Valis (10 page)

To this, Father Larry said enigmatically, "I've cried all the tears I am going to cry for that girl."

Fat could not tell ifthat meant that Larry had burned out his circuits from grief or that he had calculatedly, as a self-protective device, curtailed his grief. Fat does not know to this day. His own grief had reached critical mass. Now Sherri had been hospitalized; Fat visited her and saw lying in the bed a small sad shape, half the size he was accustomed to, a shape coughing in pain, with wretched hopelessness in its eyes. Fat could not drive home after that, so Kevin drove him home. Kevin, who usually maintained his stance of cynicism, could not speak from grief; the two of them drove along and then Kevin slapped him on the shoulder, which is the only avenue open to men to show love for each other.

"What am I going to do?" Fat said, meaning, What am I going to do when she dies?

He really loved Sherri, despite her treatment of him -- if
indeed, as his friends maintained, she had treated him shabbily. He himself -- he neither knew nor cared about that. All he knew was that she lay in the hospital bed with metastasized tumors throughout her. Every day he visited her in the hospital, along with everyone else who knew her.

At night he did the only act left open to him: work on his exegesis. He had reached an important entry.

Entry 48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction -- a failure -- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through
gnosis
-- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) -- although it has individual significance for each of us -- a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world --
and self-experience, including immortality --
it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signaling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.

The external information or
gnosis,
then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us -- that is, already there (first observed by Plato;
viz
: that learning is a form of remembering).

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself, the total entity.

The Godhead is impaired; some primordial crisis occurred in it which we do not understand.

Fat reworked journal entry #29 and added it to his
ON OUR NATURE
entry:

#29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."

By now Fat's mind was going totally. All he did was work on his exegesis or his
tractate
or just listen to his stereo or visit Sherri in the hospital. He began to install entries in the
tractate
without logical order or reason.

#30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.

#27. If the centuries of spurious time are excised, the true date is not 1978 c.e. but 103 c.e. Therefore the New Testament says that the Kingdom of the Spirit will come before "some now living die." We are living, therefore, in apostolic times.

#20. The Hermetic alchemists knew of the secret race of three-eyed invaders but despite their efforts could not contact them. Therefore their efforts to support Frederick V, Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia, failed. "The Empire never ended."

#21. The Rose Cross Brotherhood wrote,
"Ex Deo nascimur, in Jesu mortimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus,"
which is to say, "From God we are born, in Jesus we die, by the Holy Spirit we live again." This signifies that they had rediscovered the lost formula for immortality which the Empire had destroyed. "The Empire never ended."

#10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.

#12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, "
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,
"to which some of those present correctly said, "The man is calling on Elijah." Elijah had left him and he died alone.

At this moment as he made this entry, Horselover Fat was dying alone. Elijah, or whatever divine presence it was that had fired tons of information into his skull in 1974, had indeed left him. The dreadful question that Fat asked himself over and over again did not get put down in his journal or
tractate;
the question could be put this way:

If the divine presence knew about Christopher's birth
defect and did something to correct it, why doesn't it do
something about Sherri's cancer? How could it let her
lie there dying?

Fat could not figure this out. The girl had gone an entire year wrongly diagnosed; why hadn't Zebra fired that information to Fat or to Sherri's doctor or to Sherri -- to
someone
?

Fired it in time to save her!

One day when Fat visited Sherri in the hospital, a grinning fool stood there by her bed, a simp who Fat had met; this thing used to shamble in while Fat and Sherri lived together and would put his arms around Sherri, kiss her and tell her he loved her -- never mind Fat. This childhood friend of Sherri's, when Fat entered the hospital room, was saying to Sherri,

"What'll we do when I'm king of the world and you're queen of the world?"

To which Sherri, in agony, murmured, "I just want to get rid of these lumps in my throat."

Fat had never come so close to coldcocking anybody into tomorrow as at that moment. Kevin, who had accompanied him, had to physically hold Fat back.

On the drive back to Fat's lonely apartment, where he and Sherri had lived together for such a short time, Fat said to Kevin, "I'm going crazy. I can't take it."

"That's a normal reaction," Kevin said, showing nothing of his cynical pose, these days.

"Tell me," Fat said, "why God doesn't help her." He kept Kevin up on the progress of his exegesis; his encounter with God in 1974 was known to Kevin, so Fat could talk openly.

Kevin said, "It's the mysterious ways of the Great Punta."

"What the fuck is that?" Fat said.

"I don't believe in God," Kevin said. "I believe in the Great Punta. And the ways of the Great Punta are mysterious. No one knows why he does what he does, or doesn't do."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No," Kevin said.

"Where did the Great Punta come from?"

"Only the Great Punta knows."

"Is he benign?"

"Some say he is; some say he isn't."

"He could help Sherri if he wanted to."

Kevin said, "Only the Great Punta knows that."

They started laughing.

Obsessed with death, and going crazy from grief and worry about Sherri, Fat wrote entry #15 in his tractate.

#15. The Sibyl of Cumae protected the Roman Republic and gave timely warnings. In the first century c.e. she foresaw the murders of the two Kennedy brothers, Dr. King and Bishop Pike. She saw the two common denominators in the four murdered men: first, they stood in defense of the liberties of the Republic; and second, each man was a religious leader. For this they were killed. The Republic had once again become an empire with a caesar. 'The Empire never ended."

#16. The Sibyl said in March 1974, "The conspirators have been seen and they will be brought to justice." She saw them with the third or
ajna
eye, the Eye of Shiva which gives inward discernment, but which when turned outward blasts with desiccating heat. In August 1974 the justice promised by the Sibyl came to pass.

Fat decided to put down on the
tractate
all the prophetic statements fired into his head by Zebra.

#7. The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come.

Knowing this, by direct route from the divine, made Fat a latter-day prophet. But, since he had gone crazy, he also entered absurdities into his
tractate.

#50.The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.

By now Fat had totally lost touch with reality.

You can understand why Fat no longer knew the difference between fantasy and divine revelation -- assuming there is a difference, which has never been established. He imagined that Zebra came from a planet in the star-system Sirius, had overthrown the Nixon tyranny in August 1974, and would eventually set up a just and peaceful kingdom on Earth where there would be no sickness, no pain, no loneliness, and the animals would all dance with joy.

Fat found a hymn by Ikhnaton and copied parts of it out of the reference book and into his
tractate.

"...When the fledgling in the egg chirps in the egg,

Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive.

When thou hast brought him together

To the point of bursting the egg,

He cometh forth from the egg,

To chirp with all his might.

He goeth about upon his two feet

When he hath come from therefrom.

How manifold are thy works!

They are hidden from before us,

O sole god, whose powers no other possesseth.

Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart

While thou wast alone: Men, all cattle large and small,

All that go about upon their feet;

All that are on high,

That fly with their wings.

Thou are in my heart,

There is no other that knoweth thee

Save thy son Ikhnaton.

Thou hast made him wise

In thy designs and in thy might.

The world is in thy hands..."

Entry #52 shows that Fat at this point in his life reached out for any wild hope which would shore up his confidence that some good existed somewhere.

#52. Our world is still secretly ruled by the hidden race descended from Ikhnaton, and his knowledge is the information of the Macro-Mind itself.

"All cattle rest upon their pasturage,

The trees and the plants flourish,

The birds flutter in their marshes,

Their wings uplifted in adoration to thee.

All the sheep dance upon their feet,

All winged things fly,

They live when thou hast shone upon them."

From Ikhnaton this knowledge passed to Moses, and from Moses to Elijah, the Immortal Man, who became Christ. But underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man;
and we are that man.

Fat still believed in God and Christ -- and a lot else -- but he wished he knew why Zebra, his term for the Almighty Divine One, had not given early warning about Sherri's condition and did not now heal her, and this mystery assailed Fat's brain and turned him into a maddened thing.

Fat, who had sought death, could not comprehend why Sherri was being allowed to die, and die horribly.

I myself am willing to step forth and offer some possibilities. A little boy menaced by a birth defect isn't in the same category with a grown woman who desires to die, who is
playing a malignant game, as malignant as her physical analog, the lymphoma destroying her body. After all, the Almighty Divine One had not stepped forward to interfere with Fat's own suicide attempt; the Divine Presence had allowed Fat to down the forty-nine tabs of high-grade pure digitalis; nor had the Divine Authority prevented Beth from abandoning him and taking his son away from him, the very son for whom the medical information was put forth in theophanic disclosure.

This mention of three-eyed invaders with claws instead of hands, mute, deaf and telepathic creatures from another star, interested me. Regarding this topic, Fat showed a natural sly reticence; he knew enough not to shoot his mouth off about it. 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 three-eyed people.

"Maybe the Russians beamed microwave psychogenic or psychotronic or whatever-they-call-it signals at you," I said, having read an article on alleged Soviet boosting of telepathic messages by means of microwaves.

"I doubt if the Soviet Union is interested in Christopher's hernia," Fat said sourly.

But the memory plagued him that in these visions or dreams of hypnagogic states he had heard Russian words spoken and had seen page upon page, hundreds of pages, of what appeared to be Russian technical manuals, describing --
he knew this because of the diagrams -- engineering principles and constructs.

"You overheard a two-way transmission," I suggested. "Between the Russians and an extra-terrestrial entity."

"Just my luck," Fat said.

At the time of these experiences Fat's blood pressure had gone up to stroke level; his doctor had briefly hospitalized him. The doctor warned him not to take uppers.

"I'm not taking uppers," Fat had protested, truthfully.

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. Gradually his hypertension had diminished. The doctor was suspicious; he continued to believe that Fat had abreacted in his lifestyle to the days when he did uppers. But both Fat and I knew better. His blood pressure had registered 280 over 178, which is a lethal level. Normally, Fat ran about 135 over 90, which is normal. The cause of the temporary elevation remains a mystery to this day. That, and the deaths of Fat's pets.

I tell you these things for what they are worth. They are true things; they happened.

In Fat's opinion his apartment had been saturated with high levels of radiation of some kind. In fact he had seen it: blue light dancing like St. Elmo's Fire.

And, what was more, the aurora that sizzled around the apartment behaved as if it were sentient and alive. When it entered objects it interfered with their causal processes. And when it reached Fat's head it transferred -- not just information to him, which it did -- but also a personality. A personality which wasn't Fat's. A person with different memories, customs, tastes and habits.

For the first and only time in his life, Fat stopped drinking wine and bought beer, foreign beer. And he called his dog "he" and his cat "she," although he knew -- or had previously known -- that the dog was a she and the cat a he. This had annoyed Beth.

Fat wore different clothes and carefully trimmed down his beard. When he looked in the bathroom mirror while trimming it he saw an unfamiliar person, although it was his regular self not changed. Also the climate seemed wrong; the air was too dry and too hot: not the right altitude and not the right humidity. Fat had the subjective impression that a moment ago he'd been living in a high, cool, moist region of the world and not in Orange County, California.

Plus the fact that this inner ratiocination took the form of
koine
Greek, which he did not understand as a language, nor as a phenomenon going on in his head.

And he had a lot of trouble driving his car; he couldn't figure out where the controls were; they all seemed to be in the wrong places.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Fat experienced a particularly vivid dream -- if "dream" it was -- about a Soviet woman who would be contacting him by mail. In the dream he was shown a photograph of her; she had blonde hair, and, he was told, "Her name is Sadassa Ulna." An urgent message fired into Fat's head that he
must
respond to her letter when it came.

Two days later, a registered air mail letter arrived from the Soviet Union, which shocked Fat into a state of terror. The letter had been sent by a man, who Fat had never heard of (Fat wasn't used to getting letters from the Soviet Union anyhow) who wanted:

1)
A photograph of Fat.

2)
A specimen of Fat's handwriting, in particular his signature.

To Beth, Fat said, "Today is Monday. On Wednesday, another letter will come. This will be from the woman."

On Wednesday, Fat received a plethora of letters: seven in all. Without opening them he fished among them and pointed out one, which had no return name or address on it. "That's it," he said to Beth, who, by now, was also freaked. "Open it and look at it, but don't let me see her name and address or I'll answer it."

Beth opened it. Instead of a letter
per se
she found a Xerox sheet on which two book reviews from the left-wing New York newspaper
The Daily World
had been juxtaposed. The reviewer described the author of the books as a Soviet national living in the United States. From the reviews it was obvious that the author was a Party member.

"My God," Beth said, turning the Xerox sheet over. "The author's name and address is written on the back."

"A woman?" Fat said.

"Yes," Beth said.

I never found out from Fat and Beth what they did with the two letters. From hints Fat dropped I deduced that he finally answered the first one, having decided that it was innocent; but what he did with the Xerox one, which really wasn't a letter in the strict sense of the term, I do not to this day know, nor do I want to know. Maybe he burned it. Maybe he turned it over to the police or the FBI or the CIA; in any case I doubt if he answered it.

For one thing, he refused to look at the back of the Xerox sheet where the woman's name and address appeared; he had the conviction that if he saw this information he would answer her whether he wanted to or not. Maybe so. Who can say? First eight hours of graphic information is fired at you from sources unknown, taking the form of lurid phosphene activity in eighty colors arranged like modern abstract paintings; then you dream about three-eyed people in glass bubbles and electronic gear; then your apartment fills up with St. Elmo's Fire plasmatic energy which appears to be alive and to think; your animals die; you are overcome by a different personality who thinks in Greek; you dream about Russians; and finally you get a couple of Soviet letters within a three-day period -- which you were told were coming. But the total impression isn't bad because some of the information saves your son's life. Oh yes; one more thing: Fat found himself seeing ancient Rome superimposed over California 1974. Well, I'll say this: Fat's encounter may not have been with God, but it certainly was with
something.

No wonder Fat started scratching out page after page of his exegesis. I'd have done the same. He wasn't just theory-mongering for the sake of it; he was trying to figure out what the fuck had happened to him.

If Fat had simply been crazy he certainly found a unique form, an original way of doing it. Being in therapy at the time (Fat was always in therapy) he asked that a Rorschach Test be given him, to determine if he had become schizophrenic. The test, upon his taking it, showed only a mild neurosis. So much for that theory.

In my novel
A Scanner Darkly,
published in 1977, I ripped off Fat's account of his eight hours of lurid phosphene activity.

"He had, a few years ago, been experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue, and one
night, having administered to himself an IV injection
considered safe and mildly euphoric, had experienced a
disastrous drop in the GABA fluid of his brain. Subjectively, he had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity
projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically
progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined
to be modern-day abstract paintings.

For about six hours, entranced, S.A. Powers had
watched thousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flash-cut speed, and then he had been treated
to Paul Klees, more than the painter had painted during
his entire lifetime. S.A. Powers, now viewing Modigliani
paintings replacing themselves at furious velocity, had
conjectured (one needs a theory for everything) that
the Rosicrucians were telepathically beaming pictures at
him, probably boosted by microrelay systems of an ad
v
anced order; but then, when Kandinsky paintings began to harass him, he recalled that the main art museum
at Leningrad specialized in just such nonobjective moderns, and he decided that the Soviets were attempting
telepathically to contact him.
In the morning he remembered that a drastic drop in
the GABA fluid of the brain normally produced such
phosphene activity; nobody was trying to contact him
telepathically, with or without microwave boosting..."*
(
*
A
Scanner Darkly,
Doubleday, 1977, pgs. 15/16.
)

The GABA fluid of the brain blocks neural circuits from firing; it holds them in a dormant or latent state until a disinhibiting stimulus -- the correct one -- is presented to the organism, in this case Horselover Fat. In other words, these, are neural circuits designed to fire on cue at a specific time under specific circumstances. Had Fat been presented with a disinhibiting stimulus prior to the lurid phosphene activity --
the indication of a drastic drop in the level of GABA fluid in his brain, and hence the firing of previously blocked circuits, meta-circuits, so to speak?

All these events took place in March 1974. The month before that, Fat had had an impacted wisdom tooth removed. For this the oral surgeon administered a hit of IV sodium pentathol. Later that afternoon, back at home and in great pain, Fat had gotten Beth to phone for some oral pain medication. Being as miserable as he was, Fat himself had answered the door when the pharmacy delivery person knocked. When he opened the door, he found himself facing a lovely darkhaired young woman who held out a small white bag containing the Darvon N. But Fat, despite his enormous pain, cared nothing about the pills, because his attention had fastened on the gleaming gold necklace about the girl's neck; he couldn't take his eyes off it. Dazed from pain -- and from the sodium pentathol -- and exhausted by the ordeal he had gone through, he nonetheless managed to ask the girl what the symbol shaped in gold at the center of the necklace represented. It was a fish, in profile.