I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well, I'll know that the next time.
He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the Formula: "23 Skidoo."
It helped a little- but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.
But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to liberate himself.
Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924-except that he hadn't known about the Illuminati or the JAMs, then- but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going mad with horniness in a stinking cell.
It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.
"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."
He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.
"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."
He walked through the do or-and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle- and he grinned.
"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."
"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."
LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER
"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul -twenty thousand dollars- and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."
"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.
"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."
"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."
"You mean the Dev-"
"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."
"Then this person- this being-" Joe protested, "really is supernatural-"
"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced. "You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."
"But the flash of light-"
"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati- and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately- refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional -of course- and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."
"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."
"You're ignoring the bottom."
"Oh. Go on."
"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it- the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland- the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it- to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get…" Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:
"When the Pineal Eye opens -after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip- you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply- in five words, of course -when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: 'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."
"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed. "But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up. You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam- they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper. But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think about… But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."
"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.
"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.
"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added. "We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."
Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day-"
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V-the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' -right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'- how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead- in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"