"Nobody home," I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good enough.

"That's odd," he said. "Who's conducting the search?"

And I walked through the walls and into the Fire.

Which was the beginning of the larger and funkier part of my (Simon's) education, and where we cannot, as yet, follow him. He sleeps now, a teacher rather than a learner, while Mary Lou Servix awakes beside him and tries to decide whether it was just the pot or if something really spooky happened last night. Howard sports in the Atlantic; Buckminster Fuller, flying above the Pacific, crosses the international date line and slips back into April 23 again; it is dawn in Las Vegas and Mocenigo, the nightmares and anxieties of night forgotten, looks forward cheerfully to the production of the first live cultures of Anthrax-Leprosy-Pi, which will make this a memorable day in more ways than he expects; and George Dorn, somewhere outside this time system, is writing in his journal. Each word, however, seems magically to appear by itself as if no volition on his part were necessary to its production. He read the words his pencil scrawled, but they appeared the communications of another intelligence. Yet they picked up where he had left off in his hotel room and they spoke with his private idiom:

… the universe is the inside without any outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we all walk together in a single public universe that we can share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia.

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.")

"Red China?" Maldonado whispers incredulously. "You musta been reading the Readers Digest. We get all our horse from friendly governments like Laos. The CIA would have our ass otherwise." Straining to be heard over the running water, Carmel asks despondently, "Then you don't know how I could meet a Communist spy?"

Maldonado stares at him levelly. "Communism doesn't have a good image right now," he says icily; it is April 3, two days after the Fernando Poo Incident.

Bernard Barker, former servant of both Batista and Castro, dons his gloves outside the Watergate; in a flash of memory he sees the grassy knoll, Oswald, Harry Coin, and, further back, Castro negotiating with Banana-Nose Maldonado.

(But this present year, on March 24, Generalissimo Tequilla y Mota finally found the book he was looking for, the one that was as precise and pragmatic about running a country as Luttwak's Coup d'Etat had been about seizing one. It was called The Prince and its author was a subtle Italian named Machiavelli; it told the Generalissimo everything he wanted to know-except how to handle American hydrogen bombs, which, unfortunately, Machiavelli had lived too soon to foresee.)

"It is our duty, our sacred duty to defend Fernando Poo," Atlanta Hope was telling a cheering crowd in Cincinnati that very day. "Are we to wait until the godless Reds are right here in Cincinnati?" The crowd started to scream their unwillingness to wait that long-they had been expecting the godless Reds to arrive in Cincinnati since about 1945 and were, by now, convinced that the dirty cowards were never going to come and would have to be met on their own turf-but a group of dirty, longhaired, freaky-looking students from Antioch College began to chant, "I Don't Want to Die for Fernandoo Poo." The crowd turned in fury: at last, some real reds to fight… Seven ambulances and thirty police cars were soon racing to scene…