"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.
"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.
"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added. "We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."
Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day-"
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V-the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' -right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'- how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead- in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"
" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.
"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' -your own lady Isis."
"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."
"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."
"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept anything but flaxscript -they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it."
"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."
"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all alone, you know."
"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table.
"Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."
Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about the Rite."
"Yes?"
Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.
Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit, and it seemed to him a freeze and a frieze in time: a moment that would linger, as another stage of illumination, forever in his mind. Sister Cecilia, back in Resurrection School, spoke out of the abyss of memory: "Stand in the corner, Joseph Malik!" And he remembered too, the chalk that he crumbled slowly between his fingers, the feeling of needing to urinate, the long wait, and then Father Volpe entering the classroom, his voice like thunder: "Where is he? Where is the boy who dared to disagree with the good Sister that God sent to instruct him?" And the other children, led out of the classroom and across the street to the church to pray for his soul, while the priest harangued him: "Do you know how hot hell is? Do you know how hot the worst part of hell is? That's where they send people who have the good fortune to be born into the church and then rebel against it, misled by Pride of Intellect." And five years later, those two faces came back: the priest, angry and dogmatic, demanding obedience, and the bandit, sardonic, encouraging cynicism, and Joe understood that he might someday have to kill Hagbard Celine. But more years had to pass, and the Fernando Poo incident had to pass, and Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight before he knew that he would, in fact, kill Celine without compunction if it were necessary…
But on March 31, in that year of fruition for all the Illuminati's plans, while the President of the United States went on the air to threaten "all-out thermonuclear heck," a young lady named Concepcion Galore lay nude on a bed in the Hotel Durrutti in Santa Isobel and said, "It's a lloigor."
"What's a lloigor?" asked her companion, an Englishman named Fission Chips, who had been born on Hiroshima Day and named by a father who cared more for physics than for the humanities.
The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant Veronica on an unconvincingly drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, "Oh, a lloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very bad god."
Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to himself than to the peasant girl, "Looks vaguely like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu tikis."
"The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues," Concepcion said, just to be making conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn't going to be ready to prong her again for at least another half hour.
"Indeed?" Chips said, equally bored. "Who are the Starry Wisdom people?"