The illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson

wash his hands. He thought of his date the next night with Sherri Brandi and, quite mercifully, had no inkling that it would be his last contact with a woman. Still seeking calm, he went to the window and looked at the stars—being a specialist, with no interest beyond his own field, he imagined he was looking up rather than out at them. In New Delhi aboard the afternoon TWA flight for Hong Kong, Honolulu, and Los Angeles, R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the few people to be aware that he lived on a spaceship, glanced at his three watches, showing local time (5:30 p.m.), time at Honolulu,his point of destination (2:30 a.m. the next morning) and present time in his home at Carbondale, Illinois (3:30 a.m. the previous morning.) In Paris, the noon crowds were jostled by hordes of young people distributing leaflets glowingly describing the world’s greatest Rock Festival and Cosmic Love Feast to be celebrated on the shores of Lake Totenkopf near Ingolstadt at the end of the month. At Sunderland, England, a young psychiatrist left his lunch to rush to the chronic ward and listen to weird babble proceeding from a patient who had been decade-silent: “On
Walpurgasnacht
it’s coming. That’s when His power is strongest. That’s when you’ll see Him. Right at the very stroke of midnight.” In the middle of the Atlantic, Howard the porpoise, swimming with friends in the mid-morning sun, encountered some sharks and had a nasty fight. Saul Goodman rubbed tired eyes in New York City as dawn crept over the windowsill, and read a memo about Charlemagne and the Courts of the Illuminated; Rebecca Goodman, meanwhile, read how the jealous priests of Bel-Marduk betrayed Babylon to the invading army of Cyrus because their young king, Belshazzar, had embraced the love-cult of the goddess Ishtar. In Chicago, Simon Moon was listening to the birds begin to sing and waiting for the first cinnamon rays of dawn, as Mary Lou Servix slept beside him; his mind was active, thinking about pyramids and rain-gods and sexual yoga and fifth-dimensional geometries, but thinking mostly about the Ingolstadt Rock Festival and wondering if it would all happen as Hagbard Celine had predicted.
    (Two blocks north in space and over forty years back in time, Simon’s mother heard pistol shots as she left Wobbly Hall—Simon was a second-generation anarchist—and followed the crowd to gather in front of the Biograph Theatre where a man lay bleeding to death in the alley. And the next morning—July 23, 1934—Billie Freschette, in her cell at Cook County Jail, got the news from a matron
. In this White Man’s Country, I am the lowliest of the lowly, subjugated because I am not white, and subjugated again because I am not male. I am the embodiment of all that is rejected and scorned—the female, the colored, the tribe, the earth—all that has no place in this world of white male technology. I am the tree that is cut down to make room for the factory that poisons the air. I am the river filled with sewage. I amthe Body that the Mind despises. I am the lowliest of the lowly, the mud beneath your feet. And yet of all the world John Dillinger picked me to be his bride. He plunged within me, into the very depths of me. I was his bride, not as your Wise Men and Churches and Governments know marriage, but we were truly wed. As the tree is wed to the earth, the mountain to the sky, the sun to the moon. I held his head to my breast, and tousled his hair as if it were sweet as fresh grass, and I called him “Johnnie.” He was more than a man. He was mad but not mad, not as a man may go mad when he leaves his tribe and lives among hostile strangers and is mistreated and scorned. He was not mad as all other white men are mad because they have never known a tribe. He was mad as a god might be mad. And now they tell me he is dead.
“Well” the matron asked finally, “aren’t you going to say anything? Aren’t you Indians human?” She had a real evil shine in her eye,