"I asked her to come and listen to you," he said. "She was to give a signal if she thought you were ready. The signal was more dramatic than I expected, it seems. A conversation out of your past that had some heavy emotional meaning to you?"
"She's a medium?" I asked numbly.
"You can name it that." I looked at him in the light from the Biograph marquee and I remembered Mom's story about the people dipping their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood and I heard the old hymn start in my head ARE YOU WASHED are you washed ARE you WASHED in the BLOOD of the Lamb and I remembered how we all thought he hung out with us freaks in the hope of leading us back to the church holy Roman Catholic and apostolic as Dad called it when he was drunk and bitter. It was obvious that whatever the Padre was recruiting for had little to do with that particular theological trade union.
"What is this?" I asked. "And who is that woman?"
"She's the daughter of Fu Manchu," he said. Suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed like a rooster crowing. Just as suddenly, he stopped and looked at me. Just looked at me.
"Somehow," I said slowly, "I've qualified for a small demonstration of whatever you and she are selling. But I don't qualify for any more until I make the right move?" He gave the faintest hint of a nod and went on watching me.
Well, I was young and ignorant of everything outside ten million books I'd gobbled and guilty-unsure about my imaginative flights away from my father's realism and of course stoned of course but I finally understood why he was watching me that way, it was (this part of it) pure Zen, there was nothing I could do consciously or by volition that would satisfy him and I had to do exactly that which I could not not do, namely be Simon Moon. Which led to deciding then and there without any time to mull it over and rationalize it just what the hell being Simon Moon or, more precisely SimonMooning, consisted of, and it seemed to be a matter of wandering through room after room of my brain looking for the owner and not finding him anywhere, sweat broke out on my forehead, it was becoming desperate because I was running out of rooms and the Padre was still watching me.
"Nobody home," I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good enough.
"That's odd," he said. "Who's conducting the search?"
And I walked through the walls and into the Fire.
Which was the beginning of the larger and funkier part of my (Simon's) education, and where we cannot, as yet, follow him. He sleeps now, a teacher rather than a learner, while Mary Lou Servix awakes beside him and tries to decide whether it was just the pot or if something really spooky happened last night. Howard sports in the Atlantic; Buckminster Fuller, flying above the Pacific, crosses the international date line and slips back into April 23 again; it is dawn in Las Vegas and Mocenigo, the nightmares and anxieties of night forgotten, looks forward cheerfully to the production of the first live cultures of Anthrax-Leprosy-Pi, which will make this a memorable day in more ways than he expects; and George Dorn, somewhere outside this time system, is writing in his journal. Each word, however, seems magically to appear by itself as if no volition on his part were necessary to its production. He read the words his pencil scrawled, but they appeared the communications of another intelligence. Yet they picked up where he had left off in his hotel room and they spoke with his private idiom:
… the universe is the inside without any outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we all walk together in a single public universe that we can share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia.
Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But all the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have only imagined previously. Maybe it will be spiritual, like Zen or telepathy, or maybe it will be physical, one great big gang-fuck, but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva!
–Oh, man, you're stoned out of your gourd. You're writing gibberish.
No, I'm writing with absolute clarity, for the first time in my life.
–Yeah? Well what was that business about the universe being the sound of one eye opening?
Never mind that. Who the hell are you and how did you get into my head?
"Your turn now, George."
Sheriff Cartwright stood in the door, a monk in a strange red and white robe beside him, holding some kind of wand the deep color of a fire engine.
"No-no-" George started to stammer. But he knew.
"Of course you know," the Sheriff said kindly-as if he were suddenly sorry about it all. "You knew before you left New York and came down here."
They were at the foot of the gallows. "… each with its own times, spaces, laws and eccentricities," George was thinking wildly. Yes: if the universe is one big eye looking at itself, then telepathy is no miracle, for anyone who opens his own eyes fully can then look through all other eyes. (For a moment, George looks through the eyes of John Ehrlichman as Dick Nixon urges lewdly, "You can say I don't remember. You can say I can't recall. I can't give any answer to that that I can recall." Ican't give any answer to that that I can recall) "All flesh will see it in one instant": who wrote that?
"Gonna miss you, boy," the Sheriff said, offering an embarrassed handshake. Numbly, George clasped the man's hot, reptilian palm.
The monk walked beside him up the gallows' steps. Thirteen, George was thinking, there are always thirteen steps on a gallows… And you always cream in your jeans when your neck breaks. It has something to do with the pressure on the spinal cord being transmitted through the prostate gland. The Orgasm-Death Gimmick, Burroughs calls it.
At the fifth step, the monk said suddenly: "Hail Eris."
George stared at the man dumbfounded. Who was Eris? Somebody in Greek mythology, but somebody very important…
"It all depends on whether the fool has wisdom enough to repeat it."
"Quiet, idiot-he can hear us!"
I got some bad pot, George decided, and I'm still back on the hotel bed, hallucinating all this. But he repeated, uncertainly: "Hail Eris."
Immediately, just like his one and only acid trip, dimension began to alter. The steps grew larger, steeper-ascending them seemed as perilous as climbing Mount Everest. The air was suddenly lit with reddish flame- Definitely, George thought, some weird and freaky pot…
And then, for some reason, he looked upward.
Each step was now higher than an ordinary building. He was near the bottom of a pyramidal skyscraper of thirteen colossal levels. And at the top… And at the top…
And at the top One Enormous Eye-a ruby and demonic orb of cold fire, without mercy or pity or contempt -looked at him and into him and through him.
The hand reaches down, turns on both bathtub faucets full-power, then reaches upward to do the same to the sink faucets. Banana-Nose Maldonado leans forward and whispers to Carmel, "Now you can talk."
(The old man using the name "Frank Sullivan" was met, at Los Angeles International Airport, November 22, 1963, by Mao Tsu-Hsi, who drove him to his bungalow on Fountain Avenue. He gave his report in terse, unemotional sentences. "My God," she said when he finished, "what do you make of it?" He thought carefully and grunted, "It beats the hell out of me. The guy on the triple underpass was definitely Harry Coin. I recognized him through my binoculars. The guy in the window at the Book Depository very likely was this galoot Oswald that they've arrested. The guy on the grassy knoll was Bernard Barker from the CIA Bay of Pigs gang. But I didn't get a good look at the gink on the County Records building. One thing I'm sure of: we can't keep all this to ourselves. At the very least, we pass the word on to ELF. It might alter their plans for OM. You've heard of OM?" She nodded, saying, "Operation Mindfuck. It's their big project for the next decade or so. This is a bigger Mindfuck than anything they had planned.")