The illuminatus! trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

reading not what is on a face but what is behind the face. The cops were worried and excited, like any hunters on the track of something both large and dangerous. Joe was right about the assassination plot, and his disappearance and the bombing were part of it. And that meant George Dorn was in danger,too, and Peter liked George even if he was a snotty kid in some ways and an annoying ass-kisser about the race thing like most young white radicals. Mad Dog, Texas, Peter thought: that sure sounds like a bad place to be in trouble
.
    (Almost fifty years before, a habitual bank robber named Harry Pierpont approached a young convict in Michigan City Prison and asked him, “Do you think there might be a true religion?”)
    But why is George Dorn screaming while Saul Goodman is reading the memos? Hold on for another jump, and this one is a shocker. Saul is no longer human; he’s a pig. All cops are pigs. Everything you’ve ever believed is probably a lie. The world is a dark, sinister, mysterious and totally frightening place. Can you digest all that quickly? Then, walk into the mind of George Dorn for the second time, five hours before the explosion at
Confrontation
(four hours before, on the clock) and suck on the joint, suck hard and hold it down. (“One o’clock … two o’clock … three o’clock … rock!”). You are sprawled on a crummy bed in a rundown hotel, and a neon light outside is flashing pink and blue patterns into your room. Exhale slowly, feel the hit of the weed and see if the wallpaper looks any brighter yet, any less Unintentional Low Camp. It’s hot, Texas-dry hot, and you push your long hair back from your forehead and haul out your diary, George Dorn, because reading over what you wrote last sometimes helps you to learn what you’re really getting into. As the neon splotches the page with pink and blue, read this:
    April 23
    How do we know whether the universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting smaller? You can’t say that the universe is getting bigger in relation to anything outside it, because there isn’t any outside for it to relate to. There isn’t any outside. But if the universe doesn’t have an
out
-side, then it goes on forever. Yeah, but, its
in
-side doesn’t go on forever. How do you know it doesn’t, shithead? You’re just playing with words, man.
    —No I’m not. The universe is the inside without an outside, the sound made by one
    * * *
    There was a knock at the door.
    The Fear came over George. Whenever he was high, the least little detail wrong in his world would bring the Fear, irresistible, uncontrollable. He held his breath, not to contain the smoke in his lungs, but because terror had paralyzed the muscles in his chest. He dropped the little notebook in which he wrote his thoughts daily and clutched at his penis, a habitual gesture in moments of panic. The hand holding the roach drifted, automatically, over the hollowed-out copy of Sinclair Lewis’s
It Can’t Happen Here
, which lay beside him on the bed, and he dropped the half-inch twist of paper and marijuana on top of the plastic Baggie full of green grains. Instantly a brown smoldering dime-sized hole opened up on the bag, and the pot near the coal started to smoke.
    “Stupid,” said George, as his thumb stabbed the smoking coal to crush it, and he drew back his lips in a grimace of pain.
    A short fat man walked into the room, Law Officer written in every mean line of his crafty little face. George shrank back and started to close
It Can’t Happen Here;
like lightning, three stiff, concrete-hard fingers drove into his forearm. He screamed and the book jumped out of his hand, spilling pot all over the bedspread.
    “Don’t touch that,” said the fat man. “An officer will be in to gather it up for evidence. I went easy with that karate punch. Otherwise you’d be nursing a compound fracture of the left arm in Mad Dog County Jail tonight, and no right-thinking doctor likely to have a mind to