The Last Statue

Chapter 4

The streets of Asunci—n are swirling and churning with bright red silt-water, but down at the Lido, the vibe is good and the perspective upbeat. Waitresses in perky duck-like uniforms appear bringing ice-cold Antarctica beer & some sort of hors d’oeuvre sausage, followed in short order by parillada steaks, pirhana soup, and maize cakes.

Before leaving for El Dorado, Mantua had facilitated the acquisition of a mill bottle of Valisa Numinosa extract. Valisa being a very rare and obscure genus of lotus, known for its vivid, luminescent blue color & for overwhelming, mind boggling hallucinogenic properties…which come on pulsating & fluttery in the orange and white interior of the Lido; sort of like sitting inside of a big tangerine…

A voice at the bar is dropping names so hard, they might well shatter into a million pieces: Klaus Kinski, Mick “The Rooster” Jagger, and Werner Herzog, and of course the mayor, Martin Burt; all claimed as valued past customers, while a voice in a nearby booth, belonging to a Teutonic Bunge rep explains: “You see Hans, you musn’t think of the Reich as having capitulated. Consider it as more of a reorganization of corporate structure and a diversification of portfolio. so it is not prudent to draw attention to one’s self-I must get rich very slowly-but think of the possibilities; anything-anything can be done in this country.”

We flee this intolerable buzz-kill, and settle into a booth in a quieter section of the tangerine, where the noise-level is appropriate for reflection on the jagged trajectory that brought us to the far side of anywhere…

Previously, back in La-La land, having parted ways with Paramount, now employed by a tragically-hip film journal dedicated to celebration of the willfully obscure. A recent arrival to trendy obscurity being one Rex Learner, whose career had followed the same basic curve as his contemporaries: crashing on the rocks of dilated egos, bloated budgets, dubious taste, and the frosty blizzard of Peruvian snow being shoveled into the collective Hollywood septum; bottoming out with such dubious spectacles as ‘At Long Last Love’, ‘Sorcerer’, ‘One From the Heart’, ‘New York, New York’, ‘Quintet’, ‘Lookin’ To Get Out etc.’

This was now the era of Eisenberg, Ovits, Don Simpson, Geffen, Lucas, Spielberg…an agenda of dumbed-down sleaze & kid-vid fluff, reflecting retro-rightwing, trickle-down Reaganomics, peddling unrealistic quick-fix expectations, with upbeat, phony happy-endings, appealing to a very finely-calculated target demographic audience, calibrated down to a much lower common denominator than ever before. Obscene, previously unimaginable amounts of revenue now beckoned: fast-food tie-ins, product placement, merchandise licensing and endorsements, and video residuals, with a particularly medieval system for distributing the proceeds…

As I stood poised to knock on the office door, located in some flimsy pre-fab type buildings serving as make-shift Learner headquarters, as far from the realm of the Suits as you could get and still be on the studio lot; I wondered, would he live up to his currently snow-balling (& speed-balling) public image? Should I bother to interview him at all? Could I just make something up, and let it go at that, assuming that nobody will know the difference, or give a shit one way or the other, when…THWACK!! The unmistakable sound of stainless-steel penetrating cheap door, the very tip of the blade slightly protruding…

“Well…shit, you might as well come on in, get this bullshit over with…” croaks a sandpaper voice from within…

I’d heard about Learner’s violent confrontations with James Caan, Rip Torn, and in particular an anecdote about an impatient, enraged, and possibly over-medicated Garey Busey, commandeering a lance from an extra playing a Maxmillian-era French cavalry lancer, charging Learner on horseback, hurling said lance javelin-style, deep into the bottom of Learner’s chair on his frantically rising Louma crane. So I was determined to not be rattled by Learner’s antics-just get the interview, and get out…

The room was a shambles, as though in the midst of moving, although whether out or in, I couldn’t tell…weapons & white powders in plentiful evidence throughout the room, large spliff-stubs smoldering in ashtrays…and there he is, the old fraud…snake-skin Frye boots up on desk, blood-shot, insanely dilated eyes squinting behind mirrored shades, Cuban cigar in hand, massive spliff stump smoldering in the ashtray in front of him, like some sort of Rasta incense…

“So, here we are…my assistant just quit, the Suits are on my back to get this thing in pre-production, and I can’t make any fucking sense out of these pages…” indicating the scattered chunks of screenplay strewn about the room, and across the desk, sort of a familiar look about some of those pages, now that I stop & focus…

“Ah, well here’s the part you’ll want to build up, if you’re smart…the stand-off out near Durango, vying for control of the well…a full canteen as the holy grail…also, the caper in the border-town…the break-in to the vault…theft of the deed to the Cripple Creek water rights…the drunk judge-the cancelled hanging…the dam-burst, the flood, the errant riverboat…the wild ride down Cripple-Creek on the second-half of the cruise…Shit, there’s about four movies jammed into this thing, if you know how to extract them…you gotta hit the tables with a system if you’re going to beat the odds, count the cards, but don’t count on anything else, this is no reason to hedge your bets, but you’re playing this like a novice housewife from Des Moines, pumping quarters into a one-armed bandit…”

Back in Mexico, the meetings with Emilio Fernandez had actually started on an optimistic, if somewhat unrealistic note…big extravagant meals, astronomical bar tabs-even by Learner standards, marathon sport-fuck binges in plush, exotic, red velvet textured brothels-no expense spared…But soon, our esteemed amigo is perpetually enmeshed in chronic legal problems that seem to increase exponentially, until it gets to the point where Se–ior Emilio is on the lam, on a more or less permanent basis.

After a trip to Rose Marie’s, right outside of Acapulco, and a sordid, digressive prowl through pulque bars so far into the outback as to have a kind of trench gouged into the floor beneath the bar, so that seriously macho imbibers are able to relieve themselves without breaking stride (a good place to drink yourself under the table, or the volcano…) then back to Mexico City, to be ejected from the Alfonzo Bedoya retrospective. Spot of bother with security at the reception-Learner: “I don’t have to show you no stinking back-stage pass!” It slowly dawns on us that our shelf-life here has expired, so we move on to greener pastures & Better Deals…

We’re only in Lima for six hours before being ejected from Peru, after a disastrous interview on live Peruvian TV, in which Learner, within the space of about four and a half minutes, manages to mortally offend the ruling junta, the Church, most indigenous tribal peoples, the Communists, which may or may not include the Shining Path; who are violently offended…and many a random passerby. An ill-advised attempt to wing the interview in Learner’s idiosyncratic Spanish, compounded by ungodly amounts of local medicinal alkaloids, started things off on a jarring note, to be followed by a largely incomprehensible tirade onto which any outrage or affront could be convincingly projected.

The mood of the crowd gathering outside the hotel is getting ugly as we commune with Clemmons on the phone. “You guys can’t go to Columbia-so forget it. When you went on the tube and started blabbing about making a movie about the drug-trade, you may take it from reliable sources; that did not go down well in Bogota. My advice is to try for Paraguay, it’s the easiest to get into with the least questions asked. Shit, Joseph Mengele didn’t even bother to use an alias on the visa application…Remember, it’s imperative that you get out of Peru right now, quick-before you’re summoned downtown for questioning, I guarantee you won’t like it-and whatever you do, stay the fuck out of the Southern Cone…”

Our intrepid overseas legal consultant Clemmons’ first advice when briefed on Learner’s plan to relocate from Mexico City to Lima was; “No, no…you don’t want to be in Peru right now…terrorists, bombs, the Shining Path…repressive military crackdowns.

You’re better off right where you are. Can’t you guys drum up some sort of story in Mexico?”

But Learner wouldn’t be dissuaded, so here we are, in a verrry secluded spot where clandestine aircraft depart for destinations not listed on any official manifest…

“It’s not flying into Paraguay that you’ve got to worry about,” says the pilot as we clear the now invisible runway in the creaky Eisenhower-era aircraft, “It’s flying over Bolivia-that’s what you want to worry about…”

Destination: the Chaco, a desolate, hostile no-man’s land, that serves as a kind of buffer between Bolivia and the rest of Paraguay. Undrinkable, sludgy swamp-water… thorny shade-less trees, crocodiles, a cornucopia of poisonous snakes, and a mind boggling assortment of obnoxious insects & various other pests, are just a few of the richly deserved reasons for the endearing regional nickname: “The Green Hell”.

“Want you guys to meet Virge Mantua,” says our pilot upon landing, “You can’t trust a whole lot of people out here…Virge is the exception…he knows the place like the back of his hand-plus: he’s got a copter-get you to where you need to be.”

“So you’re the ones looking for Johnny Piato,” says Mantua swooping low over a greenly defined estancia, spiraling in for the landing. Now THAT gets our attention, sets off a few bells, prompting a rewind of the conversation with Learner just before departing Peru…

“It’s a blessing in disguise,” Learner had said back in Peru, as the car Clemmons had sent, discreetly pulled away from the curb. We’d made it out of the hotel undetected, and could see the disgruntled citizens at close-range, waving signs that seemed to translate to something like ‘Alfaro lives-Damn it !’ & ‘Stop stealing our grease!’ & ‘Smash the Centipede!’. Some kind of code or surrealist performance art-it was difficult to tell.

“Paraguay is where Gianni ‘Johnny’ Piato is rumored to be hiding out,” Learner chortled, “Somewhere in the Chaco, he’s got a ranch as a base of operations. Jodorowsky turned me onto this guy’s work way back when…I got to meet Piato at one of the Telluride fests. There were some rare screenings of ‘Picatrix, and ‘30 Birds in China’-total cinema sorcery, I mean literally…closest thing I can think of would be Harry Smith’s ‘Early Abstractions’, but taken way further. At Telluride he would give these informal but very intense raps that he gave permission to tape. When he would free-associate, it was as if a MallarmŽ salon in Paris 1919, was being taped like a Grateful Dead show.”

Piato was an Italian national, with an Argentine wife, whose work had become increasingly convoluted & hermetic, dropping plot-structure & character development altogether, preferring instead to manipulate & juxtapose images in a Kabbalist, and alchemistic structure.

“Images are repositories of memories, and can be used to store vast quantities of information.” says Johnny Piato on one of Learner’s bootleg tapes, “One might find such information-laden imagery on Tarot cards for example or alchemistic wood-cuts, and Kabbalist diagrams. Aside from the classic memory wheels; architecture-especially temples, palaces, theaters, labyrinths, vast-possibly infinite libraries, are all prime storage vessels…but this information can be deposited in even more abstracted forms, like a piece of music, a dance, a series of short stories, a novel, a film…Intense contemplation of these images can transform human consciousness into a force-field, invoking celestial energies of incalculable power…”

The interior of the estancia main-house still has portions of a na•ve, primitively rendered mural of what I assume to be a sort of idealized state-fair, with first-prize going to a Gurnsey cow, who seems to be floating over a hay-bale with serene, almost Chagall-like detachment.

“Most likely a Mennonite painting…their main turf is more to the east of here, but they’ve achieved pretty wide distribution throughout the area,” explains Mantua, “And at the top of the stairs, I think you’ll find it difficult to ignore, the many-times larger than life portrait of gruff but lovable, Dr. Jose Gaspar Rodriguez Franc’a-El Supremo to you…those eyes will follow you anywhere…” An obsessively detailed oil depiction of possibly the ultimate archetype of severity & stern disapproval, a stark contrast to the child-like Mennonite fair.

“My specific commission is to bring you to meet Johnny at his southern franchise, which you might expect to be a slightly more, uh…convoluted excursion.” Mantua elaborates as he passes out cold Antarcticas to all takers, “The other main brew out this way is Breman, proceed at your own risk on that one…caveat emptor. We leave for Asunci—n tomorrow, then the Lapacho Curtain…”

On the way to the main house, Mantua had showed us a crumbling structure out toward the western edge of Johnny’s property…”the Play Room”, a partially sand-filled bunker left over from the disastrous Chaco war. The charred inside…apparently the result of Piato’s recent experiments.

Although not much more forthcoming about the experiments, Mantua did fill us in on some of Piato’s background that might not have made it to the official bio. Apparently, Piato’s wife had been among the early “disappeared” in Argentina’s Dirty War. Five months pregnant, suffering a fatal hemorrhage in custody during “intensive interrogation”, was bad enough, but as headless and mutilated corpses started choking the Rio Plata, and the details of the massive Argentinian torture-machine known as “The Process of Social Reorganization,” started to become widely known, we might infer that Johnny’s formerly sunny disposition was in no small peril of darkening…
When he got the news, Gianni Piato was in the middle of making a documentary on an almost unknown, and virtually extinct, indigenous tribe known as the ItarŽ, who had remained enmeshed & invisible in their Paraguayan rain-forest environment, from which vantage point they watched with horror as their cannibal neighbors the AchŽ, succumbed to The Great Extinction Machine, and the unnatural submersion of most of their hereditary environment, by waters overflowing from Itaipœ Dam. When Piato returned from futile inquiry in La Plata, he disappeared into the rainforest, becoming initiated into the mysteries of the ItarŽ, where he evidently blended his hypnotic icon & image manipulation technique with potent shamanic symbols developed in collaboration with the ItarŽ.

It was through the ItarŽ that Piato became aware of the existence of the ‘Promised Land’ also known as Waldner-555, located in an off-limits area near the Brazilian border, designated by the government as “District-X”.

“The Promised Land”, according to Mantua, “Is a mostly underground para- military compound, presided over by a mysterious individual referred to obliquely, as ‘El Nuevo Supremo’ or ‘The King of the World’. We now know this to be Dr. Frederick Von Meir, one of the first clues being this rare ariel photo of a marigold patch-quite distinctive in that part of the rainforest, and entirely consistent with evidence analyzed from other quarters occupied by Von Meir”.

The Doktor (seal-23)

Dr. Frederick Von Meir: Outer Head of the Order of the Trapezoid, blazed a trail with roots going back to The Society of Lizards, or Eidechsengesellschaft, via Frederick Barbarossa & the Order of Teutonic Knights as decreed in The Bull of Rimini, founding the unbroken dynasty of the Dominus Mundi-the Master of the World, with a flow-chart of influence extending deep into the Illuminati, the Skull & Bones and the Orbis Tertius (Obscura). Von Meir’s Order of the Trapezoid, seems to have been the connective tissue in the Sebottendorf-Haushofer circles encompassing Thule & Vril related groups. Von Meir’s connections in the related A(A (The Order of Blazing Tlšn), extended from Col. J.F.C. Fuller, Georges Monti, and Carl Schmitt on the Continent, to John Whiteside Parsons, N. Ron Gibbered, Ray Burlingame, and Georgina Brayton in California.

Von Meir’s occult research led to his breakthrough discovery of what he called “the Reductive Mind”; a state of consciousness said to be shielded from normal human awareness by a wall of astral fire. Once activated, the Reductive Mind was able to communicate with “entities from the star-system Tlšn, the dark companion Mlejnas”, and the various orbiting, inhabited, perhaps haunted spheres: Kralnia-Z, Mizar-12, Meon-63, Neophrates, Alma Benhura, some of whose venerable inhabitants, were very obliging in their dissemination of information leading to quantum technological advances. Proximity to this “tech” put Von Meir in a pivotal position with the KlŸsterdrome: the elusive geopolitical/industrial cartel (Krupp, Farben, Thyssenn, and others whose names we’ll never know, whose judgment we’ll never see).

The good doktor’s quest for the “Reductive Mind”, led to some bold research during WWII. Exotic states of mind were studied and catalogued, while mind-altering drugs and torture were employed to crack open the shattered husk of personality, paring consciousness down to the basic Reductive Mind; whose personality was defined by violent malevolent antipathy toward the very concept of humanity, meting out the “tech” as rope for the expressed purpose of hanging ourselves.

Fears of total human destruction are not the concern of the †bermensch. Von Meir’s only valid bargaining chip with the forces invoked, and access to their ‘tech’; was the traffic in human souls marinated in pain, fear, shame & ritualized debasements of the human spirit, which is part of the formulized technique for accessing the ‘Reductive Mind’, which means cracking the former personality open like a walnut, by observation & participation in actions that would be regarded with the utmost repugnance by most current human sensibilities (murder, incest, rape, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, beastiality etc.) which give off vibrational frequencies that The Forces That Be experience as the ecstatic peak-experience equivalent of intense sex, or a hit of crack.

The practical application of these discoveries, was Von Meir’s post-war establishment of secret cults that could serve those very specialized needs, all the way from Yonkers to Buenos Aires. While assisting in the flow of Nazis to the US, during Operation Paperclip, Von Meir established resilient occult groups in Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros, eventually on down to Colonia Dignidad. With these mind-cracking techniques, bolstered by a kind of proto neuro-linguistic programming, he could meta-program subjects, to program other subjects, to program other subjects, and so on, providing very compartmentalized assassins & badger game sex-slaves etc. Some of the earliest subjects rumored to have been successfully meta-programmed, were concentration-camp inmates; including a rabbi, a doctor and an adolescent boy.

Von Meir’s greatest success however, might well be the adroitness with which he kept his name off of official records and reports, and his image off of any known photographs, allowing him to operate with low-key impunity before, during, and after the war, collaborating with his initiate Carl Schmitt, to install a fellow traveler “philosophy” professor at the University of Chicago, who would in turn, initiate & program a deep-cover sleeper-team to manifest the second phase of the 9/11/73 begun in Santiago Chile, to 9/11/01 in New York. Thy name is Legion…and thou art Neo-Con.

In California, Von Meir set up an ad-hoc headquarters in an underground, Nazi-friendly bunker in Rustic Canyon adjacent to the “Murphy Ranch”, off of Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades, (which is kind of interesting when you think about it, since a cluster German exiles fleeing Nazi persecution, lived just a strudel’s-throw away on San Remo) with a northern base near Holy City in Santa Cruz, an old-style roadside attraction-type cult commune right on the main highway, with plenty of auxiliary land harboring a covert, virtually inaccessible compound, where a circle of initiates were programmed to enact dark blood rituals, and to police the edifice of a burgeoning neuro-chemical social- engineering project, from the late 60s on, to be led by Von Meir’s protŽgŽ, Ronald Shitsky, (who had been reductive-mindedly programmed with Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ as a trigger, while his star disciple will be programmed with ‘Stranger In a Strange Land’) to whom had been transferred, a number of “technical patents”, to be sold with the intended purpose of launching a full-scale psychedelic, psych-ops blitzkrieg on America in particular, and the World in general. Some of these technical patents would parlay into “Shitsky” a.k.a. “Stark” acquiring the controlling shares to an aerospace corporation, Supervacuo, a division of Micro-Cynicon, located just to the west of Box Canyon, out beyond the Santa Susana Pass, above the San Narciso fire-road, specializing in reinterpreting & upgrading Nazi V-2 technology, (jeez, I wonder what sort of rŽsumŽ & pedigree would be appropriate for V-2 research?) located in an area hosting an absurdly disproportionate number of ritual sex-magic cults, not unlike say, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory & the Agape Lodge in Pasadena…

Meanwhile, back at the Lido, a waitress waddles by with a couple of dogfish on a platter, served apparently, with the head on…Taking a leisurely opportunity before shipping out to District-X or wherever, to savor the sheer random incoherence of it all; an expensively maintained railroad system with no trains (more of a “conceptual” railroad), the street vendors with trays full of rubber monkeys & plastic glow-in-the-dark spiders…the ubiquitous pink inflatable pigs…the harsh, strictly enforced Stronata curfew in contrast to all-night bookstores & full-service, round-the-clock prostitute availability.

Earlier, after drinking at a British theme-bar above a Korean pharmacy, we’d sloshed on down to Plaza Uruguaya, mindful to avoid the pyragŸes (cops) out enforcing the curfew. Learner purchased a sword-cane (”the gentleman’s stiletto”) at an all-night thrift store, before arriving at the Plaza; destination of old hookers & used books (fresh hookers at the Plaza Paraguaya, they tell me). Then, wrapping our bookstore purchases in a thrift-store raincoat, slog back toward the corner of Chile & Palma and the relative safety of The Lido.

Old, hopelessly obscure, English-language pulp that has weathered & yellowed, but not quite yet crumbled to dust, has to go somewhere, and the Plaza Uruguaya is apparently one of those places. Dig: ‘Escape from Vheissu’ by Raymond Bernard, Fieldcrest publications-1963…Our hero Raymond Bernard descends to the subterranean world at the center of the Earth; a utopian paradise run by scantily clad, midnight-sun bronzed, vegetarian Amazon women, where things are looking pretty good…when along comes the fly in the ointment: the evil-twin doppelganger Raymond Bernard who fronts for the malevolent Ruling Council of Nine & the Maha Imperator, who must embark upon an epic journey pursued by the original Bernard, through the nether-regions of inner Earth (as opposed to the hep region with the Amazon women) up through the remote wastes of Antarctica, including the squeaky leather discipline of New Schwabenland, the monstrous color-coded Lego-land of Rainbow City, and the gloomy slack-less entropy of Leng & Kaddath…Finally escaping along the “Route de Los Gods” with the assistance of Los Amigos del Muerte…eventually ascending through an old Lemurian emergency off-ramp located in Mt. Shasta, only to find that the doppelganger Raymond Bernard, agent of CIRCE, is now loose on the surface world, fronting a sinister secret society which of course, poses as a charitable humanitarian organization that recruits by advertising in men’s “science” magazines…

The return of Mantua prompts an excursion into the low rolling hills above Asunci—n, where monstrous architectural hybrids, congregate in a shrill display of gratuitous wealth…English-Tudor-Morrocan-Victorian-Art-Deco-Gothic-Futurist…and that’s just one house.

“Remember,” says Mantua, shifting Army surplus jeep gears, navigating a narrowing lane, winding into a decidedly more rural area, “This isn’t a sporting house-there’s one two doors down, just remember, it’s considered a major gaffe to be bargaining for services in this establishment…don’t want to end up like Tacho…”

“Taco?”

“Tacho Somoza, acclaimed statesman from Nicaragua, wound up here, as vicious fascist dingbats will, when nobody else will take ‘em. Ol’ Tacho ran a pretty tight ship, wouldn’t even spring for coffee or yerba matŽ for his Paraguayan bodyguards-a major breach of etiquette. He committed his second major fuck-up at El Mundo Occidente; the place we’re headed right now. There’s a kind of tacit immunity to Stronata policy there. One thing a Guyarni respects is a good curse, and as a priestess of the Ku, Ayisha is extremely well qualified to deliver just that-don’t get me wrong…she’s a gentle, beautiful lady…from Taiwan, I think. Adjectives like; mysterious & inscrutable, with all due implications of a hazy, if not downright shady past, would technically apply, but it starts to sound like retread clichŽ bullshit :’The Lady From Taiwan’ or something-don’t want to give you the wrong idea…”

“But old Tacho just wouldn’t listen. Figured, as always, that the unwritten law didn’t apply to him either. It was two or three years ago, he comes barging up here, storms in, scares the shit out of Ruthie at the front desk, verbalizes his needs in the crudest possible way-lotsa commotion & bad static in the hall…The red door opens-it’s Ayisha… doesn’t say a word-doesn’t have to-just stares, standing there, centered & serene in her green beaded gown, jade earrings, and silver shoes…Everything had stopped in the bar & casino…all across the killing floor…total silence…everybody within earshot knew he was doomed-this just wasn’t done.”

“Tacho’s entourage fled into the night. They knew that this wasn’t worth getting killed over; they hated Somoza anyway…wouldn’t even spring for coffee. Plus, word was out that even Strossner had had enough of Tacho. Standing there with no bodyguards, under Ayisha’s withering gaze, no choice for Tacho, but to turn tail & scram. Four days later, some chaps from Argentina caught up with Somoza just a few blocks over on Espa–a…turned him into a Swiss cheese…”

And so begins Learner’s obsession with Ayisha, which is a welcome change of pace. Up till now he’s been pining away for Catarine Milinaire, daughter of the Duchess of Bedford. Although the narrative was a bit fuzzy & subject to recollection-distortion, it would seem that Learner’s preternatural courtship of Catarine Millionaire reached some sort of premature anticlimax of dashed hopes & missed opportunity, involving a spot of bother with shots fired & a flaming mattress hurled from the second floor of the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel, while visiting Francis Coppola’s location set in the Philippines.

The obscure origins of Ayisha’s career go back to the mysteries of the KU, an often distorted and misrepresented offshoot of the Blue-Lotus Society, imported by Jandekite missionaries working the far end of the Silk-Road. After childhood training in the legendary KU “mystery dances”, said to be an encoded repository of lost and/or forbidden knowledge, capable of invoking, vast untapped power, Ayisha whose original name had been Li Pen, was the beneficiary of the legacy of her illustrious ancestors; Ts’ui Pen, Sum Tan Wu, and Yung Shon Pen, whose many Jandekite secrets lay embedded in the Pavilion of the Limpid Sun.

Arriving in London, an seventeen-year old Li Pen is recruited by the Lodge of Astarte, as a featured dancer in certain semi-public ritual performances for the LOA; a sort of Orbis Tertius outreach-program, that presented occult-themed performances that ranged somewhere between theatrical mystery initiation ritual, and a good old-fashioned, British “gentleman’s club”. The breaking point in Li’s tenure with the LOA, involved a ceremony written by LOA cult leaders called “Initiation of the KU”: which consisted of a ritual conducted around an iron & brass framed, thick glass tank filled with tinted fluid, in which lurked several realistically simulated squid-like denizens of the deep, supposedly representing Cthulhu-type scary-monsters with phallic feelers. Li, having danced, stripped, and dived into the tank, would of course be seized, and uh, entertained to the vicarious delight of serious Orbis ritualists.

“At first, I try to fit in. Work to cooperate. Not to question. But soon enough, inevitable realization: it was a blasphemy & a desecration of KU. I knew I could not do this thing again. Many important members of the Orbis Tertius (Obscura), and also the Omega, had attended these early performances. There was big pressure to stay. Angry words, insult, threat to deport. I try to respond with tact, grace and apologies. To no avail.”

“Even after leaving, I hear from friends; my life in danger, must leave town, leave country-now…”

Well now, maybe we should pause here for a reality-check (bring two forms of ID to cash it though), and review just what these allegations mean in context…I mean, could it really be that dangerous? To gain some perspective on this matter, perhaps we should consult ‘Fountain of Penelope’, by T. Ellison Blount, which is purported by it’s author to be an accurate, and entirely factual account of the activities of The Lodge of Astarte. Mr. Blount, it should be noted, is the Ipissimus Supreme of the Orbis Tertius.

-(Page 10) After a ritual, one female disciple perishes at sea
while another dies in a plane crash.
-(Page 55) A woman is covered with a seething mass of white
slugs.
-(Page 64) After an encounter with a magical talisman, a woman
dies on the way to the hospital.
-(Page 93) a baboon is destroyed by forces beyond his comprehension.
-(Page109) Recounts the appalling events that push one Sister
Nona over the edge into madness.
-(Page 134) The plight of Fr. Kimmel enmeshed in slime-dripping
tentacles.
-(Page 158) A disciple Rana, is left soulless & mindless, after a
disastrous ritual gone wrong.
-(Page 188) A woman is possessed by the Demon Choronzon
-(Page 223) A woman is apparently gobbled alive by a ritually
conjured entity.

Apparently this lodge was not real big on safety regulations (by the way, old sport, demographically speaking, not to overstate the obvious, but it seems kind of lopsidedly harsh going for the ladies, eh what?) so yeah…I guess I’d leave town too, which is what Ayisha did, next arriving in Chicago, soon to set up a dance academy, and the first replica of The Pavilion of the Limpid Sun.

In the breaking dawn light, as the drizzle continues, we approach the heavily fortified gates to El Mundo Occidente. Close-up of truncated stairs leading halfway up the vine-covered wall, about twenty feet to the right of the front entrance, whereupon reclines an apparently unconscious individual, in a generic naval pea-coat, sprawled serenely across the steps, head propped, eyes conked & cancelled against the first beams of the rising sun, just as a pair of pyragŸes have taken an interest, standing over the sleeper…initial prodding with night stick…then-WHAACKK!! In one seamless action, the sleeping guy seizes the first pyragues’ rifle-muzzle, thrusting back HARD-slamming rifle-butt into face, which leads the rest of him over the stair-rail, about ten feet to the ground, regaining wobbly legs, spitting a tooth, running off into the sub-rainforest savannah …while pea-coat guy has, in that same fluid motion, conjured a standard-issue, WWII style, Colt .45…safety off, hammer cocked, thrust pointedly into the groin of the remaining pyragŸe, who, seemingly, knows the drill, following his partner over the rail & into the bush…

“Gentlemen,” announces Mantua, with all due fanfare, as Learner knocks on the door with his ‘gentleman’s stiletto’, “I’d like you to meet The Sailor…”

Inside; the textured, velvet Monaco of your most decadent dream: brisk, quiet, subtle gaming, shaded & cooled, insular…completely oblivious to the usual brutal shifts in Paraguayan weather-patterns & politics.

“The Sailor’s great-grandfather was commander Nicholas Stepanov, an actual Paraguayan naval hero,” explains Mantua; which is good, because up until this second, I had no idea that there even was a Paraguayan navy, being a landlocked country and all, “Wantchya to meet commander Nino Jetski, late of the Argentine navy, fifth month of AWOL, if memory serves…”

“I’m not a commander anymore, I’m not in anybody’s fucking navy, I’m just a Sailor, and my regrettable ancestor, commander Nicholas Stepanov, was a fascist, jingoistic, racist, White Russian prick,” the Sailor clarifies.
As we shake hands with the pea-coat clad Sailor, Learner notices that-”Hey man, you sure speak fluent English for a Paraguayan-Russian-Argentine former naval officer, what’s the deal?”

“Ah, the whole family had a collection of languages: Russian, French, German, English, Spanish, Guyarni, Portuguese, bit of Chinese…Then, I was in a liaison intelligence unit, stationed in Norfolk Virginia, then later, San Diego. Man, those were the days; codes & ciphers, fun in the sun, Sundays in TJ…Then, back to La Plata…a fucking chamber of horrors!” the Sailor leans over to honk a massive line of gleaming Peruvian blow off of a baroque, silver-framed mirror, “MOTHERFUCKER!! So then, I’m supposed to be working with Scilingo & Astiz…fucking assholes! Alfredo Astiz-the Angel of Death! He’s so proud of that title…there’s no real interrogation, no real information being collected, just the mindless application of electric cattle-prod to genitals…these degenerate cocksuckers could do that all day, and that whole deal with the cattle-prod and pregnant women-(actually, the Sailor goes on for another 10-15 minutes here, detailing the horrors of the massive Southern Cone torture machine. As the gruesome details accumulated, the mind on the brink of glazing over with shock, I suspected that maybe the Sailor was indulging in a bit of hyperbole, perhaps embellishing what was there for dramatic effect, as remembered through a haze of ca–a & white powder…WRONG! If anything, this was the Reader’s Digest Condensed, R-17 version…Many accounts of these events exist from a wide spectrum of victims & witnesses…Upon exposure to this material, anything short of vehement outrage, would, I suspect, be less than human…mindful, as we are, that even though the Brazilians, for instance, are proud of their accomplishments in this field with their innovative use of the electric cattle-prod, (a perennial favorite throughout South America), as far as a codified, scientifically accurate application of these methods, everyone knows you have to go to the School of the Americas, at Fort Gulick in Panama…or “consultants”, like Dan Mitrione, and Michael Townley, to name two…not to mention the fact that on 9/11/73, the death of Allende, the ascension of Pinochet, the beginning of a long, grim, twilight nightmare of torture & death, local Chilean death-squads hunted down victims on a hit-list of thousands; supplied, (according to well-documented sources in books available at most local libraries), by American intelligence agencies, at the behest of Mr. Henry Kissinger, who won a Nobel prize earlier that year for his tireless humanitarian work during the Vietnam conflict. Question I ask myself is: could this be the same Nobel dynamite manufacturing family that used slave-labor from Auschwitz during WWII? Just wondering…because while Chileans were being deprived of their humanity by torture, rape, death, and psychological warfare; their once-vibrant culture of arts, cinema, and poetry, was being decimated in close working synchronization with the economics policies of Milton Friedman, University of Chicago’s leading destroyer of national economies: deregulation, absolute corporate non-accountability, lots of cheaply imported Wal-Mart junk, unilateral murder & torture of anyone connected to labor organizations, waging war on poverty by, well…simply eliminating the poor. To this day, Chile’s economy has still not recovered from this trickle-down nightmare, (and how about the US?) while Friedman won the Nobel prize in ‘76…hey, I know: why don’t we just give the fucking prize to Pinochet, eh? EH?) now just biding my days as these morons prepare to go to war with Britain! That’s right, they’re going to duke it out over the Falkland Islands! I mean I’m conflicted…I so want to see Galtieri & Videla, get their asses kicked, but you know that it’s the enlisted men who are going to take the brunt of it, poor bastards; under-trained, under-equipped, no backup, no supply-line…The whole thing is sheer suicide, but these dumbshits think they’re going to make the Brits back down just by the strength of their bluster and pomposity…”

Meanwhile, out on the killing floor, the swish & snap of fresh, crisp cards on green velvet, “You gotta play the combination on this one, jacks up, then work it out one by one from there,” the Sailor advises Learner, who in fact scores on the play, and is in the process of scooping the winnings into his hat, when Mantua appears motioning towards the red door, behind which we find the honored guest; Chu Tukka NatabŽ, primo shaman of the ItarŽ, beaming graciously, one hand holding a substantial herbal cigar, which he waves scepter-like, motioning for informality & comfortable seating…

“He says they have been expecting you, welcome to the western world,” translates Ayisha, radiating exultant serenity, and hyper-focused awareness, “He has invited you to be witness to battle of phantom opponents…Piato summons voice of thunder, with moving colored shadows, defeat common enemy, you witness-go back to own pond; make waves…”
On the desk, in front of Chu, is an elaborate, ornate box; mysterious cargo recovered from a Junkers 390, covered in a labyrinth design, consisting of repetitions of golden triangles; the contents spread in a symmetrical half-circle, consisting of:
-a watch
-a bayonet
-snapshots of human beings, old-country, ethnic, possibly Hebraic or Romany descent
-a silver lighter engraved with German SS death’s head
-7 gold teeth, perhaps once belonging to people in
the snapshots

“Sacred golden mouth-bones, belong to tribe opposing same enemy, many worlds away, but unified in purpose, communicate through rune.” continues Ayisha, while Chu, after a lengthy preamble, throws the divination teeth dice-like, scrutinizing the resultant pattern with some intensity…