Masks of the Illuminati (42 page)

The mummy Osiris rose from the grave.

I am a watchmaker in Amsterdam, he said. The nitrogen cycle.

Ulysses rose from the grave.

I am an advertising canvasser in Dublin, he said.

Stanislaus Joyce came out from under the carpet wearing the Mark of Cain.

Am I my brother’s keeper, he asked. Besides, the woman did tempt me….

Oh rocks said the voice of Nora Barnacle.

But Joyce arose from the grave glorified infinitely subtle.

Bad luck to your souls, he laughed, did you think me dead?

Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake, sang the Master Masons.

Merde
, said General Canbronne. Age of Reason. Always wear brown trousers in battle.

Dracula rose from the grave.

Don’t forget to include me in the I.N.R.I, process, he said. Landlords never die. The other side of the Devil. I never drink wine.

Eduard Einstein and Lucia Joyce were led in, wearing straitjackets, moving with the mindless jerkiness of chronic schizophrenia.

You’ll desert my mother, Eduard said accusingly to Albert. You never loved me. All you love is your goddam equations. You are a monster. You live in your head and don’t love anyone. Oh I think I shall go mad.

Oh, no, Einstein said sobbing suddenly.

You see, Crowley said to Babcock. Now it’s his turn for the
Nun
stage of I.N.R.I. Death on a White Horse.

Lucia Joyce lifted her skirt flirtatiously, showing a blue garter.

Go, damn you, she shouted at James. Hide under the ground. I know you’re watching us. Watching, always watching. You know everything—men women boys girls—and you see through it all don’t you? You live in your head and don’t love anyone.

Shite
, Joyce said, sobbing in his wine.

And there’s another candidate, Crowley said airily.

You rotten bastard.

It’s bloody beastly buggering bleeding hell to be the child of a genius, Eduard Einstein mourned.

Don’t I know it, Lucia Joyce agreed.

I am HE, Crowley chanted suddenly drawing their attention again. The Bornless Spirit having sight in the feet Strong and immortal fire Who hate that evil should be wrought in the world He that lightning and thundereth He whose mouth ever flameth He from whom is the shower of life on Earth

A true initiation never ends
.

Dare to struggle, dare to win, shouted Lenin.

Dare to guzzle Gordon’s gin, Joyce added.

Je suis Bovary
, Flaubert said looking embarrassed.

Je suis Molly Bloom
, Joyce said unembarrassed. The Master Masons chanted over the Neanderthal fire:

I think, Joyce said, that we have somehow been mutated from symbolic verbal consciousness to total body awareness. Is that it?

That is certainly part of it, Einstein agreed thoughtfully. But there is an element also of direct brain consciousness, is there not? It seems to me that you should understand Relativity better now, because
I
certainly understand it better than
I
ever did.

But the table, Joyce said. My God, the table.

What about the table? Einstein asked.

We’re inside it, Joyce said.

Yes … Einstein said softly … that’s it. We’re inside It and It is inside us. There’s a bridge …

My God, Joyce said. Yes.

In the material universe, Einstein said happily, the smaller is always inside the larger. But in the mental universe …
mein Gott
… the larger can be inside the smaller. That’s what thought is…. We are as big as whatever we perceive and conceive…. It’s a mobius strip….

Glory to thee from gilded tomb
, resounded the voice of Tim Finnegan.

Glory to thee from waiting womb
, chanted Molly Bloom.

Glory to thee from earth unploughed
, cried Osiris.

Glory to thee from virgin vowed
, sang Isis.

The cross becomes a phallus.

The phallas becomes a cross.

The cross becomes a whirling sun.

Two owls and a hen, said King Lear, Three crows and a wren, have all built their nests in my beard.

They were moving toward Zero.

My God it’s the Black Hole, Schwartzchild cried.

The entrance to Hell, Babcock said.

The Cup of Our Lady, Crowley corrected them.

It became an enormous pulsating doughnut. Joyce laughed.

Nine months to get out, he said, and the rest of our fool lives trying to get back in again….

The doughnut became the spinning galaxy.

    “Have we really been sitting here,” Joyce asked finally, “laughing like fools for three or four hours?”

“Something like that,” Einstein said.

“Is it over yet?” Babcock asked.

“I don’t think so,” Joyce replied. “Do you see what I see?”

    The earth shook. Cthulhu rose from the Depths waving white-stained garters and stocks bonds currencies of all nations boards and corporations. Governments fell like bowling pins. The stock market crashed. Nameless anarchist hordes stormed the streets, shouting
Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers
as they executed bankers corporation presidents lawyers politicians landlords priests rabbis ministers lady-golfers and anyone with a clean white shirt. Orgies broke out in parliaments, congresses, antique shops, boutiques, business offices, butcher shops, monasteries, trolleycars, hospitals, carousels, universities, academies, laboratories, nunneries, bakeries, cathedrals, law offices, factories; huge brutal cocks were thrust into cunts, assholes, mouths of voluptuous actresses, doddering dowagers, distinguished philosophers, kings, bishops, boys, girls, soldiers,
Mother Superiors, bankers, whimpering poets; cunts were fucked, sucked, chewed, licked, kissed; Queen Victoria was gangbanged by 358 Watusi warriors. Madmen defecated in wells, fountains, punchbowls, on streets and in doorways. Drooling farmboys waving signs that said
Bestiality Liberation
charged into pet shops to sodomize dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, tarantulas. Andre Breton walked about Paris shooting pedestrians at random. The last lawyer was strangled with the guts of the last politician. The Pope appeared in delirium on the balcony facing Saint Peter’s Square incoherently chanting
Cthulhu fthagn
while sodomizing himself with a twelve-inch dildo from the Yokohama Sex And Leather Corporation. Housewives murdered their husbands and rushed to the stockyards to fuck goats, howling
Io Pan Io Pan Pan The Goat With a Thousand Young!’
Nihilists attacked insane asylums with automatic rifles, murdered the staffs and set the patients free to roam the streets and set fire to psychiatrists’ offices. Avant-garde poets seized the newspapers and published strange, unsettling headlines:
Is It a New Electromagnetic Phenomenon or The Heart and Mind of Europe Dying?; Only the Madman Is Absolutely Free; The Star People Are Returning But I Have Lost My One True Love; Where Is God Now That We Need Him?
The next day the women got organized and completed the butchery. And the sky turned into the body of Nuit, black, beautiful, the starmother: and all was changed in a moment, in the flickering of an eye. It never happened. We were just four people sitting on the floor looking past time into eternity.

CROWLEY

[
Solemnly
]
:
    In my mad and werewolf heart
          I have howled thirtynine years away
          In laughter and rage: the bread and wine
          Of Werewolf Mass

[
Mass dissolves; they float free.
]

JOYCE

[
Liturgically
]
:
  In my high and mountain heart
          I have laughed thirtytwo years away
          In folly and scorn: the flesh and blood
          Of werewolf Time

[
Time ends; they enter Eternity.
]

EINSTEIN

[
Precisely
]
:
    In my clear and limpid mind
          I have counted thirtyfive years away
          In measure and line: the skin and bones
          Of werewolf Space

[
Space implodes; they enter Infinity.
]

CROWLEY

[
Furiously
]
:
    And until defiance builds of its own ache
          A truth less tame than the truth of death
          My werewolf heart shall howl against
          Both werewolf God and werewolf Man

JOYCE

[
Sadly
]
:
    Yes, until our heartache builds of its own flames
          A truth more wild than the truth of Life—

[
Isis appears. All see Her.
]

BABCOCK

[
Rapt
]
:
    My werewolf heart is pierced at last
          By the silver bullet of the Lady’s gaze

CROWLEY

[
Erotomaniac
]
:
  My werewolf heart is pierced at last
          By the silver bullet of the Lady’s eyes
          I am the Beast the Lady rides
          I am the stars within her hair

[
Isis and Osiris merge into Apophis.
]

MESCALITO

[
Green, pointy eared, dancing
]
:

          Glory to Thee, thou sire and dam

          And Self of I am that I am!

MASTER MASONS

          Glory to Thee, beyond all term,

          Thy spring of sperm, thy seed and germ!

[
Pyramidphallus rising again.
]

LOLA LEVINE

          Glory to Thee, eternal Sun,

          Thou One in Three, Thou Three in One!

MASTER MASONS

          Glory and worship unto Thee,

          Sap of the world-ash, wonder-tree!

[
The Holy Guardian Angel appears.
]

EINSTEIN

[
Seeing Angel
]
:
The unified field …

JOYCE

[
Seeing Angel
]
:
The eternal cycle …

BABCOCK

[
Seeing Angel
]
:
358: My secret Self, my adversary, my devil, my redeemer …

CROWLEY

[
Piously, to Angel
]
:
The Rosy Cross, the eternal embrace!

[
The cock crows; the Golden Dawn arises.
]

JOYCE

[
Intuiting the structure in time
]
:
Children … It reproduces continually …

EINSTEIN

[
Reasoning the structure in space-time
]
:
Unity … It’s plus one and minus one …

BABCOCK

[
Feeling the Force
]
:
Fucking … It’s making love to itself all the time …

CROWLEY

ARARITA. ARARITA. ARARITA.

[
The
Föhn
stops blowing. These our actors, as foretold, are all spirits and vanish into air, into thin air.
]

JOYCE

The flowers come back every spring. Earth to earth, dust to dust,
merde
to
merde
. Every spring the flowers come back….

EINSTEIN

The nitrogen cycle.

BABCOCK

Through the dark underworld to the Golden Dawn.

CROWLEY

[
Airily
]
:
’Tis new to you …

Joyce awoke first, hearing a birdsong in the garden. The newday sun on his face told him that it was mid-morning at least.

With tentative step, still coming back from infinity, he rose to look out the window. The garden was green as chemical dye, luminescent: lingering after-effect of the drug. From the street, voices: from a single lark on a birch branch, the song that had wakened him. It was a clear sunbright Swiss spring day, the air no longer stagnant with the wind of witchcraft.

“By
God,”
he said softly. It was the same world that Adam saw, naked and astonished: a loving presence.

“Is it morning?” Babcock asked, stirring half-awake in his chair.

“It is the first day of the rest of the universe,” Joyce said pensively.

Babcock sat up, eyes wide with mute questions. “My
God,”
he said.

“Yes,” Joyce said. “It was quite an evening, wasn’t it?”

“Did you see the Holy Guardian Angel?” Babcock asked, wholly awake, standing to stretch.

“I saw … many things,” Joyce said. “I saw, most certainly, how to write this new novel that has been haunting me.”

“I think,” said Babcock, “that I saw God and died.”

Einstein was arising from his chair now, also. “What was it Jones said about the Holy Guardian Angel, long ago?” he asked. “Something to the effect that it might come as a new scientific theory, or a work of art, or just a change of life toward compassion or religion? My
God,”
he added.

Joyce turned from the window, his eyes huge and amused behind the thick glasses. “I think we all saw God and died,” he said. “Each in our own way.”

“When did Crowley leave?” Einstein asked.

“Toward dawn,” Babcock said. “You two had already started to doze. I had a few words with him, I remember, while you were both already snoring.”

“Oh?” Joyce asked. “And what was the essence of that conversation, if you care to say?”

Babcock arose and smiled at the golden sunlight. “I told him about a doctor I met on the train two nights ago—the doctor you mentioned yourself a few times, named Jung. I said I would like to spend some time here, with Jung, before returning to London and the next stage of my Initiation.”

“You intend to continue your Initiation?” Joyce asked.

“When I am ready,” Babcock said. “When Dr. Jung thinks I am ready—that is.”

Einstein whistled, or sighed, a long astonished breath. “
‘For He is like a refiner’s fire,’”
he quoted.

Joyce turned. “And what did
you
get out of last nights entertainment?” he asked Einstein.

“It all came together,” Einstein replied simply. “I could see all of it, every piece, and how each related to the
others. My papers on relativity are just the beginning. There is a unified field that I have to work on, as soon as I finish this paper on relativity of acceleration.” He grinned with pixie glee. “It may take me twenty years, or longer, but it will be worth it. Can you imagine? Our ideas about space are as primitive as the ancient ideas about Earth being flat. Space is curved, too. Every movement is a movement in orbit, around a mass: gravity and inertia are reifications of the curvature of space. And that’s only the beginning of what I’m beginning to see….”