Part 4: Abreaction Therapy

There was no pay phone at the Palladium, a restaurant on the U. of Penn campus, but they let me use the house phone at the end of the bar. I told Sheri about the books Wilson had mentioned and asked her to get me a direct flight to Los Angeles.

I felt the stare as I turned. The man was wearing a black suit and sitting on one of the high wooden barstools. Someone had apparently replaced his blood with embalming fluid and it still annoyed him. The deep-set eyes in the greenish gray flesh stared without blinking. He stood up and moved toward me.

"Have the time?" the mouth asked.

"It's two-thirty," I guessed.

"You lie!" he affirmed with some belligerence. "It's a quarter past four." He glared at me before turning and shuffling out the door to Locust Walk.

When I followed a few moments later, he had disappeared. I went back into the Palladium and dialed the time. It was 2:33. Then I tried the number Homer Nilmot had given me.

"Trans-Global Consultants," the woman answered. She said Mr. Nilmot was out but she would relay my message.

When I got back to the office, Sheri told me she had gotten a flight reservation for the day after tomorrow.

"Just enough time to tie up some loose ends," I said. I told her about the walking stiff I had met at the Palladium.

"Sounds like one of my two Men in Black," Sheri responded. "The one from the cemetery, she said gravely."

"Well, this was definitely an actor from Rent-A-Ghoul. Who are these Men in Black supposed to be, again? Maybe that's the point of this little charade. To create distraction."

"The classic Men-In-Black are the bad guys of the space brother world," Sheri said. "Traditionally, they are tanned or olive-skinned individuals with high cheek bones, faintly Oriental in appearance, often driving black Cadillacs or Buicks or something, and who appear to people who have had ufo experiences and threaten them to keep quiet about whatever has happened. Or sometimes they show up in the guise of Xist or Air Force agents, take down full reports of the victim's experiences, and tell him the military is conducting an investigation. Except if the `investigators' are investigated, their credentials often turn out to be bogus. Experiences with MIBs may be, incidentally, the reason General Carl Spaatz, our first Air Force Chief of Staff, announced at a press conference in 1948, `There is no truth to the rumors that the flying saucers are from Spain, or that they are piloted by Spaniards.' "

I thought about that. "Well, that doesn't fit this fellow," I said. "He didn't have the slightest hint of a suntan, and I haven't seen any ufos lately."

"Me neither," said Sheri. "I guess we don't qualify to be among the chosen few." She curled out her lower lip in a pout.

There was something bothering me about what happened at the Palladium. It seemed, well, familiar.

"Give me a Men-in-Black example," I asked Sheri. "Something early, maybe. Something classic. You know, before the media and the hype took over."

"Easy," she said. "There was Albert Bender. He closed down his International Flying Saucer Bureau in 1953. He said three men wearing black suits were responsible. Most amateur ufologists concluded it was government agents who had put pressure on him. It was another ten years before Bender told the full account in his book Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Bender's three men weren't your average government bureaucrats. No, sir. They had glowing eyes. They materialized and dematerialized in his apartment. They took him to a secret ufo base in Antarctica. And so on."

"So it was likely a hypnotic experience," I said. "An extended mind fuck."

"Or whatever," Sheri said. "He exhibited the usual symptoms from contact--upset stomach, loss of appetite, headaches, lacunar amnesia."

It came to me, then, what had been bothering me about the Palladium ghoul. It took a little digging through the files, but we found it soon enough.

It was a paper entitled "The Confusion Technique in Hypnosis," by the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson. It was published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis in 1964. Erickson gives an example of the technique in action:

"[A] man came rushing around the corner of a building and bumped hard against me as I stood bracing myself against the wind. Before he could recover his poise to speak to me, I glanced elaborately at my watch and courteously, as if he had inquired the time of day, I stated, `It's exactly ten minutes of two,' though it was actually closer to 4:00 P.M., and walked on. About half a block away, I turned and saw him still looking at me, undoubtedly still puzzled and bewildered by my remark."

Erickson goes on to explain that the technique works through the use of vague and puzzling statements. Because of the initial confusion, the hypnotic subject will then treat the first clearly understandable piece of information as unusually important.

"Maybe they're softening up our minds now," I said to Sheri. "They're getting ready to stick it to us."

"Whoever they are," Sheri said.

I asked Sheri to keep trying Homer Nilmot's number. Meanwhile I made myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to study the theory of sex magic in William Sargant's The Mind Possessed. David Wilson had let me borrow his copy, which I gladly accepted. Returning it would give me an excuse to talk to him again.

According to Sargant, there is a general physiological mechanism for reprogramming behavior. It involves the creation of intense emotion, such as fear or anger, leading up to a collapse from emotional exhaustion. Sargant originally studied soldiers who were having mental difficulties stemming from traumatic war experiences. It turned out such problems could generally be alleviated through a drug-induced emotional experience of sufficient intensity to lead to a general physical collapse. Sargant called it an "abreactive experience".

"After the patient had come round," Sargant wrote, "he might burst into tears or shake his head and smile, and then report that all his previous fears and abnormal preoccupations had suddenly left him, that his mind was functioning more normally again, that he felt more like his old self, that memories which had obsessed and terrified him could now be thought of without fear or anxiety."

It was not necessary to "re-live" the original experience. Just to generate the emotional collapse. The mind, according to Sargant, subsequently became pliable to new programming--new behavior and attitudes, just as it apparently had been when the original problems were implanted.

Drugs were only one method for inducing the collapse. Music and dancing was another. So was terror induced by hell-fire preaching. Or a holy-roller atmosphere of music and confession and induction of the Holy Ghost. Or electro-convulsive therapy. Or exhaustion through repeated sexual orgasm.

The collapse could serve the purpose of a general release from worries, guilts, obsessions, and sins. But one also became open to new ideas, Sargant claimed. One could become a new man or woman, for good or evil, in the service of the Gods, the flag, or the self.

In sexual magic, the trance is induced through sexual exhaustion. Sargant quotes Aleister Crowley, the magician himself, on the details:

"The candidate is made ready for the ordeal by general athletic training and by fasting. On the appointed day he is attended by one or more experienced attendants whose duty it is to exhaust him sexually by every known means. The candidate will sink into a sleep of utter exhaustion but he must be again sexually stimulated and then again allowed to fall asleep. This alternation is to continue indefinitely until the candidate is in a state which is neither sleep nor waking, and in which his spirit is set free by perfect exhaustion of the body . . . [and] communes with the Most Highest and the Most Holy Lord God of its Being, Maker of Heaven and Earth."

I called Sheri back in and read the passage to her.

"So basically you fuck your brains out until you see visions and talk to God and the angels," she summarized.

That seemed to be pretty much it.

"With the help of experienced attendants," I noted. "It probably induces a change in the brain's hormonal balance. But obviously there are more techniques than just the one Sargant mentions here. For example, when Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron were engaged in ritual intercourse, it was L. Ron Hubbard who was communing with the Most High. Ron the Seer, right?"

"Sounds like a complex subject. If you want the whole technology, perhaps you should go the source."

She laid a book on my desk. It was Crowley's Magic in Theory and Practice.

I groaned inwardly. This wasn't what I wanted to spend my time on. I just had the vague hope that if I could get into Parsons' mind-set, it might help me find out who killed him. It was a comforting belief since it was all I had to go on at the moment. But getting into Parsons' mind- set was turning out to be a complex process.

I studied Sheri's posture. She was sitting with her feet propped up, the hem of her skirt slipping well above her knees. She was wearing a silk blouse that clung seductively to her breasts.

"You want to get something to eat after work?" she asked. "I'll buy you a burger and a margarita at the Copacabana."

I considered it. The offer was tempting. I was a sucker for fresh lime juice and tequila. I hesitated, though. All my instincts told me not to get too chummy with the help. The phone wouldn't get answered, the research wouldn't get done, the office would fall apart.

On the other hand, we were only going to get a hamburger. Why not. Just because she wanted to buy me dinner didn't mean she expected to sit on my face for dessert.

"Sure," I said. "Why don't we go have a margarita?"

At Copa we got a table on the 4th Street side where we could watch the foot traffic at the corner with South. Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come" was booming out over the sound system. As we sipped our drinks, Sheri told me that Albert Bender was also a student of magic.

"This was going on while Bender was studying ufos. What happened with respect to the Men-in-Black may have been only obliquely related to `flying saucers.' Magic is a traditional method of conjuring up elementals. And Bender suffered from a lot of poltergeist manifestations."

"In that case, maybe Jack Parsons was also visited by Men-in- Black," I said.

"Maybe it's all magic," Sheri said. "The saucers are just techno- veneer. Most of the interesting stuff seems to take place in someone's mind, with no witnesses."

I watched her tongue lightly lick salt from the rim of the glass before she took a sip of margarita. When I had interviewed Sheri only a couple of months previously, she had claimed she was a Hindu vegetarian who didn't drink but got stoned frequently. Now here she sat with a drink in her hand, and she had just ordered a hamburger.

"No salad tonight?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Sometimes like Fritz Mondale I ask myself, `Where's the beef?' I get this intense craving for bloody bovine carcass."

"As long as you don't knock over little old cows in the street to support your habit. Or stand on a soapbox preaching the occult virtues of meat-eating."

"No possibility of that, not since I found Bob. Bob says death to all fanatics."

She had been a rock groupie, once getting arrested in Miami. She had played guitar for several years, then had switched to electric blues harp and had performed with Muddy Waters.

"Bob drinks, you know," she said, her tongue at work on the rim of the glass. "He's drinking buddies with the Fightin' Jesus. That's the one who comes bringing not peace, but a sword. The Macho Jesus, not the wimp who turns the other check."

"So that's why you were reading Wigglesworth -- to study up on the Fighting' Jesus."

Once she had rehearsed for the part of Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar. Although all in all she preferred Krishna, she said, as Krishna could be seen in anyone, including a lover, she had claimed. But that was the last I had ever heard of Krishna. Maybe it's just something you say in a job interview, when you don't want to sound like a Jesus fanatic.

"Nah. American history is cultural edification. Roots, you know? Which reminds me. You want to go to a party tonight? It's called the Mauvaises Arts Ball, and gets started around eleven o'clock. It's a parody of the Beaux Arts Ball, the one for Arts and Architecture held later in October."

"Mauvaises Arts?"

"If the Beaux Arts Ball were the semi-orderly formality of a ceremonial dinner dance, then the Mauvaises Arts Ball would be the orgy in the back room. It was inspired, I think, by the reviews of Bad Cinema that Dan Akyroyd used to do on Saturday Night Live. Anyway this year's theme is Apocalypse Culture."

"As in the Four Horsemen?"

"As in the Kali Yuga, Friday the Thirteenth, nuclear winter, the mark of the beast, marrying and giving in marriage, chaos theory, the Society Hill Dungeon, rumors of war, the return of Quetzalcoatl, 2001, lycanthropy, famine, the invasion of the body builders, automobile air bags, Presidential astrology, AIDS needles washing up on the beach, earthquakes, sex with robots, psychic warfare, cable TV--all those things."

"I take it I don't need to wear a Tuxedo then."

"You can wear pretty much anything you want. There will be the usual artsy crowd there, and a lot of pinks and assorted politicos. A couple of fellow Sub-Genii are scheduled to speak, or rather to rant and rave. It's all part of the atmosphere. Later in the evening there will be a channeling session delivered by Helen Morley, the Avatar of Amargi."

"Where's Amargi?"

"Amargi is a Sumerian word meaning freedom."

That appeared auspicious. It sounded like fun, and I said I would go. I worked my way around the bar to the phone, called Trans-Global Consultants, and left a message telling Homer Nilmot where I would be.

When I returned to the table, I saw a mounted Philadelphia patrolman had stopped just outside the window. From time to time passersby would pause to pet the horse. All but the better-looking women were told to keep their hands to themselves. I guess the horse was picky.

"So what did David Wilson at Penn have to say?"

I told her about Liber Oz.

"It sounds to me pretty much a strong statement about individual rights," Sheri opined. "I think the Founding Fathers would have approved. Leave out the love part, maybe."

"Yeah. Whatever happened to politics, anyway. Now every political campaign is run as a crusade to solve the world's problems."

"So. You don't believe in crusades against evil, taking out the bad guys, all that." Sheri's tone was mocking.

"No. The way I look at it, organized sin and organized sin- fighting are two sides of the same corporate coin. It's like the Society Hill Towers' resident priest who has a number of women confess that the grocer's new delivery boy has seduced them. He makes them each put a hundred dollars in the poor box. Then the delivery boy appears, and the priest asks angrily, `What have you got to say for yourself?' `Just this,' the delivery boy replies. `Either you cut me in on those hundred-dollar fees, or I take my business to some other parish.' "

"Yeah," Sheri agreed. "You can't get rich saving souls if everyone's converted."

"Crisis managers couldn't cope without calamity. You can't get elected President without a social problem to fight, or a menace to protect people from. Of course the `problems' never disappear. The Cossacks are always coming to rape our women and destroy Our Way of Life. And by definition there'll always be people with below average income or whatever. The chief function of government is to find problems that can be profitably managed. Everyone wants to save the world, as long as doing so gives them power, and as long as someone else pays for it."

"Why do you think people go into politics, anyway?"

This was getting too serious for discussion over margaritas, I thought.

"A lot of men go into politics because of the women. Ever been to a major political convention or an election night party? Sexy women everywhere. And there's nothing like working for a noble cause to get them hot and willing."

Sheri blushed. I was surprised.

"It's niacin," Sheri explained. "I took a 500 milligram capsule a few minutes ago. It creates a skin flush similar to the Masters and Johnson sexual flush. Trisha's recommendation. Niacin reduces serum cholesterol--the fat in your bloodstream. She was a biochemistry major."

Sheri decided to change the subject.

"The other day I was in Garland of Letters--the New Age bookstore down the street, and these two women were looking at books, and this other woman comes by and says, `You ladies don't look at that witchcraft. Read your Bible.' "

"I read the Bible one time myself," I said. "Not Bob's, the other one."

Sheri looked skeptical.

"Really. The begets and all. One thing I remember it says is that Satan appears as an angel of light. You don't hear much about that, these days. To hear some Christians tell it, Satan has pointed ears, 666 tattooed on his forehead, and dresses in brand-name Lucifer Leather with an appropriately-sized forked codpiece. But their own reference manual says it's the opposite of that."

"You're saying that if everyone agrees something is evil, it's just as likely not?"

"Not exactly. I'm saying that when you find Satan, he'll probably look like Jesus Christ himself."

"And what does that have to do with Jack Parsons? Or abreaction therapy?" Sheri demanded, after a moment's thought.

"I have no idea. Just something that came to mind."

I signaled for the check.