Masks of the Illuminati (36 page)

Babcock stared. “Yes,” he said. “I recall the tale now, myself. Only it seems that when I heard it, the whole neighborhood had vanished. The hero searches the city endlessly, but never finds that street again.”

Joyce smiled gently. “In some versions, he is an old man first seen wandering the city at night. After he tells his story, he goes on searching for the street that once was but is no more. Some people, I have found, even claim to
know the man this adventure happened to. It is what Jung would call an archetypal vision. The doors to the magick world open once, and then close again, and you can never find your way back to the place they were. You see, Sir John? They have put you through a script that has existed as long as the human imagination. In your case, adapting the scenario to your own anxieties, the Witch-Queen, or Elf-Woman, or Goddess, or whatever one wants to call Her, was hostile and malign from the beginning; but otherwise they haven’t altered the classic pattern.”

“They,” Babcock repeated bitterly.
“They
. Do you, sir, still think They are merely human and that They accomplished all this by purely material means?”

Before Joyce could reply Einstein commented drily, “We shall come to that question in a few moments. But first, Sir John, is your story finished? I suspect some sort of climax is still waiting….”

Babcock rose and stretched. “Yes,” he said, beginning to pace, “there was a climax of sorts….”

“After the visit to the post office and the discovery that there was no Box 718, I went back to the Diogenes Club, half-convinced that I was mad. Before I could go to my room, the porter told me there was a gentleman waiting to see me in the smoking room. I must have walked in there like an automaton; I was in some strange mental state where it no longer mattered whether Jones or Verey had returned as miraculously as they had dematerialized, or if the Devil Himself were waiting for me. It was, God help me, Aleister Crowley.

“I could hardly speak; in fact, I could hardly feel anything—not even fear. ‘What do you want?’ I asked him. I was thinking of Scott’s words about everything produced by witches’ glamour being insubstantial as air.

“He spoke in a level, pleasant voice, without bravado or dramatics; anybody even a few feet away would think we were having a most ordinary conversation. He said, ‘Strange
things happen when an imaginary mongoose fights imaginary snakes. It does not do to meddle with us. Some go mad and kill themselves. Some simply disappear. And some flee to the ends of the earth, without ever escaping. Our eyes will be on you forever, and we will finish you at our pleasure.’ He even smiled, as if he were praising my tie or something of that sort, then turned to leave.

“Then he faced me again. ‘Do you understand at last?’ he said very quietly. ‘Your God and your Jesus are dead. They no longer have any power to protect you or anyone else who calls on them for help. Our magick is now stronger, for the Old Ones have returned, and Man shall be free of guilt and sin. Pray to Jesus for help, if you must; it will help you no more than it helped Verey or Jones. Our hands will be at your throat forever, even if you see them not. We will come for you when you least expect it.’

“That was all,” Babcock said listlessly. “He was gone before I had fully recovered from his blasphemous words. I left England that night, traveling under an assumed name. I went to Arles, in southern France, and stayed at an inn. After a few days, I came back to my room after a visit to the local church and found an inverse crucifix hanging over my bed. I have been moving on, city to city, ever since then.”

Joyce rose and stretched the kinks out of his body, casting a grotesque spidery shadow on the wall behind him. “Well, Professor,” he asked, “are we living in the twentieth century or the thirteenth?”

The
Föhn
whistled at the window.

Einstein studied carefully the dottle of his extinguished pipe. Under their drooped lids his eyes searched what the cold smell of the ash spoke not.

“Well,” he said finally, “I do not regard this matter as hopelessly obscure. There is quite a bit of light amid the engulfing darkness, don’t you think, Jeem?”

Joyce smiled wanly. “I have picked up a few rays of
light,” he said carefully. “But they are small and fugitive and my darkness is still much greater. Shall I list the points that appear most cogent to me?”

“By all means,” Einstein urged.

“There are four,” Joyce said. “I might title them as follows:

1. The Clue of the Quadrilateral Metaphor;
   

2. The Matter of the Tacked-on Tragedy;
   

3. The Matter of the Enumeration of Sonnets;
   

4. The Clue of the 26 Garters.
   

“Does that suggest anything to either of you?” he concluded impassively.

“Not to me,” Babcock said, baffled.

“Nor to me,” Einstein added. “But I wonder if you have found the parts of the answer that are still beyond my comprehension…. However, imitating your style, I can list the points that have aided me in seeing through this malign little drama. There are eight in my case, as follows:

1. The Razor of David Hume;
   

2. The Matter of the Marvelous Multiplication;
   

3. The Incident of Casual Telepathy;
   

4. The Matter of the Superabundant Coincidences;
   

5. The Clue of the Over-Defined Image;
   

6. The Mystery of the Extra Mountain-Climber;
   

7. The Clue of the Impossible Name;
   

8. The Matter of the Relativity of Dimensions.
   

“I think that these points fairly well reveal what has actually been transpiring here,” he finished. “Do you understand what I am implying, Jeem?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Joyce said. “In fact, I am more confused than I was before you gave us that list of allegedly helpful hints.”

“Most interesting,” Einstein mused. “We all see only that which we are trained to see…. Well, be that as it may, since you gave us your list first, could you explicate them for us before I get to my list?”

Joyce removed carefully his glasses, to polish them meticulously on a handkerchief. “I am now about seventy-five percent blind,” he said thoughtfully; finishing, he translated the glasses back to his nose. “Presto! The world is created again: I can see it.” Pull out his eyes: Apologize. “The world is created anew each time we change our focus or viewpoint,” he went on. “Let us change our focus for a moment and look at the beginning of all this,
Clouds Without Water
, through sharper glasses.” He paused.

“Yes?” Babcock prodded.

“The author of
Clouds Without Water
is a singularly deep young man, as Gilbert and Sullivan said of a similar case,” Joyce went on. “He can say two things at once; even, in some places I have noticed, three things at once. For instance,
consummatum est
, the closing words of a sonnet Sir John has called to our attention, can refer [as previously noted] either to a Catholic Mass or to a Black Mass; but they can also refer to the completion of a sex act: foreplay, union, climax, consummation. But our author can even say
four
things at once: the mystical
wine
symbolism in the alchemical sequence, I note, may refer to the vaginal secretions of the poet’s paramour, as Sir John suspected; to the wine of the Mass; to the wine of a Black Mass; or even to the traditional use of Vine’ as a symbol of divine intoxication in Sufi authors such as Omar Khayyám. This is the Clue of the Quadrilateral Metaphor.

“So, I ask myself just how deep this singularly deep young man can really be. The tragic end of his saga is, to me, blatantly false and propagandistic. The number of adulterers in Europe may not exceed the sands of the Sahara, or the atoms in the galaxy, but it is certainly vast; and they do not automatically succumb to advanced, incurable
syphilis in every case. Nor do they, if the disease is diagnosed, immediately commit suicide. They seek treatment, and if they are lucky and the disease is caught soon enough, they are even routinely cured. I do not say the sad end of Arthur Angus Verey is impossible, merely improbable. It has a moralistic, preachy sound, very much as if it were the work of the Reverend Charles Verey. This is the Tacked-On Tragedy I mentioned. But let me ask: Does such dual authorship sound in accord with your notions of human psychology, gentlemen?”

Einstein spoke first. “Go on,” he said. “You definitely seem to have the part of the puzzle that still eludes me.”

Babcock added, “I will certainly grant that Verey would hardly have published that book without such a harsh moralistic lesson at the end….”

Joyce rapped the floor with his walkingstick. “Point one carries,” he said. “Well, then, the old legal adage tells us, ‘Guilty in part, guilty in whole,’ which may or may not be true, but gives me a pretty thought, nonetheless. If the Reverend Charles Verey wrote the ending, could he have written the whole? All day a phrase from Dante has been running through my head:
ed eran duo in uno, ed uno in duo
. ‘They were two in one, and one in two.’ It describes Bertrán de Born, beheaded, in the
Inferno
. Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster, Faust and Mephistopheles….”

Einstein laughed. “Astonishing,” he said. “For the last two days I’ve been thinking of Faust and Mephistopheles, and of the great line Goethe gives to Faust:
Zwei Seelen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust
. My father used to tell me that was the most profound line in the play. ‘Two souls dwell, alas, within my breast.’”

“The extreme form of this dualism is the Split or Multiple Personality discussed in psychology texts,” Joyce went on. “But we are all prisms—split and multiple personalities, to some extent. We each have our hidden side,
which Jung so poetically calls the Shadow. What would the Shadow of the Reverend Charles Verey be? The opposite of his public persona of Presbyterian righteousness, of course. It would be, in fact, very much like the alleged Arthur Angus Verey—libertine, sensualist, adulterer, blasphemer against Christ and the Church. I suggest, in short, that
Clouds Without Water
was written entirely by Reverend Charles Verey. To each ‘Thou shalt not’ of the public Reverend Charles Verey, the internal ‘Arthur’ cries, ‘I will!’ The Shadow, the Satanic ‘Arthur’ writes the lush voluptuous sonnets, lingering longingly on every lovely lewd licentious detail of a fantastic love affair with a gloriously wicked and totally desirable woman; the public Persona arranges that this book of wet dreams ends with ‘Arthur’ being destroyed for his sins and adds the running footnotes re-asserting traditional morality.

“Well, gentlemen,” Joyce asked, “does Point Two carry? Are the two souls in
Clouds Without Water
dwellers in one breast?”

Babcock shook his head dubiously. “It is possible in psychology,” he said. “But it is contradicted by the facts as we know them.”

“The facts as we know them,” Einstein said mildly, “have been distorted by a deliberate conspiracy to keep us from knowing the facts as they really are. Go ahead, Jeem.”

“We now have, in
Clouds Without Water
, a book such as I myself try to write,” Joyce said. “A multi-dimensional, multi-level, multi-meaningful book. A puzzle-book, one might say—and what could be more appropriate to our times, when all the best minds recognize increasingly that our existence is a profound puzzle? The reader is challenged, if he is intelligent enough to look beyond the mere surface, to ask what
Clouds Without Water
really is. Firstly, it could be what it appears to be and pretends to be: the account of an adultery that came to a bad end,
with a running commentary by a clergyman underlining the ‘moral’ lesson that The Wages of Sin Are Death. Perfect for the British reading public. Or, secondly, it could be what Sir John has decoded: a manual of Tantric sex practices, showing how the permutations and variations on the erotic union between a man and a woman can be excruciatingly prolonged until ecstasy is exploded into oblivion, into egoless trance. Or, thirdly, it could be what I have said: the record of the split in the personality of a tormented Presbyterian puritan, dreaming of the deliciously wicked delights of coitus, fellatio and cunnilingus, and then punishing his Other Self for enjoying those dreams.”

“But which is it really?” Babcock exclaimed. “You are just adding to the mystery, not clarifying it—
ignotium per ignotius!”

“What is the Veal’ length of a rod, Professor?” Joyce asked.

“It depends on the coordinate system of the rod,” Einstein said, amused, “and the coordinate system of the observer, and the relationship between their velocities.”

Babcock grimaced. “That doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “Length is length, and that’s all there is to it.”

“That is not all there is to it,” Einstein said. “All our judgments in which length plays a role are judgments about instruments used to measure that length. And the readings of the instruments will depend on our velocity in relationship to the velocity of the thing being measured. Lorenz worked all this out mathematically but couldn’t believe it. I decided in 1904 to believe it and see where it led me. It led to solving all the puzzles that have bedeviled physics since the Michelson-Morley experiment. It led, in fact, to the simple conclusion that there is no length as a
ding an sich
, an objective entity, but only length
₁
as read by instrument
₁
, length
₂
as read by instrument
₂
, and so on. The same applies to time, I have also demonstrated.”

“But,” said Babcock, “this takes us outside sensory space and linear time entirely. It is Gnostic and Platonic.”

“In a sense,” Einstein granted. “The difference is that Plato left off at the point where I begin. He never connected his geometric archetypes with empirical sense-data. I have made that scientific connection. My theory explains experiments that can be explained in no other way.”

“Tell him about the rock and the train,” Joyce suggested languidly from his shadow.

“Oh, that is a type of relativity that has been known since Galileo,” Einstein said. “I have merely provided a contemporary illustration. Suppose you throw a rock from a train. In what path does it fall?”