I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR. Napalm sundaes for How Chow Mein, misfortune's cookie.

Josephine Malik lies trembling on the bed, trying to be brave, trying to hide her fear. Where, now, is the mask of masculinity?

This delusion that you are a man trapped in a woman's body can only be cured one way. I might be kicked out of the American Psychoanalystical Association if they knew about my methods. In fact, already had a spot of bother with them when one of my patients cured his Oedipus complex by actually fucking his mother, convincing himself extensionally as the semanticists would say that she really was an old lady and not the woman he remembered from infancy. Nevertheless, the whole world is going bananas as you must have observed, my poor girl, and we have to use heroic measures to save whatever sanity remains in any patient we encounter. (The psychiatrist is now naked. He joins her on the bed.) Now, my little frightened dove, I will convince you that you really are a true-born, honest-to-God woman…

Josephine feels his finger in her cunt and screams. Not at the touch: at the reality of it. She hadn't believed until then that the change was real.

Weishaupt bridge is falling down Falling down Falling down

And modern novels are the same: in the YMCA on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, looking out the window at the radio tower atop Brooklyn Technical High School, a man named Chancy (no relative of the movie family) spreads his pornographic tarot cards across the bed. One of them, he notes, is missing. Quickly, he arranges them in suits, and hunts for the lost card: it is the Five of Pentacles. He curses softly: that was one of his favorite orgy tableux.

Rebecca. The Saint Bernard.

"It's probably all jumbled in your head," I went on, furious that our plan was falling apart, that I needed his trust now but had no way to earn it. "We've been disintoxicating and dehypnotizing you, but you almost certainly can't tell where the Illuminati left off and we rescued you and started reversing the treatment. You're due to explode into psychosis within twenty-four hours and we're using the only techniques that can defuse that process."

"Why am I hearing everything twice?" Saul asked, balancing between wary skepticism and a sense that Malik was not playing games any more but urgently trying to help him.

"The stuff they gave you was an MDA derivative- very high on mescaline and methedrine both. It has an echo effect for seventy-two hours minimum. You're hearing what I'm going to say before I say it and then again when I do say it. That'll pass in a few minutes, but it'll be back, every half hour or so, for the next day yet. The end of the chain is psychosis, unless we can stop it."

"Unless we can stop it."

"It's easing up now," Saul said carefully, "Less of an echo that time. I still don't know whether to trust you. Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?"

"Because the psychic explosion is on Saul Goodman's time-track, not on Barney Muldoon's."

Ten big rhinoceroses, eleven big rhinoceroses…

"You Wascal Wabbit," Simon whispers through the Judas Window. Immediately the door opens and a grinning young man with the Frisco-style Jesus Christ hair-and-beard says, "Welcome to the Joshua Norton Cabal." Joe sees to his relief that it was a normal but untypically clean hippie hangout, and there are none of the sinister accoutrements of the Lake Shore Drive coven. At the same time, he hears the strange man in the bed asking, "Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?" My God, now it's happening when I'm awake as well as when I'm asleep. Simu-multi-taneously, he hears the alarm and cries, "The Illuminati must be attacking!"

"Attacking this building?" Saul asks confusedly.

"Building? You're on a submarine, man. The Lief Erickson, on its way to Atlantis!"

Twenty big rhinoceroses, twenty-one big rhinoceroses….

"Number Seventeen," read Professor Curve, "Law and anarchists will give the American people a speedy Cadillac."

All the Helen Hokinson types are out today. Another one just hit me for the Mothers March Against Dandruff. I gave her a nickel.

1923 was a very interesting year for the occult, by the way. Not only did Hitler join the Illuminati and attempt the Munich putsch, but, glancing through the books of Charles Fort, I found quite a few suggestive events. On March 17th- which not only fits our IT-23 correlation but is also the anniversary of the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the day the Lord Nelson statue was bombed in Dublin in 1966 and, of course, good Saint Patrick's holy day- a naked man was seen mysteriously running about the estate of Lord Caernarvon in England. He appeared several times in the following days, but was never caught. Meanwhile, Lord Caernarvon himself died in Egypt- some said he was a victim of the curse of Tut-Ankh-Amen, whose tomb he had burglarized. (An archaeologist is a ghoul with credentials.) Fort also records two cases that May of a synchronistic phenomenon he has traced through the centuries: a volcanic eruption coinciding with the discovery of a new star. In September, there was a Mumiai scare in India-Mumiais are invisible demons that grab people in broad daylight. Throughout the year, there were reports of exploding coal in England; some tried to explain this by saying the embittered miners (it was a time of labor troubles) were putting dynamite in the coal, but the police couldn't prove this. The coal went on exploding. In the summer, French pilots began having strange mishaps, whenever they flew over Germany, and it was suggested that the Germans were testing an invisible ray machine. Considering the last three phenomena together- invisible demons in India, exploding coal in England, invisible rays over Germany- I guess somebody was testing something…

You can call me Doc Iggy. My full name, at present, is Dr. Ignotum P. Ignotius. The P. stands for Per. If you're a Latinist, you'll realize that translates as "the unknown explained by the still more unknown." I think it's a quite appropriate name for my function tonight, since Simon brought you here to be illuminized. My slave name, before I was turned on myself, is totally immaterial. As far as I'm concerned, your slave name is equally pointless, and I'll call you by the password of the Norton Cabal, which Simon used at the door. Until tomorrow morning, when the drug starts wearing off, you are U. Wascal Wabbit. That's U., the initial, not why-oh-you, by the way.

We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common with the SSS. That's the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists- the crew who began your illuminization in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade the government's postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM script-Divine Marquis Memorial script- and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the Legion of Dynamic Discord. Anything to avoid Federal Reserve notes, you know.

It'll be a while yet before the acid starts working, so I'll just chat like this, about things that are more or less trivial- or quadrivial, or maybe pentivial-until I can see that you're ready for more serious matters. Simon's in the chapel, with a woman named Stella who you'll really dig, getting things ready for the ceremony.

You might wonder why we're called the Norton Cabal. The name was chosen by my predecessor, Malaclypse the Younger, before he left us to join the more esoteric group known as ELF-the Erisian Liberation Front. They're the Occidental branch of the Hung Mung Tong Cong and all their efforts go into a long-range anti-Illuminati project known only as Operation Mindfuck. But that's another, very complicated, story. One of Malaclypse's last writings, before he went into the Silence, was a short paragraph saying, "Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann Hesse. Hardly anyone understands Albert Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton." I guess Malaclypse was already into the Mindfuck mystique when he wrote that.