The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse, the Blind Tigers won't be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven't gotten to yet, and the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore, he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive- but our hero, it turns out, gives lengthy comments on them).

At this point there is a major digression, while a herd of minor characters get on a Braniff jet for Ingolstadt. It soon develops that the pilot is tripping on acid, the copilot is bombed on Tangier hash and the stewardesses are all speed freaks and dykes, only interested in balling each other. Atlanta then takes you through the lives of each of the passengers and shows that the catastrophe that is about to befall them is richly deserved: all, in one way or another, had helped, to create the Dope Grope or Fucks Fix culture by denying the "self-evident truth" of some hermetic saying by Heracleitus. When the plane does a Steve Brodie into the North Atlantic, everybody on board, including the acid-tripping Captain Clark, are getting just what they merit for having denied that reality is really fire.

Meanwhile, Taffy has hired a private detective named Mickey "Cocktails" Molotov to search for her lost Aryan rapist with hollow cheeks. Before I could get into that, however, I was wondering about the synchronistic implications of the previous section, and called over one of the stewardesses.

"Could you tell me the pilot's name?" I asked.

"Namen?" she replied. "Ja, Gretchen."

"No, not your name," I said, "the pilot's name. Namen wiser, um, Winginmacher?"

"Winginmacher?"

she repeated, dubiously, "Bin Augenblick." She went away, while I looked up Augenblick in a pocket German-English dictionary, and another stewardess, with the identical uniform, the identical smile and the identical blue eyes, came over, asking, "Was wollen sie haben?"

I gave up on Winginmacher, obviously a bad guess.

"Gibt mir, bitte," I said, "die Namen unser Fliegen-macher." I spread my arms, imitating the plane. "Luft Fliegenmacher," I repeated, adding helpfully, "How about Luft Piloten?"

"It's Pilot,

not Piloten," she said wit h lots of teeth. "His name is Captain Clark. Heathcliffe Clark."

"Danke- Thanks," I said glumly, and returned to Telemachus Sneezed, imagining friend Heathcliffe up front there weathering heights of MISSPELLED - soaring and plunging into the ocean because, as Mallory said, it's there. An Englishman piloting a kraut airline, no less, just to remind me that I'm surrounded by the paradoxical paranoidal paranormal parameters of synchronicity. Their wandering ministerial Eye. Lord, I buried myself again in Atlanta Hope's egregious epic.

Cocktails Molotov, the private dick, starts looking for the Great American Rapist, with only one clue: an architectural blueprint that fell out of his pocket while he was tupping Taffy. Cocktails's method of investigation is classically simple: he beats up everybody he meets until they confess or reveal something that gives him a lead. Along the way he meets an effete snob type who makes a kind of William O. Douglas speech putting down all this brutality. Molotov explains, for seventeen pages, one of the longest monologues I ever read in a novel, that life is a battle between Good and Evil and the whole modern world is corrupt because people see things in shades of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet instead of in clear black and white.

Meanwhile, of course, everybody is still mostly involved in fucking, smoking grass and neglecting to invest their capital in growth industries, so America is slipping backward toward what Atlanta calls "crapulous precapitalist chaos."