The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But all the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have only imagined previously. Maybe it will be spiritual, like Zen or telepathy, or maybe it will be physical, one great big gang-fuck, but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva!

–Oh, man, you're stoned out of your gourd. You're writing gibberish.

No, I'm writing with absolute clarity, for the first time in my life.

–Yeah? Well what was that business about the universe being the sound of one eye opening?

Never mind that. Who the hell are you and how did you get into my head?

"Your turn now, George."

Sheriff Cartwright stood in the door, a monk in a strange red and white robe beside him, holding some kind of wand the deep color of a fire engine.

"No-no-" George started to stammer. But he knew.

"Of course you know," the Sheriff said kindly-as if he were suddenly sorry about it all. "You knew before you left New York and came down here."

They were at the foot of the gallows. "… each with its own times, spaces, laws and eccentricities," George was thinking wildly. Yes: if the universe is one big eye looking at itself, then telepathy is no miracle, for anyone who opens his own eyes fully can then look through all other eyes. (For a moment, George looks through the eyes of John Ehrlichman as Dick Nixon urges lewdly, "You can say I don't remember. You can say I can't recall. I can't give any answer to that that I can recall." Ican't give any answer to that that I can recall) "All flesh will see it in one instant": who wrote that?

"Gonna miss you, boy," the Sheriff said, offering an embarrassed handshake. Numbly, George clasped the man's hot, reptilian palm.

The monk walked beside him up the gallows' steps. Thirteen, George was thinking, there are always thirteen steps on a gallows… And you always cream in your jeans when your neck breaks. It has something to do with the pressure on the spinal cord being transmitted through the prostate gland. The Orgasm-Death Gimmick, Burroughs calls it.

At the fifth step, the monk said suddenly: "Hail Eris."

George stared at the man dumbfounded. Who was Eris? Somebody in Greek mythology, but somebody very important…

"It all depends on whether the fool has wisdom enough to repeat it."

"Quiet, idiot-he can hear us!"

I got some bad pot, George decided, and I'm still back on the hotel bed, hallucinating all this. But he repeated, uncertainly: "Hail Eris."

Immediately, just like his one and only acid trip, dimension began to alter. The steps grew larger, steeper-ascending them seemed as perilous as climbing Mount Everest. The air was suddenly lit with reddish flame- Definitely, George thought, some weird and freaky pot…

And then, for some reason, he looked upward.

Each step was now higher than an ordinary building. He was near the bottom of a pyramidal skyscraper of thirteen colossal levels. And at the top… And at the top…

And at the top One Enormous Eye-a ruby and demonic orb of cold fire, without mercy or pity or contempt -looked at him and into him and through him.

The hand reaches down, turns on both bathtub faucets full-power, then reaches upward to do the same to the sink faucets. Banana-Nose Maldonado leans forward and whispers to Carmel, "Now you can talk."

(The old man using the name "Frank Sullivan" was met, at Los Angeles International Airport, November 22, 1963, by Mao Tsu-Hsi, who drove him to his bungalow on Fountain Avenue. He gave his report in terse, unemotional sentences. "My God," she said when he finished, "what do you make of it?" He thought carefully and grunted, "It beats the hell out of me. The guy on the triple underpass was definitely Harry Coin. I recognized him through my binoculars. The guy in the window at the Book Depository very likely was this galoot Oswald that they've arrested. The guy on the grassy knoll was Bernard Barker from the CIA Bay of Pigs gang. But I didn't get a good look at the gink on the County Records building. One thing I'm sure of: we can't keep all this to ourselves. At the very least, we pass the word on to ELF. It might alter their plans for OM. You've heard of OM?" She nodded, saying, "Operation Mindfuck. It's their big project for the next decade or so. This is a bigger Mindfuck than anything they had planned.")