Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (45 page)

“Yeah. I’m so full I might have to go barf,” Derek says with his usual candor.

“Gordon?”

“It was great. Thanks….” Gordon’s mind is churning. He feels like he’s on the threshold of a revelation, but he just can’t get over the hump. His grandmother (or the spirit she was channeling) seems to have hinted at some unspeakable force toying with world history, using the same small group of pawns in a twisted metaphysical game. Maybe it’s like a five-dimensional Gnostic chess match–something too complicated to comprehend all at once. He’s reminded of the string of absurd coincidences between the assassinations of Lincoln and JFK. He makes a mental note to look up both assassinations in his encyclopedia when he gets home.
¹

“Can I help with the dishes?” Gordon asks his grandmother, thinking some mindless physical labor might help clear his head.

“No, you boys just run along,” Helen says. “It’s still Halloween. Go have some fun. Scare yourselves silly.”

“Okay then. I guess we’ll see you tomorrow.”

“All Saints’ Day,” Helen reminds him.

“Bye, Grandma!” Derek shouts, a lizardfishmonster blur streaking like a comet toward the door.

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Outside, across the street at the Nyquist’s house, Mr. Nyquist stands in the dim yellow light of his doorway shaking with early-stage Parkinson’s disease as he hands out candy to a glow-in-the-dark skeleton, two ghosts, a witch, a rubber-faced Ronald Reagan, and a Catholic bishop wearing red satin vestments. A tall mitre sits on the bishop’s head like a stylized lobster claw with the Number of the Beast,
666
, painted in gold leaf at its center. As Gordon and Derek get closer, they see a coagulation of bloody drool glistening on the bishop’s chin and vampire fangs descending past his lower lip. It’s an odd sight for Kingsburg, a town that’s never been very big on anti-Catholic sentiment. Although most of the Swedes are Protestants, they don’t go around denigrating other faiths.

It makes Gordon wonder if Halloween is one of those holidays (“Holy Days”), like Easter and Christmas, co-opted by the Christian calendar from more ancient pagan celebrations. A slaphappy magic rabbit didn’t show up at Jesus’ crucifixion to hand out Easter eggs, after all. The hare and the egg are hijacked symbols from the Norse goddess, Ostara, or the Saxon fertility goddess, Eostre, or maybe the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar... Gordon can’t remember which is which, but he knows for sure that worshippers of one of those goddesses or the other practiced taurobolia–the ritual sacrifice of a divine bull, whose blood magically purified and revived the earth (along with baptizing some of the participants). He’s also fairly certain the myth of Cybele and Attis is mixed up in there somehow, too.

But where did Halloween come from? Who started this weird tradition of dressing up children in scary costumes and having them run around at night banging on doors and shouting, “Trick or Treat!”? Did it have its roots in the Celtic harvest festival,
Samhain?
Britain’s Lord of Misrule? The Boy Scouts? The Druids? Whatever the truth is, it’s long since dissipated into opinions–which vary. It’s become as impossible to know as who killed JFK.

The yellow light across the street blinks out as Mr. Nyquist closes his door. The vampire bishop whoops and runs over to do a little war dance in Mr. Nyquist’s ivy bed–no doubt trampling ancient, hidden dog turds in the process–then he hikes up his red satin robes and trots off to the next house for more bounty. Gordon wonders,
Did the fall of the Roman Empire really happen, or do the Vatican and the Mafia still pretty much control everything?
It’s a paranoid thought for paranoid times, with the assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II still so recent.

On the walk home with Derek, Gordon’s thoughts start to swirl
. It doesn’t seem fair
, he thinks to himself.
Why do liberal, progressive leaders like the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King get assassinated, while the conservative old dinosaurs like Ronald Reagan and the Pope survive the attempts on their lives? And who stood to benefit if Reagan had been assassinated, anyway? The same dark cabal that went after the Kennedys couldn’t want Reagan out of the way
–Reagan was their guy!–
unless they wanted Vice President Bush in his place. George H.W. Bush, former director of the CIA, the man who kept a lid on the CIA’s misdeeds in the messy aftermath of Watergate and protected CIA secrets from the House Sub-Committee on Assassinations; a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones society, a 33rd degree Mason, and a rumored descendant of Vlad II Dracul–father of the 15th-century Transylvanian warlord, Vlad IV Dracula, who inspired Bram Stoker’s famous book. Just how big a role did
Bush
play in all this?

As these paranoiac associations flit through Gordon’s mind, it occurs to him that he might need to step back a little and broaden his perspective. Maybe the assassinations were best looked at in terms of myth. A thousand years in the future, JFK and Jackie O. might have the same resonance in the collective consciousness of Americans as Cybele and Attis did for the ancient Greeks. The idea isn’t so far-fetched…. After all, Arthurian legend was invoked early in the game, when Kennedy’s reign in the White House was compared to Camelot. It would follow that the assassination, on a mythological level, reenacted the killing of the king. The relatively new medium of television made sure that all of the country’s citizens were given the opportunity to see their courageous leader’s brains blown out in broad daylight. What a huge, negative impact that must have had on the dreaming psyche of the USA.

No one is safe, not even the President….
That was the subconscious message imprinted on the mind of every American on the day JFK died. It was hammered home again with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and John Lennon. It was a message that instilled a panicky sense of helplessness and despair, a sense that the world is rigged and malevolent powerbrokers rule from the shadows. Maybe it was intended that way. Maybe sending that message was the underlying motive for every one of the assassinations in the first place.

Gordon remembers a quote from William Carlos Williams that he wrote down in one of his notebooks:
“America is a pathetic place where something stupefying must always happen for fear we wake up.”
American politics and American culture interact in an endless feedback loop that creates and amplifies a passivity-inducing sense of dread. In a flash, Gordon sees how it all might work:

It starts with an evil intent–the CIA’s secret program to create mind-controlled assassins, for instance. Somewhere, somehow, the sensitive psychic antenna of an artist picks up on that intent and broadcasts it as a warning to the rest of us–as art. In this case it would be Richard Condon’s book,
The Manchurian Candidate
, and the subsequent movie directed by John Frankenheimer. Sometimes we heed the warning and catastrophe is averted, but by focusing so many minds on the evil intent, the original malefactors are often emboldened and, ironically, their intent becomes more likely to enter reality. Thus, Sirhan Sirhan (and perhaps an accomplice) assassinates Robert Kennedy. Then the media picks up on the event and amplifies it, creating ripple effects of fear and dread throughout the culture. The Beatles record
The White Album
and Charles Manson thinks there are messages in it just for him. Manson, in turn, hatches his own evil intent to start a race war by killing rich white people, specifically Sharon Tate. That intent then collides with the evil intent to birth an Antichrist in June of 1966 (6/66), which we were warned about by Ira Levin’s book,
Rosemary’s Baby
, and the Roman Polanski movie of the same name. Then all hell breaks loose in the media frenzy surrounding the Manson murders, finishing off the nascent spiritual revolution of the sixties. Peace, love, and understanding have to take a backseat when the American public is collectively shitting its pants in terror. In the end, the guys in the CIA–whose task is to wage psychic warfare on the nation’s citizens, keeping everyone in their place via artificially-created fears (while the advertising world does the rest, enslaving everyone to material obsessions via artificially-created desires), guys in that particular, ultra-secret hidden branch of the CIA, anyway–wind up saying, “Wow, that worked pretty good. What can we do next?”

And then Gordon thinks,
Hey, wait a minute…
I
was born in June of 1966.

While it’s perversely flattering, for a second, to think that he might be the spawn of Satan, Gordon quickly realizes how unlikely it would be for the Antichrist to incarnate in the body of a skinny, asthmatic narcoleptic. The Antichrist, if he ever shows up, will probably look a lot more like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the star of
Conan the Barbarian
, who answered the question, “What is best in life?” by replying, “To crush your enemies! To see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of the women.” Words to live by, apparently, if you’re a pumped-up barbarian or on the CIA’s secret payroll. Maybe Schwarzenegger will follow Ronald Reagan into politics someday (
Arnold
is an anagram of
Ronald
, Gordon’s pattern-seeking brain can’t help but notice…).

“Let’s listen to ‘I Am the Walrus’ again,” Derek suggests as they head up the sidewalk toward home.

Another group of trick-or-treaters passes them as Gordon is reaching for his keys to the front door. Older kids this time. There’s a cannibal clown with a wig of yellow condoms and a splintered bone fragment through his bulbous red nose; a slatternly witch in black fishnet stockings; a baggy-suited Superman in a frayed dimestore cape; a blood-smeared Indian squaw; and a silent, overfed guy in a tuxedo with a blank white hockey goalie’s mask on his face, in homage to the bogeyman from the
Friday the 13th
movies
.
Gordon is reminded that he should be putting on his own costume for the Halloween party Jimmy is hosting at his uncle’s house later that night (Uncle Lloyd is away on a business trip and unwisely left Jimmy in charge of watering the plants). Then he notices someone else. A tall, slightly out-of-focus someone wearing a toxic green bunny suit and hefting around a sparkling silver sledgehammer. The sight gives Gordon chills. Suddenly, he feels like he’s losing his grip on reality. Because the bunny is speaking to him via telepathy, and what it’s saying to him is:

“You still don’t remember all that you know, but you’re getting closer. Prepare yourself for anamnesis.”

Gordon is about to ask the bunny to define the term
anamnesis,
but in a blink it disappears. His brain finds the concept of bunny-induced telepathy so appallingly strange that his neural filters refuse to admit it to conscious memory–so the whole episode is shuffled off to Gordon’s unconscious, for later recall in his dreams. In his waking mind, it’s as if he never saw the bunny at all.

Derek, however, took in everything. But the bunny made him promise not to talk about it.

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Yeah, I know… I’m quite the spunky little fucker at the age of three. It’s kind of obnoxious. But you should hear my singing voice–it’s not half-bad. And that Tijuana Lizardfishmonster get-up was goddam prescient, as you’ll soon discover. I could tell that even Gordon’s daimon was impressed.

Anamnesis, in case you were wondering, is a Greek word that means, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” It’s sort of the opposite of amnesia. Plato used the term when he talked about how all learning is really a form of remembering, a way of recalling the eternal spiritual truths we knew just before our souls took the plunge and incarnated in these lame, knuckle-headed human bodies again. You can especially see anamnesis in action with kids around preschool age, when they start picking up language and facts so fast that it seems like there’s no way they could be taking everything in for the first time–they must be remembering things they already knew somehow. And I’m not just talking about my own amazingly precocious, erudite, and quick-witted three-year-old self here. Just about any snot-nosed brat my age does the same.

But anamnesis can go even further, if you’re lucky…. It can help you untangle illusion from reality and make you aware of your true divine nature. It can bestow grace, wisdom, and salvation. But only if you’re ready for it. Anamnesis arrives on a need-to-know basis.

Here’s another thing you should know about anamnesis: Some of the spiritual truths it reveals about life on this planet aren’t very pretty. Starting with the Big One: that we volunteered to descend into this prison world and lock ourselves into a linear-proceeding space-time matrix with hardly any memories of our spiritual identities–all just so human suffering could be inflicted on us.

Now why the hell would we do that? What are we, masochists?

Well, maybe yes, maybe no…. Like I’ve said before, there are lessons our souls need to learn from our time spent on Earth, lessons we can’t seem to learn anywhere else. So in a way, we’re being educated and enslaved all at once. But if our souls are making progress, we’ll also learn to break free from false, limiting realities. We’ll learn to say “fuck off” to tyranny. One particularly good spur toward doing that is suffering:

“What can one say in favor of the suffering of little creatures in this world?” Philip K. Dick wrote before the end of his wild, traumatized life (Five marriages! Drug addiction! Grinding sci-fi poverty!) “Nothing. Nothing, except that it will by its nature trigger off revolt or disobedience–which will in turn lead to an abolition of this world and a return to the Godhead.”

If you want my opinion, the abolition of this world won’t be happening anytime soon, so don’t get your hopes up. Philip K. Dick experienced his own personal abolition after a series of strokes and a heart attack in March of 1982. He never got to see the theatrical release of
Blade Runner
, the movie made from his novel,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
, which came out later that same year. (Gordon and his buddies saw it and thought it was one of the best movies ever, even with the dopey voice-over narration.) Life was just about to get good for Phil, so he died. Typical.