, in turn, became so submissive as to border on masochism. “This is ridiculous,” she objected once, “you’re becoming…effeminate.”
“Eris can be…somewhat ‘adjusted’ … to modern notions of decorum after we’ve invoked Her,” he said calmly. “First we must have Her here. My Lady” he added obsequiously.
“I’m beginning to see why you had to pick an actress for this,” she said a few days later, after a bit of Method business had won her an extra reward. She was, in fact, beginning to feel like Eris as well as act like her.
“The only other candidates—if I couldn’t get you—were two other actresses and a ballerina,” he replied. “Actually, any strong-willed woman would do, but it would take much longer without previous theatrical training.”
Books about matriarchy began to supplement the films: Diner’s Mothers and Amazons, Bachofen, Engels, Mary Renault, Morgan, Ian Suttie’s The Origins of Love and Hate, Robert Graves in horse-doctor’s doses—The White Goddess, The Black Goddess, Hercules My Shipmate, Watch the North Wind Rise. She began to see that matriarchy made as much sense as patriarchy; Hagbard’s exaggerated deference toward her began to appear natural; she was far gone on a power trip. The invocations grew wilder and more frantic. Sade and Masoch were brought into the chapel to assist with demonaic music performed on a tom-tom and an ancient Greek pipe, they ate hashish cakes before the invocation now and she couldn’t remember afterward exactly what had happened, the voice of the male called upward to her, “Mother! Creator! Ruler! Come to me! Come to me! come to me! Ave, Discordia! Ave, Magna Mater! Venerandum, vente, vente!
Thou bornless ever reborn one! Thou deathless ever-dying one! Come to me as Isis and Artemis and Aphrodite, come as Helen, as Hera, come especially as Eris!”
She was bathing in the rockpool when he appeared, the blood of slain deer and rabbits on his robe— She spoke the word and Hagbard was stricken— As he fell forward his hands became hooves, antlers sprouted from his head —His own dogs could eat him, she didn’t care, the hemp smell in the room was gagging her, the tom-tom beat was maddening. She was rising out of the waves, proud of her nudity, riding on the come-colored pearls of foam. He was carrying her back to her bed, murmuring, “My Lady, my Lady.” She was the Hag, wandering the long Nile, weeping, seeking the fragments of his lost body as they passed the closet and the window; he placed her head gently on the pillow. “We almost made it,” he said. “Tomorrow night, maybe …”
They were back in the chapel, a whole day must have passed, and she sat immobile in full lotus doing the pranayama breathing while he danced and chanted and the weird music of the pipe and tom-tom worked on every conditioned reflex that told her she was not American but Greek, not of this age but of a past age, not woman but goddess … the White Light came as a series of orgasms and stars going nova, she half felt the body of light coming forth from the body of fire…and all three of them were sitting by her bed, watching her gravely, as sunlight came flowing through the window.
Her first word was crude and angry.
“Shit. Is it always going to be like that—a white epileptic spasm and a hole in time? Won’t I ever be able to remember it?”
Hagbard laughed. “I put on my trousers one leg at a time,” he said, “and I don’t pull the corn up by its stalks to help it grow.”
“Can the Taoism and give me a straight answer.”
“Remembering is just a matter of smoothing the transitions,” he said. “Yes, you’ll remember. And control it.”
“You’re a madman,” she replied wearily. “And you’re leading me into your own mad universe. I don’t know why I still love you.”
“We love him, too,” Sade interjected helpfully. “And we don’t know why either. We don’t even have sex as an excuse.”
Hagbard lit one of his foul Sicilian cigars. “You think I just laid my trip on your head,” he said. “It’s more than that, much more. Eris is an eternal possibility of human nature. She exists quite apart from your mind or mine. And she is the one possibility that the Illuminati cannot cope with. What we started here last night—with Pavlovian conditioning that’s considered totalitarian and ancient magic that’s believed to be mere superstition—will change the course of history and make real liberty and real rationality possible at last. Maybe this dream of mine is madness—but if I la
y it on enough people it will be sanity, by definition, because it will be statistically normal. We’ve just started, with me programming the trip for you. The next step is for you to become a self-programmer.”
And he told the truth, Stella said. I did become a self-programmer. The three that you know were all my creations. Possibilities within me, women I could have become, anyway, if genes and environment had been only slightly different. Just small adjustments in the biogram and logogram.
“Holy Mother,” George said hollowly. It seemed the only appropriate comment.
“The only other detail,” she went on calmly, “was arranging a convincing suicide. That took a while. But it was done, and my old identity officially ceased to exist.” She changed to her original form.
“Oh, no,” George said, reeling. “It can’t be. I used to jack off over pictures of you when I was a little boy.”
“Are you disappointed that I’m so much older than you thought?” Her eyes crinkled in amusement. He looked into those suddenly thirty-thousand-year-old eyes of one manifestation of Lilith Velkor and all the arguments of Sade and Masoch appeared clownish and he looked through those eyes and saw himself and Joe and Saul and even Hagbard as mere men and all their attitudes as merely manly, and he saw the eternal womanly rebuttal, and he saw beyond and above that the eternal divine amusement, he looked into those eyes of amusement, those ancient glittering eyes so gay, and he said, sincerely, “Hell, I can never be disappointed about anything, ever again.” (George Dorn entered Nirvana, parenthetically.)
All categories collapsed, including the all-important distinction, which Masoch and Sade had never argued, between science fiction and serious literature. N
o because Daddy and Mommy were always just that Daddy and Mommy and never once did they become for a change Mommy and Daddy do you dig that important difference? do you dig difference? do you dig the lonely voice when you’re lost out here shouting “me” “me” justme
“I can never be disappointed about anything, ever again,” George Dorn said, coming back.
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 78
