Saul found his voice. "Your offer is appreciated but declined," he said. "Frankly, I find your tawdry mysticism even more adolescent than your sentimental vegetarianism and coarse lasciviousness. The trouble with the Illuminati is that you have no sense of true drama and not even a patina of subtlety."
Her eyes widened as he spoke, but not with surprise at his resistance- either she was really alarmed, and sorry for him, or she was a great actress. "Too bad," she said sadly. "You've refused Heaven, so you must travel the harder path through the halls of Hell."
Saul heard a movement behind him, but before he could turn a sharp sensation pricked his neck: a needle, another drug. Just as he was guessing they had given him a stronger psychedelic to escalate the effect, he felt consciousness slipping away. It was a narcotic or a poison.
The wagon started with a jerk: we were off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of arse. What was it Hagbard had said to me, the first time we met, about straight lines, courtrooms, and shit? I couldn't remember, my mind drifted, Joseph K. opening the law books and finding pornographic illustrations (Kafka knew where it was at), deSade keeping a precise mathematical tally in the brothel, how many times he flogged the whores, how many times they flogged him, the Nazis counting every gold filling in the corpses at Auschwitz, Shakespeare scholars debating about that line in Macbeth (was it benches or banks of time?), the prisoner may approach the bench, you can bank on it, buddy, bank on it… PIGS EAT SHIT PIGS EAT SHIT… and Pound wrote "the buggering bank," he rejected Freud, but even so he got a whiff of the real secret… how one homo ominously loopses another…
"My God," the Englishman said. "When do we get out of the teargas area?"
"We're out of it," I told him wearily. "That's regular Chicago air now. Courtesy of Commonwealth Edison and U.S. Steel over in Gary."
The McCarthy woman was weeping quietly, although the Mace had worn off by now. The rest of us rode silently, a little caravan of dried snot and tears, the parmesan cheese odor of stale vomit, some lingering acrid Mace fumes, the urine of somebody who had peed himself, and that high sulphur dioxide and slaughterhouse aroma of Chicago's South Side. The quality of mercy is very strained; it drippeth like the pus from chancre. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Chairman Mao appeared and lectured us: "Ho is just a poetaster. Now, if you want to hear some real socialist verse, consider my latest composition:
There was a young lady from Queens
Who gobbled a plateful of beans
The beans fermented
And she was tormented
By embarrassing sounds in her jeans!
Indicates the anal orientation of capitalist society," he explained, dwindling into a pool of blood on the floor next to the kid with the broken arm.
(In 1923, Adolph Hitler stood beneath a pyramidal altar and repeated the words of a goat-headed man: "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel." James Joyce, in Paris, scrawled in crayon words that his secretary, Samuel Beckett, would later type: "Pre-Austeric Man in Pursuit of Pan-Hysteric Woman." In Brooklyn, New York, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, returning from a party at which Hart Crane had been perfectly beastly- thereby confirming Mr. Lovecraft's prejudice against homosexuals- finds a letter in his mailbox and reads with some amusement: "Some of the secrets revealed in your recent stories would better be kept out of the light of print. Believe me, I speak as a friend, but there are those who would prefer such half-forgotten lore to remain in its present obscurity, and they are formidable enemies for any man. Remember what happened to Ambrose Bierce…" And, in Boston, Robert Putney Drake screams, "Lies, lies, lies. It's all lies. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody says what he thinks…" His voice trails off.
"Go on," Dr. Besetzung says, "you were doing fine. Don't stop."
"What the use?" Drake replies, drained of anger, turning on the couch to look at the psychiatrist. "To you, this is just abreaction or acting-out or something clinical. You can't believe I'm right."
"Perhaps I can. Perhaps I agree more than you realize." The doctor looks up from his pad and meets Drake's eye. "Are you sure you're not just assuming I'll react like everybody else you've tried to tell this to?"
"If you agreed with me," Drake says carefully, "if you understood what I'm really saying, you'd either be the head of a bank, out there in the jungle with my father, grabbing your own share of the loot, or you'd be a bomb-throwing revolutionary, like those Sacco and Vanzetti fellows. Those are the only choices that make sense."
"The only choices? One must go to one extreme or the other?"
Drake looks back at the ceiling and talks abstractly. "You had to get an M.D. long ago, before you specialized. Do you know any case where germs gave up and went away because the man they were destroying had a noble character or sweet sentiments? Did the tuberculosis bacilli leave John Keat's lungs because he had a few hundred great poems still unwritten inside him? You must have read some history, even if you were never at the front lines like me: do you recall any battle that refutes Napoleon's aphorism about God always being on the side of the biggest cannons and the best tacticians? This bolshie in Russia, Lenin, he has ordered the schools to teach chess to everybody. You know why? He says that chess teaches the lesson that revolutionaries must learn: that if you don't mobilize your forces properly, you lose. No matter how high your morality, no matter how lofty your goaclass="underline" fight without mercy, use every ounce of intelligence, or you lose. My father understands that. The people who run the world have always understood it. A general who doesn't understand it gets broken back to second lieutenant or worse. I saw a whole platoon wiped out, exterminated like an anthill under a boot. Not because they were immoral or naughty or didn't believe in Jesus. Because at that place, on that day, the Germans had superior fire power. That's the law, the one true law, of the universe, and everything that contradicts it- everything they teach in schools and churches- is a lie." He says the word listlessly now. "Just a lie."
"If you really believe that," the doctor asks, "why do you still have the nightmares and the insomnia?"
Drake's blue eyes stare at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says finally. "That's why I'm here.")
"Moon, Simon," the Desk Sergeant called.
I stepped forward, seeing myself through his eyes: beard, army surplus clothes, stains all over (my own mucus, somebody else's vomit). The archetypical filthy, dirty, disgusting, hippie-commie revolutionary.
"Well," he said, "another bright red rose."
"I usually look neater," I told him calmly. "You get a bit messed over when you're arrested in this town."
"The only way you get arrested in this town," he said, frowning, "is if you break the laws."
"The only way you get arrested in Russia is you break the laws," I replied cheerfully. "Or by mistake," I added.
That didn't set well at all. "Wise guy," he said gently. "We like wise guys here." He consulted my charge-slip. "Nice record for one night, Moon. Rioting, mob action, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace. Nice."
"I wasn't disturbing the peace," I said. "I was disturbing the war." I stole that one-liner from Ammon Hennacy, a Catholic Anarchist that Mom was always quoting. "The rest of the charges are all bullshit, too."
"Say, I know you," he said suddenly. "You're Tim Moon's son. Well, well, well. A second-generation anarchist. I guess we'll be locking you up as often as we locked him up."