"You saw Jesus?"
"Well," he said bashfully. "That wasn't just from the nails in my shoes. It was after I whipped my back with wet rope for six hours."
Sophie gazed at him thoughtfully for a long time. "What you trying to do, boy?"
"I'm learning how to live without fear," he said simply. "You know my dad. He's afraid of everything and everybody. Jews, Catholics, bad omens, the government, a broken mirror… you know. I just don't want to live my life that way."
Sophie thought about it for three days. Then she told him there was a man he ought to meet.
"What sort of man?" he asked.
"A high priest of Voudon."
RED EYE
Mister, what does it mean when a man crashes out?
–ida lupino in High Sierra, script by john huston
DECEMBER 24, 1983:
The Eye, diamond-bright and glowing with a red inflammation, floated in the air at the head of the couch as Joe Malik returned to the Euclidean flatland at the bottom of the gravity well. Bloodshot eyes I've got to be haunted by, he thought bitterly, still dealing with the dimensions of the triangle. 3 X 3 x 3. No doubt about it. 333. The number of the Mighty Devil Choronzon, who had afflicted Dr. Dee and Sir Edward Kelley in the seventeenth century and raised hell for Aleister Crowley earlier in this century. Choronzon, the Lurker at the Threshold, who drove back any occultist who tried to push open the final door, cross the boundary of the unmarked state. Choronzon, avatar of the Great Lie, spirit of Constriction, protector of the Illuminati.
Choronzon with a hangover, to judge by the redness of the eye.
"Jeez that was great oh honey ah you doll you lovely Arab sheikh you," Carol was bubbling happily.
But Blake Williams plows on:
"The Freudian, of course, sees much more in Krazy's love for Ignatz. Sadomasochism, in fact. 'Li'1 dollink, always fetful,' Krazy mutters contentedly as each brick bounces off her head. And worse: Krazy is female only in some sequences. In others this remarkable feline is indisputably male. Herriman, the psychoanalyst would suggest, had some AC-DC hang-ups when he conceived this fantasy.
"Sometimes, Professor, you remind me of Burroughs," Natalie said.
"Well, I do admire much of his work, especially The Job …" Williams was pleased by the comparison.
"No, the other one, the guy who wrote Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs."
"I? Remind you? Of Edgar Rice Burroughs?"
"Of something he said once. He said that he had a lot of fun with his imagination and that he knew in a small way what a grand time God had in creating the universe."
Joe Malik didn't even believe in Choronzon. The Skeptic within him had decided that the most operational model for those events which naive occultists attribute to "Choronzon" was to classify them as synchronicities activated by the presence of the Trickster God archetype, in the Jungian collective unconscious, or Leary's neurogenetic archives, or somewhere back down there in the thalamus or brainstem. To assume, even for a minute, that Choronzon had an objective existence beyond the archetype in the unconscious circuitry of the central nervous system was to collapse into prescientific theology and demonology.
But, alas, the Skeptic was only one program inside the Malik biocomputer, and not at his best at moments like this. The Shaman tape began running in its own programs as the Skeptic faded out, and Joe noticed again for the thousandth time how the ego circuit melded with the new program as easily as it had with the old, so now he "was" Joe Malik the Shaman, son of a thousand years of Sufis, and if Choronzon was really messing around he betta watcha his ass.
"It's that motherfuckin' loa," Carol said angrily. "We didn't do the exorcism right…"
"Choronzon" was a mind-construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered "Both." This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his Laws of Form.
A loa was a mind-construct of those primates who specialized in Santaria, also called Magicko de Chango or Voudon. A loa, just like the Gentry, might on occasion be kindly disposed; but a guardian loa who was set on a woman to prevent her from copulating (except with the primate who had through Santaria created/projected/contacted said loa) was well known to be extremely malign, devious, fiendish, impish, devilish, and a Royal pain in the ass. The has, like the Gentry and the various Cabalistic angels and demons, operated beneath the space-time continuum in "dream time," where the true Free Masons create reality friezes.
An archetype was a mind-construct of a primate named Carl Jung, who specialized in preneurological psychology. An archetype existed at the "psychoid" level, which was below that of individual or collective unconsciousness, where the organic and the inorganic meld and merge into psychoid matrices which, if nudged by the right archetype, would produce a reality-construct so astonishing that it would appear like magick or a very strange "coincidence." Jung called these psychoid archetypal effects synch ronicities.
And Marvin Gardens, coked to the nines, is reading on and on with absolute absorption:
Syngamy forms a zygote, which develops into a new diploid form, and the cycle begins anew
Cycles that's it, he thinks excitedly, we're all permutations and combinations of that first amoeba every ejaculation another birthdeath or node in the everybranching whatchamacallit. Oh man this is heavy and I'm really grooving with it cycles in time great wheels turning like the Mayan calendar the genetic clock like music but oh shit maybe it's just the coke I still haven't figured out if the damn amoeba is immortal.
But Malik is maintaining his cool, albeit with some effort. "So all right," he said aloud, facing the Eye unblinking, "are you just trying to scare me to death, or do you have a message for me?" Treat all of Them in a lofty way, lest They have cause to think thee weak, said Dr. Dee.
"We better do the exorcism again," whispered Carol Christmas-nude, golden, and delicious-also maintaining her cool.
Carol had a great deal of experience at maintaining her cool. Her career had been typical of self-directed Unistat females who matured in the early 1970s: one rape at age fifteen while hitchhiking (she never hitchhiked again); two abortions; husband #1, who turned out to be so free of Macho and the Male Stereotype that even God's Lightning couldn't accuse him of Chauvinism (he wept most pite-ously when Carol got tired of supporting him and threw him out); husband #2, who was brilliant, kind, generous, sensitive, and a junky; a succession of mediocre lovers, with one or two she still treasured in memory but wouldn't want to live with again for all the tea in Acapulco; producers who believed that an actress as gorgeous as she should only be cast in roles that justified getting all her clothes off sometime during the third act and several times in their private offices; husband #3, who had put the goddamned loa on her when they separated; and Ronnie
"Ronnie is doing very well for a special child," the doctor had told her the last time she visited the home. That was a hell of an elaborate euphemism for Mongolian idiot, she thought angrily; but the doctor was trying to be kind, and she forgave him.