Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (49 page)

This was an experience which I treasured. It had been done in utter stealth, concealed even from my son's mother.

First I had fixed a mug of hot chocolate. Then I had fixed a hot dog on a bun with the usual trimmings; [...]

Seated on the floor in Christopher's room with him, 1---or rather VALIS in me, as me-had played a game. First, I jokingly held the cup of chocolate up, over my son's head; then, as if by accident, I had splashed warm chocolate on his head, into his hair. Giggling, Christopher had tried to wipe the liquid off; I had of course helped him. Leaning toward him, I had whispered,

"In the name of the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit."

No one heard me except Christopher. Now, as I wiped the warm chocolate from his hair, I inscribed the sign of the cross on his forehead. I had now baptized him and now I confirmed him; I did so, not by the authority of any church, but by the authority of the living plasmate in me: VALIS himself. Next I said to my son, "Your secret name, your Christian name, is-" And I told him what it was. Only he and I are ever to know; he and I and VALIS.

Phil felt certain that there was an entity communicating with him throughout 2-3-74, and one of the names he gave it was VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Valis bestowed information on Phil by means other than pink light. A series of tutelary dreams began in March, continued on nightly into the summer, and returned intermittently for the rest of his life. In a July 1974 letter Phil insisted that "the most eerie-and yet at the same time the most valid proof of what had happened, that indeed something real had happenedwere my continuing experiences while asleep. Soon after the eight-hour show of dazzling graphics I began to have what I do not think are dreams, since they are not like any dreams I have ever had or even read about." Phil believed that the information they contained had been subliminally encoded during the March 18 graphics display. In a June 1974 letter he described the dream flow:

[. . .] I was hoping for increased neural efficiency. I got more: actual information about the future, for during the next three months [from March on], almost each night, during sleep I was receiving information in the form of print-outs: words and sentences, letters and names and numbers-sometimes whole pages, sometimes in the form of writing paper and holographic writing, sometimes, oddly, in the form of a baby's cereal box on which all sorts of quite meaningful information was written and typed, and finally galley proofs held up for me to read which I was told in my dream "contained prophecies about the future," and during the last two weeks a huge book, again and again, with page after page of printed lines.

Information from the future? Phil had already, in Ubik and CounterClock World, posited a kind of Logos that moved in retrograde or backward time to bestow knowledge and salvation. And his research on 2-3-74 uncovered tantalizing physics research on tachyons, particles that move faster than light in retrograde time and could, theoretically, carry information from the future. Whatever the source, a basic problem remained: The dreams seldom offered clear guidance. Often the information came in the form of non sequitur language fragments (one of these, "Aramcheck," became a character's name in Radio Free Albemuth) or integer sequences. Some words and fragments proved to be Sanskrit roots or phrases of koine Greek (the language of the Near East in the time of Christ), such as "poros krater" (limestone bowl), "crypte morphosis" (latent shape), and "The Rhipidon Society" (rhipidos: fan; the Rhipidon Society plays a key role in Valis). There were also the terms "Fomalhaut" and "Albemuth," which Phil associated with the distant star-Sirius, he speculated-from which the information might have been transmitted. Then again, the koine Greek indicated that Asklepios, the god of healing, whose father was Apollo and whose stepmother was the Cumaen sibyl (the possible source of the "AI Voice"), might be his nightly tutor.

In one dream appeared "singed pages," as if "the book had gone through a fire but had been rescued." Phil wasn't always sure that he wanted to take in what he felt he was being "forced" to read. Some of the dream texts pointed to ominous "religious fanatics" conspiracies that took in the deaths of Pike, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Meanwhile, hypnagogic voices offered enigmatic oracles. While falling asleep one evening in July 1974, Phil "heard her (you know, my anima, the sibyl), singing along with a choir: 'You must put your slippers on / To walk toward the dawn.' " In January 1975, also in a hypnagogic state, came "Saint Sophia is going to be reborn." (Alternative version: "St. Sophia is going to be reborn again; she was not acceptable before.") Readers of Valis will recognize these oracles.

In addition, there were the dreams of the three-eyed beings. In Valis Phil writes of the dual identity character Fat/Phil:

In March 1974 at the time he had encountered God (more properly Zebra), he had experienced vivid dreams about the three-eyed people-he had told me that. They manifested themselves as cyborg entities: wrapped up in glass bubbles staggering under masses of technological gear. An odd aspect cropped up that puzzled both Fat and me; sometimes in these vision-like dreams, Soviet technicians could be seen, hurrying to repair malfunctions of the sophisticated technological communications apparatus enclosing the threeeyed people.

In the Exegesis, Phil drew pictures of these beings and sometimes identified their third eye with the wisdom (ajna) eye of Hinduism and Buddhism. He also explored the possibility that they were aliens of superior intelligence who had, by means of satellite-fired information beams, contacted him. As to such theorizing, narrator Phil concludes, in Valis: "By now Fat had totally lost touch with reality." In real life, Phil was equally aware of how his richly associative mode of thought-in which there were no "dead" gods who could not be reborn in the human psyche-would sound to others. From a July 1974 letter which Phil included in the Exegesis:

I can see myself telling my therapist this. "What's on your mind, Phil?" she'll say when I go in, and I'll say, "Asklepios is my tutor, from out of Periclean Athens. I'm learning to talk in Attic Greek." She'll say, "Oh really?" and I'll be on my way to the Blissful Groves, but that won't be until after death; that'll be in the country where it's quiet and costs $100 a day. And you get all the apple juice you want to drink, along with Thorazine.

As this letter indicates, Phil was not one to lose his sense of humor, not even when it came to his own "divine" revelations. On the contrary, Phil always retained the ability to see just how loopy his experiences could seem. Not only could he laugh at them, he could also subject himself to fiercely skeptical questioning-as an Exegesis self-interview quoted later in this chapter will establish. Phil was neither credulous nor a fool. He held to no single set of beliefs as to what was happening to him. Yet he possessed the moral courage to treat it all seriously, as a source of possible knowledge, rather than dismiss it outright. In America, if you are unfortunate enough to have a spiritual-seeming vision, it had better conform to the doctrines of an established church. If it doesn't, you're crazy, simple as that. Phil knew full well just how his experiences would seem to others. But he was damned if he was going to deny himself a single avenue of speculation.

By July 1974, Phil was considering the possibility that his psyche had been merged with that of his friend the late Bishop Pike. After all, so many of the little changes in Phil seemed to reflect Pike's tastes:

Now I am not the same person. People say I look different. I have lost weight. Also, I have made a lot of money doing the things Jim tells me to do, more money than ever before in a short period, doing things I've never done, nor would imagine doing. More strange yet, I now drink beer every day and never any wine. I used to drink only wine, never beer. I chugalug the beer. The reason I drink it is that Jim knows that wine is bad for me-the acidity, the sediment. He had me trim my beard too. For that I had to go up and buy special barber's scissors. I didn't know there even was such a thing.

Also, for no reason attributable to Bishop Pike, Phil began calling the dogs "he" and the cat "she"-the opposite of the facts.

But what were the money-related instructions Jim/Thomas/Valis/ Other gave Phil? In a 1979 interview Phil stated: "It immediately set about putting my affairs in order. It fired my agent and publisher." Well, Phil never fired his publisher, Doubleday, though he was extremely angered, in April-May, by having been quoted inconsistent sales figures for Flow that seemed to Phil to indicate that Doubleday, aided by the indifference or collusion of the Meredith Agency, was trying to rip him off on royalties. In addition, he resented the low $2, 500 paperback advance (from DAW) that Doubleday had negotiated for Flow. In a May 5 letter Phil requested an audit of the printing runs of all of his previous novels published by Doubleday. And in a still more vituperative May 7 letter, which Phil may never have sent (editor Lawrence Ashmead, the addressee, doesn't recall receiving it), Phil told the tale of hapless SF author "Chipdip K. Kill" (Phil's name in John Sladek's 1973 parody), author of "Floods Of Tears, The Ripped-Off Author Said," victimized by "Dogshit Books" and agent "Skim Morewithit."

In a May 4 letter, he dismissed the Meredith Agency after twenty-two years. His primary stated reason: The agency had failed to back him in his dispute with Doubleday. Phil proved mistaken in his allegations concerning the Flow print runs, which he himself soon recognized. And the $2, 500 DAW bid for the paperback rights to Flow was the highest received; there was nothing to be done. In a letter dated May 12, Phil reinstated his client status with the agency. In the meantime, however, he'd opened negotiations with agent Robert Mills, which he didn't terminate until October, keeping his options open. For Phil had placed one condition on the May 12 rehiring that vindicates to an extent his claims of increased practical acumen-and earnings-as a result of 2-3-74.

Phil insisted that the agency pursue the total back royalties due him from Ace Books. In the early seventies, the Science Fiction Writers of America was successfully pursuing Ace royalty claims on behalf of a number of writers. The clamor Phil raised effectively heightened the efforts of the Meredith Agency on his behalf in checking out Ace royalty reports-by May 28, it had forwarded to Phil over $3,000 in back royalties.

But all the dreams, visions, and hard-nosed acumen exacted a severe physical toll. Phil had suffered from hypertension for years; at the time of their marriage, April 1973, Tessa recalls, his blood pressure was roughly 200/160. Phil's 2-3-74 experiences seem to have exacerbated the hypertension. In early April, he was hospitalized after a blood-pressure reading (as stated in Valis) of 280/178: "The doctor had run every test possible, during Fat's stay in the hospital, to find a physical cause for the elevated blood pressure, but no cause had been found." Uppers had been out of the picture since 1972. Tessa is convinced that Phil experienced a series of minor strokes during this time, and notes that Phil's doctor offered this as a probable diagnosis:

The times I think of as "minor strokes" are the times when he stumbled for no apparent reason, when he suddenly turned livid or flushed, when he would blank out in mid-sentence. These were stressful times, and I believe that he was having strokes, although very minor ones. If the spirit had not told him to go to the doctor, he might have died. Although he was supposed to have his blood pressure checked regularly, he would not go to the doctor. There would always be some excuse (usually the flu) for staying at home. The spirit, however, insisted that he go. When he went, the doctor told him to check into the hospital.

Tessa adds: "Were his experiences nothing more than a series of minor strokes? I doubt it, although I have no doubt that he was also having strokes."

During his five days in the hospital, Phil purchased gifts for fellow patients-little girls suffering from muscle disease. In addition, he spoke of his experiences with one Roman Catholic and two Episcopal priests who came to his bedside at his request. During one of Tessa's visits, some of Phil's papers were stolen from their apartment. A disquieting signshades of Santa Venetia.