"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 Waterhouse.
"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) and 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.